Tag Archives: war

06.22.25
by

Nuclear Jinx

I had so wanted to be frivolous here this week and then Saturday night happened. 

Oh, what the hell.  Here’s Jinkx Monsoon, Broadway star and former winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race, doing one of the most entertaining impressions I’ve ever seen of…

Oh, just watch it.

Okay, fine. 

NOW, let’s bring down the room.

Four guys you’d never want your daughter, son, sister or brother to date stood in the halls of the White House on the evening of June 21st, 2025 and told us we just launched a bunch of mega-bombs on a Middle Eastern country of 90 million people in order to prevent said country from putting together some sort of nuclear material into some sort of weapon that said country was supposedly weeks, months or years away from…. creating… enriching… launching?…. obtaining?

None of us seems to quite know.   

“Weapons of Mass Destruction” anyone?

Perhaps POTUS does, but he’s not saying.   Exactly.  Or pretty much any other way.

As for the three other guys behind him – J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth (Note: If this was the track, they’re be an entry – aka three horses owned by the same stable –  1 a, b and c)  – they remained suited up and silent in navy suits behind the boss, who was center stage in the blue jewel-toned number.

I mean, they might tell us more by the time you read this.  Perhaps in a scheduled press conferences on June 22 or on June 23 in a top secret security briefing to our representatives in Congress.  Who are supposed to know this stuff ahead of time and vote before the U.S. launches bombs into another country and ostensibly starts a war.

Of course, that didn’t happen.

Totally normal stuff here, right?

 And at no point last night was the word war mentioned in their four minute “presentation.”

So I guess that means we’re…. not in a war… with Iran?

Or are we?

I don’t even know what now

I mean when George W. Bush and Dick Cheney took us into the Iraq War twenty plus years ago, at least there was a vote.  And evidence, as specious and/or made up as it was.  They even called it an actual WAR and gave it a name – Operation Iraqi Freedom.  (Note: Yes, we eventually saw what they did there).  But this time there was no vote, no evidence – false or otherwise –  and nary a peep to any members in the Senate or the House of Representatives.

Just the Four Horsemen of the Christian Right telling us they did this thing that wasn’t a war.  Just a lot of… and I quote:

…Great American patriots who flew those magnificent machines tonight…. and no military in the world could’ve done what we did…. Not even close… There’s never been a military that could do what just took place.

In case you were wondering.

Grammar matters

FYI, the magnificent machines were B-2 bombers and what they dropped were 30,000 pound bunker busters (MOBs) that bore straight into the ground to presumably blow up nuclear material thousands of feet below thousands of feet of concrete.  What happens to the remains of that nuclear material, and what the destruction caused by bombs weighing hundreds of thousands of pounds will be, is anyone’s guess.  But presumably, like always, it’s all in the name of “peace.”

Seriously, what could go wrong?

And while you’re contemplating that, here’s Jinkx telling a dirty celebrity story.

Now remember that the man leading us into this war – or whatever he claims it is – is the same person who took over the Kennedy Center a few months ago because a handful of times, among its hundreds of thousands of evenings of entertainment, it served as a venue host for drag shows.  This same person also runs a federal government whose national suicide hotline will no longer refer trans or gay kids to the LGBTQ+ hotline specifically for them, run by The Trevor Project.  That’s an actual truth bomb that just happened that you can read about here. 

Jinkx Monsoon and her kind, be damned.

Totally fine!!

Meanwhile, stay safe. 

As for those of us in Los Angeles, luckily we now have an extra 700 Marines on our streets, courtesy of POTUS, to keep us safe….

…From immigrants.

“One Day More”  from “Les Miserables” – Jinkx Monsoon (playing every role)

03.06.22
by

Law and Order: Zorch Unit

I like the adage write what you know because I’m not the kind of writer who can make up fictional worlds on the planet Zorch. 

Though I might have fun introducing you to a few Zorchian characters and amuse you into believing there is life on other planets.  But that’s only because my Zorchians would seem like Earthlings, probably Americans and likely with an attitude since that is my worldview.

We all have attitudes.

Sing it, sister!

In other words, we are more alike than we are different, as I’ve written before and actually stole from a writing mentor, who in turn likely pilfered it from someone else.

That doesn’t make it any less true.

As we watch what looks like World War III beginning to unfold with the unprovoked, slow decimation of Ukraine and its 43 million people at the hands of crazed Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, it’s hard to not feel like we’re on the planet Zorch. 

Or Ukraine is the planet Zorch. 

OK.. I’m following…

Or planet Zorch is an evil place led by a crazed dictator bent on destroying Ukraine, or daring us and other NATO nations to stand up to it.

It depends on your worldview.

The constant is people are more alike than different. 

How does the image I saw this weekend on CNN of an 18-month old baby boy dying in a blood-soaked blanket in a Ukrainian hospital in the city of Mariupol after intense shelling by Russian bombers relate to all this?

It doesn’t.

All I could focus on were his very much still alive Earthling parents. 

We must.

How did his father, who carried him in, ever make it to the hospital amid the shelling? 

How was that hospital even open? 

What will the life of his hysterical mother – and that Dad’s wife – be like if she even manages to make it out of this unprovoked, needless war?

When I think of that little boy who will never grow up…  Well, I can’t think of that.  I mean, I do but then there comes a point where I walk away or somehow the subject gets changed in my head. 

As it does for so many of us.

Click the pic for links!

In my case it made me once again think of the structural engine behind the indestructible Law and Order franchise.

We earthlings need to believe that at the end of the day our laws will more time than not give us order.  As if real order was possible to ensure and laws were the one imperfect way we had to ensure them.

Well, that might work on Earth but not here (Note: Or there) on Zorch.

There is no Benson and Stabler on Zorch??

Zorchian reality, by contemporary definition, is an environment where the rules don’t apply and our meager laws don’t fix much of anything.

This is especially the case when we don’t have the courage to enforce them or the right logic to forestall impending cataclysmic catastrophe and thus ensure a truly moral order.

Not that we aren’t presently courageous or devoid of any logic whatsoever.

After all, we haven’t reached the end of this episode, or perhaps season arc, quite yet.

We’ll see. 

BUM BUM


Here’s a short, easy to read piece written by nuclear and foreign affairs expert Tom Nichols in The Atlantic that explains better than I can our mixed emotions on how to proceed in helping the people of Ukraine.

And this is a news report about two college roommates at the University of Delaware – one from Ukraine and the other from Russia – who led one of the many large protests to the war this week by college students all over the country.

Though truly, they’ve been taking place all over the world and are often led by the young.

If you want to know more about what college students, nee our future leaders, think click here and what you might find is the smallest glimmer of hope.  It’s a random series of thoughts and responses from them compiled by the NY Times.

Meanwhile, I’ll be the college professor in the corner trying to make some sense of Zorch so I can write about it in a more effective way.

Attitude only gets you so far these days.

Zorch – “Zut Alore”