You may have noticed (I hope, actually!) that my last posting sounds like it was written with the assistance of a bottle of cheap red wine and some screwdrivers. If it did, then that means it was “evocative” and “realistic” maybe. I won’t make a habit of it because I am wicked unimpressed with my drunk-blogging. Maybe I should be the new SECWAR?

I’ll keep this short; it’s really a side-point that popped up while I was working on the other post, and I didn’t want side-points hanging off my side-points like some kind of intellect-infecting ginger root. So:

Pardons. Here is my solution.

Imagine a democrat ever gets in office again. Or looks like they have a good chance of it. They announce: “I have decided to use SEAL Team 6 and my presidential immunity to order that everyone alive who has a presidential pardon can either present themselves at a federal prison and ask nicely to finish their sentence, or they’ll be unalived.”

There we go! Solved the corruption of presidential pardons problem pretty quickly. One of the things I keep realizing is that politics is pretty simple. Nation-building and economics and trade and keeping peace – those are difficult – but being King Thag really doesn’t take a lot of brains. Look at the gold-painted garbage decorating the Oval Office. In fact, all you need to learn, to be King Thag, is how to explain to your spear-men (“The Thagomizers”) the difference between “terminate” and “terminate with extreme prejudice.”

I’m going to out myself, here. I have become an ex-pacifist after watching the last decade-plus. There are many arguments for pacifism but I don’t think we can rationally claim that human life is valuable when we all sit back and allow the horrible pieces of garbage that we install over us, to schedule, track, and authorize lethal drone strikes against people half a planet away. Obviously, they are not a threat. Those guys in the motorboat, they are not a threat. Did you notice what was missing from that particular scenario? The US made no attempt at all to ask Venezuela to do something (nationalism based on the Peace of Westphalia) – if those are Venezuelan boats, ask the Venezuelans to pull one over, board it, and we’ll pull up a US Navy “asset” to photograph, interrogate, etc. – but not blow up. The lesson I get is not “how stupid Trump is” it’s that there are powerful people who do not care about anyone’s life. Maybe their own kids, but probably not – these people are so badly broken that they can’t think about stuff like that. That’s why Barron Trump already shows signs of being a fucked-up dude. But, I still become incandescent with rage when the US news media and congressional/bullshit caucus start yammering about sinking the ship with a double-tap, when CIA and USAF drones have been doing double-tap in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen, and who knows where else, for decades. They just do it on MSF hospitals and journalists instead of fishermen.

If they’re not pacifists (hewing to a line of “killing, bad”) they’re political hacks, just trying to score points off one particular war crime. Meanwhile, Washington is war crime central. Who is the world’s largest exporter of terrorism?*

Here’s a funny thought: think how many hours of legal wrangling it took to get Donald Trump to – oh, right, nothing legal has happened to Donald Trump – but all that time and money, you could have given it to homeless people and made a difference. How much legal wrangling did those guys in the boat get? There’s something wrong when the US court system ties itself in knots over whether the president’s dating technique consists of writing a check, and people are killed with air strikes that may be off. [They also drone-murdered Bin Laden’s daughter, because she was a huge threat in Yemen, or something] Also, total dearth of discussion about the boats.

I’m pretty sure they ought to know the origin port of the boats. Are we seriously to believe there aren’t CIA people crawling all over the place? Of course they are.

What do you see?

I see a crab boat. Floats on top, middle area where someone can stand and throw pots overboard. Big engines, sure. Maybe they run drugs, sometimes, or rolexes or stolen goods. Literally, who gives a shit? But it’s just left to our imagination, I suppose, that those are packets of heroin when the more you look at them, the more they look like fishnet buoys. Blow their ass away – they’re smuggling fishnets. I don’t really know, of course, but it’s my opinion that what got those guys killed is that their engines are too big. Maybe they zip out to someplace they’re not supposed to fish, fish, and used to be home at the dock by dinnertime. I am not a fisherman, but – maybe they have big engines so they can get into international waters or where there is particularly good fishing. If you have a slow boat that takes 3hr to get there and 3hr back, you have 2-3 hours of daylight. Time is money, and money kills.

If those were packets of drugs, lashed together to be watertight like you’d have to, there would have been a small fountain of packets of drugs when the boat sank. Even though it was blown up with exceptional overkill. If it was fishing bouys, same story. More to the point, our navy are supposed to be amazing nautico-ninjas so why didn’t they pull up, fire a burst and tell them to stop, and let a few helicopter jumpers have some fun jumping out of a helicopter? They practice doing that.

So, fire Pete Hegseth, pardon him, and have SEAL Team 6 silence his ass.

Top view drone aerial photo of fisher boat sailing Cyprus Mediterranean Sea.

Looks like nets. PS – any narco-runner who can’t buy an awning or stow their drugs below deck probably does deserve to die. WTF.(* Who is the world’s largest exporter of terrorism? The CIA.)