My wish for the New Year:
May the broken be healed
May the sick be restored
May happiness return to those in despair
May the lonely be loved
May the hungry be fed
And may our world find its way to peace.
Sunday, January 4, 2026
Saturday, January 3, 2026
Trump says "U.S. will run Venezuela."
Can someone explain how the U.S. can bomb a sovereign country and kidnap its president, then announce to the world that the U.S. will now "run" the country?
We know Maduro is a bad guy, but so is Putin; so is Kim Jong Un, so is the Supreme Leader of Iran.
Will we now announce to the world that America will bomb those countries, kidnap their leaders, and then "run" their countries?
U.S. strikes on Venezuela spark alarm across Latin America and beyond
Other regional powers, including Chile and Mexico, echoed strong condemnation.
Mexico called the strikes a violation of the U.N. Charter and urged an immediate halt to acts of aggression.
In a Fox News interview on Saturday, President Trump said Mexico was run by drug cartels and he said quote "something is gonna have to be done with Mexico."
PS. Trump pardoned the Honduran president who exported 400 tons of cocaine to the U.S. He has pardoned other drug dealers as well.
I don't think his illegal invasion of Venezuela and takeover of that country is about drugs.
Trump has repeatedly claimed without evidence that boats have been carrying drugs into the U.S. from Venezuela. But in fact Venezuela is not a major source of drugs.
Maggie Haberman,White House reporter: “We’re not afraid of boots on the ground if we have to have” them, Trump said. This is the opposite of what his administration has repeatedly said its posture is.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs, White House reporter: As he justifies the military operation in Venezuela, Trump argued that Maduro sent members of Tren de Aragua to the United States to terrorize American communities.
David E. Sanger, White House reporter: Trump’s own intelligence community earlier this year undercut that claim, finding that the gang was not controlled by the Venezuelan government.
“We are going to run the country right,″ Trump said as he turned to oil. “It’s going to make a lot of money.”
Trump said Venezuelan leaders must comply with the United States or else. “All political and military figures must realize that what happened to Maduro can happen to them,” he said.
THE POTUS WHO'S BEEN BEGGING FOR A NOBEL PEACE PRIZE JUST BOMBED VENEZUELA AND KIDNAPPED ITS PRESIDENT -- ALL BY BREAKING US AND INTERNATIONAL LAWS.
From "The Other 98%":
"The U.S. just invaded Venezuela, bombed its capital, and seized its president — and they’re pretending this is normal. In the early hours of January 3, 2026, the United States launched coordinated military strikes across Venezuela, including in Caracas and surrounding regions. President Nicolás Maduro and his wife were reportedly captured and flown out of the country by U.S. forces, according to President Trump.
This wasn’t a “limited action” or some kind of border enforcement — this was a military invasion.
Explosions were heard throughout the Venezuelan capital and at key military installations. Smoke was seen rising from air bases and strategic sites. Venezuela’s government immediately declared a state of emergency and condemned the attacks as “military aggression” that strikes at the very heart of its sovereignty.
Trump’s own announcement on social media claimed the United States had “successfully carried out a large-scale strike against Venezuela and its leader,” with details to come at a later press conference.
The operation was described as involving elite U.S. forces — including Delta Force — signaling this was not a quick raid on a criminal lab or a synchronized DOJ action, but a planned military assault.
Let’s strip away the euphemisms: this is invasion, not enforcement. There was no imminent threat to American soil that justified the use of force under international law.
The U.N. Charter’s Article 2(4) clearly forbids the use of force against another state’s territorial integrity or political independence unless it’s self-defense or authorized by the Security Council. There’s no evidence either condition applied here — and global reactions reflect the shock and outrage.
The administration’s own allies in Congress are already questioning the constitutional basis for this war and pointing out that they were lied to about regime change not being the agenda.
Make no mistake: the narrative that this was about “drug trafficking” or “narco-terrorism” was always a pretext. Trump’s government had been building up military presence in the Caribbean for months under what’s been called Operation Southern Spear, deploying aircraft carriers, troops, and designating Venezuelan institutions and gang networks as terrorist entities — a setup that conveniently paves the way for overt military intervention.
Venezuela sits on some of the largest proven oil reserves in the world, and its economic and geopolitical position has long made it a target of U.S. political and economic pressure.
This isn’t a secret — it’s been openly debated and speculated on by Venezuelan officials who say the U.S. wants control of their resources under the guise of law enforcement and “democracy promotion.”
Now the gloves are off. A sitting president has been removed by force. A foreign government has been targeted without international sanction. A region already weary of U.S. intervention is watching this unfold with justified fear.
This isn’t a “surgical strike,” it’s a regime change operation that tramples on international law, sets a dangerous precedent, and undermines every multilateral institution that’s supposed to prevent exactly this kind of brazen imperialism.
We should not — we cannot — sit silent while the U.S. rewrites the rules of global engagement by bombing, kidnapping, and exporting its political will. Sovereignty, justice, and international norms matter — and it’s time we demand accountability for a foreign policy that just crossed every line in the book."
"Kidnapping a foreign leader is illegal under international law -- well, unless you're Russia that is. And seriously? We're going to try Maduro on drug trafficking charges? What if he's convicted?
Trump pardons convicted drug traffickers, doesn't he? So long as Maduro's friends make a substantial "donation," I guess. We've gone from piracy on the high seas to invasion and kidnapping and show trials. If I was Greenland, and Canada, I'd be real damn worried about now.
Oh, hope you filled up the car yesterday, because nothing Wall Street and the Oil Industry love more than bombing an oil producing country. They're changing the prices in front of every gas station in America right now.
Trump is a criminal. He might as well be Putin.
Trump is the mad murderous tyrant who should be on trial here in the US."
Wednesday, December 31, 2025
Maybe because I was born and raised in Boston..
and heard the name Kennedy since I was a child that another unbearable tragedy, the death of John F. Kennedy's granddaughter, Tatiana, so moved me.
I followed John F. Kennedy's exciting candidacy for the presidency as a young teen, thrilled to think a young, handsome U.S. senator from my state could become president. I remember a classmate who supported Nixon's candidacy and I kept up a friendly competition to see whose chosen candidate would win -- we were both too young to vote. When JFK won, my family and I were thrilled. I'd been used to seeing Dwight D. Eisenhower as a young child on television, and thought only old men could be presidents, but now JFK would make US history as the youngest president ever elected.
The brief Kennedy years were an exciting time for us Bostonians, and I followed his presidency the way other young teens followed movie stars in the then popular Hollywood gossip magazine, Photoplay.
Then unimagined tragedy hit us all in the gut on November 22, 1963, when our beloved JFK was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. In my mind, I can still see that famous photo of Mrs. Kennedy and her two young children, Caroline and John, standing on the steps of the White House waiting for President Kennedy's funeral procession to arrive. My parents, my brother, and I wept as we watched the horse-drawn caisson carry his casket to Arlington Cemetery to be placed beneath the Eternal Flame.
As the years passed, we watched Caroline and John grow into fine young adults. But tragedy was never far away. Our former First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, passed away in 1994 at the young age of 64, and five years later, the unthinkable happed again when John F. Kennedy, Jr., his wife, and his sister-in-law were killed when his plane went down off the coast of Martha's Vineyard in July of 1999.
And now, the unendurable news of Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg's daughter and JFK's granddaughter's passing at the age of 35, leaving behind her husband, George, her 3-year-old son, and her 1-year-old daughter, her father, Edwin, her sister, Rose, and her brother, Jack.
We mourn with them in the loss of this intelligent, accomplished, beautiful, gentle woman.
Her passing reminded me of how far back my family appreciated and supported her grandfather, John F. Kennedy. We found this letter from him to my father after my father passed away. I treasure it:
Tuesday, December 30, 2025
"The Desecration of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Performing Arts Center," -- Michael Jochum
The Desecration of the Kennedy Center
Drummer and vibraphonist Chuck Redd, the longtime host of the Kennedy Center’s Christmas Eve Jazz Jam, made the only moral decision available when he canceled this year’s performance after the institution announced it was renaming itself in honor of Donald Trump. A sacred holiday tradition, gone, not because Redd is “intolerant,” but because he refused to become wallpaper for a regime that confuses vandalism with patriotism.
The response from Trump’s newly installed cultural commissars was immediate and obscene.
Richard Grenell, a Trump loyalist, freshly appointed chairman after Trump purged the board and crowned himself king of the place, fired off a threat demanding $1 million in damages from Redd for what he called a “political stunt.”
The vice president of public relations piled on, accusing artists who refuse to perform under Trump’s banner of being “selfish” and failing their “basic duty” to perform for “all people.”
Read that again.
They renamed the Kennedy Center after themselves.
They erased the spirit of John F. Kennedy from his own memorial.
They hollowed out a cultural institution into a MAGA banquet hall.
And now they are threatening musicians for declining to participate.
This is not patriotism.
This is coercion.
This is authoritarianism wearing a flag pin.
And the people who call artists “un-American” for protesting this grotesque takeover are not defending the country, they are defending the demolition of its soul.
Donald Trump, a man who has never read a poem, sat through an overture, or understood a single note of jazz unless it came with a picture book and a teenage blonde on his lap, already hosted the Kennedy Center Honors, and the ceremony was broadcast on national television to embarrassingly low ratings.
The verdict was immediate.
The country did not show up.
The audience did not come.
The empire yawned.
Because fascism always begins by stealing the places where beauty lives, and it always ends by discovering that beauty cannot be coerced.
The Kennedy Center, that marble temple to imagination and the dangerous idea that the human spirit is bigger than a tax deduction, has now been reduced to a MAGA banquet room with flags, folding chairs, and a buffet of cold chicken and lukewarm grievance.
Trump calls this “revamping in his image.”
Which is to say: taking a cathedral of culture and repainting it with the aesthetic of a rundown Midwestern strip mall.
He purged the board.
He named himself chairman.
He crowned himself curator of taste.
Taste.
This is the man whose artistic legacy consists of The Apprentice, a golden toilet, and Kid Rock holding a beer in one hand and a rifle in the other.
Ticket sales are collapsing.
Donors are fleeing.
Artists are walking away.
Renée Fleming resigned.
Ben Folds stepped down.
Issa Rae pulled out.
More than twenty productions vanished.
Because the arts are sacred.
And Trump, by his very nature, is a desecration.
He is the anti-art.
The anti-aesthetic.
The vandal with a key to the museum.
The Kennedy Center is not just a venue, it is a signal to the world of who we are when we are at our best.
Trump hosting the Honors became the punchline to a joke told by a dying empire.
The man who thinks culture is something you put on a baseball hat decided who received cultural immortality, and the country turned the channel.
Everything he touches decays.
Everything he touches becomes cheap.
Every institution he enters loses its dignity.
Not because he hates art,
but because art requires a soul.
And he has never owned one.
So to my fellow musicians, composers, painters, writers, dancers, actors, this is your moment.
This is not about left or right.
This is about whether the inner creative life of this country will be governed by imagination or by intimidation.
When they attack the arts, they are attacking the one part of you they cannot own:
your inner creative self.
Do not give them that.
Do not decorate their decay.
Do not perform for your own erasure.
If the price of patriotism is silence in the face of vandalism, then it is not patriotism, it is surrender.
Art is resistance.
Beauty is resistance.
Refusal is resistance.
And history will remember who protected the stage when the tyrant tried to steal the spotlight.
– by Michael Jochum
Michael Jochum is a writer and musician reflecting on art, politics, and the human condition.
Monday, December 29, 2025
NARCISSISM HAS CONSEQUENCES
JOHN F. KENNEDY MEMORIAL PERFORMING ARTS CENTER
According to WNO artistic director Francesca Zambello, roughly 40% of seats are now going unsold compared to pre-takeover numbers, with longtime patrons boycotting the venue outright. Donors, she says, don’t want their money confused with political endorsement and saying the building has been 'tainted.'”
Issa Rae: Canceled a sold-out show, citing values infringement.
Lin-Manuel Miranda/Hamilton: Canceled the musical's run, stating, "We're not going to be a part of it while it is the Trump Kennedy Center".
Low Cut Connie: Canceled a performance, stating they wouldn't perform until the Center returned to non-partisan programming.
Peter Wolf: Canceled a book event due to the administration's actions.
Amanda Rheaume: Canceled her April 5th appearance due to differing politics and values.
Balún: Canceled a scheduled performance, citing alignment issues with their safety and justice values.
Sir András Schiff: Canceled all US performances, including at the Kennedy Center, for 2025-2026.
Christian Tetzlaff: Canceled a US tour.
Artists/Personalities Who Resigned Roles:
Shonda Rhimes: Resigned as treasurer from the board.
Ben Folds: Resigned as artistic adviser to the National Symphony Orchestra (NSO).
Renee Fleming: Resigned as an artistic advisor.
These cancellations and resignations stem from a broad protest against Donald Trump's takeover and restructuring of the institution, which many artists felt violated the Center's historic mission of fostering art for all.
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