Sunday, January 5th

I started going on news diets last year, as the news has been especially stressful since about November 8th, 2016. It honestly helps my brain, but I always carried a weird sense of guilt or foreboding about not knowing what was happening on the big Risk board we call "politics" that doesn't actually ever affect anyone (except when it absolutely does). They always ended when I'd catch a important-seeming tidbit and, my appetite for terrifying geopolitical news being apparently endless, I'd plummet right back in. Last week after hearing about the assassination of Qasem Soleimani I had what you might call a reverse breakdown, or possibly a hypomanic episode, and decided that instead of taking another news diet I would instead lean-in and go on a massive binge of politics. I blew the couple of Christmas gift-cards I had on books that I kept wishlisted but probably never honestly meant to read.

For now I'm going to use this as my secret Screaming Pillow to post thoughts I have that my some-hundred friends don't read on Facebook. I'll also use it for memes  and probably as a travel journal and place to review stuff I think is good (or bad!) and other assorted loose thoughts. Anyway, it's 2020 and blogs don't even exist anymore and no one will ever see this, so let's rock 'n' roll:

Bullet points of the last three days for people who have been avoiding news for mental health:

•  Trump requested Iraq's PM to act as a mediator in discussions with Iran's general, Soleimani. He landed in Iraq for these talks and was assassinated, at Trump's order. This is called perfidy and it violates the Geneva Convention and is literally a war crime. It also tells the world we cannot be trusted. Soleimani was an Iranian government official, not a stateless terrorist like bin Laden. His role as the head general made him a combination of Mike Pence (VP) and Mike Pompeo (CIA Director).

• Trump is currently tweeting that he's planning to target 52 cultural sites in Iran for airstrikes to represent the 52 American hostages that were taken in the 1979 hostage crisis (none of the hostages were killed, they were all released to the US btw). This is literally and blatantly a war crime and exactly what terrorist groups like ISIS do.

• Iraq is kicking the US armed forces out of the country, entirely and permanently. We are no longer able to fight ISIS (who was all but eradicated until we abandoned the Kurds in Syria, resulting in ISIS prisoners escaping and reforming, as well as handing over Syria to Russia) and now the Iraq war that started 17 years ago under false pretenses is officially all for nothing (including the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed, thousands of US troops killed, the trillions of dollars spent, just to scratch the surface).

• Rather than taking a military response (yet), Iran has gone to the United Nations and is asking them to condemn the US for our war crimes. Trump is continuing to tweet horrific shit that constitutes war crimes and his administration and supporters are taking turns pushing blatant lies and horrific pro-war propaganda.

• Right before the assassination, more emails leaked showing Trump explicitly did the things that got him impeached. GOP congress members are still saying they are going to acquit Trump regardless of the what the trial shows.

It's horrific. We are so far beyond "partisan bias", this is fucking abominable. There is no way around it: anyone who still supports Trump in anyway is either a true monster or is harmfully ignorant. This is really fucking bad and pretty simple and everything is getting worse and simpler. Even if you're (rightfully) exhausted, or honestly don't care, please, it's long past time to start paying attention and get ready to show up for protests, inform people who have ears to listen, volunteer, anything. This isn't going away and it's not the comparatively cutesy Bush era where you could buy a Rock Against Bush album and feel good about otherwise ignoring it. Fuck.