Brewed Dudes, or, Excuse me, waiter, but my coffee has a pistol in it

 In order:
1) "SS" is "America's Coffee"? WTF? Hello? "Sounds better in the original German" much?
2) If you're calling the sound of a suppressed semiauto pistol "smooth" you either a) have never heard one, or
b) have no respect for the intelligence of your audience.
3) Ammosexuals are deeply weird people.

I’ve seen these guys around the Internet but I've never bothered with them because
1) we roast better coffee here and
2) I’ve never been comfortable around people with assault rifle fetishes because
a) if you’re gonna have a kink for God's sake have a sexual kink, because they’re more fun, and
b) I ran a battery of 105mm howitzers, fucknozzles, and I’ll see your pissy little 5.56 and raise you four goddam inches. 

 

Fire for effect, bitches!

Last thoughts on the whole idiotic "groomer" nonsense...

Good discussion over at Nancy Nall's joint. Which brought the following thoughts to mind (a lot of the conversation revolved around young people making choices about their sexuality or gender that they might regret...):

Are there people who are going to be troubled on the issues of sexuality and gender? Are there people who will be confused, or make mistakes, or do things that they might regret?

Yes.

(Or not. But that’s not really the point)

The point being; is any of that none of your business, or mine, or anyone’s business but theirs and the people who care about them?

Also yes.

People are complicated. All people – cis, trans, het, non-het, binary, non-binary. Some may be more complicated than others. But either way, it’s the height of arrogance to barge into their lives uninvited and start opining about them, their choices, their lives…

Like anything else that neither picks my or your pockets nor breaks our legs, our most appropriate posture is sitting quietly drinking a nice hot cup of STFU.

Let's think for a moment. This is about a tiny subset of the human race. Why are we even discussing this, other than a bunch of looney wingnuts are screeching about it in public?

Now.

Since the whole reason we’re even discussing this is because wingnuts are screeching about it, while we ponder the whole business it’s important to remember that:

1. Wingnuts in 2022 believe things about people, gender, and sex that would be embarrassingly vile and ignorant in a 15th Century Spanish Inquisitor, and
2. Wingnuts don’t want you to think that, so they’ll find something anodyne to cloak their vile ignorance in.

So the current hysteria about everything non-cis-het is all about finding ways to get their hatred and loathing of everyone they find icky into the conversation by linking “trans-people-gay-people-child-molesting”.

That’s as genuine as linking model trains with oenophilia, but they don’t care, anymore than they really care about their lies regarding the Affordable Care Act, Black people, the 2020 election, and the robust manliness of Donald Trump.

It’s performance art, pure bullshit, they’re good at it, and by spending time even discussing this (rather than telling them to STFU and leave other people alone…)

So. Bottom line?

I’m perfectly fine with everyone who’s not me living their lives the way they want (unless it involves stuff like driving drunk or experimenting with the public use of high explosives – y'know, picking pockets, breaking legs…) so I have absolutely nothing to add to the issues of human sexuality other than “Good luck. Call me when you figure it out.”

Wingnuts?

Same-same for you nimrods: sit down and STFU. 

If we ever need more tax cuts for billionaires we'll know where to find you.

Naval makeover! (cruiser-to-submarine edition)

 The cruiser Москва has passed on.

He is no more. 

(Russian naval vessels are by tradition "he's" rather than the "she's" of English or American sailor tradition) 

He has ceased to be, expired and gone to meet his maker. Bereft of life, he rests in peace, has shuffled off his mortal coil, rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible.

Okay.

Rule #1 of war is "Shit happens", and the fact that this vessel is now full of water is not in itself either shocking or particularly interesting. 

If one was in a snarky mood one might make the same sort of observation Bismarck might have made about continental powers like Germany or Russia wanting (let alone "needing") large capital ships: "...the fuck?" (only in the original German, of course...). 

If one was in a snarky mood.

To me there are two interesting parts about this, though.

The first is that the Russian official line is that the cruiser was lost "under tow in heavy seas after an internal ammunition explosion". 

Not because nasty enemy missiles turned him into a flaming pyre, no, no! Just your basic head-on-collision-twenty-car pileup of fucked-up munitions handling and/or storage, piss-poor damage control, and incompetent seamanship.

I kind of get the dictator-grade level of "not wanting to admit that your enemy hurt you" propaganda. But to want to make the story "our sailors are lethally incompetent" seems...a bit louche' at best. Tell me...how does that make things in your navy sound...better?

Now, that said; damage control at sea is goddamn hard. It requires constant, repetitive, realistic training led by good petty officers and planned and overseen by competent and demanding officers.

Even the best navies have their bad days; we saw that back in 2015 when we talked about the loss of HIJMS Taiho during the Battle of the Philippine Sea. 

The 日本海軍 Nippon Kaigun - the Imperial Japanese Navy - was one of the best-led (at the tactical level, at least...) and best-trained in the world in 1944. But that didn't prevent the sinking of one of their newest carriers because of poor damage control after a single torpedo strike.

On the other end of the military scale, though? Damage control is one of those massive-training-fail issues that seems to be endemic in "gangster" military organizations. Think Idi Amin's or Saddam's "armies" if you want a model. 

If nothing else this Russo-Ukrainian War has done a pretty good job of throwing a nastily bright light on exactly how fucking brutally bad the Russian armed services are. As bad as the Ugandans or the Iraqis.

Turns out that when your national model is "kleptocracy" your national military is just about as good as you'd expect based on that. 

When your soldiers and sailors are "led" by people - from petty officers and NCOs through general officers to their political masters - whose whole mode of thought is "steal what you can, neglect what you can't, and lie about everything to everyone both above and below you"  and those troops are either not trained for shit (or completely untrained) and their "leaders" are often incompetent, either because the system is designed to ensure the leaders are piss-poor, or unable to demand they aren't, to find that the entire organization those soldiers and sailors are part of ends up being criminally incompetent at the difficult business of war, including the difficult task of naval damage control, should hardly be shocking.

If you choose shitty crooks to "lead" you, you shouldn't be shocked when they "lead" you into shitty crookedness. 

Which leads me back from the shores of Ukraine to the shores of North America.

Because you'd think that this sort of military clusterfuckery would be a cautionary tale for those of us here on the sidelines in the United States about the whole business of being all enthusiastic for dictators because, say, they hate homosexuals and you do, too. That getting your dream of "leaders" hating on liberal soy-boys and darkies and uppity women isn't worth the sort of incompetent "leadership" that ends up getting your sailors killed and their capital ships sunk. 

Even for the most foaming-mouthed-rabid MAGAt groupies of Tubby and his crooked little weasel pals.

But, no.

They won't believe that.

Ever.

And that's a problem, a problem deeper than the bottom of the Black Sea, where the Москва now rests.

The Boxer

One of the things that's been so difficult and frustrating for me to watch is my country seeming to be intent on re-fighting fights I thought had been fought (and won for the good...) long ago.

The current insanity of the wingnut Right for all things other-than-heterosexual is one of them.

First, I don't get it.

Do these fucking C.H.U.D.s think that they can just scream and stamp their widdle feet and legislate other-than-heterosexual people away?

Obviously, yes, because that appears to be the idea, such as it is.

That's nuts.

That's like saying that if I close my eyes long enough that the table I'm sitting at will just...go away.

Gay people are...people. Lesbian people, non-binary people, trans people. They're just...people. For fuck's sake, cis-het whacko Christian "conservatives", it's like you're trying to pretend there's nothing in this world not like you (or what you want it to be). 

There's all sorts of people who aren't fucking like you. People who like model trains. People who sleep in Sundays. People who hate green beans. People who like (or love, or lust after) people who may not be the ones you "think" they should.

To insist otherwise?

That's utterly bugnuts.

No, actually, that's worse. Because "wishing people away" is how you start down the road that ends against walls, in shallow graves, or in ovens.

And second, and fuckadoodledoo, I thought we'd settled this on let's-not-do-stupid-shit grounds.

It's plain commonsense; if We the People are going to hand out legal and financial goodies based on things like legal and financial marital status (and We the People want to at least pretend that our society is based on Equal Justice Under Law) then every consenting-adult has to have in on that.

So if I want to marry for the tax writeoff? Cool. If I want to gay-marry, or lesbian-marry, or whoever-so-long-as-we-can-consent for the same bennie?

Also cool.

If I want to love? Lust? Dress like? Be with? Think or talk or be? Someone not manly-man or girly-girl? 

What' s the fucking problem with that?

And, seriously, who the fuck does that hurt? Who is hurt because that's a thing, and that everybody knows and accepts it as a thing?

I mean...if a schoolkid is old enough to know that there's a thing like fucking Donald fucking Trump, he or she or they are old enough to know that Heather has Two Mommies (or Daddies, or whatever...) or some other kid may have guy parts but not really feel very guy-ish. 

Personally, IMO the first should shit-scare all of us waaaaaaay more than all that other stuff, but, whatev'.

I know a lot of this is about supposed-Christian-bible-stuff but, frankly, 1) we're supposed to be a nation under civil law, not a fucking theocracy, and 2) if you're gonna clobber other people with bible-stuff you better not be mixing fucking fabrics or eating a roast beef sando with a glass of milk. 

(There's nothing more despicable than notional theocrats who pick-and-choose their theocracy. You wanna be a nutty God-pesterer? You gotta be full-on-nutzo. Buy it all or nothing. No homosexuals? Then no shrimp and no charging interest. You own it all, you don't get to pick your looney bits.)

Point is...here we are. 

Every whackadoodle wingnut (which means effectively the entire American Republican Party) is screeching like their junk is in a vise about non-heterosexuals being pedophiles (Oh, hi, Roy Moore, Matt Gaetz, Donald Trump, Denny Hastert, Gym Jordan! Ears burning, ma dudes? Yep, talking about your little, ummm..."problems") or "groomers" or every other awful goddamn sexual thing they can throw at the public wall to see if it sticks.

I'll be the first to say that there are troubling things that We the People should be deeply concerned about. Climate. The fact that here in the world's richest and most powerful polity there are people with more yachts than they can ever sail while a couple of miles away there are people who can't sleep indoors. Nonalcoholic "beer". COVID-19.

But the fact that Asami and Korra (and, yes, I totally shipped those two and still do...) love each other?

That's so far down the fucking list...no. Just no. 

It's not even on the fucking list.

It's just two people. Imaginary people, even. In love. Just like people, lots of people, real not-cartoon people, do.

And the fact that we're fighting over this?

Again?

Has me infuriated in a sort of angry-sick-and-tired-of-this-bullshit way.

One of the saddest and most irritating parts of having lived this long has been watching the worst people in my country return to the worst ideas my country ever had and dig up those ideas like a fucking stupid spaniel digging up the stinking remains of a dead rabbit.

Sexism.

Racism.

Homophobia.

I thought we were on the way to burying those sonsofbitches deeper than Newt Gingrich's morals.

Seems I was wrong.

Well, shit.

"In the clearing stands a boxer
And a fighter by his trade
And he carries the reminders
Of every glove that laid him down
And cut him 'til he cried out
In his anger and his shame
"I am leaving, I am leaving"
But the fighter still remains..."

~ Paul Simon

Belonging Task Force

 

 This morning I got a corporate-wide e-mail.

Now my guess is that this is intended to be some sort of "diversity/equity/inclusion" group, and that's fine. Frankly, entirely too many of us geologic/engineering types are straight white dudes.

But the branding?!? "Belonging Task Force"? Seriously? Am I the only one old enough to immediately channel Tom Lehrer's "Folk Song Army"?

"Oh we are the Folk Song Army
Guitars are the weapons we bring!
To the fight against poverty, war, and injustice;
Ready! Aim! Sing!"

But that wasn't my immediate thought; instead it was "Why is this a thing when the first question that comes to my mind when I think about my corporate culture is "What the fuck is your malfunction?"

Stuff like this makes me wonder if the people in the C-suites really have any clue what's happening out on the shop floor.

Lessons learned from Ukraine

I've been kicking this around for a while, and wanted to get it down before I wander away from it.

What have we learned from what's been happening in Eastern Europe over the past month or so?

 
1. Thucydides is still correct: the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

We like to think, we pampered wealthy white Americans, that there is a "justice" that transcends simple brute force. If we're Christian we like to think that there's a "God" (and his kid) who cares about people and sort of wants them to do justly and love mercy.

And then comes something like Ukraine, where the ugly reality is impossible to hide.

So no. There's no arc of history that bends towards justice. If people want justice, they need to defend it, by force at times, with their lives if they must.

That lesson is bolded by the actions of Russia in Ukraine. But it should resonate with us here, since we have steadfastly refused to take action against those who have already attempted once to use force to "do what they can" thinking that they were the strong and we are the weak. If we do not, then we ARE the weak, and they will do with us what they can.

Putin isn't the only leader of authoritarian goons in the northern hemisphere.

2. When someone tells you what they are, believe them.

Vladimir Putin has said one thing consistently since loooong before he was Donald Trump's mancrush; that the devolution of the USSR was the Worst Thing EVAH and that if he could he would get the band back together.

Well, because the successor state to the Soviet Union looked like a shitshow and its' dictator seemed full of shit like many other dictators, a lot of us got complacent about how serious he was.

Ask the resident of Kyiv how serious.

If I was a Latvian or and Estonian right now I'd be hugging everyone who insisted that the Baltics scurry into NATO as soon as the Сове́тский флаг came down.

Now the NATO countries - including the U.S. - need to accept that those former Soviet republics are all on Putin's list. That means taking Article 5 seriously. Is Riga worth Manhattan? We might find out sooner than we like, because...

 
3. The Russian military is proving what a bad fucking idea personal autocracy is.

We in the Western militaries listened to and, often, believed the tales the Russian media and government told about the modernization and professionalization they'd done with the successor to the old Soviet Red Army.

I'm not sure if they were fooling us, or themselves, or both, but boy fucking howdy were they full of shit.

Turns out that the Russian conventional forces are bad. Reeeeally bad. "Iraqi Army" bad.

It's hard to imagine that Putin kicked off this war knowing that Saddam's Republican Guard made his regulars look like an anime goon squad. So I suspect he's been fed the diet of bullshit and flattery that people who can kill you whenever they please tend to get. His military advisors told him what he wanted to hear, not what he needed to hear.

"Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy." ~ Jorge Luis Borges

But the bottom line is that modern warfare is goddamned hard to do, and the Russians are no better at it than you'd think given the open kleptocracy and brutal autocracy that permeates Russia the country.

That's...actually kind of a Bad Thing for us as well as for them.

Because if the Russian armed forces would get waxed in the first 48 hours of combat with a Western military?

All Putin has to swing is his nukes.

And that should worry all of us at least a little bit.

4. Smedley Butler is still right, too; war was a racket and still is.

No matter the outcome in Ukraine, everyone involved is likely to be the worse for it. Obviously the dead, but those wounded, or homeless, the refugees, the prisoners, those impoverished by war or sanctions or economic collapse. Those who have lost family, friends. The citizens of Russia's "near abroad", who must now fear that success in Ukraine will make them next in line for death and mayhem.

Of course, the Russian leadership is likely to be insulated from all that. War "leaders"  -unless they make the mistake of losing war and being captured by the victors - are seldom punished, no more than the "leaders" here that committed the identical war crime of waging aggressive war in 2003 were punished. 

It's always the "ordinary" people who suffer when the Great and the Good amongst us choose to use force to get - or try and get - what they want.

So, like most rackets, it's the bosses that profit and the footsoldiers - military and civilian - that die.

I wish I had a happier conclusion.

But, just like Ukraine today, there is no lightness; only ruin and hatred, the strong doing what they can and the weak, well, suffering.

Mamma Mia!

At the end of a very long day - which involved driving some 150 miles and spending the day pestering people playing with dirt - it was "sing-along night" at my daughter's high school production of Mamma Mia!

Surely you at least know that this ABBA-fueled jukebox musical is a thing, right?

Well, the kiddo's school theater group has been staging it all this past week, and mileage be damned, last night is was my parental duty to go see it.

I've confessed my love for the art form in general, but this particular example is...well...not one of my favorites.

I'm not a huge ABBA fan, for one. Which isn't to say that I don't and can't enjoy bop-along silly helium dance pop - the reaction that Scissor Sisters I Don't Feel Like Dancing provokes in me is embarrassing in it's total lack of decorum -  but outside of the title song I've always been pretty immune to the charm of the Swedish quartet.

And the book is frankly idiotic beyond the "usual idiotic" level of musical books.

But being a good parent I dragged my filthy ass into the big theater to see what the Girl and her dramat pals had come up with.

And came away pleasantly surprised.

It was a damn good production, for one thing, especially held up against my memories of wooden high school versions of Oklahoma! and Bye Bye Birdie and the other typical school-musical chestnuts. The set, sound, and lighting were damn near professional-grade, the choreography and blocking were smooth and both integral to and advanced the plot (such as it is - it's still a deeply stupid book...).

The ABBA songs weren't nearly as irritating as I remembered, except for the second-opening number; having the daugher Sophie sing Honey, Honey to her absent dad? Ummm....creepy much? Yyyokay.

The piece that made it really not just tolerable but enjoyable, though, were the two female leads; Lily Russell as Donna, the mother, and Rosa Workman as Sophie, the daughter.

They were both solid actors doing good work in their parts. But what their performances really reminded me was of the difficulty that an actor in musical theater has that they don't share with either their straight-theater or concert/gig singer counterparts.

A musical actor has to act with their singing voice.

That's goddamn hard. That's what makes the art so much fun for people like me who enjoy it; seeing people who are good at that difficult skill execute it well, and Lily and Rosa did that last night. They made their otherwise-ridiculous characters into real people for two hours on the stage, and invested you in them by the power of their singing voices.

Obviously opera presents the same challenge, but there you have the help of having your songs written by people like Verdi or Mozart or Wagner and not Björn fucking Ulvaeus.

(And that's why, incidentally, I have such contempt for the current slew of "singing shows" like The Voice and American Idol; they force the idea of singing into a power-pop ballad mold to the point where many listeners assume that "good singing" is "belting a ballad at the top of your emotional range".

Well, Mamma Mia! does have one of those - Donna gets the star turn with The Winner Takes It All - and Russell belted it nicely and got the expected roof-raising ovation.

One thing I should add here; the Girl herself.

She’s a musical fan and totally gets how lame a jukebox musical like MM is (we both love good productions like Wicked or Sweeney Todd) so she’d been positively cackling with schadenfreude at leaning on the whole “support the kid’s efforts” parental guilt to make us sit thru it. It’s actually worse for my Bride because she loathes the whole musical genre, good, bad, or indifferent.

But she's also a kiddo so, like all kiddos, wants loving attention and approval for her efforts.

So we went, and, surprise, it was fun, and the Girl danced in the aisles during the encores, and everyone went home happily humming "Waterloo".

And if there's no better purpose for the silly thing?

The Mamma Mia! did just what it was supposed to do.