Renee Good

 Two observations: 

1) When the steering wheel of a car in motion is turned sharply to the right, the tail end shifts away from that direction to the left, especially with a long car. The agent, the one who did the shooting, was very close, videoing with his phone. Too close, and he got bumped. 

2) Why was he so close?  He was part of a coordinated effort to arrest Renee Good, on the pretense of the vital need to move her vehicle. They were rushing her, for the arrest, and he was documenting it.  It was somewhat planned, improvised, but incomplete due to her pulling out suddenly with the car--something I would say was not expected by the cops, as she was basically surrounded.  They expected her to surrender, not put it in gear and flee.

I would put the actual incident in the broad category of "killed while fleeing arrest", something that happens all too often, but with some very special characteristics in this case.  

First was the lack of any presumption of innocence.  It seems there may have been some bad blood building between her (and her partner) and the ICE force, though that hardly excuses what happened. 

Second, there is the unusual nature of the victim.  "Killed while fleeing arrest", in the US, is generally associated with a black male (who is presumed guilty, of course).  This was clearly a recognizably white, middle-class woman with a friendly demeanor. That was unusual in the extreme.  I'm not saying it's that different in nature from the more common form of killing the suspect who is trying to flee from arrest.  The message, it's clear, was that there was no mercy for irritating white women, either. 

Third, it was ICE killing people on the street.  Their nature as an organization seems to be more to capture and then let them rot  rather than summary execution. This comes down to ICE agents being armed and authorized to use lethal force (under limited circumstances).  In the case of the shooter,  he had been being trained to do so, though I suspect that level of skill might be rare in their force these days.*   What I think he had learned from the training was that he could use the pretext of his bump from the car to claim self-defense.

I mourn her unnecessary death and for her survivors.  

In the immediate aftermath of the incident, HHS Secretary Noem stated that the shooter, who was in danger of his life and firing in self-defense, had done everything right.  If so, and I seriously doubt it, that means the training is seriously wrong-headed--people try to escape arrest in many different situations, and the instinctive response to shoot, if you can, must be suppressed.  There needs to be more presumption that contacts with civilians avoid casualties at all costs, just as there should be such limitations with potential deportees, too.   Better yet, get ICE off the streets of our cities, out of schools and public places, and reduce their numbers.  

 

Happy Anniversary!

We think of annual remembrance as being a public event, like New Year's Day, or as some would have it, January 6, as an event worthy of an anniversary, with this one being the special crooked number 5. 

The anniversaries that mean more to me are the subjective ones.  Two examples: 

--I put on a t-shirt today that I dug up recently, going through a suitcase of old clothes for things to give away.  It's a nice white shirt, from Speedo, that was given at a Knicks game that I went to.  It helps me remember what was probably my best NBA game experience ever, from the period, roughly defined as the Patrick Ewing era, that I was a devoted follower with a share of season tickets. I noted that the 30th anniversary of it is coming up this February.  It was late Jordan, and all the 3-pointers were going in for the Knicks that day, who won by over 30 points. I'm keeping the shirt. 

--The date our marriage was celebrated in 1993 was September 11.  We find it very convenient for reserving a table at restaurants.

So, I have no objection if you celebrate an anniversary today.  If what you celebrate is the survival of our constitutionally-mandated Federal proceeding, despite the obstruction, okay.  If it's the riot. go tase yourself.  

Things Move Faster Now? 

I'm hearing a lot of "I can't believe it's been five years".  I feel, on the other hand, that from a political point of view, it has been five very long years, notwithstanding the slow pace of the cases against Trump (the cases against the rioters went much quicker).  He hit absolute bottom, faced a real prospect of having to run for it, but then, with the covering fire from his movement, was able to overrun his party and capture Our Flag. 

 January 6, 2021 at the US Capitol is very much analogous to November 8, 2023 in the Munich beer hall putsch .  It took Hitler almost 10 years to gain power; Trump's grab for almost unlimited power took only four.  The difference was the ability of today's wealthy insurrectionist-in-chief to buy protection in the US court system from high-end lawyers and compliant judges, with the substantial aid from a cross-section of US oligarchs. Somehow there was a finding that just running for President meant that he couldn't be tried for his most serious charges. 

Admittedly, Trump moved very fast since his inauguration, faster than he could effectively manage. I am observing this occasion by reviewing the hundreds of emails received in the month after the election, when the shock was receding and folks began to think about what was coming*.  It turns out that virtually all of what has happened was clearly foreseen--there were even hints of the Venezuelan Gambit and the Greenland Gluttony (Apparently Trump had already stared at the 2-D maps showing how f--ing big it appears to be).  

It was seen then that Trump 2.0 would be liberated from the restraints he observed (if unwillingly) in his first term. The story is emerging now that he considered a swap with Pootie of Ukraine for Venezuela, or of Greenland for Puerto Rico (sounds like a good deal for Denmark!)  Certainly people could see pardons for January 6 rioters (and we shouldn't have been surprised if Trump just auto-penned them),  The mutant monster known as DOGE was rising from the valley, but apart from its obvious giant footprint the extent of its cruel trail of destruction wasn't seen clearly. 

 

 

*The review is necessary to keep my email (of 25+ years) going; it's maxed out on its space, and I can't buy more.  Thing is, I don't have that policy of 'read and save or kill' when they come in. I get too busy.  I generate a page (usually from the last five years, when the size of emails increased) at random and plow through it.  This time, it was mid-December, 2024.   

 

  

  

Pottery Barn Status: Just a Crack?

One thing that the realization of the Venezuelan Gambit makes clear is poor Venezuela will be "run" no better than the US is "run" by these clowns.  That being said, the military and CIA had their act together impressively for the capture mission, and we are grateful for that. 

I do appreciate Rubio's expressed point of view, that this is just the removal of a corrupt, criminal leader*, and not a signal for massive violence or political upheaval.  It at least gets most of it over the hurdle of the questioning of the whole sordid affair and into the courts.  "It" being the complete disregard for the formalities before beginning the large-scale hostilities. 

It won't work, though, in my opinion.  Trump will give it a try, as the negotiations continue on his share of the oil revenue and on the mass return of the refugees. I have doubt whether he can succeed with this approach toward the current regime, the best outcome for him politically--a clean operation, declare victory, take the bump, move on--but we all know he has other options, as long as they don't involve a prolonged ground presence.  In his case, he might call up and use the poor National Guard of some compliant state to maintain security for oil workers. 

Having described the best possible outcome, we now have to consider the alternatives.  First is trouble from the official government and military of Venezuela, which so far has had a mixed reaction there: some are ready to cooperate, some take a more resistant stance.  It could merely be that they are not yet bought in to the new Trump system. So to speak. If they don't play along over the key transitional period of a few months to a year, though, it could get ugly. 

Next consider the opposition, as Trump Co. may end up having to do. The Trump approach surprised me by freezing the organized opposition out, after all the mutual flattery and the Nobel Prize nonsense for M.Machado.  In the long run, this could end up looking more like Cuba or Afghanistan than Iraq or Libya, especially if the general impression is that the Yanqui imperialists are stealing their money, once again, and meanwhile the bad deal they are getting from the government is continuing to bankrupt the nation. One thing I have yet to hear is the cost in Venezuelan lives of this initiative.   

Finally, the real deals.  What he's doing is effectively to help knock out one criminal narcotics conspiracy, on behalf of a larger, more organized one.  And what percentage is the Don going to get up front and from whom?  The oil project is a more long-term one that could end up working or falling disastrously short.  The reserves are there, if you can keep them.  In the very short term, there should be a drop in the commodity price for oil.  

 If he's smart, he will do what they did in Iraq, but more consistently and successfully, and "invite" the top 100 of the power figures of the formerly-Chavismo power structure headed by A. Maduro to depart, with a bar of gold bullion each.  Being very experienced in dealing with rampant inflation, they'll want that instead of questionable dollar assets. But depart they must. Then it'll be easier to impose his will and get his cut.  

Finally, it should help Dickhead Don in the continual battle to find domestic political distractions from the Epstein Files virus and from affordability. Gas prices should continue to help though the summer as a reaction to this.  Foreign affairs give Trump a lot more leeway to do his will when the courts can't or won't intervene. Congress will squawk but do nothing, and they already are disadvantaged because it happened while they slept.  If he doesn't watch it, though, he could become subject to arrest abroad at some point. The criminal.  

I have to admit that they brought this to a head faster than I thought they would.  I thought it would take more clear signs of impending recession to spark the attack. There was a little uptick in unemployment and continued Trump jawboning the interest rate, but we are all poorly-informed on the real prospects for the economy in the near future.  A big risk, but the phrase "world's largest crude oil reserves" was vibrating in Trump's feeble but cunning mind. 

My big question is:  how many fronts are we going to be dealing with, by the time this faux isolationist fait accompli artist+ is through?  I see four, easily: apart from potential rebellion in America South,  Israel trying to dominate in the Middle East, China squeezing Taiwan and disrupting the rest of East Asia, and Russia in the former Soviet Union, or even Eastern Europe.   And probably a politically weakened, physically collapsing, seat-of-diapered-pants driving greedmonger.  Think Baron Harkkonen going for the "spice", if you permit a "Dune" reference.   

  

 Epilogue: 

My draft response to Adam Kinzinger's video, which he taped just after Trump's press event, in frustration as the news kept changing early:  

I'm afraid I must resist the appeal not to jump to outcomes--which, after the safe return of the US capture operation personnel, and the count of Venezuelans lost in it, is all there are:   
I don't agree that "this is not Iraq"--there is the same lack of a clue of a plan.  Instead, this time it will be transactional negotiation at the point of a gun.  The main topics are the US cut of oil profits (and our loan will follow agreement) and allowing return of refugees on a large scale.  The current regime will not come to agreement, so they ("we") will move on to the next.  

Finally, the person who won the presidential election was not Nobel-prize winner Machado but the person the opposition put up when she was not allowed to run.  Gonzales.   Why not stick him in and then supervise elections, rather than invade and bomb?  (and help the oil industry there get back to production, of course) 

My response, edited: 

 I don't agree that "this is not Iraq"--there is the same lack of a clue of a plan.

the person who won the presidential election was not Nobel-prize winner Machado but the person the opposition put up when she was not allowed to run.  Gonzales.   Why not stick him in and then supervise elections, rather than invade and bomb?   

 

* I would suggest that the indictment should read, or should have read, "Conspiracy to distribute narcotics outside of usual cartel channels. "    I know the grand jury had to do it in a hurry.  

+Two French expressions in one sentence.  Is that too many?  

That Was "The Golden Age" That Was

 -- A little 2025, a little the last 80 years, and a Gore Vidal novel I just finished.  

 

 

There is no doubt that 2025 was a year of a distinct and recognizable change in the USA.  What it portends for the future is much in doubt--ain't it always that way?--but this year, taken as a data point, is truly what President Biden used to say, an inflection point. 

The effect of the attempted destruction of the federal government that was the chief initiative of the Trump Administration in this year may take long to fully reveal itself, whether or not there is ever a serious effort to reverse it.  The damage sought to our climate, cruel and casually imposed, may or may not be fatal in the larger, global sense. 

The damage to our international relations, though, and to our nation's position in the world order, is permanent. Even if we somehow regain our footing as a nation and can refrain from piratical kleptocracy in the new A.D. (After Dickhead), we will never again be the monopole, the only superpower, able to set and maintain the primary rules of geopolitics on the grand scale.  Diplomatic primacy, military superiority, the security of owning the world's reserve currency, the best military alliances, somewhat real economic dominance--these are all in question, even if we can maintain our momentum in a frenetic technological race. We can talk about the loss of moral posture below.    

What we shattered in 2025 was cracked by the fall of 2024.  It was no longer possible to dismiss the freakish Trump win in 2016 as an aberration.  This was the great realization abroad, and the implications of that fact, although not always viewed in the same way for its effect locally, always provides critical guidance on the national interest, because always relevant.  The USA was, indeed, that important. It will never be the same in that regard.

A 2025 retrospective post on Substack by Phillips O'Brien, an expert on the military-diplomacy nexus and the war against Ukraine, was titled "2025 In Review: The Year We Switched Sides".  That tells a lot of the story, and is almost incontrovertible in that case, but I disagree with the notion that this applies to us all (in the US) and across the board, but merely that, in the world to come, all will know that we can change sides without any consistency. Except greed, maybe. What has changed is that we are not in the clear leadership position anymore.  

"The Golden Age" 

The seventh and final novel in Gore Vidal's series of US historical novels came out in 2000.  He lived until 2012, but he was already 75 then and near the end of his highly productive writing career.  As with others in the series, he mixed real historical characters, using their authentic statements and writings to drive dialogue and interactions with invented characters which he strategically placed close to "the room where it happens" (to quote the play "Hamilton").  

The narrative centers around the journalistic career of an invented D.C. newspaper editor and publisher, Peter Sanford, spanning the years from 1940 all the way to contemporary time in 2000, though its focus was mostly on the time just before the US' entry into WWII and the immediate postwar period.  For the characters in the story (and clearly for Vidal), the intentional entry into that war was in order to launch a period of global dominance, though its gleam was ended after the (again, intentional) fabrication of the Cold War, which soon transformed into the Korean War stalemate (his character's view:  defeat and surrender), and by the betrayal of our values of the anti-Communist witch-hunt.  So, from that view, the Golden Age only lasted from 1945 to 1950.

Vidal's cynical view of American history reveals itself frequently through the story.  FDR knew the Japanese were going to attack; in fact, he welcomed it and forced it to happen. The sudden Wendell Wilkie rise to the Republican nomination to challenge Roosevelt's unprecedented third term was driven by by big money of New Dealers who wanted to make sure both parties were inclined to war, against popular opinion and the positions of the top Republican candidates, and included a murder to help ensure that the dynamics of the Republican convention favored the dark-horse candidacy of Wilkie.  Such are the creations Vidal puts into his story behind history. I was somewhat surprised he never mentioned the shocking story of the internment of Japanese on our West Coast. 

Sometimes he deals with known fact, often with popular underground wisdom, frequently he grants his characters the prophetic quality which comes only with hindsight, and he is not beyond inventing history.  In The Golden Age, Sanford's foil is an opportunist, Clay Overbury, who is a Senator due to take the Presidency in 1960 (instead of JFK, in the knowing whispers in Washington drawing rooms) before he dies in a plane crash.  The Sanford character is part of a family particularly close to FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt, and then later he has personal interactions with President Harry Truman. 

Vidal breaks down that fourth wall to some extent in this novel, which covers some events Vidal, as someone within the elite, witnessed personally, if peripherally. He even puts himself, "Gore Vidal", in a couple of scenes and ends the novel with Gore fictitiously interviewing Sanford, now Vidal's age of 75 and physically infirm, at Vidal's (real) home in Ravello, Italy.  Then the final chapter is told by Vidal in first person and wraps up the series with some philosophical musings about the existential reality, or lack thereof, of history, reality, and the greater historical context. It includes some unfortunate comments sarcastically referring to the fear of Arabs blowing up planes, just a year before the reality hit. 

I would point out that Vidal was also something of a scholar of ancient history and his whole limited 1945-50 range of US' period of true greatness is a slight at ourselves in comparison to the greater Golden Age of Athens.  It is instead to empire that the US is and was destined, in Vidal's view, something developing over several of his novels and many of his essays. 

With respect to Vidal's view, our Golden Age was not really ended by the Korean War or the rise of our stultifying military-industrial complex.  Our culture and its impact has been much more than military rule, domestic or abroad, and much less about governing the savages than about guiding them toward our interests.  With plenty of advantage over our rivals, we've been able to more than keep pace, militarily, economically, and above all, technologically. Until now.   

Last Words on this Regrettable Year:  

AI has achieved the right level to interact with American culture--that's why it's called "slop". 

I cannot complain too much about the year, as I have had little or no personal impact of the government insanity.  Just some people who've lost their jobs; I'm sorry for them, but that happens all the time as employers take it out on those below in the hierarchy.  The stress of constant challenge to our confidence in our supposed political leadership hurts deeply and reminds us of the need for reform, but we all recognize the failure in the scenes we are presented daily.  The most common injury is to morality and decency. 

And honesty. My greatest concern for 2026 is that the flood of fraud, combined with the tariffs, will inhibit consumer spending to the point that recession does come, and that Washington will then create some war as a distraction.  In my view, that is the only way the Republicans will be able to hold onto power in Congress. 

Postscript: The Golden Age of Food  

 The organic food movement grew some surprising legs, so it may survive locally, but global food availability--the incredible variety of food that is available today, because of both sea and air shipping--may be in serious danger.  The price of imports and supply chain issues may combine over time to end broadly-available exotic produce and narrow our diets, though there may remain pockets of gourmet for the most wealthy.