AfterMath

In a recent comic, political cartoonist Ted Rall posted this:

In the image Rall apologizes to Walt Kelly, the late and great popular newspaper cartoonist who once had his character Pogo famously utter "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

Kelly left us long ago, and I lament his absence today, when speaking the truth about an insane, slobbering and tyrannical President Donald Trump is likely to see all political cartoonists declared enemies, subject to arrest by ICE and summarily executed.

That day is coming soon, my fellow Americans. And it was YOU who elected this monster.

I think it was about 25 years ago, when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was being developed. There were concerns about it creating a miniature black hole, which would quickly devour the collider facility and then the entire Earth itself:

But there were also concerns that it would create a massive particle called a strangelet, composed of up and down quarks along with a strange quark, whose composition would be stable and capable of converting the entire Earth into a huge strangelet mass, destroying all life. The particle itself is known to be unstable, but in large enough amounts it would be stable—and even more powerful than Donald Trump to destroy everything in its path.

Such a mass (called a "quark nugget") would also be electrically neutral, and would therefore be a candidate for dark matter, which physicists to date have spent billions of dollars looking for. The LHC is nowhere near powerful enough to create such a mass, but the Big Bang would have had more than enough energy to create enormous amounts of these things. And being stable and electrically uncharged , they'd just be floating around now in the observable universe, behaving exactly like dark matter.

In her latest video, noted German physicist Sabine Hossenfelder references the Einstein-like American mathematical physicist Edward Witten, who has proved mathematically that quark nuggets can exist (Hossenfelder rightly comments "And who can disagree with Ed Witten?") I won't disagree either, but if quark nuggets cannot ever be produced in the laboratory, then to me it's just another kind of hypothetical pixie dust.

A vassal state is a country ruled by another, but propped up by a local ruler who kowtows to the true power. Thanks to President Trump, Venezuela is now a vassal state of America.

Venezuela's erstwhile president Nicolás Maduro was a liberal authoritarian ruler who oppressed dissent and was indifferent to his country's covert policy of allowing illegal drugs to transit from Colombia (along with precursor chemicals from China and India) and into America and other nations. The drugs of choice are fentanyl and cocaine, each highly addictive and often fatal (especially fentanyl, which is lethal in mere milligram doses).

Trump is now claiming ownership of Venezuela, presumably until a "suitable" client ruler is either elected or appointed. Venezuela's vast oil reserves are the true underlying reason for Trump's illegal military actions, since he doesn't really give a damn about the drug problem.

My prediction: The year 2026 will be unlike and far worse than anything we've ever experienced under Trump. He's just getting started. May God help the world.

Another year. God grant that it will be much better than the last.