Saturday, January 10, 2026

More Saturday Male Beauty


 

The Mad King’s Madness Deepens

In the last week we have seen (i) the Felon launch a military attack on Venezuela with seemingly no follow up plan - the CEO of Exxon/Mobile said Venezuela is "uninvestable" and throwing cold water on the Felon's claim that American oil companies would rebuild Venezuela's oil production, (ii) a White House claim the the Donald Trump named in the Epstein files is a different Donald Trump, (iii) the Felon threatening military action against Columbia, Panama, Mexico, and Greenland, (iv) the Felon screaming profanities at Sen. Susan Collins for voting to limit the Felon's war powers, (v), ICE murder a white 37 year old mother and then the Felon and JD Vance label the victim a "domestic terrorist" and lie about the shooting, (vi) ICE shooting two other individuals in Oregon, and (viii) a report indicating that job creation during the Felon's regime is the worse since 2020 which saw the Covid shutdown.  None of  these situations stem from a competent and well advised president and cabinet. Congress could stop the madness if it wanted to through impeachment and other means. Unfortunately, and frighteningly, most congressional Republicans continue to close their eyes to the madness and cruelty or, worse yet, act as cheerleaders for insanity.  Seemingly, to these self-prostituting Republicans, avoiding a primary challenge is more important than the civil rights of citizens, respecting long term allies and alliances, and democracy itself.  A piece at Substack looks at the growing madness:

Things are not going well politically for Donald Trump. The polls show him underwater on every major issue. And while he insists that these are fake, it’s clear that he knows better. He recently lamented that the Republicans will do badly in the midterms and even floated the idea that midterms should be canceled.

And as January 6th 2021 showed, Trump simply can’t stand political rejection. He will do anything, use any tool or any person at his disposal, to obliterate the sources of that rejection. So as we head into the 2026 midterm season, the best way to understand U.S. policy is that it’s in the pursuit of one crucial objective: Propping up Trump’s fragile ego.

What was the motivation for the abduction of Nicolás Maduro? It wasn’t about drugs, which were always an obvious pretense. By Trump’s own account it wasn’t about democracy. Trump talks a lot about oil, but Venezuela’s heavy, hard-to-process oil and its decrepit oil infrastructure aren’t big prizes. The Financial Timesreports that U.S. oil companies won’t invest in Venezuela unless they receive firm guarantees. One investor told the paper, “No one wants to go in there when a random fucking tweet can change the entire foreign policy of the country.”

The real purpose of the abduction, surely, was to give Trump an opportunity to strut around and act tough. But this ego gratification, like a sugar rush, won’t last long. Voters normally rally around the president at the beginning of a war. The invasion of Iraq was initially very popular. But the action in Venezuela hasn’t had any visible rally-around-the-flag effect. While Republicans, as always, support Trump strongly, independents are opposed . . . .

And now the story of the moment is the atrocity in Minneapolis, where, on Wednesday, an ICE agent killed Renee Nicole Good by shooting her in the head.

Trump and his minions responded by flatly lying about what happened. But their accounts have been refuted by video evidence which show an out-of-control ICE agent gunning down a woman who was simply trying to get away from a frightening situation. Yes, MAGA loyalists will fall into line, preferring to believe Trump rather than their own lying eyes. But public revulsion over Good’s murder and Trump’s mendacity are high and growing.

A president who actually cared about the welfare of those he governs would have taken Good’s killing as an indication that his deportation tactics have veered wildly and tragically off course. He would have called for a halt of ICE actions and made sure there would be an objective and timely federal investigation into this national tragedy.

But for Trump, ICE’s violent lawlessness is a feature, not a bug. Sending armed, masked, poorly trained, masked and out-of-control armed thugs into blue cities is, in effect, a war on Americans, just as January 6thwas a war on American institutions. In effect, Trump would rather savage his own people than be held accountable for his actions.

So in Trump’s mind, Renee Nicole Good’s murder is at most collateral damage, in service to his insatiable need to dominate and feel powerful -- so insatiable that he is attempting to create an alternate reality, claiming that that Good ran over an agent although there is irrefutable video evidence that she didn’t.

And when one set of lies doesn’t work, he switches tactics – changing the topic, deflecting, and spouting even more lies. Thus, just hours after Good’s death, Trump proclaimed that he was seeking a huge increase in military spending . . .

It’s a near certainty that Trump’s assertion that he arrived at an immediate 50% increase in the military budget after “long and difficult negotiations” is yet another lie. There’s been no indication whatsoever that a massive increase in defense spending was on anyone’s agenda before he suddenly posted about it on Truth Social.

So what was that about? Given the timing, it’s clear that Trump’s announcement was yet another exercise in self-aggrandizement, as well as an attempt to grab the headlines away from Good’s killing. But what’s also important to realize from Trump’s announcement is that he is now clearly conflating the size of the US military with his ego. Evidently the sugar rush of Maduro’s capture has left him wanting more and more military validation, particularly as his poll numbers tank.

So here’s a warning to the US military: if you continue to indulge the sick fantasies of this man, he will drag this country into more and deeper international morasses to feed his need for glory. Do what Admiral Alvin Holsey, an honorable man, did – stand down and refuse an illegal order. Here’s a warning to the Republicans: if you continue to allow this man to perpetrate war against his own people with impunity through the actions of ICE, you will be remembered as cowards and hypocrites. Here’s a warning to all his other enablers: if you do not do something to stop this madman, you will go down in history as traitors to this country.

And here’s a warning to those directly perpetrating Trump-directed atrocities: He will not be in power forever, and I expect and hope that you will be held accountable, personally, and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Saturday Morning Male Beauty


 

Friday, January 09, 2026

More Friday Male Beauty


 

ICE Sent a Message to Us All in Minneapolis

In Nazi Germany one of the regime's tactics was to use the Gestapo and SS to terrorize the population into silence and obedience.  Those who resisted or spoke out against the regime often were murdered or imprisoned, both as a punishment, but also as a message to others who might otherwise oppose the Nazi dictatorship.  Fast forward to 2026 America and ICE under Kristi Noem (who lies with as much frequency as the Felon) and the message being sent to citizens is to be silent and submit and to ignore the illegality and deliberate cruelty of much of what ICE agents are doing. Earlier this week Renee Nicole Good, a white mother of three and widow of a military veteran, was killed by an ICE agent and yesterday two people were shot in Oregon by ICE agents. Good's killing was filmed by numerous onlookers and shows that the regime's explanation for what happened is false and a deliberate lie, both Noem and JD Vance and the Felon lying about what occurred.  In the minds of the Felon and his immoral henchmen, citizens and critics have no rights and if one raises their voice in opposition, bad things can happen to you.  Good's killing also underscored that so-called white privilege will not protect you. A column in the New York Times looks at the menacing message being sent to all Americans.   Here are column highlights:

Throughout Donald Trump’s second term, when he’s sent armed, masked ICE agents into cities, locals have tried to resist by organizing neighborhood watches, both to warn people that agents are coming and to document the arrests they make. Minneapolis, where this week ICE launched what its acting director called the “largest immigration operation ever,” was no different.

Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general, told me that since ICE ramped up its operations in Minneapolis, it’s felt “like we are being inundated with a hostile paramilitary group that is mistreating, insulting, terrorizing our neighbors.” And the residents of Minneapolis have responded: “People have got their whistles, and they’ve got their little alert system to tell people ICE is in the neighborhood. They’ve been protesting. They’ve been out there trying to protect their neighbors.”

Many of these people probably believed that even in Trump’s America, citizens still have inviolable liberties that allow them to stand up to the jacked-up irregulars who’ve descended on their communities. The civil rights of immigrants have been profoundly curtailed; even green card holders are on notice that this government may detain and deport them simply for protesting. But Americans — particularly, let’s be honest, white Americans — might have thought themselves immune from ICE abuses.

The killing of Renee Nicole Good, a mother of three and widow of a military veteran, tests that assumption. ICE, said Ellison, is all but telling people, “‘You want to defend your neighbors, you’re going to do it at the risk of your own life.’ I think that’s the unmistakable message. Just looking at the tape, they could have said, ‘You get out of here,’ right? And then she gets out of there. They didn’t want her to get out of there. They wanted to either drag her out of that car or do what they did. And it was all about teaching lessons.”

The lesson didn’t end with Good’s killing — the administration had to smear her afterward. As The New York Times reported, bystander footage filmed from several different angles shows that the agent who shot Good wasn’t in the path of her S.U.V. when he fired on her. That did not stop Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem from accusing Good of trying to run agents over in “an act of domestic terrorism.” Vice President JD Vance called her a “deranged leftist.”

In the imagination of some on the right, Good quickly came to stand in for all the grating Resistance moms they’d like to see crushed. Fox News sneered that Good was a “self-proclaimed poet” — she’s the winner of a prestigious poetry award — “with pronouns in her bio.” The conservative radio host Erick Erickson described her as an “AWFUL,” or “Affluent White Female Urban Liberal.”

It’s entirely possible that had Good lived, the Trump administration might have tried to prosecute her. That’s essentially what happened to Marimar Martinez, a U.S. citizen in Chicago, in October. Martinez was in her car trying to warn people about ICE when she collided with a Border Patrol vehicle. Federal officials claimed she “rammed” a car driven by the agent Charles Exum, while her lawyers say he sideswiped her. Exum then got out of his car and shot her five times.

Martinez survived, only for the Justice Department to charge her with assaulting a federal officer. Her lawyers soon discovered that Exum had been boasting about the shooting in text messages. In one, he wrote, “I fired 5 rounds, and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.” In another, he said, “Sweet. My fifteen mins of fame. Lmao.” The Justice Department ended up dropping the case before even more messages could be revealed.

Exum’s giddy sadism shouldn’t have been surprising; it reflects the culture the administration is encouraging among its immigration enforcers. In one ICE recruiting ad, an agent mans a mounted gun atop some sort of militarized vehicle, with the words, “Destroy the flood.” It was a reference to the video game Halo, where players must kill a flood of hostile space aliens. Another shows sword-wielding knights with the words, “The enemies are at the gates.”

Homeland Security’s social media feed is an unending stream of demented propaganda and bellicose Christian nationalism. . . . . . They are telegraphing the creation of a far-reaching police state.

In such a system, the relationship between every citizen and their government is transformed by the constant demand for submission. Since Good’s death, Republicans have been lining up to threaten those who don’t immediately comply with ICE’s orders. “The bottom line is this: When a federal officer gives you instructions, you abide by them and then you get to keep your life,” Representative Wesley Hunt of Texas said on Newsmax.

All of us, citizens and immigrants alike, are being ruled by people who think life is a privilege bestowed by authority, and death is a fair penalty for disobedience.

Be very, very afraid.

Friday Morning Male Beauty

 


Thursday, January 08, 2026

More Thursday Male Beauty


 

ICE Thugs Have Killed a U.S. Citizen

Increasingly, the ICE agents under the direction of the Felon and ICE Barbie appear to be out of control and appear to deliberately seeking to provoke bystanders and observers in order that they can then lie and call the citizenry "rioters" and "domestic terrorist" - the latter term being what the Felon wants to label his critics.  Watching ICE operations it seems brutality and cruelty are the point with no regard to the rights of undocumented immigrants or U.S. citizens.   Yesterday, an ICE agent killed a white 37 year old American citizen by shooting into her vehicle on the false claim she was trying to run him over - a bald-faced lie based on a videos filmed by onlookers.  ICE Barbie repeated this lie and seemingly expects citizens to ignore what they saw with their own eyes.  Frighteningly, yesterday made clear that no one is truly safe from ICE thugs - many of whom are hastily trained and apparently told they are above the law - if they arrive in one's neighborhood.   No doubt the Felon's regime will continue to spew endless lies and seek to foment news stories to distract from the Epstein files and the reality that the Felon's regime has no plan for what comes next in Venezuela. In the Republican Party in which I grew up, by now steps would have been taken to rein in a lawless occupant of the White House.  Sadly, that political party has ceased to exist.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at yesterday's deliberate killing:

When a federal immigration agent shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis today, the details were fresh but the story was familiar. Once again, a law-enforcement officer had fired into a moving vehicle, even though experts on use of force, and many agencies’ rules, prohibit or discourage the practice as dangerous and ineffective.

The facts of the Minneapolis shooting are still emerging, but bystander videos and eyewitness accounts provide some sense of what happened. Federal agents are in Minnesota as part of an enforcement push as the Trump administration focuses on welfare fraud among Somali immigrants in the state. Video shows bystanders watching (and heckling) federal agents. A truck with flashing lights pulls up; the driver and a second agent jump out and rapidly approach a burgundy SUV blocking the road, and the driver appears to tell a woman to get out of her car. The SUV reverses briefly, then starts to move forward. A third officer then fires several shots. The car veers away before crashing.

According to a witness who spoke to The Minnesota Star Tribune, a doctor at the scene attempted to help the woman who was shot, but was kept away by federal agents. When an ambulance finally arrived, it was blocked from reaching her by law-enforcement vehicles, and paramedics had to reach her on foot. The woman has died.

An initial statement by Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, appeared to be false in most of its key details, including claiming that “violent rioters” were at the scene and alleging that the driver had “weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them.” The available footage suggests that the driver may instead have been trying to flee. Many DHS claims about incidents between civilians and agents have been misleading or plainly false, and the Trump administration has sought spurious charges against anti-ICE protesters.

Residents and local officials reacted with outrage.  . . . . Firing at a car like this is problematic as a matter of both law and practice. Under a 1985 Supreme Court ruling, police aren’t permitted to open fire on someone who is fleeing unless that person presents a serious danger to the officer or others. Justice Byron White wrote that “it is no doubt unfortunate when a suspect who is in sight escapes,” but “it is not better that all felony suspects die than that they escape.” (The driver in question here was not clearly under arrest, much less a felony suspect.)

Shooting into moving cars is often a bad idea, though, even when it might be legally justified. Officers who fear they are in danger often miss their target—sometimes harmlessly, sometimes striking bystanders or other officers. “If you actually hit the driver and are successful, now you’ve got an unguided missile,” Geoffrey Alpert, a professor at the University of South Carolina and an expert on police use of force, told me in 2021. “It’s just as likely if you shoot someone that a foot’s going to go on the gas as on the brake.” In this case, photos suggested that the SUV struck another car after its driver was shot.

Experts also point to poor training as a common reason for these shootings. Though the identity and experience of the officer who opened fire today are not yet known, it should be one area of focus. As ICE and other border agencies scramble to add staff and to reach huge deportation quotas set by the White House, they have lowered standards and shortened training in the hopes of getting agents on the streets sooner—but untrained officers are more likely to make mistakes.

Tense relationships between state and local governments and the federal government will complicate the investigation into this shooting . . . .Governor Tim Walz, a Democrat, today accused DHS of “propaganda” and promised “accountability and justice.” Officers who kill civilians are seldom charged with crimes, and when charges are brought, officers are often acquitted, but Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison has shown a willingness to prosecute officers for violence, including securing the convictions of four Minneapolis police officers in the murder of George Floyd. A successful prosecution here might be even trickier.

In some ways, I barely recognize this country any longer.  

Thursday Morning Male Beauty


 

Wednesday, January 07, 2026

More Wednesday Male Beauty

 


Carville: Venezuela Is All About the Epstein Files

Since the weekend's attack on Venezuela and the seizure of Maduro and his wife, at the orders of the Felon,  no clear plan for what comes next seems to exist save for the Felon's claims that the America will "run Venezuela" and that millions of barrels of oil will be taken by him/the United States. Maduro's faction remains in power and the country is sliding into even more instability. Pundits - the CBS anchor sounded like a hired cheerleader for the Felon - have tried to buy into the seemingly non-existent plan for going forward or, like CBS and Fox News failed to look for true motives. Yes, Maduro was a bad actor, but what's the plan after his removal?  Of course, all of this ignores what James Carville calls out as the true motive: distraction from the Epstein files and the flailing Felon/GOP economy. Insane threats against Columbia, the Panama Canal, Canada and Greenland only ramp up the media's distraction from what the Felon fears the most: the full release of the Epstein files, more and more of which continue to be "discovered" by the Felon's Department of Justice.  As also noted, the adventure in Venezuela has shifted media coverage from the healthcare crisis put in motion by the falsely named "big beautiful bill" and the continued rising prices of consumer goods and energy. A piece at Salon looks at Carville's assessment:

James Carville thinks the pundit class are trying too hard to make sense of [the Felon's] President Donald Trump‘s stunning strike on Venezuela. The former Democratic Party strategist said the entire operation was a diversion from the ongoing release of the Epstein Files and the rising costs of healthcare.

“Why’s he doing this? What’s his objective? You know what his objective is. It’s Jeffrey Epstein. They keep finding I don’t know how many more millions of documents,” Carville said in a video for Politicon on Saturday.

Carville slathered disrespect on television hosts and lawmakers who were racking their brains over Trump’s motivation.

“If you think this is anything remotely legit, or this is in furtherance of some foreign policy aim, or some aim of American interests, come on, please! Please, people! It’s all about Epstein! Wake up! Get the scales off your eyes!” he said. “Think beyond just the front of your nose!”

Carville said that Trump carried out the attack on Venezuela as a last-ditch effort to avoid a complete revolt over continued revelations from the Epstein Files.

“In his reptilian survival way, he says ‘I’m going to do this and draw attention away from Epstein,'” he said.

Trump has followed the arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro with threats toward other Latin American leaders. He singled out Mexico, Cuba and Colombia in statements following the weekend attack, saying that Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum hasn’t done enough to combat drug cartels and accusing Colombian President Gustavo Petro of “making cocaine.”

In an interview with “Fox & Friends,” he said Petro needs to “watch his ass.” 

Petro has condemned the strikes on Colombia’s neighbor and taken shots at American leaders whose names appear in the Epstein Files. Late last year, Petro said that the United States was run by a “clan of pedophiles” trying to “destroy democracy in Colombia.”

“To keep the list from coming out, they send warships to kill fishermen,” he said. “As if the people of Colombia would applaud an invasion of their brother.”

  

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

 


Tuesday, January 06, 2026

More Tuesday Male Beauty


 

What Could Go Wrong With The Felon's Gunboat Diplomacy

Not only do the Felon and the supine Republican Party want to bring back the worse excesses of the Gilded Age, but after this past weekend it's apparent that the Felon also wants to bring back the gunboat diplomacy the United States pursued in the 1890's through arguably the 1920's and beyond. Under this form of diplomacy, might makes right and smaller countries are demanded to cower before America while powerful nations carve out their spheres of influence if not outright colonies.  It's the formula that lead up to WWI that lead to the death of millions, both civilians and military members, and ultimately saw the fall of empires and monarchies (e.g., Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia). I suspect the Felon is ignorant of this history which was to an extent repeated in WWII, not that he cares.  It's all about strutting about like a bully and monarch and demanding nation's bend to his wishes. As a long column in the New York Times lays out, if the Felon is free to unilaterally  seize Venezuela without compliance with international law, then by extension Putin can seize Ukraine or other parts of the former Russian/Soviet empire, and China can seize Taiwan (and 60% of the world's semiconductor sources).  The Felon likely could care less about the harm done to America and the world long term as long as he and his billionaire cronies enrich themselves in the short term.  Here are highlights from the Times column:

“War,” the Prussian military thinker Carl von Clausewitz wrote, “is a mere continuation of policy by other means.” If there is one line that virtually every Army officer learns from Clausewitz’s posthumously published 1832 book, “On War,” it’s that description of the purpose of armed conflict.

Those words were among the first that popped into my head when I woke up Saturday morning to the news that the American military had attacked Venezuela, seized its dictator, Nicolás Maduro, and brought him to the United States to face criminal charges.

The reason those words occurred to me was simple — the attack on Venezuela harks back to a different time, before the 19th century world order unraveled, before two catastrophic world wars, and before the creation of international legal and diplomatic structures designed to stop nations from doing exactly what the United States just did.

It’s a mistake, incidentally, to view General Clausewitz as an amoral warmonger. He wasn’t inventing the notion he describes; he was describing the world as it has been. His statement is a pithy explanation of how sovereign states viewed warfare for much of human history.

When a strong state operates under the principle that war is just another extension of policy, it is tempted to operate a bit like a mob boss. Every interaction with a weaker nation is tinged in some way with the threat of force — nice little country you have there. Shame if something happened to it.

This is not fanciful. In a telephone conversation with The Atlantic’s Michael Scherer, [the Felon] President Trump threatened Venezuela’s new leader, Delcy Rodríguez, who served as Maduro’s vice president. “If she doesn’t do what’s right,” Trump said, “she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.”

Diplomacy and economic pressure are almost always still a first resort for powerful nations, but if they fail to achieve the intended results — well, you can watch footage from the American strike in Venezuela to know what can happen next.

But the Clausewitzian view isn’t the only option for nations and their leaders. There is a better model for international affairs, one that acknowledges the existence of evil and the reality of national interests, but also draws lines designed to preserve peace and human life.

In Summa Theologica, written in the 13th century, Aquinas outlined three cardinal requirements of what came to be known as just war theory.

Echoes of Aquinas are all over the U.N. Charter. Article 2 of the United Nations Charter bans aggressive warfare (taking away a key tool in the Clausewitz toolbox); Article 51 permits individual and collective self-defense to keep great powers in check; and Chapter V established a body (the Security Council) that’s designed to keep the peace.

No one would argue that the system is perfect. We’ve seen wars of aggression since World War II, but the system has achieved its primary goal. The world has been spared total war.

The Aquinas model, however, has to fight two foes — the will to power and the loss of memory. Just war theory demands restraint from the powerful. It asks great powers to forgo imposing their will — even to the point of subordinating their short-term national interests to the long-term aspiration of international peace and justice.

That’s where our loss of memory comes into play. Restraint is more persuasive when people actually remember a world war, and the people who built the United Nations and NATO had been through two. In that sense, the moral argument against aggressive war has practical application.

The world has seen what happens when the will to power dominates world affairs, and its leaders know (or should know) that the most catastrophic conflicts can start from the most modest beginnings.

When Gavrilo Princip took aim at the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, for example, and Austria-Hungary mobilized against tiny Serbia, how many world leaders grasped that more than 16 million people would die in the war to come?

When memory fades, the Clausewitz model grows more tempting — in part because it can achieve quick results, just as it did in Venezuela early Saturday morning.

The Trump administration — acting entirely on its own and without seeking congressional approval — decided it was in the best interests of the United States to remove Maduro from power.

But when it struck, it violated every principle of just war.

First, [the Felon] Trump acted unilaterally, turning his back on the sovereign constitutional requirements of American law. He did not consult with Congress. He did not secure a declaration of war. He simply attacked a sovereign country on his authority alone.

Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, has argued that the administration’s action wasn’t an act of war, but rather a “law enforcement operation” and that the Defense Department merely protected the arresting officers.

This defense is laughable. Under that reasoning, a president could transform virtually any war into a law enforcement operation by indicting opposing leaders and claiming that the large military forces needed to secure the leader’s arrest were simply protecting law enforcement. That’s not an argument; it’s an excuse.

Second, Trump struck without a casus belli, without just cause recognized by international law and the U.N. Charter. . . . . the attack “pretty clearly violates the charter,” even if there is no clear way to enforce the charter’s commands.

Third, while removing a dictator from power can be a just end, Trump’s decision to turn his back on the democratically elected opposition is profoundly troubling. That the remaining elements of a corrupt regime still govern the country — subject to American demands to negotiate oil deals with American companies — risks perpetuating corruption and oppression at the expense of freedom and democracy.

Nothing here is new. . . . . Trump’s attack on Venezuela was a piece of a much larger whole, the restoration of the politics and diplomacy of 1900 — the years before the catastrophe of the First World War.

The gunboat diplomacy of the Gilded Age certainly meant that the United States dominated Central and South America. It imposed a quasi-colonial reality on the region. Each nation developed under at least some degree of American oversight. Every nation was only as sovereign as the United States allowed it to be.

Trump’s attack on Venezuela didn’t take place in a vacuum, either. In December, the administration released its National Security Strategy paper that put the Western Hemisphere first.

The document addressed the Americas before it addressed Asia, Europe and the Middle East, and it declared that the United States will “reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere.” . . . the paper created a dangerous distance between the United States and its European allies. It declares that Europe must “stand on its own feet and operate as a group of aligned sovereign nations, including by taking primary responsibility for its own defense.”

In isolation, that statement isn’t terribly problematic. The nations of Europe are rich enough and strong enough to shoulder most of the burden of collective defense. American allies, though, contribute more than many Americans may think. According to a recent RAND study, America contributed roughly 39 percent of the total defense burden by 2023 — a number that has dropped substantially since the end of the Cold War.

If Americans wonder why any South American regime would seek closer ties with other foreign powers, perhaps we should ask what their history has been with the United States and what the people of South America think about an aggressive revival of the Monroe Doctrine.

There are better and worse ways to argue about Trump’s approach.

The worse argument is to say that Trump set a precedent with his intervention in Venezuela — a precedent that nations such as Russia, China and Iran will be eager to follow in their own respective spheres of influence, and we will have no standing to object when our adversaries take the same approach to countries in their spheres of influence that we took in ours.

But Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China and revolutionary Iran have never had the slightest concern for just war theory or any moral argument. They’re held in check (to the extent they are) by deterrence, or, when deterrence fails, raw military force.

We can barely keep the world order together when only three of the five permanent members of the Security Council — the United States, Britain and France — comply with the U.N. Charter and international law. But if the United States joins Russia and China in their approach to armed conflict and international relations, then the Western postwar consensus is truly dead.

America First isn’t necessarily isolationist — there’s nothing isolationist about arresting the leader of a sovereign nation and pledging to “run” it, but it is myopic.

It pursues the sugar high of national power at the expense of justice and peace. You can see that Trump is on that sugar high right now. On Sunday night, NBC’s Sahil Kapur reported that Trump was still saying, “We’re gonna run” Venezuela. “If they don’t behave,” Trump added, “we’ll do a second strike.”

But [the Felon] Trump wasn’t just thinking about Venezuela. “Colombia is very sick, too,” he said. Cuba is “ready to fall.” He also threatened to strike Iran if Iran kills protesters and brought up Greenland again: “We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security.”

If there is anything that could decisively wreck NATO, it would be an attempt to annex Greenland. Annexation could conceivably empower Denmark to invoke Article 5, the collective self-defense provision of the North Atlantic treaty, against the United States.

But there’s a further problem: The true international norm is that when the strong dominate the weak, the weak try to become strong. That can mean alliances with enemies. That can mean global rearmament. That can mean nuclear proliferation. It can also mean that a foolish world once again endures the high cost of forgetting what it’s like when great powers go to war.

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty


 

Sunday, January 04, 2026

More Sunday Male Beauty


 

A Happy Love Story Between Two Men - Revolutionary

As more details leak out about the Felon's illegal attack on Venezuela - and perhaps even more frightening, the Felon's announced plan to run that country - I'm taking a pause from politics for a day and waiting for more factual details.  In the meantime, I am again focusing on HBO's hit "Heated Rivalry" which is based on two of a series of books by Canadian author, Rachel Reid.  I've read the books and am happy that the show has attracted so many non-LGBT viewers and fans.  Each of the books is at essence a love story that faces the hurdles of homophobia, bigotry and negative stereotypes - things that every "out" LGBT individual has had to face and consciously overcome.  If one reads the early years of this blog, my own "coming out" journey was anything but easy and at darkest points included two suicide attempts - something that still takes the lives of LGBT individuals who buckle under the strain of stereotypes and too often family rejection.  In the past, gay characters in movies or television are either homogenized, depicted as superficial witty "best friends" of other characters, or the stories end in tragedy.  The reality is that being gay involves more than mere physical sex and involves love and intimacy - and regular boring lives of work and and social involvement with family, friends and co-workers.   Yes, there is plenty of sex in Heated Rivalry, but the real story is lovie and intimacy as demonstrated by Ilya saying to Shane in Russian that he loves him too much and doesn't know what to do about it.  A column in the New York Times looks at the series and how it goes beyond mere representation of gay characters to show lives, love and intimacy. Here are column excerpts:

“Heated Rivalry” has become a breakout hit. The hockey drama — adapted from an erotic romance novel for the Canadian streaming service Crave — just ended its first season on HBO Max and has left gay men crying at watch parties that feel more like 19th-century religious revivals.

If you want to understand why this show has become our community’s equivalent of a cultural earthquake, the answer is that watching a gay couple be mildly boring and in love is still radical. . . . in the season finale, which landed last week, the two men are secluded in an intimate cottage — grilling burgers, lying by firelight, taking daytime swims, scrolling through their phones on the sofa.

Culture has not kept up with queer people, despite major political strides, legal victories (including marriage equality) and growing social acceptance. Stories and art explicitly about queer life are being made, but they rarely find a wide gay audience. They’re not typically embraced the way “Heated Rivalry” has been.

For years, queer representation in mainstream culture was driven by a political imperative. We needed to be palatable, monogamous and mortgage-ready to be tolerated. You could see this impulse in “Will & Grace,” where queerness was domesticated through friendship and slapstick, and later in “Modern Family,” where the suburban gay couple were beloved precisely because they reassured straight viewers that nothing about them was too strange, too erotic or too much. A lot of what is being produced about gay men, even now, replicates a straight world in rainbow colors.

Maybe what we ache for now is not culture built to serve a political end but a focus on the intimate — someone on top of us, breaking down in tears as he confesses his love. What is turning us on is not the thrill of naked bodies but the shock of being emotionally known. That is what some of us have been missing.

“Heated Rivalry” often focuses on the flirtations queer people recognize instantly: the charged eye contact at the opening face-off, boyfriends nudging feet under the table during a coming out, a glance across a crowded gala. The literary critic Richard Kaye has argued that flirtation has long been central to Western literature, a serious erotic mode in novels from Jane Austen to E.M. Forster. Seeing that tradition evolve onscreen between two men — not as subtext but as text — feels like a revolution.

What feels especially new is the way that flirtation becomes true intimacy. When another player in the league comes out by kissing his partner on the ice — a game changer in every sense — Shane’s phone rings. Ilya tells him he’s coming to Shane’s secluded lakeside cottage. Not for a night. Not for a postgame hookup. He’s choosing to step into Shane’s life, transforming their yearslong relationship into something with a future.

“Heated Rivalry” resonates because it embodies our lives. After the religious right pathologized us during the H.I.V./AIDS crisis, we reclaimed the sex story by reviving bathhouses and sex parties, by unapologetically embracing hookup culture on apps like Grindr, by celebrating eroticism in our fashion and nightlife. And slowly, we became more visible in family life and at work. There are queer politicians and lawyers, Olympians and celebrities. But representation is not the same thing as intimacy. We still need more stories about us, our relationships, our romances, our desires.

As the show has gained popularity, the cultural conversation has veered, perhaps predictably, toward straight people’s responses to the show. Articles, TikToks and morning shows have fixated on the thrill of being, say, a straight woman witnessing two men falling in love. This commentary has felt uncomfortably reminiscent of bachelorette parties in gay bars — our spaces becoming someone else’s spectacle, our bodies becoming someone else’s backdrop.

But if straight women like the show, that is fine. They should enjoy it. After all, it was adapted from a novel written by a woman. Her stated goal — to make a sweet, sexy, happy love story between two men in which, as she says, “the sexual tension and romance isn’t subtext or a tease or something that ends in tragedy” — fits what so many of us have been missing. Her willingness to write toward our joy feels rare, and so does the result: our intimacy made central, not symbolic; love scenes that are not lessons; desire that doesn’t apologize for itself.

We do not need more stories to prove that we exist. We need stories that capture how we live — in the touch, the embrace, the everyday if boring intimacies that were never meant to be translated. Our next frontier is not mere acceptance but depth.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty