A letter to my sister

My little sis called me today. Left a voicemail about TrumpFuckery, and in particular mentioned Ukraine.

I just didn't feel like spending half an hour moaning and pissing about all that, so I wrote her this email:

 "The reality is that we’re screwed for at LEAST the next two years, and that assumes that these fucksticks’ idiot rampage fucks things up bad enough that even the idiot public gets pissed enough to vote Democratic. Which is far from a given; it’s just as likely that there’s a third party nonsense (which means the GOP wins) or they just don’t vote at all (…so GOP wins…).

 

The Trumpenscum has it all; all three branches, the press licking their taint…all we can do is try and delay and go to court - and that’s a weak reed given the SCOTUS Furious Five - or the streets, and that’s both risky and dangerous, because Fatso WILL invoke the Insurrection Act and become a Fuhrer in fact as opposed to in practice.

 

So everything and everyone we non-scum humans care about - parks, public spaces in general, social safety nets, modern medicine..? All we will have is what they don’t want or just don't want to trash because they’re fucking trash people who are stealing perfectly good oxygen and that's what fucking oxygen-thieves do.

 

Ukraine? Fuck. If the EU doesn’t step up they’re doomed. Palestine? Doomed. Taiwan? If Xi is willing to pay off Fatso? Doomed.

 

I’ll see if I can find the link, but Amanda Marcotte has a piece interviewing someone who’s deep-dived into the wingnut bible-bangers. (It's here).

 

The bottom line? It’s a cult, they’re fanatics, and there’s no reaching them; it’s culture war as ACTUAL war. There’s no going back any more than there was for the Hitler Youth dying in the streets of Berlin or the kamikaze taking off from Kyushu in August 1945. 

 

I’m not exaggerating; we cannot “beat” these people using democracy. They see that as race and religious suicide. They must be destroyed…and that means real, actual, no-shit Civil War. And I don’t see “our side” as ready and willing to do that. I don’t blame them! That’s horrendous!

 

But that’s where we are.

 

I'm reminded of the passage in Tolkien where Frodo is pissing and moaning about how fucked it is that this whole “ring” shit has to happen on HIS watch.

 

Gandalf replies, no shit, Sherlock, really? Word up Frodo, he says; that’s what EVERYONE in this situation thinks. It sucks. It just sucks. 

 

But it is what it is and all you and I and everyone else can do is suck it up. 

 

And so we do. 

 

I'm not saying "Stop fighting". Even if you're doomed to lose, you have to fight. Even if it means you die, if what you're fighting for is worth it, you fight - and die - as hard as you can. Every Nazi you kill in Poland before you die is one Nazi that can't invade France, can't invade Russia, can't defend Normandy or Italy or Berlin.

 

But that doesn't make the dying any easier. 

As we used to say over at Intel Dump:

 

WASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSF!

A bas Citoyen Trump

 

Cui bono?

As usual, the news is overstuffed with Fatso's fuckery and that of his sejanus, Elmo.

It's not worth dissecting in detail; it's just more "Let's do 1929 over only the plutocrats win!" bullshit.

I did want to make a couple of observations, though.

1. If you're really hunting "waste, fraud, and abuse" of federal agencies you don't use racist nineteen-year-old coders. You bring in forty-eight-year-old forensic accountants.

You bring in the ElmoTeens because you want to write in backdoors and hack government servers for a plutocrat whose "businesses" survive on government handouts.

Just sayin'.

2. I want every interview of every Republican official at every level to begin with:
"You (or "your Congressional Republican colleagues") have introduced a plan to cut over 800 billion out of Medicaid, a program millions of your fellow Americans depend on for their health care. This will mean that millions of those people will lose that care. What do you recommend those people do?"

Every. Single. Interview.

Over and over.

Until one of them loses it and responds with Auric Goldfinger's line:

"No, I expect you to die." 

These fucking people.

Every morning I read the news and the thought that keeps returning is "How come you never have a rocket-propelled grenade when you really need one?" 

One more thought.

One thing that I think hasn't been hit hard enough in all the coverage of this TrumpMuskFuckery. The single biggest societal issue isn't just the looting and breaking things. 

It's the fundamental issue with the WAY the MAGAts are going about this.

Societies - settled, "mature", societies, economies, polities - depend on stability.

The way the people within the entities live, if they intend to live a peaceful, productive life, is dependent on knowing that 1) when they wake up today the "rules" - social, economic, political - will be the same as they were when they went to sleep, and 2) if things change, that change is done through a methodical, orderly (and in a republic) public democratic process.

That gives people chance to live stable lives in peace or, if things change, time and resources to either fight the change or adapt to it.

In other words, the laws and rules remain in place until and unless they are changed, and, if changed, are changed through gradual public debate and accountable legal or legislative processes. 

To put it more simply; civic life cannot be Calvinball.

That's the biggest problem with all this GOPFuckery. It speed-runs these massive changes, largely because (I believe) these sonsofbitches know that if they tried it the legitimate, Constitutional, legal ways they'd end up having to explain things that will make them look "bad" and risk getting handed their whole ass.

Because, for the non-billionaire class of citizens, they ARE bad. They will make the vast majority of us poorer, sicker, weaker, less-legally-protected, more insecure, more frightened, less "citizens" more "subjects".

And the MAGAts Trump is running know that. 

The polling on their mercantilist, racist, sexist, imperialist, every-other-Gilded-Age-ist fuckery is awful. When the public - even big swathes of the MAGAt public - knows the actual effects of all this stuff (as opposed to the "woke!woke!woke!" bullshit bullhorn version used to smokescreen it) they haaaaate it.

So even though these people have it all; executive, legislature, courts, every lever of U.S. government...they aren't even trying to do this through the Constitutional framework. They want Calvinball because Calvinball is only fun if you're Calvin. 

For the rest of us it's just scary, stupid, unpredictable, dangerously unhinged chaos.

And you can't run a huge industrial republic on unhinged chaos.

Unless...

You're a plutocrat and you don't have to rely on things like legal rights or poultry inspections or Medicare, or...you think you are that plutocrat.

Then you can hope to pluck loot from the chaos.

It worked for Attila.

Which is an excellent reason not to see how it works here and now. 

Because when society works for barbarism the people inside it have to become barbarians or die.

Coup-coup for Cocoa Puffs

 Liz Warren lays it down about the theft of federal financial secrets by Elmo the Musk.

Yeah, this fucking guy:

Here's the worst thing about this dipshit stealing the federal wallet.

It's not that he's a ketamine-addled neo-Nazi illegal Afrikaaner immigrant from apartheid South Africa. Or that his primary "genius" seems to be hoovering up federal funds while being a ginormous asshole.

That's just him.

It's that the fucker is SO fucked up; so doped up, so mobbed up with foreign influence and fascist scum, that if the federal government wasn't run by another adderal-addled fascist clown he couldn't get further than the fucking Top Secret clearance he has and barely even hang on to that. 

The linked article noted in December that:

"SpaceX lawyers and executives reportedly concluded that if the company sought a higher level of clearance than Musk currently holds, he risked being turned down and potentially stripped of the clearances he currently holds."

I had a fucking Top Secret clearance. I was a sergeant running an ambulance section in Panama.

If your dog was a good dog he could get a fucking Top Secret clearance.

But fucking Elon?

"According to the (Wall Street) Journal, Musk’s lawyers outlined scenarios in which he might inadvertently disclose secrets to foreign officials with whom he regularly speaks, including the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, with whom he is reported to have been in regular contact since 2022. Musk’s use of another semi-legal drug, ketamine, in pursuit of what friends call “pure creativity”, along with reports of LSD, ecstasy and magic mushrooms, could also be an issue."

Y'think..?

In a sane polity this goofball would no more be permitted a sniff of governmental authority than he'd be permitted a permanent resident visa. Yet here he is, with mine and every other citizen's social security number, tax and income information, and Dog knows what else. What the fuck is he gonna do with it?

Why should he be able to do anything with it?

The Second Fraudulency Administration has spent it's first month speed-running the Fall of the Roman Republic by empowering thieves and bastards and thugs (and other loons - looks like we're getting that brain-worm nitwit RFK the Lesser for HHS...) and doing every ridiculous crime they can think of as rapidly as possible.

But this?

This is just beyond stupid.

C'mon, MAGAts! You're supposed to hate immigrants! How about deporting THIS goof? What's the downside?

I know the GOP wants to crash the "safety net". They've had a hard-on for Social Security, Medicare, AFDC...pretty much everything that FDR enacted to prevent a fascist or communist revolution in the Great Depression. They hate that they have to see poor people get anything; desperate poverty worked so well for the rich in the original Gilded Age! Desperate people will do anything, degrade themselves, and others, to find a way out of poverty.

But this?

It's just...

It's so blatantly in-your-face ignorant and shitty. It's a total dick move. 

I read somewhere that what this feels like is the good old "Coalition Provisional Authority" of the 2003 Iraq Occupation. 

I agree; it's got the same feel; gormless, clueless, cocky and greedy Republican nitwits swaggering into the palaces, posing amid the looting, sure of their brilliant "plans" and how they're gonna "move fast and break things" in ways too clever for the normies to grasp.

While in the reedbeds along the Tigris, the mujahedeen foregather by night.

Decisive Battles: Frontiers 1914 - Part 5a: Opening Moves

 Finally!

After all our preparatory discussions - about the prelude to the Great War, French and German warplans, the ground and air reconnaissance elements - we're at the start line of the Great War, the "LD", the morning of 1 AUG 1914, when the German ultimatum that Russia "cease all war measures against Germany and Austria-Hungary" expired without response and the war began.

The operations we can lump into the "Battle of the Frontiers" took place over the next thirty-five days. Here's a rough outline of what happened where, and when.

Again, we're faced with an immense task; millions of soldiers moving and fighting over thousands of hectares of ground of all types from the alluvial plain of Belgium through the forests of the Ardennes to the mountains of the Vosges to the valley of the Ill River.

I think the best way to break down all this fire and movement is first by time. We can break down operations into four main time segments:

1. Preparations (1 AUG to 7 AUG) which includes mobilization, movement to the LD, and preliminary actions in eastern Belgium,

2. First Encounters (7 AUG to 21 AUG) which includes mostly lots of movement but also the actions around Liege in Belgium and Mulhouse and vicinity on the French right/German left,

3. The Crisis (21 AUG to 24 AUG) which includes the major engagements in the Ardennes between the French and German centers, and Charleroi/Mons/Le Cateau on the Franco-British left/German right, and

4. The Great Retreat (24 AUG to 5 SEP) which includes the withdrawal of the Entente forces south and west until the First Battle of the Marne begins.

Within those time increments I think we can break out geographical areas:

A. The Southeast (French 1er/2eme Armee & "Armee d'Alsace", German 6./7. Feldarmee): including the engagement areas along the Franco-German border generally between Nancy and the Swiss frontiers.

B. The Center (French 3eme/4eme Armee, German 4./5. Feldarmee): which includes primarily the Ardennes region and the areas in and around the Franco-Luxembourg border, and

C. The Northwest (French 5eme/6eme Armee, Belgian Army, and British Expeditionary Force, German 1./2./3. Feldarmee): that comprises the heart of Belgium and the Franco-Belgian border.

So my idea is to take each time segment and subdivide it into the actions in the geographical areas. So the first part of this post will be:

Preparations - General (1 AUG to 4 AUG)

If you recall the events of late summer 1914, the Austro-Hungarian government had hoped to solve their Damn Thing in the Balkans by crushing Serbia; the Dual Monarchy declared war on 28 JUL.

Serbia's patron, Russia, issued a general mobilization order on 30 JUL.

Okay, now we haven't really discussed "mobilization" yet, but it's critical to the start of the war. Because it means doing everything the Powers needed to fight a general war; assembling military units - including calling up reserve troops from their civilian lives - first at their barracks, then moving them to their initial deployment areas. 

This also meant "mobilizing" all the logistical support elements, too; gathering rations (food and water) from farm to market to depot, marshaling transportation (usually railroad stock but also trucks or boats/barges), plus distributing military stores like arms and ammunition, uniforms, horses...everything armies need.

The thing about mobilizing is that it was effectively a race between the Powers' armed forces (and civilian economies); whoever mobilized more quickly and effectively would be far ahead of the power curve.  

So if a nation started to mobilize, all that polity's potential enemies had to mobilize, too, or risk being unprepared when their enemy completed mobilization first and attacked.

By mobilizing the Russian government was effectively warning Austria-Hungary that war with Serbia meant war with Russia. The Austrians weren't deterred (though they should have been, as we discussed in Part 1).

Germany warned Russia to demobilize the following day, and when the Russian government ignored the demand, went to war with Russia on 1 AUG.

France had a treaty with Russia, remember, but the German government jumped in first, declaring war on 3 AUG. 

 

The Asquith government of Great Britain wasn't happy about all this warring but had treaty obligations to defend Belgium from invasion...

(one interesting aspect of this meant that when French General Joffre asked to move preemptively into Belgium in early August the Viviani administration replied a hard no; let the Boche draw British ire.)

...which they did; the UK declared war on Germany on 4 AUG.

The third "power" of the Triple Alliance, Italy, declined to get involved; on 3 AUG the Salandra government announced that Austrian aggression abrogated the alliance and began a fairly sleazy intrigue to try and pry the best deal out of both sides.

With war declared the armies began to move. But first...

A Brief Note on Sources: between the last installment and this one I procured a copy of Matt Bowdon's 2017 work The Great War's Finest, An Operational History of the German Air Service, Volume 1: Western Front 1914.

It's an amazingly comprehensive study of, as the title indicates, the German air operations during our time and place. I'm unfamiliar with the author but his scholarship is truly impressive. He must have spent a tremendous amount of time in the German archival materials.

That said, Bowdon is as biased as his title also indicates. His account includes personal judgements on German ground and air operations that seem to reflect a willingness to give the Imperial commands, at least, the "benefit of the doubt". Where the German commanders or the German Army organization erred he does state that as such, but I'd suggest combining his work with another from the Entente perspective to ensure a rounded view of the events of August 1914.

That said, I have been utterly unable to find a similar level of information for the Armee de l'Air. There's a good bit of information online about the British RFC, but the French fliers?

Non.

My guess is there are such sources in French, which I am not just unable to find but would be unable to read if I could. I have been forced to glean what I can from various accounts which typically mention French air operations only peripherally or obliquely if at all.

If any reader is familiar with such a source I would be deeply beholden for a recommendation thereof.

Okay, so...

Preparations - Northwest (4 AUG - 7 AUG): German Operations

The first reconnaissance moves began on 4 AUG as the reinforced German X. Armeekorps of 2. Feldarmee - this reinforced corps was nicknamed the "Meuse Army" or Maasarmee - began probing the Belgian defenses around Namur. 

This included both air assets, including the aircraft of Feldflieger Abteilung (FFA) 9 and an airship (Z VI), and cavalry units from HKK 2 including 2te, 4te, and 9te Kavalriedivisionen.

Showalter and others (2019) is fairly scathing about the aerial reconnaissance:

 "Emmich (commander of X. Armeekorps) received the partially false Fliegermeldung report that the (roads leading to the Meuse) were free (of Belgian forces)...and the Meuse bridges...were intact"

The Showalter (2019) account notes that one problem might be that FFA 9 was not even supposed to be there - if you look back at the "air assets" post FFA 23 was attached to X. AK; FFA 9 was not just attached to a different armeekorps (IVte) but a different feldarmee (1te). 

The X. AK air assets were so delayed that the Imperial OHL tasked a "fortress flying detachment" based in Cologne (Festungflieger Abteilung Koln) to support the Liege operations, but Bowdon (2017) points out that the problem was distance; Liege was at the extreme range of a 1914-era Taube or Aviatik, so loiter time was short.

The supporting pilots were operating with a completely unfamiliar maneuver unit, and - as we'll see - an under-resourced "air staff".

We discussed the sad 6 AUG sortie of Z VI (dropped a couple of artillery rounds, was shot down and crashed) in the previous "air assets" post.

The German cavalry did manage to push to the river north and south of Liege by 4 AUG, but the northern bridges were largely either destroyed or covered by fire; 2te and 4te Kavalriedivisionen had to halt at the east bank and probe for a crossing. 

To the south 9te Division did manage to send a squadron ahead and seize the Meuse River bridge at Poulseur on 4 AUG, but the remainder of the division had to bivouac for the night well east of that objective.

By 5 AUG, however, all three cavalry divisions of HKK 2 were west of the Meuse. Belgian resistance was light.

The overall result of the initial German intelligence problems was a bloody failure of an infantry assault on the night of 5-6 AUG; the Maasarmee tried to storm the Liege fortress belt and was shot apart by Belgian defenders behind field fortifications thrown together between the fixed forts that the German reconnaissance had not fully revealed.

By the evening of 7 AUG the German right wing operations were already a day or so behind schedule.

Preparations - Northwest (4 AUG - 7 AUG) - French and Belgian Operations

The Belgian defenders appear to have deployed several of their cavalry units along the Meuse, though the river itself appears to have been the main defensive work and the Belgian cavalry seems to have done little or no reconnaissance or (other than patrolling the riverbank) counter-reconnaissance.

Belgian air operations over Liege are reported to have included:

"Sous Lieutenant Henri Crombez flew one of the first war patrols, in a Deperdussin racer on 4 August 1914...Adjutant Behaeghe was the first to engage an enemy, a few days later."

What results these sorties produced, if any, is not described, but the German main effort in the Northeast was not difficult to suss out; the Liege fortresses had to be masked, stormed, or destroyed. The Belgian defenders seem to have prepared fairly effectively, given the disparity in strength and weaponry.

To the south, French GQG ordered mobilization of the single "strategic" reconnaissance cavalry formation, "Cavalry Corps Sordet" on 31 JUL. By 5 AUG the corps was along the border near Mezieres, and on 6 AUG were:

"...moving the corps forward to the Neufchâteau area...Sordet advanced eastward the next day (7 AUG), almost to the Belgian-Luxembourg and Belgian-German frontiers, with the 5th Cavalry Division riding through Neufchâteau. The French encountered no major German forces (because) Sordet had advanced before the German I Cavalry Corps (HKK 1) had made any move in the Ardennes sector. 

Mindful of his overall mission to determine the scope of German deployments, Sordet immediately  decided to shift northward toward Liege where he knew there were Germans..." (McGrath, 2010)

Sordet's horse soldiers were on the road to Liege on the morning of 8 AUG.

I'm frankly baffled where the French air assets were during this time. We've talked about the little French airships - not much of anything there - but the Armee de l'Air should have been up over Belgium and either wasn't, or wasn't doing much of anything. 

Despite the German 1te and 2te Feldarmee moves into eastern Belgium (and 4te and 5te Feldarmee into southeastern Belgium and Luxembourg) the French air reconnaissance doesn't seem to have sortied aggressively into Belgium. Indeed; as we'll see, the Armee de l'Air doesn't seem to have been aggressive during most of August anywhere.

Preparations - Center (4 AUG - 7/8 AUG)

Both sides spent the bulk of this time either moving off the start line against light (if any) opposition - the German 4te and 5th Feldarmee - or holding in place near the frontier in the case of the French 4eme and 5eme Armee. 

 

Neither appears to have actively reconned their prospective opponents, although Belgian reports seem to have reached the French GQG, because on 8 AUG GEN Joffre alerted his central armies to prepare for an attack on German forces pushing west towards Neufchateau and Longwy.

Bowdon (2017) does a nice job of summarizing the opposing sides' concept of operations:

"Joffre believed the German center was weak and susceptible to attack...the French Third and Fourth Armies were ordered to attack and defeat the German center then turn west against the flank and rear of the advancing German right wing...while...the Fifth Army, with the assistance of the BEF, was to engage and hold the German right..."

Unfortunately for Joffre, the German center did not consist of a weak group of six corps, but was composed of two large armies...three cavalry divisions and the Metz garrison."

Sordet's cavalry was supposed to scout north of the central armies as part of that unit's mission. We'll discuss that in a bit. 

You'd think that the Armee de l'Air (and the Belgian air service, to the extent it could help...) should have been extremely motivated to find and either confirm or revise Joffre's initial assessment. I can find no evidence that either service did so. As we discussed in Part 4b, the French airships did do some reconnaissance starting in the second week of August, but we have little or no record of those sorties or what intelligence they produced.

So very little reconnaissance activity in the Central sector during this time period.

Preparations - Southeast (4 AUG to 7/8 AUG)

The Alsace-Lorraine region was the "other" active theater of operations during the first week of war, largely because Plan XVII made it so. The first French encounter came on 7 AUG, near the Alsatian town of Mulhouse in the Ill River valley.

A task force consisting of the VII Corps d'Armee (VII CA) and a cavalry division moved out that day and closed on Mulhouse early on 8 AUG.

Bowdon (2017) reports what German aviation was on it:

"(German) Seventh Army's flying sections were the first on the Western Front to begin active flight operations. From the 4th to the 6th (August) XIV AK's FFA 20 dispatched at least two flights per day...on the morning of the 7th one of FFA 20's crew spotted Bonneau's (the commander of VII CA) columns on the march and decided on their initiative to land near the front to inform 58 IB (58te Infanterie Brigade)...the verbal report confirmed for the brigade commander that he was facing a much larger force (and)...allowed the small German force to smartly conduct a delaying action..."

The other 7. Feldarmee flying units as well as divisional cavalry did good service reconnoitering the French forces and finding errors, "...including several gaps in Bonneau's line north of Mulhouse...to create a (counterattack) plan to exploit the gaps and envelop the French left..." (Bowdon 2017).

It was this intelligence that informed the German counterattack planned for 8 AUG.

Summary: Preparation Phase Reconnaissance Operations

Northwest: A mixed bag. The German cavalry seems to have struggled, and German aerial reconnaissance was unsurprisingly sketchy given the ad-hoc organization. French air operations appear nonexistent, and what information the Belgian cavalry and aircraft gained appears to have been meager or poorly understood.

Center: Nothing of significance

Southeast: The German aviators seem to have been active and effective, the French nonexistent. Hard to tell how well the cavalry scouts did, although the German horsemen (per Bowdon) seem to have contributed. The French cavalry are not apparent in the histories, but their issues began to show up shortly, as we'll see in the next post.

Next: The Plots Thicken: 7/8 AUG to 21 AUG

Posse Stupidtatus Redux

 The Second Fraudulency Administration begins the preparations for the Second Battle of Columbus:

"The soldiers from the 82nd Airborne and 10th Mountain have not yet been issued “prepare to deploy orders,” the official told Task & Purpose. Rather, they have been informed that if the secretary of defense orders the Army to send more troops to the southern border, they would be the next to go."

This has been baked in from the start of this idiot's second election, but it's not any smarter, and this is actually even stupider on it's face because of the forces employed. 

Using light and airborne units for this bullshit border policing is a complete waste of quick-reaction force elements as well as a dumb idea in general; paratroops, especially, are trained to be aggressive and active - that doesn't make good "peacekeepers". 

The 325th Infantry's trigger-happy "riot control" played a big part in the Fallujah Rising, and the Parachute Regiment was the Bad Guy of Bloody Sunday.

We tend to think of the whole "posse comitatus" prohibition as a civil liberty issue. But there's a good military reason for keeping soldiers out of civil law enforcement; it's better for the soldiers, too.

When Tubby did this before the GIs had a very bad time of it. It was simultaneously stressful and boring as fuck, so the guys did what bored, stressed GIs do; they got in trouble.

I see no reason that this nonsense will work better the second time. All the underlying economic, social, and geopolitical conditions haven't changed.

But this isn't really about geopolitics, or economics. It's about stoking the rage-fire of the MAGAts, which are the only "Americans" this President gives a shit about. For him if it's stupid but it does that? It's not "stupid".

Which is a seriously fucked up way to govern, but, well, Trump.

Which reminds us that the guy is really, really, REALLY stupid. Here's a glittering assortment of the stupid just from the one WaPo story fragment in the linked article:

1. Tubby thinks Spain is a BRICS nation.
2. He has no idea what percent of its GDP his own country spends on its military (it's about 3%) but,
3. He insists that the other NATO members spend 5% on theirs...
(FYI, of the top 15 spenders only four spend more than 5% - Ukraine [37%], Saudi [7%], Russia [~8%], and, weirdly, Algeria [8%] - and a cluster of three spent around five: Oman [5.4], Israel [5%], Kuwait [4.9%]. NObody spends more than about 2-4% outside of nations at war and oil sheikdoms...)
4. He announced a "...$500 billion joint venture regarding artificial intelligence." which was either a lie or just confusion; there's no funding for it or anything like it, and
5. He admitted he had no clue who he'd pardoned for January Treason.

So we're going to get it good and hard no JUST from greed and bile, Fatso's usual go-tos, but from pure fatheaded ignorance and stupidity.

Fuck but that's irritating.

Empire of Fools

Day 2 of Trump 2: Revenge Boogaloo! and Tubby the Stable Genetic Engineering Genius has determined that there are two and only two human genders...

...so by executive order the incredibly weird, complicated diversity of the human genome can…ummm...just stop being weird, diverse, and complicated and start being...ummm...what a bunch of ignorant bigoted MAGAts want it to be. 

 
Day Fucking 2. 

TWO. 

We’ve got something like another thousand days of stupid shit like just this.

At LEAST this stupid. 

Let's not even start on tariffs.

This, perhaps more than anything, more that the racism, more than the bigotry, more than the oligarchy, more than the hatred, more than all the other vile, shitty things that Republicans want and are, is what's so infuriating about my second go-around of MAGAt rule.

It's the stupid, stupid.

These people want - and what my own crowd didn't loathe and fear enough to show up to stop - incredibly simpleminded "solutions" to complex, difficult problems. 

They want, let's be blunt, stupid things.

No, tossing out immigrants of all varieties isn't going to "solve" anything. Not low wages. Not high prices. Not the increasing enshittification of American life.

Immigration, transgender people, "DEI", "wokeness" aren't the reasons America isn't Great for you and the other non-plutocrat Americans. 

Income inequality and poorly written tax codes and other laws, corporate greed and monopoly power, and regulatory capture are.

Immigrants aren't the reason your health care sucks; greedy insurance companies and greedy medical providers and wealthy people and corporations and poorly written laws and tax codes are.

Immigrants aren't the reasons your rent is so expensive; greedy landlords and NIMBY neighbors and poorly written zoning and development codes are.

Transgender people aren't the reason your kids are struggling; greedy college administrators and poorly written financial aid codes and corporate degree-gatekeeping are.

All these and more problems are extremely complex and difficult because We, the People, have allowed these problems to burrow deep within our already-flawed governmental systems. 

We've sat on our asses, most of us, fiddling with silly nonsense about Drag Queen Storytime and Bud Light ads whilst the wealthy and powerful whose primacy was written into the foundational documents regained all the power they'd lost (and more!) since the last time they shit the national bed in 1929.

The bottom line, as any Roman of the late Republic could warn you, is that you can have great disparity of wealth or a republic.

But not both.

And the simpleminded, in their search for a "simple" solution to this complex problem, have chosen the worst possible "simple" solution:

Just fucking elect the greedy fucking plutocrat and by inference all his greedy billionaire buddies.

Jesus wept.

I honestly don't have any idea how you fix this. There's even a saying: "You can't fix stupid." 

How do you show someone who doesn't believe that pouring literally billions of tons of things like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere can raise global climatic warmth? How do you convince someone who thinks that China pays tariffs on Chinese exports that something like "health insurance" is nothing but a greedy middleman that helps increase medical costs while adding nothing of value? How do you prove to someone who thinks the President dictates the price of eggs that supply problems related to avian flu are the reason for the high price of eggs?

"Solving" all these things would require incredible knowledge, hard work, and patience to understand, and incredible levels of effort to deal with, especially given that the people and organizations that profit from stuff like corporate and personal profits will fight like ten thousand devils against you.

Instead, well, how about going for the con man who tells you that trade wars are fun and easy to win? That your relationship problems are because uppity bitches? That your egg prices are because you have to press "one" for English?

Is that fucking stupid?

Of COURSE it is!

But it's simpler and easier that putting in the hard work of self-governance.

So here we are.

I have no idea where this will end up. And given my neurological problem, whether I'll even be alive to know.

But from here?

It doesn't look promising.

To be ruled by competent evil is appalling.

But to be ruled by stupid fools..?