Forward, to the future

August 29th will mark, if you can believe it, the seventh anniversary of the first post on this blog.

So much has happened since then - our baby was followed two years later by another baby, and now the two of them are bright and articulate little boys, exceptionally well-versed in the spiritual choices of Anakin Skywalker, but otherwise devoid of any sense of restraint or moral compunction (I am grooming them for careers in finance).

It really was a different time, as this article from Wikipedia illustrates...

• A new (NATO) command group had taken over in Afghanistan
• There were concerns about Pakistan assisting the Taliban
• The Russians were dealing with unrest in Chechnya and Dagestan
• North Korea was at the center of international crisis around its nuclear program
• California floundered through a fiscal crisis as its ineffectual lame duck governor contemplated political oblivion

Can we really have come so far?

Anyway, what should we do here?  What with this new social media popping up, maybe we could migrate the whole kit and kaboodle over to Myspace, or Friendster, or Blippy, where we could take advantage of the advantages of Web 2.0, as this video illustrates:



I look forward to collaboratively synergizing with you to develop a social media strategy that will take our brand to the next level.

Semi-serious note: maybe we should wait for Diaspora?

Gettin' to be that time again

July is ending not a moment too soon. (I am so over July already.) NFL teams are in training camp, but many of us are not cringing with every new injury report. "OMFG -- Dez Bryant sprained his ankle in the first day of camp!" "DeSean Jackson was carted off the field and will probably spend the season in a body cast!" "Cedric Benson is having his head surgically re-attached to his body! (Listed as probable for the season opener.)"

Yeah, it's fantasy football time, yo!

My 2009 Yahoo! league champion t-shirt is mocking you all. (Did you even know there was a choice of t-shirt or bobble-head at stake last year? Would it have improved your play? Yeah, didn't think so.)

If you've got the patience to read this blog, you're qualified to be in the league. Actually, since we're hoping to have more than six people, that's not an actual requirement. If interested, post a comment or send me an email, or knock on my door anytime of day or night, or stalk me outside my place of work. There is no money involved (Eisengeiste does not condone illegal activities like betting on sports or vandalizing people's iPhones or shooting the neighbor's rooster), just bragging rights and your choice of a t-shirt or bobble-head which will arrive so long after the end of the season you'll have forgotten all about it.

All your Facebook are belong to us

"Remember that torrent yesterday that contained the personal information off of 100 million scraped Facebook profiles? I thought it was strange that the guy didn't sell this information, since many companies would be interested. Turns out they are interested... Here are the major companies that are downloading the torrent..."

Seahawks camp, Day #1

Helpful preview here.

You know who else's inner circle was full of homosexuals?

Remembering The Gay Reich.

I don't recall the Flirtmobile

Some blessed soul has preserved '70s Anchorage for us.

(Update: for good or for ill, there's more. Almost enough for your misty-eyed South central Alaska nostalgia needs.)

Further update: I don't recall the "Flirtmobile" because it didn't exist. But neither do I really remember the Artmobile.

I do however recall the construction of the Federal Building in the block on the left.

Ted Haggard Documentary

The child is the father of...yikes!

#2 son using the Eve Online character generator

You go Ted!

Haggard now says his scandal is helping him reach out to people: "It's amazing. People tell me everything. That never happened when we were respectable."

"I cuss now," he also boasts.


My favorite line from this whole episode is:

a massage gone awry

Really?  What does that even mean?  As in "I went to get a massage...and something went horribly wrong...and then I had an earth-shaking orgasm." 

I guess I'm not quite following the narrative there.

Thank you TPM Muckraker.

25 bucks, 420 years

I've been playing the Europa Universalis series off-and-on for ten years, now. A couple of weeks ago, I picked up the latest expansion, Europa Universalis III: Heir to the Throne. The complete package costs $25 on Steam or Direct2Drive.

For those unfamiliar with EU, the emphasis has been on evolutionary change in the game towards better historical realism. In this expansion, they've also done a lot to make it a more enjoyable game, while still improving realism.

You are the power behind the throne of a nation from 1399 to 1820. You can start any year, and most any country, but most of the action is in Europe. The sheer number of facets that the player can effect are pretty intimidating -- so many ways to screw up. You have: war, diplomacy, trade, economic production, religion, culture, national ideals, great men, royal marriages and succession, historical events (like the Reformation), papal influence, the Holy Roman Empire, alliances, colonization, piracy, rebellion, espionage, manpower levels, military and exploration leaders, national stability, national prestige, national reputation (bad boy rating), and others I'm forgetting.

The biggest difference between this game a something like Civilization IV, besides the fact that it is played on a historical map, and everything is modeled more accurately, is that you can't just attack other countries that are weaker than you without consequences. If attack another country without casus belli, you will destabilize your country and hurt your relations with other nations.

This week, I started playing Holland in the year 1399. At that point, Holland was just two provinces, Holland and Zeeland. Now it is the year 1495. (Only 325 years left!) My current ruler is Floris VI of the Habsburgs. Just for fun, I worked out his full title, restricted to things he has legitimate claim to in the game:

Floris, by the grace of God, Holy Roman Emperor, forever August, King of Holland, King of New Holland, of the Azores, and of Loango, Defender of the Faith, Duke of Brabant, Limburg, and Gelderland, Count of Flanders, Holland, Zeeland, Artois, Hainaut, and Liege, Lord of Frisia, Breda, Antwerp, and Utrecht

Here is his Europe in 1495:

As you can guess, I'm a little worried about France. Their national focus is, quite simply, to have the biggest army. I fought them to a draw in one war, but they were also fighting Castille at the time. They're still fighting Castille, and you can see the results. Still, they couldn't keep a hold of Normandy and Britanny.

Britain (England and Scotland unified maybe 20 years ago) is also a problem. They own the Jutland peninsula and Mecklenburg and have an invincible navy. It took me years of war to get them off my eastern border, too. One of your jobs as Holy Roman Emperor is to keep non-member powers (like England) out of the Empire, and they've been all up in my business.

At the beginning of a new century, things are good for Holland. The King is Emperor and Defender of the Faith. Holland dominates every trade center in Europe (as well as Alexandria and Samarkand), and has explorers looking for new ones in the East. Holland was first to establish colonies in North America (Newfoundland and Cape Breton islands -- Delaware and New Jersey didn't work out). We have begun a program of reforms of the Holy Roman Empire. Our prestige and reputation surpass every other nation.

What could possibly go wrong in the 16th century?

Steampunks in Paradise: Dessert Wines and the Franco-Prussian War

One of the big historical holes in my head was the 1870 Franco-Prussian War.

This wiki article indirectly demonstrates war is not only wrong but usually completely bonkers. The apparently famous Ems dispatch regarding the French's errant viscount and his tiresome objections to the Hohenzollerns' aspirations to the Spanish throne caused the war, especially the part about being very rude indeed.  Here it is, in its entirety:

Sent by Heinrich Abeken of the Prussian Foreign Office under King Wilhelm's Instruction to Bismarck.

His Majesty the King has written to me:

Count Benedetti intercepted me on the promenade and ended by demanding of me in a very importunate manner that I should authorize him to telegraph at once that I bound myself in perpetuity never again to give my consent if the Hohenzollerns renewed their candidature. I rejected this demand somewhat sternly as it is neither right nor possible to undertake engagements of this kind [for ever and ever]. Naturally I told him that I had not yet received any news and since he had been better informed via Paris and Madrid than I was, he must surely see that my government was not concerned in the matter.

[The King, on the advice of one of his ministers] decided in view of the above-mentioned demands not to receive Count Benedetti any more, but to have him informed by an adjutant that His Majesty had now received [from Leopold] confirmation of the news which Benedetti had already had from Paris and had nothing further to say to the ambassador.
His Majesty suggests to Your Excellency that Benedetti's new demand and its rejection might well be communicated both to our ambassadors and to the Press.

That's it! Let's invade France.

Later, an awesome detail:

"Dispatched from Paris as the republican government's emissary, Léon Gambetta passed over the German lines in a balloon inflated with coal gas from the city's gasworks, and organized the recruitment of new French armies."

This is of course about the same time when, logically enough, a Austrian Hapsburg was King of Mexico. the Germans besiege Paris, win, leave, and get Alsace-Lorraine, and Germany gets to be Germany for the first time. The Paris Commune gets rolling over all debts being due in 48 hours. Then a bunch of rural French businessmen, presumably Tea Baggers, decide to barge in and kill 20,000 of their fellow citizens for messing around with social equality.

The Franco-Prussian War, World War I, and WWII. Once again, we learn that white wines are bad news.

Ten bucks, two months

I'd say "relapse" is too strong a word...is it dark outside already?  (Runs great on Vista.)

Of Englishmen and cats

Christopher Smart (Wikipedia entry)

• English
• Poet
• 1722-1771 (aged 49)
• Father died when he was 11
• Fame established over six-year period of creative intensity, 1749-1755
• Mentally ill?  Certainly eccentric.  Confined to madhouse, anyway, 1756-1763
• Famous work about his cat:  "For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry" from Jubilate Agno, a litany based on the word "For"
• Smart's cat is described as "the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him".
• One odd thing about that...there is another (less famous and fragmentary) companion poem, a litany based on the word "Let"...some modern scholars now believe the poems were meant to be read together.
• Lived lavishly on a poor income, died in debtor's prison.

Syd Barrett (Wikipedia entry)

• English
• Songwriter and musician
• 1946-2006 (aged 60)
• Father died when he was 16
• Fame established over four-year period of creative intensity, 1964-1968
• Mentally ill?  Certainly eccentric.  Left Pink Floyd in 1969, "distanced himself from the public eye."  His sister says not crazy - reclusive from 1970s on.
• Famous work about his cat:  "Lucifer Sam"
• Barrett's cat is apparently named after the devil
• One odd thing about that...in "Lucifer Sam" there's this lyric where he says to his girlfriend "You're the left side / He's the right side."  The "For" side of Smart's poem - the part about the cat - is set on the right of the "Let" side.  OMFG!!!
• Lived modestly on royalty income, died at home, left £1.7 mm to his family.

With respect to "Lucifer Sam" there are, to my surprise, three credible versions in addition to the original linked above:

• Love and Rockets starts with a pop feel and brings in the heavy riff later
• Primrose League - pretty badass
• Neils Children - whiny psychedelia works...who knew?

Bear Tooth Theater, August 2nd

You gots to go

Get off my lawn

PC gamers crush console kiddies

One night in July

Dodger Stadium, the Giants in town.  I was picking this up on my car radio as I ran errands last night.

First a bit of context - the Dodgers have owned the Giants this year.  In April the Dodgers not only won a series from the Giants, but reliever (and noted headhunter) Vicente Padilla hit Aaron Rowand in the face, breaking bones in his cheek.  There were no cards or calls of condolence from the Dodger organization.  The Giants fought back by...well, by doing nothing.

Then, right before the All-Star break, the Dodgers came into AT&T Park and swept the Giants.  Tough guy Matt Kemp homered and drove in three runs in the final game of the series. 

So last night the Dodgers are beating Tim Lincecum's brains in, and it's the same old story.  LA's up  5-1 in the fifth, and Kemp is up:




"Can you hear me now?"  If you've seen Slap Shot you have an inkling of what happened next.  It got much better (the whole story is here), and it's surely a game the umpires would like to forget.

It's a civic duty

Have you voted?

Refudiated

Palin strikes again.  The stupid...it burns...

Here's an Eisengeiste dedication:

Life in Oz

They don't make money.
They don't have a plan to make money.
They're worth a billion dollars and talking IPO.

The 70s were tough for everyone

Writes like...

The Front (based on Shulman post):

I write like
Dan Brown

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

First Sea Lord (based on LBJ post):

I write like
Kurt Vonnegut

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

All I can say is: (affects Yosemite Sam voice) I hate you. 

More fun here.

Some interesting thoughts on the Afghan war

Here

Some wars are righter than others

Still has his fastball

Thirty one years after Disco Demolition Night, and a year after we sang his praises, Mike Veeck gets TPM, hook, line, and sinker.

Thought on the Wars

President Johnson, in moral agony over Vietnam, once told his staff: "If I go, people die, and if I stay, people die."

The wars are a fact of history - and as much as I opposed the invasion of Iraq, there are no actions to be taken which free us of failed moral choices. We may now be able to leave Iraq in an orderly way, having killed a 100,000 people, without wasting all their lives.

In Afghanistan, we're invaders with a hot personal grudge, and a slower moral conscience. But it's there. The people who had to grab the reins on these runaway wars are not fools, and I'm not yet convinced just leaving will kill less people.  If there is a better alternative, one that prevents more deaths, I don't know what it is.

Like this oil catastrophe, the key point of best moral action was in the distant past- not drilling irresponsibly, not bringing us to oil dependency, which is driving force of these wars. Once it happens, you have to play your best cards, and when it ends, try a different game entirely.

That being said, whenever you finding yourself talking lightly about war, stub your toe, hard. That pain is the punctuation on this:

War is a mass effort to insert metal at high velocity into soft human flesh. Everything else is the stench of the battle for power.

The hip catch phrase that's taking the country by storm

The imaginary paradise of Julius Shulman

Visual Acoustics, an excellent documentary on the work of Julius Shulman, the brilliant photographer of modernist architecture who passed away last year, is now available on DVD.

Many people who think they love modernist architecture are really in love with the visual sensibility of Shulman, who took most of the defining pictures of early American modernism.  This iconic shot of Koenig's Case Study House No. 22 turned a nice modernist house into something arresting, something that made the casual magazine browser pause and gape.

Shulman did it again and again, taking odd geometrical buildings made of strange materials and demonstrating how - in his mind's eye, at least - they cohered with the land and sky and invited habitation.  His clients, mostly young architects trying to earn a living building to the new aesthetic, were surprised and delighted by the results. He was that rarest of all animals, an artist who could sell houses.

Of course part of Shulman's success was that he was not exactly photographing the structure, although he had a knack for capturing the angles and vanishing points that were hallmarks of the modernist style.  But his interests went far beyond the building - sometimes further than the client would have liked.

Shulman worked with Neutra for 30 years, until the latter's passing in 1970.  Shulman recalled that he was on site once at a Neutra project and moved to take his camera outside.  Neutra tried to stop him, but Shulman prevailed.  The result was:

 



If this has anything to do with architecture, I'm Justin Bieber.

Shulman was meticulous with light and composition, and managed, within the exceptional constraints of the role he played, to evoke beautiful imaginary lives, lives untroubled by traffic, neurosis, or discord.  Some say he sold modernism to America, but it would be more correct to say that in his commercial photography he persuaded America to see things his way - a "floating world" (to use the Japanese term) that was harmonious, perfectable, and, best of all, well-lit.

Perhaps he was such a spectacularly successful marketer because his aesthetic emphasized things most modernist architects hardly cared about.  Some of these guys really believed "form follows function" and "a house is a machine for living in," even as they aped the aesthetics of the Greeks and Japanese (a dynamic that came full circle with Wright's magnificent Imperial Hotel in Tokyo).

While I would argue his commercial success had a nice parallelism with his sincere artistic intentions, he could take other kinds of pictures too.  Some hint at his concern for the environment, others signal his deeply-held conviction that L.A. was turning into something other than a modernist fairy-land:




I never heard Shulman exactly say it in the documentary but I'll say it here:  he was a mysticist.  Yes! A damned mysticist.  These pictures are full of stuff that's not in them.  He put his own heart and mind into these photographs, and in doing so he made modernism something good and special and human, something it never really was.

There is an excellent Atlantic piece on Shulman here.  There is also a brief mini-documentary, narrated by Shulman himself, on Youtube.  You can also get Visual Acoustics on Netflix.

Yesterday's future was better

Mile High Final Movie - Frank Lloyd Wright from John Pugh on Vimeo.

Need to rally here...

FSL engages in prophecy, 2005

A favorite Eisengeiste moment.

I trust this will improve your view of robots

Germany is sad

Further confusion

"Of all the versions of my recorded songs, the Johnny Rivers one was my favorite. It was obvious that we were from the same side of town, had been read the same citations, came from the same musical family and were cut from the same cloth. When I listened to Johnny's version of 'Positively 4th Street,' I liked his version better than mine. I listened to it over and over again........When I heard Johnny sing my song, it was obvious that life had the same external grip on him as it did on me." - Bob Dylan



Here he is pretending to be Ricky Nelson. At this point I wouldn't be surprised if he could sound like Aretha if he wanted to.

Dan Ariely on why it's hard to care about global warming

Ariely is one of the pre-eminent behavioral economists in the world, I think his comments tie in with some of the points that Wohlforth guy makes.  His new book (Ariely's, not Wohlforth's) is The Upside of Irrationality.

I'm having a lot of trouble with my Johnny Rivers post

Dr. X posts this from the Whisky-a-Go-Go:

I'm having a lot of trouble with my Johnny Rivers post.  It was originally motivated by a desire to connect back from Devo's Secret Agent Man to the (lip-synced here) original.  This performance on Letterman shows what it's like in real life.

(Ok, not to go off on a tangent right away, but you really should go listen to the Polysics version, too.)

Anyway, there are all sorts of problems associated with the socio-musicological significance of Johnny Rivers, and they are so intractable I despair of putting his achievements into the proper context.  A few random points may help frame the problem:

• He sings and plays like a rock star, but doesn't have the rock star personality or physique.  If he were a 10% worse musician and looked like Ryan Seacrest, he'd be Elvis Jr.
• If you ask someone "who is your favorite rock performer", almost no one will say "Johnny Rivers".
• Nonetheless, he has sold about 30 million records, and by the count of Bruce Eder at Allmusic.com this success has launched "at least three record labels and a dozen other careers."
• There was a moment in the  late 60s when rock took a hard turn into the weird and trippy.  Some of it was good, some not.  Rivers did not make that turn. Regardless of its merits, the new style was completely at odds with his disciplined aesthetics and rhythmic priorities.
• Maybe he hasn't written enough good songs.  His real core competency is taking a good song and turning in the definitive performance, e.g., Secret Agent Man, Memphis, Seventh Son, etc.
• Maybe he peaked too early.  The definitive Johnny Rivers record is Live at the Whisky-a-Go-Go, a stunningly vivid document of his inaugural stand at the LA hotspot, the flawless representation on vinyl of a polished rock and roll artist, a man utterly in command of his medium.  He was 22.

But he did continue to develop, and as he did so it became apparent that his own songs (though not artistically of great merit) were as popular as his scintillating covers.  He also produced the 5th Dimension's first records, and their records were sold on his label.

But these are the hallmarks of a successful career in the music business, not of great artistic achievement.  His artistic claim rests solely on  his mastery of the simple but elusive go-go rock genre.  Rivers may be a one-trick pony, but it is a very good trick.

He has a sense of humor, too.  Here's a nice version of Memphis, with him throwing in some Bob Dylan on the third verse at no extra charge:



If it were my Rock and Roll Hall of Fame he'd be in, but they don't take my calls since that dustup over The Dickies. Rivers' website is here.

Say That Again in Pumpokol

 A fascinating list of extinct languages here.

I noticed that many American Native languages died out in the 1920s and 1930s- a period where the educational goal was assimilation. I remember that people in Alaska have memories of being beaten for speaking their native tongue. Missionaries, doing god's work again.

In Alaska, if memory serves, there at at least 40 Native language and dialect groups. One of the most heartbreaking stories I ever read was the last two speakers of I think a Dena'ina dialect- twin sisters in their 90s, one of who had just passed. She had become the last one to think in the unique thoughts made possible by this language, and sang as she walked through the berry patches. 

General resource on Alaska languages.

Cultural and language eradication is happening, often deliberately, now in Tibet, now in South America, now in the U.S. The loss is forever. And yet it is also true that the astounding proliferation of English gives hope for the communication essential to prevent the human race destroying itself.

Hard to know what to think, other than to support preservation efforts, end political oppression, and surf the convenient dominance of English. Human cultures do not exist trapped in amber, yet every language and cultural practice lost is the end of a way of thinking.

English serves business and education well, much as Latin and French and German once did. However, the dominant ideas woven inside the English language might be crushing everything else. It's great for marketing this so-called "iPhone," (to which my near-total indifference has not prevented this presumptuous gadget from staking a neural colony in my brain); but what's the compelling, persuasive word for "please stop paving everything you look at"?

I expect there is perfect phrase for this, in Pictish.

After Monmouth

In this day and age, I'm not sure every schoolchild knows about the Battle of Monmouth (1778).  Many, apparently, don't even know that our nation won its independence from England.  I have to admit, despite a passing interest in the subject, that I'd never heard of it either, until it was mentioned on a History Channel documentary today.

That war was full of forgotten battles.  I would wager that most educated Americans couldn't name more than a few of the key engagements - Lexington and Concord of course, and Bunker Hill...perhaps Princeton or Saratoga.  It is a shame that so many of the others have been totally forgotten, notably the disaster at Long Island (also one of the largest battles of the war), Daniel Morgan's momentum-changing ass-whipping of the British at Cowpens (the road from there went to Yorktown), and the Battle of the Chesapeake (which finally forced Cornwallis' surrender).

The Battle of Monmouth, fought near Camden, New Jersey, is in the same category (a good pre-Civil War narrative of the battle is here). 

It was:

• The first major engagement after Valley Forge
• The largest battle of the entire war (11,000 Americans against 15,000 British troops)
• The first battle in which the rebel army was made up primarily of Continental regulars
• One of the few battles in which the Americans did not retreat afterward
• The last battle between the main armies of the antagonists and the last major battle in the Northern states

It was also one of Washington's finest hours as a military commander, as he rode forward, halted the retreat of Lee's men, and organized lines of defense so the main force could come up and engage the enemy.  Lafayette said of Washington's conduct that he "seemed to arrest fortune with one glance.... His presence stopped the retreat.... His graceful bearing on horseback, his calm and deportment which still retained a trace of displeasure...were all calculated to inspire the highest degree of enthusiasm.... I thought then as now that I had never beheld so superb a man."  (Lafayette named his son after him.) 

I suppose the battle is forgotten because it led nowhere - even John Ferling's encyclopedic (and outstanding) Almost a Miracle gives it barely five pages.  Ferling says "Monmouth was not a pivotal engagement...neither side gained anything..."  Lafayette, in a letter, first called it a battle but corrected himself and instead termed it an "affair."

It is true that the Battle of Monmouth had little impact on the military situation of the time.  The British were retreating and continued to retreat.  The Americans were unable to inflict a significant defeat on the British, or capture any of their baggage.  From a military perspective, the British achieved their goal of an orderly withdrawal from Philadelphia.

But, the more I look at it, the more I that think this was a greater moment than historians have allowed.  It was the first time the Continental Army showed it could stand face-to-face, on European terms, against the best British forces in North America.  And it gave the lie to the British claim that the Americans were a rabble - if they can't fight properly, why are you retreating?

Perhaps not coincidentally, it was also Washington's last major engagement before Yorktown.  In this battle, like most of his others, Washington fought against larger and better-trained enemy forces.  Ferling points out that until Yorktown, "in eleven years, and two wars, no enemy army had ever formally surrendered to him."

And then Washington did something unprecedented, that made our country possible:



Many people encouraged Washington to take over as dictator or king.  Here, in full, is a letter Washington wrote to one such supplicant (source):

Sir - with a mixture of great surprise and astonishment I have read with attention the sentiments you have submitted to my perusal.  Be assured, Sir, no occurrence in the course of the War, has given me more painful sensations than your information of there being such ideas existing in the Army as you have expressed, and I must view them with abhorrence and reprehend with severity.  For the present, the communication of them will rest in my own bosom, unless some further agitation of the matter, shall make a disclosure necessary.


I am much at a loss to conceive what part of my conduct could have given encouragement to an address, which to me seems big with the greatest mischiefs that can befall my Country.  If I am not deceived in the knowledge of myself, you could not have found a person to whom your schemes are more disagreeable; at the same time, in justice to my own feelings I must add that no Man possesses a more sincere wish to see complete justice done to the Army than I do, and as far as all my powers and influence in a constitutional way extend, they shall be employed to the utmost of my abilities to effect it, should there be any occasion.  Let me conjure you then, if you have any regard for your Country, concern for yourself or posterity, or respect for me, to banish these thoughts from Your Mind, and never communicate, as from yourself or anyone else, a sentiment of the like Nature.

Happy 4th of July!

With an explanation

Tea Party Jesus

Words of conservatives in the mouth of Jesus.

The Clintons can only dream

Recent Obama roundup from the right.  Amazing...just to sum up:

• He's "trying to create a civil war" (the first world leader in history, apparently, to incite a civil war against himself).
• He's "trying to destroy the country"
• He's a "clinically diagnosable narcissist"
• Might be a spy
• "It's almost like we're intentionally making things much, much worse" in the Gulf of Mexico
• Government "is in your toilet" (no it's not, I looked, it's not there)
• He wants one world government (in my toilet?!)
• He is running a "thugocracy"

Well, at least they respect his capability.  Stalin could envy that agenda.

You don't know like I know