In a Just World, It’s The Stock and Hillary for Putin

New England Puritans were using a form of punishment as late as the 18th century known as “Stock and Pillory,” a delightful form of punishment that employs public shaming of the convict by clamping their neck and wrists in a “stock” by the side of a heavily trafficked area where they were “pilloried” in full public view. Passersby were encouraged to gawk, taunt, and physically abuse them (within limits). Sometimes the victims were allowed to “take a shot” at the perpetrator while he was helpless in the stock. Sometimes the criminal was whipped viciously (as is still practiced in Singapore).

In light of Mr. Putin’s spectacular display of poor citizenship on the world stage, it appears he is overdue for the refresher course in hubris, and the stock is the perfect tool for the job. While the stock and pillory punishment was highly effective in Elizabethan times, it would be beyond timeliness to mark the passing of another Queen Elizabeth by reviving this time-honored object lesson …but with just one itsy-bitsy refinement: In light of the apparently extreme animosity between Vladimir Putin and Hillary Clinton, let’s put Vlad in the stock, sans his pants down, and let Hillary “have at him” with a “strap on” …or maybe we should let Mr. Zelensky personally pick out the device and the insertion point.  At any rate, we should Just pull the little dictator’s pants down and crank up the “Dueling Banjos”  …you can expect to see a long line queue up behind Ms Clinton. Then, after “Little Napoleon” stops crying, let Ms von der Leyen drag him to jail by the ear. Throw the motherfucker in the drunk tank with the Hell’s Angels for a month and the Los Angeles City Jail should make a new human being out of the man: A toothless Putin should be relatively harmless after his little A-Hole returns to a normal size.

Donald Trump: On the Razor’s Edge

Donald Trump is skating along the edge of a razor that once belonged to Friar William of Ockham. Recall that Ockham’s Razor (Occam’s Razor) is the first law of parsimony (a system of solving problems). It states that we often over-complicate problems in which the solution is usually the simplest and most obvious: If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is usually a duck. In this particular case, it looks an awful lot like espionage, pure and simple. It quacks loudly, like skulduggery gone awry. If only ducks could scream.

Why? Because America’s core demographic is changing from white to non-white. Somewhere around 2012 it started to sink in on the American people that this change is an absolute, inevitable fact. The traditional logic of the white people calculates that if more brown people vote than white people, the numbers may represent …well, a potential quantum shift in the economy of the upper-middle-class whites. Along comes Donald Trump, a documented racist who has made the national newspapers in race-related stories for sixty years. He speaks to the relatively uneducated middle-class white people in “dog whistles” that subliminally address their fears. Talk about timing! The Trumpist Evangelical Minority turned out and voted for him to a man jack, sweeping Trumpy Bear™ up out of the gutter and into the White House. It is important to note here that an overwhelming majority of the population did not vote at all.

The fact that Donald Trump was born into an organized crime family doesn’t seem to be a media issue these days like it was back in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. A brief re-cap of the history of crime in America and Donald Trump’s place in it, follows: Continue reading →