This blog is dedicated to the struggles of people everywhere to advance human progress and save this planet from the decline of capitalism. Its focus, since 2011 has been supporting the emerging revolutions everywhere.
Long-time readers of Linux Beach may remember Tim Gionet, who goes by the on-line handle of Baked Alaska, as one of the chief instigators of a white supremacist attack on the Santa Monica Committee for Racial Justice in July and August of 2017. This was before he spoke at the infamous “United the Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA on 12 August 2017. He was one of the “very fine people” the now twice impeached Trump heralded. He was a feature player in the struggle I documented in Six days before Charlottesville, the same racists came to Santa Monica. He can be seen in both these pictures from Santa Monica and Charlottesville—bearded, black baseball cap with white lettering.
Latter, I told you that it had been reported that his injured bodyguard was visited in the hospital by a representative of Donald Trump.
In 2018, he surfaced again as a supporter of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, at a pro-Assad rally organized by the “anti-imperialist”ANSWER Coalition. a real example of white Left-Right convergence at its finest. When he was profiled by Al Jazeera, Assad's infamous propagandist, Partisangirl came to his defense.
Also in 2018, I exposed the relationship between the Republican candidate running against Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Omar Navarro, and Baked Alaska.
Well, Baked Alaska is back in the news again. Yahoo Newsreported this afternoon:
FBI arrest social media personality known as Baked Alaska for his alleged involvement in the Capitol riots
Tim Gionet, a streamer who has gained popularity on social media under the name Baked Alaska, was arrested in Houston on Saturday, and is being charged with federal crimes for allegedly taking part in the insurrection at the US Capitol. Gionet allegedly live-streamed himself and others while inside the Capitol on January 6. He also had a warrant out for his arrest for violating release conditions from a separate incident in Scottsdale, Arizona.
This is a rather unsurprising development given his history, but I thought you might want to know given the part coverage of him in this blog. All this scrud needs to do hard time.
Since the Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd last summer, it has become a staple of the Trumpists, Republicans, and white supremacists in general, that these protests were responsible for the looting that devastated some business districts. There definitely was a relationship between these two phenomenal, but it's not the one we have been led to believe. Let me the speak from my own experience on this.
The Looters
On the afternoon of 31 May 2020, there was an outbreak of looting in nearby Santa Monica, CA. It took place in the ritzy shopping area around 4th & Santa Monica Blvd., and since it was, well, Santa Monica, it got nationwide coverage. Here is an ABC7 report on it, complete with a bird's eye view of the looting, shot from a helicopter.
You'll notice that they accurately labeled their report Looting in Santa Monica blocks away from Black Lives Matter protest. The reporter accurately describes the looters of being opportunistic, and you'll notice there are only a handful of Santa Monica Police around, and they are completely overwhelmed. If you know that Santa Monica has a pretty substantial police department, you may be inclined to ask: Well, where are they? More on that later.
The Protesters
There was a rather large and robust march through Santa Monica, and neighboring Venice, to protest the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others, that took place around the same time.
I participated in that march.
I picked it up as the march came by my place in Venice. It was heading south on Pacific Ave. from Santa Monica, when I shot this picture from my balcony. Then I promptly joined the march. I live about a block south of Santa Monica.
We continued south on Pacific for about a mile into Venice. While we were still marching south into Venice, the word came down the line that the police, both LAPD & SMPD, had moved the curfew up to 4:00PM. It had been 6:00PM. It was then around 3:30PM, hardly enough time for the marchers to get back to their starting point in Santa Monica, let alone transit home.
Then we went one block west to Ocean Front Walk, and headed north back towards Santa Monica.
As you can see, it was a very peaceful march, if somewhat loud.
It involved local area residents of all ages and many ethnicities.
As we crossed Rose Ave. again, I punked out, for a variety of reasons, including covid, curfew, and just plain being tired of walking, and headed on home.
But I caught what happened next on TV.
As the matchers got into Santa Monica, they were blocked by what looked to be the entire Santa Monica Police Department. As you can see by the time, they were intent on enforcing that 4:00PM curfew they had declared while the march was still in progress. There had been no violence from the marchers to that point, and no looting from the BLM protesters at any time.
This was happening about the same time of the looting was breaking out on Santa Monica & 4th, about a half-mile away.
Apparently, SMPD didn't have enough forces to both kettle and harass the social justice protesters, and deal with the looters at the same time. So, they chose to mess with the peaceful protesters while they let the looters run wild.
From their POV, it was all good, because they could use the looting they failed to stop to tarnish the Black Lives Matter protesters that were demanding an end to police violence and harassment. Two for one.
The looters were opportunists. They were criminals who knew that the police preoccupation with peaceful protesters would give them the opportunity to loot in areas that normally would be heavily policed.
So, you see, rather than the protesters being looters, or even aligned with the looters, it was actually the looters and the police that were making common cause.
If I seem overly concerned with the danger of an unhinged president still in charge of the nation's nuclear arsenal in the final weeks of his administration, it's not just because he is desperate to retain that power.
It's not just because he has shown that he is willing to try to do so by any means, even those that are illegal, and may well result in mass casualty events.
It's not just because he clearly enjoys chaos and mass destruction. It's not just because he seems willing to burn the country if he isn't allowed to continue ruling it.
It's not just because he has shown little regard for human life.
It's not just because he's so fond of those areas where he can exercise the unilateral power of the presidency, like issuing pardons or launching nuclear weapons.
It's also because he has been obsessed with the “power and importance” of nuclear weapons for more than 50 years.
While I wrote blog posts and made videos warning about this danger while he was running for office, I haven't focused on it since because that Rubicon had been crossed, and I always saw this nuclear danger as an end game scenario, a kind of parting “shot” from a finally defeated Trump.
We are there now.
Many years ago, Trump used his now-suspended Twitter account to warn us that this was a situation we had best avoid, as in this 2013 tweet:
Be prepared, there is a small chance that our horrendous leadership could unknowingly lead us into World War III.
But we find signs of this obsession 30 years before that tweet.
On 8 April 1984, New York Times magazine ran a piece by William E. Geist about Donald Trump's expanding real estate empire titled "THE EXPANDING EMPIRE OF DONALD TRUMP." It was supposed to be a puff piece promoting the young real estate developer's latest project, Trump Castle:
Donald J. Trump is the man of the hour. Turn on the television or open a newspaper almost any day of the week and there he is, snatching some star from the National Football League, announcing some preposterously lavish project he wants to build. Public-relations firms call him, offering to handle his account for nothing, so that they might take credit for the torrential hoopla.
... With castles on the drawing boards, the first tenants are moving into Mr. Trump's $125 million Trump Plaza luxury cooperative apartment building at Third Avenue and 61st. Street. His Generals are off to a winning start in their first season under his ownership. He is hovering attentively over his newly opened Xanadu of conspicuous consumption, the $200 million Trump Tower condominium-office-retail complex on Fifth Avenue, also supervising the final touches on Harrah's at Trump Plaza, a mammoth $220 million casino-hotel in Atlantic City set to open next month.
This puffery drones on like that for more that 6,600 words before Trump takes it in a most unexpected direction:
The football thing is cute, Trump Tower and the piano and all of that, it's all cute, but what does it mean? he says, sounding what borders on a note of uncharacteristic despair.
Asked to explain, he adds: What does it all mean when some wacko over in Syria can end the world with nuclear weapons?
Since the object of this piece was clearly designed to promote Trump as New York's dynamic new developer, it's odd that he would even bring up the question of nuclear holocaust, let alone keep returning to it
Trump tells Geist that his obsession with nuclear holocaust goes all the way back to 1969:
He says that his concern for nuclear holocaust is not one that popped into his mind during any recent made-of-television movie. He says that it has been troubling him since his uncle, a nuclear physicist, began talking to him about it 15 years ago.
And he tells Geist his greatest dream:
His greatest dream is to personally do something about the problem and, characteristically, Donald Trump thinks he has an answer to nuclear armament: Let him negotiate arms agreements - he who can talk people into selling $100 million properties to him for $13 million. Negotiations is an art, he says and I have a gift for it.
In a Washington Post interview that same year, 1984, Trump again returned to the question of nuclear war:
This morning, Trump has a new idea. He wants to talk about the threat of nuclear war. He wants to talk about how the United States should negotiate with the Soviets.
He wants to be the negotiator.
He says he has never acted on his nuclear concern. But he says that his good friend Roy Cohn, the flamboyant Republican lawyer, has told him this interview is a perfect time to start.
It could have been a real boon to humanity had Trump's nuclear obsession really been about nuclear disarmament, but as we have often seen with Trump, he is shrewd enough to portray this obsession in a positive light. Thirty-two years later, after he had won the US presidency, and was actually in a position to move towards nuclear disarmament, what he did was quite the opposite. The LA Timesreported, 23 December 2020:
While the country has been preoccupied with the COVID-19 pandemic, economic decline and the election, President Trump’s administration quietly and steadily steered America’s nuclear weapons industry to its largest expansion since the end of the Cold War, increasing spending on such arms by billions of dollars with bipartisan congressional support.
Overall, the budget for making and maintaining nuclear warheads has risen more than 50% since Trump was elected in 2016, substantially outpacing the rates of increase for the defense budget and overall federal spending during his presidency before the pandemic. On Monday, Congress approved Trump’s proposal to increase spending next year for the production of such weaponry by nearly $3 billion.
Three years after the Geist piece, in 1987, Ron Rosenbaum did an extensive interview with Trump in the 21 Club for the now defunct Manhattan, inc. In 2016, he reprinted it in Stale. It was to be another puff piece about the high-profile real estate developer. Rosenbaum recounted:
My gig was to take the loudest, glitziest luminaries of the loudest, glitziest era of Manhattan, the power brokers and power lunchers, out to lunch and turn on a tape recorder, and then to profile their self-importance.
The interview was suppose to be promoting Trump's latest project, the Trump Tower Atrium, but mostly what Trump wanted to talk about was The Subject. Rosenbaum said “his PR adviser told him he shouldn’t talk about The Subject at all, he should only be plugging the success of the Trump Tower Atrium,” but when Rosenbaum “heard of Trump’s initial enthusiasm for talking about The Subject,” he was happy to make that the focus:
“I’m dealing at a very high level on this,” [Trump] said. With people in Washington. In the White House. There was too much at stake for him to risk the wrong kind of exposure on The Subject.
The Subject has itself been the subject of considerable delicate pre-lunch negotiations between Trump and the magazine. Trump was enthusiastic when he first heard I wanted to focus on The Subject.
That’s great, he said: The Subject is far more important than any development deal he’s ever done, than any deal of that sort he’ll ever do. The life-or-death nature of The Subject transcends mere real estate. He’s pursuing it as if it were the biggest deal of his life. The Ultimate Deal.
Rosenbaum tells us “The Subject is nuclear weapons proliferation and Trump’s crusade to find a way to halt it before a wild-card nuke deals death to millions.” Trump told him “It’s one of the great problems of the world. Not one of them. It is the.” Here again Trump credits his uncle for starting his obsession:
“My uncle who just passed away was a great scientist. He was a professor at MIT. Dr. John Trump. In fact, together with Dr. Van de Graaff they did the Van de Graaff generator. He was the earliest pioneer in radiation therapy for cancer. He spent his whole life fighting cancer and he ended up dying of it.”
It was his uncle, Trump tells me, who got him started thinking about The Subject.
Probably remembering his PR advisor's advice, he complained “What I would have liked was a story on how well the Atrium at Trump Tower is doing.”
“Well,” I said to Trump, “we can get into that. Would you like to start out by telling me how well the Atrium’s doing?”
What followed was the single most surprising moment of our conversation. The one that convinced me that Trump’s interest in the nuke-spread issue was genuine.
He brushed aside my offer to listen to the Atrium success story. And never once returned to it. The master salesman passed up a chance to make a pitch. Instead he returned to The Subject.
Later, when he again realized his obsession with nuclear weapons was getting in the way of business, he said:
“You know, a while ago you asked me to talk about the success of Trump Tower Atrium—it really does pale. It’s hard to get off this subject.”
In the rare moments when he did return to business, it showed how little Trump has changed in the 33 years since that interview. When asked what he would have done if he had won a bid he wanted to loss, Trump said, “I’d ask for a recount, because the price I bid was ridiculous.”
Although Trump's reputation was suppose to be that of a great deal maker, Rosenbaum wrote:
But the thrills and perils of deal making no longer have the same excitement for Trump these days. Not compared with The Subject.
“Nothing matters as much to me now,” Trump says.
He’s been “spending so much time on this other thing,” he says, meaning The Subject, that he’s hardly had time to think of conventional deals.
Trump was already concerned about our current situation, nukes in the hands of a madman:
“Those people think that because we have it and the Russians have it, nobody will ever use it because they’re assuming everybody’s not necessarily mad.”
And even then, he envisioned a world dominated jointly by the US and Russia:
“Most of those [pre-nuclear] countries are in one form or another dominated by the U.S. and the Soviet Union,” Trump says. “Between those two nations you have the power to dominate any of those countries."
Probably Marco Rubio was familiar with candidate Trump's obsession in February 2016, when he called him“a lunatic trying to get ahold of nuclear weapons.”
In a 1990 Playboyinterview, Trump again returned to his obsession:
I’ve always thought about the issue of nuclear war; it’s a very important element in my thought process.
In 1995, when asked on MSNBC where he saw himself in five years, this was his response:
“In five years from now, who knows? Maybe the bombs drop from heaven, who knows? This is a sick world, we’re dealing here with lots of sickos. And you have the nuclear and you have the this and you have the that.”
Margaret Hartmann, writing in the Intelligencer, 20 August 2017:
Hearing the U.S. president promise last week to respond to any North Korean threats with “fire and fury like the world has never seen” was astounding — though perhaps it shouldn't have been. Trump has been publicly discussing his vivid fears about nuclear weapons for decades, predating any serious talk of him running for president. These comments suggest that Trump thinks about nuclear annihilation far more than the average American.
Chris Wallace of Fox News had some great advice on Trump: “Watch what he does, not what he says.” We must now apply that test to Trump's claim that his long-standing “concerns” about nuclear holocaust came from a desire for nuclear disarmament, and not for nuclear destruction.
Like many of you, I have long been a strong supporter of nuclear disarmament, but all we could do was protest. Once he became president, Trump was in a position to do much more. Forty-eight years after his uncle sparked his obsession, he was finally in a position to do something about “his greatest dream [is] to personally do something about the problem.” So, what did he do?
In his single term in the White House, Donald Trump expanded America’s nuclear arsenal and undermined decades of arms-control efforts.
...
1. Trump nudged the Pentagon to double the number of low-yield nuclear weapons, which according to experts raise the risk of nuclear war by making nukes seemingly more “useable” in an armed clash between major powers.
At the same time, Trump’s nuclear doctrine expanded the list of external threats that officially justify nuclear retaliation. Perhaps most notably, the list of threats now includes a major hacking event. The U.S. Navy subsequently deployed the low-yield W76-2 variant of its Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missile.
2. At the opposite end of the yield spectrum, the billionaire president accelerated development of high-yield SLBMs and canceled a Pentagon plan to decommission the megaton-class B83-1 gravity bomb.
That means that if Trump was to decide to nuke someone because of “a major hacking event,”which we just had, by the way, it would be a completely legal order, and while most cybersecurity experts blame Russia for the hack, Trump blames China, and his decision on who to nuke is final.
What he has done as president shows that this 50-year-old obsession has not been for nuclear disarmament, as he would have you believe, it has been a fetish for nuclear weapons, and the nuclear holocaust they can create.
The next eight days are extremely dangerous ones for the whole world not just because Trump is an “unhinged” president, to use Pelosi's artful term, with the ability to launch nuclear weapons. The danger is greatly amplified because this unhinged president has had a 50-year-old obsession with nuclear weapons, and his ability to use them is about to expire.
With that troubling thought expressed, let me return to Geist's article for a lighter note. In 1984, Geist makes a statement that deserves its own place in the “Famous Last Words” Hall of Fame:
The idea that he would ever be allowed to get into a room alone and negotiate for the United States, let alone be successful in disarming the world, seems the naive musing of an optimistic, deluded young man who has never lost at anything he has tried.
Let us all hope for the best, and do everything we can to remove Trump from office as soon as possible.
Today, Martha Raddatz on ABC This Week, tried to assure us that US President Donald Trump can not unilaterally order a nuclear strike:
George Stephanopoulos: Martha, on Friday we saw that extraordinary call from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, wanting to know what kind of safeguards were in place to prevent any kind of improper nuclear strike by the president. I think there was surprise that that was made public.
Martha Raddatz: Again adversaries are looking at us every minute, and China and Russia certainly were surprised that that was made public, but Nancy Pelosi was assured that there are procedures in place guaranteeing that there will not be any sort of accidental launch of a nuclear weapon or any sort of illegal launch of a nuclear weapon. There does not seem to be a lot of concern about that just because of those procedures. Many people think there are not enough procedures, and I'll bet you that's something they'll look at in the new administration, but for now they are not concerned about it.
The hole in her claim of protections against “accidental or illegal” launch, is that any order to launch nukes by POTUS is considered legal. All the safety mechanisms in place are designed to protect against an illegal launch by rogue elements in the military. They are all designed to assure that the order actually did come from the president. After that, it's all good.
In spite of the importance for all US citizens to understand the circumstances and authorities that might lead the United States to launch nuclear weapons, information on procedures for launching nukes is a state secret. This is the most authoritative report I have found, it is titled Defense Primer: Command and Control of Nuclear Forces from the bi-partisan Congressional Research Service, and since it was updated on 3 December 2020, we can be sure it is current, even after Donald Trump clearly lost the election. Here are a few selections from that paper (emphasis added):
The U.S. President has sole authority to authorize the use of U.S. nuclear weapons. This authority is inherent in his constitutional role as Commander in Chief. The President can seek counsel from his military advisors; those advisors are then required to transmit and implement the orders authorizing nuclear use. But, as General John Hyten, then the Commander of U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), noted during his September 2016 confirmation hearing, his job is to give advice, while the authority to order a launch lies with the president. The President does not need the concurrence of either his military advisors or the U.S. Congress to order the launch of nuclear weapons. In addition, neither the military nor Congress can overrule these orders. As former STRATCOM Commander General Robert Kehler has noted, members of the military are bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice “to follow orders provided they are legal and have come from competent authority.”But questions about the legality of the order—whether it is consistent with the requirements, under the laws of armed conflict (LOAC), for necessity, proportionality, and distinction—are more likely to lead to consultations and changes in the President’s order than to a refusal by the military to execute the order. In this sense, addressing legal questions about an order to use nuclear weapons would seem similar to the process used for evaluating any employment order from the President. The President could delegate the authority to authorize the use of nuclear weapons to others in the chain-of-command(an option considered necessary during the Cold War), but they also could not overrule the President.
In other words, any evaluation of the legality of a presidential nuclear strike order would come after the strike, and not in the five or six minute window that may be available if an adversary was to launch an attack from a boomer close to US shores.
On the The Nuclear Command and Control System(NCCS), the paper says this:
Specifically, the NCCS provides the President “with the means to authorize the use of nuclear weapons in a crisis and to prevent unauthorized or accidental use.”
So, Raddatz is 100% right about protections against an accidental launch, but that's not our current concern, is it? The danger of an accidental or unauthorized launch of nuclear weapons has long been a concern, and deep protections against that have long been in place. What this system never considered, in putting so much power in than hands of one man (a woman has yet to hold such power*) was the possibility that the United States would elect a rogue president like Donald Trump.
Some may think the president wouldn't be allowed (by who?) to launch a nuclear strike unless missiles were already heading to us first. This Congressional report is also clear on that point:
The United States has never declared a “no first use” policy, and the President could order the first use of nuclear weapons. As noted above, his military advisors may seek to adjust his orders to meet the laws of armed conflict, but there is, otherwise, no legal barrier to first use.
The irony of the current situation is that we are depending on rogue elements in the military to protect us from a “legal" launch order from an unhinged president. But as this report from Bloomberg makes clear, mutiny is unlikely:
It takes just two “votes” to launch the missiles. So even if three two-officer ICBM crews refuse to carry out the order, it won’t stop the launch.
Also for those who actually believe in Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), it should be a serious security concern that we are announcing that the US can't launch nukes within minutes while Trump is POTUS.
Like Fox News, ABC doesn't want to see Donald Trump impeached for a second time, so they are telling a big lie about the most exigent need to remove Trump immediately. This should surprise no one. As I documented in Bourgeois media resorting to sleight-of-hand to put Trump in the White House, 21 December 2015, ABC News has long been willing to lie to protect Trump.
Beyond this problem of Trump's finger still on the nuclear trigger, there are other important reasons why Trump must be removed from office ASAP. His coup attempt didn't begin or end on 6 January, 2021, it is on-going. He is already apologising to his supporters for appearing to call out their attack on the most democratic branch of government. The right-wing The Western Journal, is reporting today, Breaking: Trump Regrets 'Peaceful Transfer of Power' Video, Vows Not to Resign:
In its reporting of what was taking shape behind the scenes, The New York Times said that in conversations with aides, “Mr. Trump struck a defiant tone, insisting that he would remain a potent force in American politics as aides and allies abandoned him and his post-presidential prospects turned increasingly bleak.”
“Behind closed doors, he made clear that he would not resign and expressed regret about releasing a video on Thursday committing to a peaceful transition of power and condemning the violence at the Capitol that he had egged on a day before,” the Times wrote.
A report in The Daily Beast said Trump loudly proclaimed his intention to remain in office on Friday.
At the same time, he has refused to disavow a call by his most extreme supporters for an armed march on the US Capitol, and state capitols on 17 November 2021. Twitter said it closed @realDonaldTrump, in part because they fear it would be used to promote additional seditious activity, and that his final tweet, announcing that he wouldn't be at Biden's Inauguration, 20 January 2021, could signal to his most extreme supporters that their hero would not be in harm's way should they plan a mass casualty event at the Inauguration.
*This situation where one person can nuke the world must be changed, and no doubt will be changed before a woman becomes commander in chief, just as South Africa was forced to give up its nukes when it stopped being ruled exclusively by whites. This is all for the good, still there is a rotten smell about it.
Now, a number of lawmakers, most notably the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, are openly worrying about a problem I have been warning about even before Trump was elected, the grave danger of nuclear weapons under the control of an unhinged president. In my last post, This may be Fox News' most dangerous lie yet, I showed that Trump still retains the ability to unleash nuclear weapons by unilateral orders, in spite of vague assurances from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. Milley tried to assure us that military officers further down the chain of command would refuse any such order.
Since then, the military brass, in response to reports of the Pelosi-Milley conversation, have re-affirmed that Trump is still commander in chief, retains full authority to launch a nuclear first strike anywhere, and at anytime. The only legal ways to take this power away from him are impeachment or removal via the 25th Amendment, and any refusal of a nuclear launch order from the president would amount to a munity or military coup.
It's clear that Veep Mike Pence will never countance a 25th Amendment removal, and Senate Majority leader Mitch Mcconnell will not allow a Senate trial, even if the House impeaches him. So many say, what's the point in moving forward with an impeachment on Monday.
So, it now seems that for the next 10 days, the only thing that may stand between an unhinged Trump ordering a nuclear strike, and its execution, is a military officer becoming the sort of hero that Denzel Washington played in Crimson Tide. This is a very thin thread upon which to hang the future of humanity.
Be that as it may, Pelosi is right to say the House must do its job, even if the Senate won't. But there may be an even stronger reason: If it should come down to some in the military deciding whether on not to refuse an order from the commander in chief, wouldn't it be far more likely that they would mutiny, and refuse such an order, if they know Donald Trump is awaiting trial because he has just been impeached for a second time?
