Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from 2026

250 Years of the USA

A Hollywood film poster that shows the best and worst of America in one product Nothing made by humans is all good. Of all the verities that have been agreed on since the dawn of thought, and hence, civilisation and history, the imperfectability of humanity is high on the list. The USA is therefore, like every other nation in history, a flawed, imperfect country, devised by humans, caught like us all in the flood of history. Since it is 250 years old (more or less today), we must also agree that it was conceived and born relatively recently, compared to many other civilisations (India and China and England, for example). Human recorded history is at least 5,500 years old, after all. So, let us admit that the USA is deeply flawed: it was greatly enriched by human slavery, an extraordinarily callous evil; another mass evil, part of its founding myth and extension Westward was the near or total genocide of the indigenous peoples who first lived and belonged on the land now called the USA ...

Poem on the 2-1 Loss to the USA by the Canadian Men's Hockey Team In The Gold Medal Game at the 2026 Winter Olympics

On The Game For a moment, while they played, my father was alive again, roaring at the TV - come on! come on! - and then, that overtime brutality - a millisecond of pain that smashes a dream - and there I am, facing a screen - defeat instead of uproaring joy - reminding that puck and luck rhyme - losing in overtime, Jack Hughes the nation-killer extreme - I sit there, facing the scarred ice, just me, and my father gone back to where the dead don't play, or watch, much hockey. February 22, 2026, by Todd Stanley Swift

Playboy of the Western Hemisphere

Exceeding all expectations for ruining a new year so quickly, Trump and his band of useful idiots, seemingly avoiding any of the constitutional checks and balances, enacted precisely the sort of decapitation attack on a sovereign nation to take control of power and resources that was aimed at Ukraine a few years ago... although this time the pretext was the soon-to-be infamous Donroe Doctrine , which, frankly, simply states that anything the Americans want in the Western Hemisphere (which includes Mexico, Cuba, Canada and Greenland) they can take... just because. It's a very ugly self-serving doctrine from a time when the USA was an underdog fighting off imperial powers from Europe; now, it is the basis for the law of the jungle, otherwise known as might makes right. The biggest Silverback wins. There's so much contradiction and risk of blowback here, it's astonishing if unsurprising that a sociopath would go against decades of their anti-quagmire anti-nation building rheto...