TWGB: It's Raining Shoes!

 

It certainly has been a minute, hasn't it? So, what brings me out of self-imposed blogging exile, if not something very relevant to my obsessions? Is it that the POTUS's favorite she-pimp seems to be getting favorable treatment, with the expectation of more of the same? Well sure, that's pretty heinous, given what she has done, and you would certainly be right to wonder why, but there's of course more, because this is TrumpWorld--and of course, there are emails, lots of them, indicating Trump knew about the girls. 

I don't think any mature rational person, knowing what we know about Trump and women (and girls) who isn't pretty sure how well he knew either--it was not a well-kept secret.

But if you know me by now, you know all roads go back to Moscow. Or really, anywhere kompromat on this scuzzy, flabby-brained bag of crapulence can damage this country's national security. Because fine, MAGA does not give a tiny, constipated shit for women and girls--understood. From "Moses Mike" Johnson to the lowest Q-creep, they can pretend to moralize all they want, but at the end of the day, they can, will and do compromise their morality for the sake of politics. 

But Epstein was letting the Russians know what of course they already knew--how to handle Trump. Epstein was talking with the Russians and people in Trump's circle at a period of time that is MIGHTY inconvenient. 

Makes you wonder, doesn't it? I don't want to wonder, though--we need to see what else in in these Epstein files, and not whatever version has been redacted to death (so we have heard). The American people deserve the truth. 

(As for me, I'm still writing--I'm doing my usual November poetry challenge. )

It's Especially NOT Funny Because It's True

 

pic.twitter.com/ZUeYUHMNjA

— Secular Talk (KyleKulinskiShow@bsky.social) (@KyleKulinski) March 17, 2025

MAGA doesn't care about this. MAGA says these friends of child traffickers say some things we agree with, so we will ignore that they also exploit working class Americans and threaten our retirement, our Social Security and Medicaid/Medicare and so on. Because THEY SAY SOME THINGS MAGAS LIKE.

So, it doesn't matter if they support dictators abroad, want a dictatorship here, support billionaires first, not America, and wipe their asses on the Constitution.

They say some things the MAGAS like. Are they ever true, correct, necessary things? They are just over the shit rainbow and think being along for the ride is winning--even while they are riding on a soon-to be jettisoned sidecar. 

They Aren't Serious People

 

Two relatively weird and messed up things (I guess not just two, but these were the ones I was tracking) happened today--the Trump Administration got to pretend they were being "promises kept" about releasing the so-called "Epstein files" and they also seem to have gotten the Tate Brothers extradited from Romania. 

I'm not going to touch on Romanian politics or how President in fact Elon Musk is rooting for the pro-Russian candidate and mad the democratic republic wants a do-over and all that--my bandwidth is limited, and TrumpWorld is messy enough as it is. Per my understanding Cailin Georgescu earned his troubles honestly and you want to keep that between him and the country his dumb ass ran, cheated, and was caught on the verge of insurrection in. 

For a lot of reasons, I don't find that funny, myself. I do think it's very funny we are going to pretend the Tates are supposed to be, adamantly, "innocent until PROVEN guilty" when we just horked them out of the environment people were trying to find them guilty in. And their whole schtick was advertising themselves as successful pimps and human traffickers and admitted to being all the bad things they are accused of. 

Abbott and Audacity

 

INBOX: ⁦@GovAbbott⁩ slams ⁦@JoeBiden⁩ ⁦@POTUS⁩ for providing baby formula to undocumented immigrants during a national shortage #txlege #tx2022 pic.twitter.com/OGhLYVl1Q5

— Evan Smith (@evanasmith) May 12, 2022

It seems to me that the complaint Gov. Abbott makes that the Biden Administration is feeding babies in immigrant detention is an obvious example of Adam Serwer's axiom: "The cruelty is the point."  There isn't an option here--you feed the kids or they die of starvation. Texas Governor Greg Abbott understands that, but he also understands that there are people who really don't care if that happens. And those are his people. He doesn't have a solution to the issue of fixing the food supply or actually taking care of these children.

What? Greg Abbott, concerned about the supply chain or child welfare? 

It really feels like he doesn't care if children are endangered so long as he is making a culture war point.  He comes up with complaints about things, not real solutions even while real people can be harmed. So of course he has something to say about even the babies of undocumented immigrants--he has made the border his business, and threatening babies I guess makes him look tough. 

Or it makes him look like a sick SOB. I know how I see it. 

The Children

 

The word 'children' was painted in large Russian script on the ground outside the Mariupol Drama Theatre, Maxar satellite images collected on March 14 showed. Ukraine accused Russia of bombing the theater on Wednesday. Russia denies the attack https://t.co/JtB56K8eCz pic.twitter.com/iV13h0dBXm

— Reuters (@Reuters) March 16, 2022

What can you say about the rules of engagement of a force where painting the word "children" next to a building in the hopes that a bombing would be passed over makes that building a target? Because I have no doubt in the world this is what happened. 

I compare this to the Russian lies about the maternity hospital they shelled and the woman that they tried to portray as a crisis actor. In my heart of hearts. I will never forget that knowing she was losing her child, with a shattered pelvis, she begged to be put out of her misery and the cosmos in its accidental mercy responded. On what moral plane do such things happen? 

There isn't any morality here. This is total war, Vernichtungskreig. This is scorched earth thinking. When Putin started to talk about his paranoid fear about Ukraine and his border, it seemed to me he was talking about Lebensraum. He wanted a place for Russian people, and Ukraine as a state was in his way. When there is talk of even logging the Ukraine forest to pay for his war, I am hearing echoes of Operation Barbarossa.

Death and A Complication

The death of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein has fueled speculations about what happened to the prisoner--wasn't he supposed to be on suicide watch? (It turns out--he no longer was.)  Wasn't there an awfully long list of people who wanted to see him dead? (Yes, very probably.) Wouldn't his death end the investigation into his child sex trafficking? (Well, not necessarily--he had accomplices who should still be held to justice.)

I think the tendency to assign blame when a high-profile individual is found dead or dying in his cell is very reasonable. Being off suicide watch a mere three weeks after a previous attempt sounds suspicious as hell. Assuming murder, though, goes a bit further than I think is necessary. Here's what we know about Epstein: the man was a highly self-driven person who pursued money and power in order to live a life that was completely unaccountable to the law. He displayed the sociopathic ability to use and manipulate people in order to evade responsibility for his actions. In addition to having obtained an absurdly lenient plea deal, it seems evident the Epstein also finagled money out of at least one benefactor (probably more) and never faced the music for that.

Jeffrey Epstein's "art", if we could can it that, was escape. He got away with things. Although I appreciate the incredulity some are expressing that his death is not being treated as a murder, it seems actually pretty believable to me that a person who lived a life intent on maximizing his liberties and unaccountability would kill himself as yet another escape from facing the full weight of his crimes and one last middle finger to the world, the law, the morality he gave few fucks about.  If I saw the likelihood of any conspiracy at all in his ending, maybe there was a degree of "LIHOP" (Letting It Happen on Purpose) to quickly let the world be dispatched of such human rubbish. 

Of course, I don't know any better than anyone else, and while I hope there will be a very thorough investigation, sometimes the results of even very thorough investigations can be confounded. Of such is the world in which we live.

TWGB: No Kings

It makes sense to me to open this post with Donald Trump signing the front of Bibles for Alabamians who have survived the extraordinarily severe tornado outbreak that killed 23 people. He would surely sign the cover, as it is the only part I really think he ever looked at. But that isn't weird. A Bible is a keepsake book, a thing you won't throw away. And the signature of a President, no matter which one, is a kind of historical record. Many Christians have keepsake Bibles where there is a place to recognize family histories like births and deaths. It's a part of our family lore and hand-me-down heritage to gift a Bible to a newlywed couple to remind them to raise their family in the faith. My parents received such keepsake Bibles that I ferreted out as a unchurched child among our various basement treasures--put-away unfashionable clothes and holiday decorations and military mementos and other random things people in their thirties have that their kids might find. 

I found the religion I didn't have--and because I was a reader, read. But there was nothing in those keepsake gifted Bibles that made me feel anything different about us--other than that my immediate family never indoctrinated me into this thing of religion that their families obviously had, that we never practiced. I used the unused pages to try and fill in the family history bits that had been left not filled in, but didn't even know what apparently, family Bibles should have recorded. 

What I did know, though, was better than religion--I had safety. My parents taught me to be capable. I wasn't brave, but I could fake it. I wasn't strong, but I could find strength. I was not fast, but I could be ready. I was smart, but they taught me when to not be too clever. I don't know what Donald Trump was taught when he was a wee'un, but I don't think it is too much removed from his grandfather who started hotels that might have offered more than the usual accommodations. He was taught to monetize, to capitalize.  And this is what he does. He moved from residential real estate to casinos because here is more money there. And then branched out to other ventures like a modeling agency, that wasn't too far removed from human trafficking. 

Things being sex-trafficking adjacent though, are necessarily bad, and it looks like Trump and the GOP are pretty well sex-trafficking adjacent. (More so than usual.) A recent bust of a spa chain that deals in massages and more which was goddamn close to Mar-A-Lago brought in NFL Patriots owner Robert Kraft, but the founder of this little old business selfied with so many prominent GOP figures, but most notably Trump at the Super Bowl. Well, I guess for a person with a dodgy business, friend in high places could come in handy. She also took pics with Jesse Watters and Judge Pirro and all the Trump kids and so on. 

Donald Trump likes to talk about sex trafficking along the US border. This, under his very nose--is actual sex trafficking. 

But is there more to the story? Is the madam trafficker also selling access to a certain person inclined to be accessible at one of his business addresses?  Yes? He is often there and is apparently susceptible to people who want to drop him a note that says anything like "Dear king". 

Now, my friends, you know in this country there shouldn't be any kings but Jesus and Elvis, and Elvis has left the building. Trump is no "King Cyrus" either. Trump being called "King" is weird, but his accepting hints of policy from randos who frequent his business is also very weird.

I look at his trademarks, and have to wonder what this is all about. Is he eventually setting up actual escort services and what could generously be called spas along the lines of Mme. Yang at any of his properties abroad as a kind of full-service agreement? After all, this is the guy who is not at all circumspect with his own sexual continence. But I also wonder--what about the blackmail potential? Trump has used surveillance on people at his properties. To what end, though?

Haiti Child-smuggling Case--something about road to hell and good intentions?

From CBS, with commercial (sorry):



Regardless of whatever "good intentions" the American missionaries might have had in taking the children, it definitely was a stupid action. It's believed that most of the children were not orphans, and a recent story indicated that it was the parents of the children who had given them over in the hopes of giving them a better life. But in the midst of such chaos, and with the rampant opportunities for human trafficking by not-so-well-intentioned people, they really should have had second, third, and fourth thoughts before taking them. And sadly, it sounds like they've really gummed up the works for other people who were trying to do everything right.

It's a very sad thing.