Category: From The Editor

A War With The DPRK Would Be Bigger Than 9/11

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

As you may recall, in early September 2001, the Bush Administration was struggling for validity after the 2000 Electoral College controversy. Not a lot was going on and we were all worried that a recession was on its way. In fact, I doubt anyone remembers what was going on the morning of Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001 because we collectively didn’t really wake up until we were being told we should support a preemptive war against Iraq.

And so here we are in 2018. The Trump Administration seems teetering towards the brink of abject disaster. This is the point when it seems pretty obvious that a way with the DPRK is Trump’s failsafe. It’s the leaver he can pull that will make all of this go away. In the chaos after a war with the DPRK begins, he can finally fire Sessions, fire Mueller, pardon everyone he wants to pardon and we’ll all wakeup in 2025 to President Tom Cotton being sworn in.

People like me will try to bring up all the things we’re talking about right now, but I’ll just be hushed and and told to support the new president, to give him a chance. It’s a very tragic way to finally liberate the long-suffering people of North Korea, but I do believe there is a better than even chance that a war between the US and the DPRK will happen in August 2018.

I say August because if you’re someone deep in the bowls of the Trump Administration, you probably think that if you start a war in August, it’ll be wrapped up by November and Lee Greenwood will be on the radio belting out God Bless The USA the morning people head to the polls.

Of course, there are any number of potential complications that make this scenario far from absolutely likely. As I keep saying, it’s likely the DPRK has sleeper cells in the US that could cause major havoc should they be activated. And the public might blanch at 20,30 or 40,000 American expats dying during the course of a war with the DPRK. The sheer number of people who might die as a result of such a war might be enough to turn people off an cause the Blue Wave to be very real.

But that’s not how the John Boltons of the world would see things. They would think people would rally around the flag like the did after 9/11 and all of Trump’s problems would vanish down the memory hole. Only time will tell, I guess.

If We See Pictures Of Trump’s Dick From Stormy Daniels’ Sexts, Will It Matter?

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

These are the times that try men’s souls.

It’s possible that Stormy Daniels has, uh, “pictures” she got during her affair with Donald Trump. I am jumping to conclusions, but if those pictures are of Trump’s junk….lulz, nothing matters? I mean, would it really matter? Trump seems to have a God-like hold on his supporters, so the whole seeing Trump’s junk probably wouldn’t phase them.

I would like to think, however, that that might be rock bottom. That once we all get to see Trump’s junk that that would be it. Trump would still be president, still have the power to ruin everything, but psychologically, we would have reached the total be-all-end-all of how bad it could possibly get with Trump as president.

But nothing matters. That 35% of the electorate who would drink Trump’s Jim Jones Kool-Aide seem to control the country now, so we’re fucked. We all so very fucked.

John Bolton As National Security Adviser Would Mean DPRK War Is Coming

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Among the many insane things happening today is the news that John Bolton was seen at the White House. This is very bad news for anyone who hopes we will take a serious look at the good news going on between the two Koreas and take a step back from war.

I have said, and continue to believe, that if you look at what we know about what’s going on politically with Trump right now that it would make sense that we would go to war with the DPRK around August of this year. I say that because August is perfect because if it starts then, the war would probably be wrapped up by early November — at the cost of a million dead, natch — and old Lee Greenwood will be belting out that Iraq War classic “God Bless The USA.”

I say this because Trump lacks any human empathy and wouldn’t care about the massive lost of human life, Trump knows he will be impeached — if not convicted — if he loses Congress to a Blue Wave, and he’s so desperate to improve is poll ratings that a quick, bloody war would be perfect.

John Bolton has a history of being a warmonger and if he has the president’s ear on a regular basis, it makes sense that my prediction is more accurate than ever. It hasn’t happened yet, but as the Mueller investigation continues its march across Trumplandia, it seems all but inevitable that Trump, in a panic, will start a war with the DPRK to make it all go away.

A war with the DPRK would give Trump an enormous reboot. It’s his political failsafe. It’s the thing he has in his back pocket no matter what. Of course, war is a pretty crazy thing. Any number of pretty catastrophic things could happen if a war with the DPRK starts. There might be North Korean sleeper cells in the United States that would be activated. That alone could be the cause of a few hundred thousand civilian dead if they release chemical or biological weapons on the American homeland. That doesn’t even begin to address the threat from a fully functional ICBM or an attack on Japan.

I think Japan is the place we’re not giving enough thought about. While the DPRK has a love-hate relationship with South Korea, it has a hate-hate relationship with Japan. If it looks like the DPRK is finished, they will be sure to take as much of Japan down with them. That could be another million dead under the proper circumstances.

Regardless, John Bolton as National Security Adviser would mean this worst case scenario is one giant leap towards becoming a reality. We have to start taking the possibility of a war with the DPRK done for cold, crass white-knuckled political reasons as a real possibility.

The Big Reboot: It’s Inevitable That Trump Will Start A Preemptive War With DPRK

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I only keep writing about this because it seems so obvious. It’s obvious that something like this is going to happen: Trump sometime between now and, say, August, will start a preemptive war with the DPRK. As Trump grows more comfortable with this power, he will look around and realize there’s an easy way out of the looming impeachment he will face once Mueller finishes his job.

Start a war.

And, given how Trump lacks any sense of human empathy, he won’t really care that starting a war with the DPRK will sentence about 1 million people to death. Add to this that 100,000 Americans are within range of the DPRK’s weapons and the reboot we had politically with 9/11 will look like chump change. Think of what we were worried about in early September 2001 and how we didn’t wake up from the post-9/11 grief period until just before the run up to the Iraq War.

Now imagine 10,000 American civilians — at least – coming home in body bags as part of a renewed Korean War and how that would draw attention away from TrumpRussia and how, generally Trump is completely incompetent. Trump could easily cruise into a second term should a war with the DPRK happen, regardless of the reason behind it. So that’s why I think we’re going to war with the DPRK between now and August. I say August because that would give the American military a few months to crush the DPRK and have the troops coming home in a big ass parade just around the time voters would go to the polls in November. At least, that would be the thinking of the Trump Administration.

The is little we can do about all of this, given the enormous power the American presidency has when it comes to starting wars.

#MAGA, The Blue Wave & Trump’s Coming Preemptive War With The DPRK

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

If you wanted to get all reflective about things, one might say that had Hillary Clinton won the Electoral Vote and was president now, things would actually be worse. I say this because Trump would have the best of both worlds — he could bitch an moan on Twitter all day about how bad things were, but wouldn’t have to actually do anything about it. Add to this how he probably would start Trump TV and you can see how things could be worse. And, what’s even worse, the same insane nutjobs who wanted to march on Washington and establish a deathcult in late October 2016, would be growing ever more hysterical.

As it stands, however, what’s going on is this: the Resistance needs time to rebuild its ranks of leadership. So, it’s going to be a while. The earliest anything is going possibly change is November 2018. Even then, between November and January, the lame duck session of Congress probably is going to cram in as many insane Federal judges as it can. But given that I think Trump is going to short-circuit the Blue Wave by starting a war with the DPRK between now and August, it could be much, much longer before anything changes. In fact, my big fear is the entire system is so broken that it could be a decade or more before The Resistance finally comes to power and even then everything will have changed so much that things simply won’t be able to snap back into place.

Having said all that, we need to think about that 35% of the electorate that continues to support Trump. It reminds me of the old SNL skit, “How’s He Doing” that had a round table of African Americans giving their views on Obama. I really think SNL needs to do a similar skit with Trump supporters. The issue is, and this is one I continue to struggle with: why is it so difficult for Trump supporters to see they’ve been duped.

This is not to say that they don’t have legitimate grievances, they do. They have a whole host of reasons why they should be upset with the existing order. I get that. But what I don’t get is their continued support for Trump personally.

And, really, the only thing that can give us any hope is that Trump doesn’t have any ideology other than winning the moment and whatever he tweets at any particular time. If he had an ideology he had thought through and was willing to defend, he would be a real danger to the Republic.

But, fortunately, he doesn’t have that. But what he does have as his fail safe is the ability to start a preemptive war with the DPRK. I still think that’s in his pocket. If things get too bad, he just arbitrarily starts a war with North Korea, kills about a million people needlessly and that’s that. We wake up in 2025 with President Tom Cotton getting sworn in.

Sadly, there’s no much we can do about it. I have proposed that the war with the DPRK will start between now and August 2018 and I have not seen anything to make me think otherwise. It has nothing to do with what is going on in Korea and everything to do with the continuing domestic crisis that is Donald J. Trump. A massive war with the DPRK will give Trump spectacular approval rating for a just long enough to prevent the Blue Wave from happening. That core 35% of the electorate who continue to support Trump no matter what will be the basis of a scary realignment of the American body politic as Trump becomes a war president.

And there’s not much we can do about it.

V-Log: A Preemptive War Between #DPRK & USA Is Inevitable By August 2018

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

This is a really long, but interesting v-log of me walking and talking about why I believe war between the US and the DPRK is all but inevitable by August, 2018. Enjoy!

V-Log: Some Brief Words On How To Solve The NRA Problem

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Here you go. Enjoy.

How People Power Can Defeat The NRA #BoycottNRA

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Sometimes, it seems as though the NRA is so powerful that the average person can’t do anything. I disagree. As history has shown us with what happened with the Anti-Masonic Party in the early 1800s, if the electorate decides collectively to do something, change can happen.

The party was founded in the aftermath of the disappearance of William Morgan, a former Mason who had become a prominent critic of the organization. Many believed that the Masons had murdered Morgan for speaking out against Masonry, and many churches and other groups condemned masonry. As many Masons were prominent businessmen and politicians, the backlash against the Masons was also a form of anti-elitism. Mass opposition to Masonry eventually coalesced into a political party. Before and during the presidency of John Quincy Adams, the United States endured a period of political realignment, and the Anti-Masons emerged as an important third party alternative to Andrew Jackson’s Democrats and Adams’s National Republicans. In New York, the Anti-Masons supplanted the National Republicans as the primary opposition to the Democrats.

Really, the closest modern thing I can compare what I suggest to is what MADD was able to do in the 1980s, but that was a lot easier for various reasons. I live in Virginia and the NRA ran attack ads against the Democratic gubernatorial candidate saying he had an “F” rating with them. I was like, “Wow, I’m voting for that guy!” So, if you really want to do something about the NRA, if you want to combat their power, vow to yourself you will never vote for anyone with an A Rating from the NRA. It’s a small, but powerful decision.

You’re going to have to kind of ignore the enormous power of the NRA propaganda. You’re going to have to say fuck that. Nothing they say or do will get you to vote for someone they support. Absolutely. It doesn’t matter where you live, if enough people take this pledge, eventually things will change.

I guess the point is, we have to take things into our own hands. Politicians live off the vote and enough people, on principle, refuse to vote for someone with an A Rating from the NRA eventually after a lot of bitching and moaning, Washington will get the picture.

But this won’t come easy. The NRA has a lot of power and the Trump Administration seems hell bent on imposing some sort of weird dystopia on America. But I still believe in American democracy, I still believe that we ARE a democracy.

I would also suggest you try to support the efforts of the teens protesting the NRA by not giving your kids grief if they walk out of school. But that is maybe a bit much for some people.

It’s times like these when I wish John Lennon was still alive. We really need him right now.

The Anti-Masonic Party & How To Defeat The NRA

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Dire times call for drastic measures and I think maybe we can learn a lesson from the origins of the Anti-Masonic Party in New England. Essentially, as I understand it, the people of New England got fed up with the shenanigans of the Masons in New England and vowed not to vote for anyone who was a member.

So, one could argue that America is ripe for a nation-wide political boycott of the NRA. In essence, if the populace simply collectively decided to not vote for anyone who took NRA money, maybe the pols in Washington would sit up and take notice.

Now, of course, this would not come easy. It would take just the right political moment. It does seem, however, that we’re careening towards just that type of moment. You can’t stymie the political will for as long and as absolutely as the NRA has without there being a folk backlash at some point. People on a individual level might eventually get fed up so much that they actually evoke real political change.

I don’t exactly have the highest hopes that this will happen. But you can always hope.

V-log: Of #Hollywood, #Screenwriting & #Storytelling

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

In these two videos, I go into great length about my personal views on Hollywood, screenwriting and storytelling. These videos are meandering and rambling, but pretty good, all things considered. It’s too bad that people aren’t willing to watch videos.

But, in short, I talk a lot about how Hollywood establishes traditional gender rolls and then plays with them for dramatic effect. I also talk about my movie concept that would be a homage to The Big Chill. Like I said, these two videos are really interesting if you’re into storytelling.