The following is a transcript of President Donald Trump’s January 21 speech at the Davos Economic Forum, or as much as could be translated from his native language:
Hey there. So anyway, I gotta lotta complaints. I had to switch flights before I even got here. Somethin’ about electrical issue. Somebody should do somethin’ about that. Who’s the Transportation Secretary? Who elected him?
Anyway, I land here in Davos, and they got the big red carpet rolled out for me, but there’s no honor guard. There’s no heads a’state. Nobody to greet me. It’s like I’m bein’ snubbed. Like when the last time Zelenskyy came to see me in Washington. But when I had Putin in Alaska, I pulled out all the stops. I had the military roll out a red carpet for him themselves. I came out to greet him. That’s how ya show respect to a real man. Putin’s a real man. He’s so forceful, so strong… so masculine … Hyh. Huh. ‘Cuse me. Sorry, just talkin’ about him makes me so wet…
So anyways, I came here to talk to NATO about Iceland. I mean Greenland. Why do I, I mean we, we need Greenland so much? Well, there’s this story. One Viking’s talkin’ to another Viking, and he goes ‘Sven, you named this place Iceland but it’s all grass and volcanoes.’ “Ya.” ‘And you named this other place Greenland but it’s all ice and rocks and tundra.’ “Yas.” ‘Why?’ “So da bandits raid da Greenland and leave my Izeland alone.” ‘But people aren’t gonna get confused just because you switched the names! You’d have to be unbelievably STUPID!’
So anyways, that’s why I’m goin’ for Iceland.
Greenland is a source of rare minerals. And lutefisk. Can’t forget the lutefisk. We must never allow ourselves to enter a lutefisk gap. But it’s all under threat now, it’s all under threat from Russia and China. No really, you see them China navy vessels all trawlin’ around the Arctic, you know it’s them cause they all smell like roast duck. And the Russians. You tell me, ‘Russians aren’t patrolling the Arctic. In fact this whole thing seems like it’s straight designed to turn the rest of NATO against its biggest military asset so Putin can move in.’ I have NEVER worked with Putin. I have never wanted him to succeed. Only America. I have never wanted Putin to dominate the United States, bending us over, pounding and pounding, making me wish I could have his baby…
Sorry, where was I?
So I says this and everybody’s all mad. Like the Nobel committee wouldn’t give me a Peace Prize, cause I keep threatenin’ to invade everybody. I don’t need them. I told the Kingdom of Nobel, cause you wouldn’t give me a Peace Prize, I don’t need to think about peace anymore. But nobody agrees with me. They’re so ungrateful. Like the Swiss. And the Germans. If it wasn’t for us, they’d all be speaking German now.
[offside] What, they ARE speaking German? Proves my point.
They used to love me. They used to call me ‘Daddy.’ Girls love it when you call them Daddy. Nobody calls me Daddy anymore. Well, maybe Eric and Tiffany, but who cares about them?
I told everybody here, I could use force. I really, REALLY wanna use force. I wanna see blood in the streets and people cry. Like Minneapolis. Women love it when you use force. Did you know that? My lawyers are sayin’ don’t elaborate. But I wanna use force. But I won’t. Cause I’m a nice guy.
See, I can do all this cause I’m the most popular president ever. I won the popular vote this time! By LOTS! Nobody will stand up to me. Cause everybody loves me. If I ever die, and I made a deal with God, so that’ll never happen, but if it did, my birthday would be a national holiday! It’d be bigger than the Fourth of JULY! That’s how much America LOVES me!
I won that election. And the one before that. And the one before that. And all the others. Washington? He cheated. I woulda won. All of them, they cheated. Reagan winning 49 states in 1984? Cheated. Lincoln winning the Civil War? Cheated. If I’d been Jefferson Davis in 1860, I’da won that election. Then we’d all be the Confederacy. But don’t worry, I’m doin’ everything I can to make that happen.
All I’m sayin’ is that you owe me. I mean us. The United States. And by that, I mean me. You owe us. We give you protection, we expect a cut. We expect a piece of the action. I’m just askin’ for Greenland. It’s just a rock. Just a piece of ice. It can’t be that important to you. I’m willing to destroy the greatest alliance in world history over it, it can’t be that important.
Yeah, people say all this makes me a dictator. Sure I’m a dictator. Some times ya need a dictator. Why did ya need a dictator? So he can make as much money as he can squeeze outta everybody else and fuck over anybody he wants with his government to make up for the fact that he’s so old and feeble he can’t find his own dick under his dunlop with a set a’tweezers. That’s why ya need a dictator.
Did I mention I’m almost eighty years old, clinically senile and have no internal monologue?
Well, anyway, that’s the speech. I’m late for my golf game. I hear the golfin’ is great in Switzerland this time o’year. Where AM I? Am I elected yet??
—
On the CBS Evening News, anchor Tony Doukopil remarked, “Today, Donald Trump truly became president.”
On January 15, Paramount Plus released the first two episodes of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. I’ve only had time to see the pilot (‘Kids These Days’). And while I don’t know if I like this as much as Strange New Worlds, it has potential.
It is notable not for its cast of young cadet characters so much as the stellar cast around them, like Holly Hunter, Paul Giamatti and recurring Trek people like Oded Fehr and Robert Picardo as “The Doctor” (who as a hologram could feasibly exist for 900+ years in the Star Trek: Discovery timeline).
Hunter plays Captain Nahla Ake, a very Holly Hunter-like character who rolls her legs up on her command chair while giving orders or facing off a villain. But the point-of-view character is named Caleb Mir, who is first shown in flashback from 15 years prior, when his mother (Tatiana Maslany) has been manipulated by the ruthless Nus Braka (Giamatti) into a supply raid that ended up killing Federation officers. Ake is the officer who pronounces sentence on the two which means separating Caleb from his Mom and making him a ward of the Federation. But he made his first opportunity to escape and had been on the run ever since. Ake resigned her commission over the whole incident, but after the “Burn” disaster is resolved (in Season 3 of Discovery) Admiral Vance, the head of Starfleet (Fehr) catches up with Ake and offers her the chance to run a new Starfleet Academy/War College to train the (ahem) next generation of officers as the Federation rebuilds. She demurs but Vance dangles the carrot of being able to trace the whereabouts of Mir. Mir (Sandro Rosta) turns out to be a roughened criminal escaping from one prison planet to land up in the next, but Ake gives him her own offer to use her resources in Starfleet to find out what happened to his mother.
And by the way, props to the producers for casting the male lead as a black person, in the tradition of Ben Sisko and Michael Burnham, and in the spirit of Whoopi Goldberg saying that when she saw Nichelle Nichols on the original Star Trek, it confirmed that Black people would continue to exist in the future. Cause right now, that’s kind of up in the air.
The two fly out to the starship Athena, which looks pretty impressive, at least from the overhead view. It is actually the nucleus of the campus building which is to fly itself to San Francisco and serve as the Academy’s new headquarters. In his first day or so, Caleb runs into other cadets, being a pacifist Klingon med student, a young culture student who happens to be the daughter of an admiral, an elitist jerk who is still capable of doing the right thing, and another culture student who is actually from an entire culture of sentient holograms.
And on the way to Earth, Nus Braka shows up to attack the ship, with a Tic-Tac-Toe game carved into his hairdo and serving up more ham than an Easter Sunday brunch. He uses “protomatter” to disable the Athena and try to steal its warp drive, but Mir with his own hacker knowledge of protomatter is able to devise a scheme to override his controls. But this leads to Braka teleporting on board to fight Caleb, in the course of which he tells him that his Mom helped him break out of prison, but doesn’t say what happened to her before he inevitably escapes.
This is yet another case of a Star Trek hero breaking protocols and getting away with it because it turned out to yield the right result. So Caleb gets to stay in the Academy on detention while Ake helps continue the search for his mother, and so the premise is set.
As you see, this isn’t treading that much new ground, with several Trek shows having aliens cast against type and Voyager having officers who were not just roguish but actual criminals. What intrigues me about the long term prospects of Starfleet Academy is that it potentially expands the setting of Discovery from Season 2, which the latter seasons didn’t really do much with. In particular, the rebuilt Starfleet Academy is set up to be part of a larger story in which a former “good guy” nation reduced to the Dark Ages rebuilds not only itself but the broader civilization that formed around it.
A rapist, a fraudster and a mental patient walked into a bar. And the bartender said, “Hi, President Trump!”
Anyway…
I’ve been seeing a few people from other countries, with some cause, blaming the entire nation of the US for what we are seeing in the world today because even if some people voted for a candidate who had a resume other than killing half a million people in one year with Trump Virus ™, there weren’t enough of us, and Trump actually won without the Electoral College this time. And I’ve seen some Americans posting back that those people in other countries don’t understand how screwed up this country is, how voting is mostly state-by-state, and how most people can’t afford to organize or have a general strike to shut down the country precisely because this government prevents us from having health care that isn’t dependent on our employment and most of us can’t survive beyond a paycheck-to-paycheck level.
That’s one take. Here’s mine.
Did you ever see Chinatown?
Warning, there are spoilers.
Detective Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) ends up investigating a murder when the chief engineer in the Los Angeles water and power department is found dead. In the course of this he finds out that the reservoir is releasing huge amounts of water despite the city’s drought. Meanwhile the victim allegedly had a mistress but it turns out the ‘mistress’ is the sister of the man’s wife. The wife, Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), hires Jake to continue the case and Gittes figures that Evelyn’s father, Noah Cross (John Huston) is behind the water dump in order to facilitate a land grab in the county. Jake confronts Evelyn about her inconsistent story and she reveals that her sister is also her daughter by Cross (I TOLD YOU, spoilers). Gittes tries to confront Cross but he takes Gittes by gunpoint and forces him to reveal the location in LA’s Chinatown where the women are hiding. Evelyn gets her sister/daughter to a car as police arrive. Jake tells her to turn Cross over to the police, and she says “he OWNS the police.” She tries to drive off but the cops shoot her, she slams her car into a corner, and as the cops surround the car, Cross takes the confused teenage girl out to comfort her, and Jake realizes that the disgusting pig is going to get away with everything. He’s going to take over the county AND he’s going to rape his daughter the way he raped her mother. And as his friends on the force lead him away, one of them says “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”
Living in America is like living in the last scene of Chinatown, except that instead of one state, it’s THE ENTIRE FUCKING COUNTRY.
And the joke is that all the Good Folk Real Americans who wail and whine about how an omnipotent “they” are responsible for all their problems and behind a terrible international pedophilia ring decided that the best way to solve their problems was to vote for the Big Pig at the heart of that ring and turn him into an unaccountable and invincible God.
But the brilliant thing about the Trump occupation regime is how you can’t focus on the last outrage they committed because in 48 hours they commit an even bigger outrage. I speak, of course, of the regime’s murder of civilian Renee Good in Minneapolis when she was trying to observe an ICE raid of a neighborhood. This particular incident is proving to be an excellent case in how the plain folks of this land allow their stupidity and evil to collaborate in defending their government’s actions.
Despite the fact that the shooting was fully captured on tape, I’ve seen all kinds of social media takes embracing the Church of Trump dogma that Good was “a professional agitator” and that she was shot in self-defense after she “viciously ran over the ICE officer” and “it is hard to believe he is alive”. Never mind that said officer was not even knocked on his feet and was seen walking down the street under his own power while neighbors were screaming at him.
Riddle me this, detectives, why is the burden of responsibility in a threat situation always with the lone unarmed civilian and not with the mall cop who has five weeks of training, riot gear, automatic weapons and two squads of reinforcements with the same characteristics?
Never mind that the video clearly shows the victim turning the SUV away from the officers. “But the vehicle is a deadly weapon!” Well, that much more so when you shoot the driver and let the car run down the road and hit someone’s else car, as happened in this case. “Uh well, I HAD to shoot that bear, it was self-defense.” “Okay, so why did you step IN his path when he was running?”
Then Thursday the shooter’s identity was revealed (which should warn ICE that they should quit assuming their masks are armor) and it was also found out that in his service he had recently gotten stitches after he “got his arm stuck in the window of a vehicle as the driver tried to flee an immigration arrest. He was dragged roughly 100 yards down the street before breaking free.” President of Vice JD Eyelashes did a whole press conference where he tried to justify the officer’s actions as being the result of combat stress. In which case that would indicate he’s exactly the sort of person not to be put in a situation with guns. The fact of this past incident where he tried to stop a moving vehicle from outside indicates to me that he has a history of escalating.
The Church of Trump defenses for this murder are a classic case of willful ignorance. Mere stupidity is insufficient to justify their position. Stupidity could be excused as an inability to process information or a simple lack of knowledge. Such active and willful rationalizations are bad faith arguments for a position that one knows to be wrong. Of course the same people who thought Renee Good shouldn’t have “fucked around and found out” are the same ones who think Ashli Babbitt is a sainted martyr.
And at the same time, we still have the previous outrage that the Renee Good murder trumped, where Trump basically looked at Venezuela, and said “this is mine” and apart from capturing the dictator Nicolas Maduro to face charges in the US, didn’t do anything to follow up. I believe this is because Trump (who was against Bush’s invasion of Iraq after he was for it) didn’t want to get involved in the sort of quagmire that undermined Bush even with his own party. So Trump has handed everything over to Maduro’s Chavista government by default, and they are doing that much more to crack down on dissent than they did. But while some parts of our government like Marco Rubio’s Department of State wanted to indicate a hands-off approach, Trump is all about seizing Venezuela’s oil, including seizing any remaining export ships for their profits to go to “secure” (personal) Treasury accounts. And that’s already causing problems with our “friendly” socialist government in Venezuela. Why do we even need Venezuelan oil, when its crude needs extra refinement, that will require extra investment (which was risky to oil companies before and that much more risky now) and America is already one of the leading oil producers on Earth? Because Secretary Rubio, as a Miami Cuban, has been jonesing to change the Communist governments of the Caribbean since childhood. And he also knows that Trump doesn’t care about arguments based on political strategy, so he said “oil” and his sovereign went “GIMMEGIMMEGIMME! MINEMINEMINE!!” So at some point they’re going to need boots on the ground to get that oil. Not like Trump cares about that, they won’t be his boots. Swollen ankles, y’know.
So Lord Trump is thinking of giving the administration of Venezuela over to effective Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. There’s a great idea. Turn a Hispanic country over to Stephen Miller, who loves Hispanics the way Hitler loved Jews.
Speaking of Stephen Miller acting like Hitler, in the wake of our Latin coup, he and other people have continued to wave our flag over Greenland, Miller’s own wife Katie did a media post showing the Arctic island with an American flag imposed on it, labeled “SOON.” He also did an interview with Jake Tapper at CNN (Cuck News Network), where he said “”The real question is, by what right does Denmark assert control over Greenland? What is the basis of their territorial claim?” (Raising the question, what is ours?) It’s like everything else. The Boy King tells himself “I got a right to this. I’m entitled to this.” And his inner circle of worshipers use whatever fraud and force they can to make his delusions reality. Never mind that Denmark, by extension Greenland, is a NATO member, and trying to force the issue would definitely break NATO for all practical purposes, and that directly benefits Vladimir Putin, the ruler of Russia, and wouldn’t that be an incredible coincidence?
We have no eternal allies. We don’t even have eternal interests. We just have a little boy who wants what he wants, and no one will stop him from getting it. We don’t have allies. We have those who are forced, and those who force us. Those who are forced include E. Jean Carroll, the contestants at Miss Teen USA, and everyone else in the United States, not to mention Venezuela, Greenland and Canada.
Who are those who force us?….
Draw your own conclusions.
The thing is, it’s not as though our Constitution and system of government failed in themselves, but they need individuals to enforce them, and our Constitution, which was specifically designed to keep the executive from becoming a mad Caesar, is not being enforced because Democrats are a combination of learned helplessness and programmed reverence for the Big Government they created, and the president’s own party is not a party so much as a death cult. And that is because no matter how stupid and insane Trump is, 77.3 million voters in 2024 were more stupid than him.
Now if you follow social media feeds, maybe some of those Trump worshipers have come to regret their decision, which might also be why the Trump Party lost so big in off-year elections even in states where they were favored. But it’s still too late. The damage is done and it’s been getting worse by the day. The best you can do is try to contain it.
At the moment, the best way to do that would be to force another government shutdown. Yes, another one. Why do we keep having them? Because Democrats want to fund government for people besides Elon Musk, Exxon, and Paul Blart, Gestapo Cop, and Republicans don’t. So they can’t create real budget plans, they just keep passing continuing resolutions that kick the can down the road, and even that is like pulling their own teeth. Now, because the Democrats kept embarrassing themselves trying to force concessions by shutdown in 2025 (and Republicans kept embarrassing themselves trying to do this with Democrat presidents), most Democrats didn’t even want to contemplate holding the budget hostage. Besides which, there’s that aforementioned reverence for Big Government, even when it’s subverted against them. But that was before Renee Good was murdered. The Fucking News: “Without new congressional allocations for 2026, both DHS and ICE would have to shut down after Jan. 31.” And in the wake of ICE’s latest atrocity, there is growing thought in the Senate to cut them off. Senator Chris Murphy (D.-Connecticut) said “Democrats cannot vote for a DHS budget that doesn’t restrain the growing lawlessness of this agency.” I mean that would have been an idea before they voted to do so last year, but hey.
And while the Senate is secure for the Trump Party for this year, they may not even keep the House through November. Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor (BR.-QAnon) has already quit. Another Republican Congressman is in the hospital. And this week California Republican Representative Doug LaMalfa suddenly died at the age of 66. There is a Texas special election in a redistricted area that will probably be won by a Democrat. That would make the margin for Speaker Mike Johnson (BR.-Louisiana) only four, meaning he can only afford to lose one defector on bills, as tied measures lose in the House. And neither chamber is totally united any more.
While the Bullshitter Bully seems more omnipotent than ever, his Party is weaker than ever, and let us never forget, they do what he wants because he does what they want. As I say: Trump is the symptom. THEY are the problem. And while they were already likely to lose at least the House big time, their losses are that much more likely as it becomes that much more clear that the regime is at war with the rest of the country, and voting is the last way we are able to mount an effective protest short of Madame Guillotine. And if Democrats win in 2026 (I do not say ‘when’, cause these are Democrats, and God hates us all) we, the people, need to seriously change the direction of the political class, and that requires changing the only non-Republican party that can get people elected. No more of these Chuck Schumer go-along-to-get-along leaders who still think of the Republican Party as compatriots and colleagues. THEY ARE A GODDAMN OCCUPATION GOVERNMENT RUN BY OUR NATION’S ENEMIES, and they need to be treated as such.
As campaign season commences, every citizen who can do so ought to press every candidate on the question of whether a Democratic House will impeach Trump. And that leads to the question of whether House members will support Hakeem Jeffries as Speaker or find somebody who recognizes where we are and is willing to fight the regime rather than pretend they can be dealt with in good faith.
That’s two things that need to be done right there. And if Democrats win in November, they need to do everything they can to press their position, and to correct the issues that let Trump happen in the first place. For instance, as long as Republicans want to jerk around with our election rules, Democrats ought to follow suit. Like have states pass laws saying you can’t vote unless you can write an essay answer to the question “What is the difference between ‘your’ and ‘you’re’?”
You know how I said my New Year’s Resolution was to not focus so much on Trump? So much for that idea.
Overnight between Friday and Saturday morning, the Prince of Peace invaded Venezuela. That in itself is not a surprise, given that our Simple Simon Bolivar has been telegraphing moves against that country for most of his first year back in office. What amazes me is that it worked. Apparently they dropped in some commandos and captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, and are hauling them back to the States on charges of machine gun possession, drug smuggling and other stuff that Boss Trump doesn’t seem to mind if you’re rich enough to bribe him for a pardon.
And sure, even some Republicans are sputtering over the fact that their President is acting without Congressional approval, but we had several votes come up before this to invoke the War Powers Act and they didn’t vote for it then. Trump operates, always has operated, under the old saying “it is better to get forgiveness than permission.” Just DO the thing, and permission is moot. After all, we’ve already done it, and it’s going to be a lot harder to undo. Same thing as getting rid of USAID, the Department of Education, the East Wing, all of it. So in the next few days Trump’s media shills are going to go on full court press to tell us all that anybody who opposes this new campaign for freedom is a Commie Muslim atheist tranny who just hates Our Lord Donald Trump, America’s Greatest President since Jesus Himself.
And our Liberal Media has been showing several incidents of locals cheering in the streets because Maduro is gone, but anybody who thinks this country cares about liberty, especially under our own wannabe dictator, is going to be very disappointed by the new management. These guys are less altruistic than Ayn Rand.
Speaking of whom, Rand did say that a free nation needs no permission to liberate a collectivist slave state, and few people would dispute that Maduro was running a collectivist slave state, but then that being the case, and given that we are clearly not acting on ideological motives, it comes back to the question of who benefits.
Venezuela has the world’s largest proven oil reserves but has had only about 1 percent of the global output, partially due to US sanctions and largely due to mismanagement of facilities. In his press conference, where he sounded more wheezy, slurred and fatigued than ever, Trump openly declared that the country would be directly managed by the US on behalf of our oil companies. There was of course no mention of María Corina Machado, the right-wing opposition leader whom many observers thought won Venezuela’s last election, won the Nobel Peace Prize of 2025 (in exile) and publicly said that Trump should have gotten it. I am posting the transcript of Trump’s “speech” here in order to spare the reader Trump’s Whiny Mafioso With Sleep Apnea voice. Given again how much potential the territory could yield compared to current production, there might indeed be room for improvement.
But it’s just like thinking you can get rich in Las Vegas. The trick is not to make the money, the trick is to get out of town with it. It was almost as easy to conquer Iraq because that country was also a human rights nightmare and people were glad to see us come. But then we decided we didn’t need stuff like a local support base, let alone an exit strategy, because while in theory we were going to liberate the population, in practice all the connected people in the Bush Junior Administration were going to run the place as an industrial colony for the Empire. And that’s what strengthened the guerrilla campaigns against us, because whatever our troops on the ground wanted, they weren’t there to save orphans and give them Hershey bars. And they of course paid the cost, along with hundreds of thousands of locals. And keep in mind, the Bush people actually DID have some folks who believed their own hype about Iraqi Freedom. Trump clearly just wants to treat an entire country as his personal property, and his underlings make the Bush team look as competent as the actual British Empire. And they didn’t last forever either.
The difference is that Iraq was hot, humid and infested with guerrillas but was a nice, open desert for our troops to operate in. Venezuela is hot, humid, infested with guerrillas and a country consisting mostly of deep jungle with a coastline.
Can anybody say “Vietnam”, boys and girls?
Not like Trump would have any experience with that place.
The real disturbing aspect of this invasion is not that this is somehow a break with precedent. Of all Trump’s aggressions, invading a Latin American country is one of the more typical examples of American foreign policy. This is NOT a new action in American history. Remember when we invaded Panama and captured Noriega, just cause we could? When Reagan invaded Grenada in the Caribbean and overthrew its President, just cause he could?
No, nobody remembers. Because nobody reads history. This country can’t even learn from its own Goddamn history. That’s why Trump loves the poorly educated. Who else would elect him?
To paraphrase again from Ayn Rand, what this country needs to do is not preserve the Constitution, but to discover it, because we haven’t been running things according to the Constitution for quite some time. And if the first year of Trump II: Electric Boogaloo didn’t make it clear that that approach to government is reaching an unsustainable point, his Vietnam II is going to make it that much more clear. But since it’s also becoming clear that the Congress and the media won’t treat this as anything more than another Surprising Plot Twist episode of The Trump Show, this country may have to completely destroy itself in order for us to start fresh. It’s starting to look like a better and better idea. Maybe if we didn’t call ourselves “The United States of America” we’d quit assuming we had a legacy right to invade people in this hemisphere.
Of course that raises the question of what we call ourselves. America is taken. Columbia is taken. I don’t think most of us would appreciate being called California and All These Other Guys.
