Go Directly To Jail

 

This is what was left behind when the funny farmers came and hauled off our "Jesus wants me to show you my tits" homeless Crazy Lady last May.

Now, our Portland area "Mr. Potter Association" (People for Portland, two lies for the price of one, since these folks are not "people" in the humane sense and they're certainly not "for Portland" in any way but "make Portland more like Lake Oswego") have a new homeless-question poll out.

"Portland-area poll finds huge appetite for tougher tactics on homelessness".

Because of course it did.

Because a huge chunk of people want simple answers to complex problems, want a hammer to make everything that bugs them into a nail.

Lots of people are assholes, too, but that's a whole different thing.

But think about this.

What are "tougher tactics"?

Force.

That's the bottom line, isn't it?

"An overwhelming majority of Multnomah County voters say...people in crisis living on the streets should be required to undergo addiction or mental health treatment.Only 25% of Multnomah County voters said that treatment for people experiencing mental health or substance use disorder should be voluntary; 67% believe “we need legal tools to encourage and compel people to get help. "

How?

How do you "require" some doper to get clean, or some nutter to take their meds?

"Legal tools"? A band saw? Pliers?

"Legal tools". Just say it straight; you junkies and loonies are gonna get straight or go to fucking jail.

Because we have all the money and jail space to shove a bunch of crazy junkies for being crazy junkies, right?

Fuck me runnin'.

"Nearly three-fourths also back a proposal by Mayor Ted Wheeler to enforce a citywide daytime camping ban..."

That's the latest Wheeler gimmick, BTW; force the hobos to pack their shit every morning. And then...what? Hump their ruck all over town? Drive their RV up and down Interstate Avenue from 8am to 8pm?

The Good People for Portland are nutty enough about the hobo camps as it is. Can you imagine the reaction to wandering groups of encumbered homeless people like some sort of Mongol horde with shopping carts instead of horses? And this is the supposedly GOOD idea the Portland city government is proposing?

Nothing has changed since I wrote about this last time. Or, for that matter, since I first wrote about it two years ago. And nothing has changed the conclusion I wrote then:

"...there he is, with his tent and his trash and his stolen bikes and his encroaching on your public space with all of that and his personal problems. You drive him away and he just becomes some other Portlander's problem and the people those Portlanders drove away come to camp in your patch.

So I still don't have a good answer to the "homeless problem"; the solution will take time, money, and interest we aren't willing to invest, and without the solution we're stuck with these filthy camps in every public space."

Except people like "People for Portland" and the angry Potters they polled are more angry and more vicious and less willing to invest time, money, and interest in actually figuring out ways to get these poor bastards out of the parks and off the streets rather than fantasizing about jailing them.

Am I happy about the "homeless problem"?

Look back up at the picture. That was just one person, in one place. That's unacceptable for a dozen reasons. 

No, I'm not "happy" about the homeless situation.

But I'm at least realistic about it.

While the big megaphone in the hands of these People for Portland is just shouting their nonsense, as random and pointless and unrealistic as the ranting of the Jesus Tits lady, all over the sky above and with about as much hope of actually solving the problem.

Decoration Day 2023

My first since retirement, and so freighted with a very odd feeling of ordinariness; when every day is a holiday none are.

Instead of choosing to make the long drive down to Willamette National Cemetery I left the quiet house and crossed the big river into Washington, to the little graveyard outside the old Vancouver Barracks.

The old post cemetery isn't the original burying ground set aside in the 1840s. That space was built over when the post expanded in the 1880s and as many of the bones as could be found were removed to the current location, just north of the busy street that is 4th Plain Drive.

It's a very odd little spot. There's a couple of paved loops but no parking area, giving a weird "drive-through" feel to the place. Like everyone else, I just pulled the little car off the road in as gentle a fashion as possible to spend some time with the dead.

As always in these federal plots, the identical stones testify a wide variety of shades; obviously GIs and their families, but also the legacy of the frontier post - civilians working for the Army, traders and travelers, native (probably) laborers. There's even a handful of POWs from the Second World War, German and Italian prisoners buried far from their homes.

I did the same thing I always do.

Wandered among the gravestones, nodding to the GIs as I passed, pouring out a libation in their memory. Most of those buried around me appeared to be guys who'd died between the big wars, in the 1920s ans 1930s, veterans and timeservers alike only in sharing the Army blue or khaki, or OD green. Or the tree suit I wore at the end of my time.

As so often these latter days, I felt the slow loss of the kinship I once felt with my nation and my service. That We the People had soldiers fighting overseas seemed like another age instead of just two years ago.

At the end of my stroll I found myself next to what remained of 1SG Ewart, who'd been topkick in the 1st Infantry back in the day. It seemed like an old First Shirt would be a good sort of person to entrust a cold beer, so I left mine with him and turned for home, my moment with the dead done and another lazy retired sort of day before me.

I'm no longer certain what this day means, to me and to my nation. We seem more than ever a house divided against ourselves.

Yet.

As always today;

This.

The Beginning of Wisdom...

 ...you'd think, would be you getting 18 years in the joint for sedition.

It's not. 

This fucking traitor learned nothing. He will do it again after President-again Trump pardons his traitor ass. He's said it. Believe him.

And I pause to remind you; I fucking warned you about that:

"As I said on Facebook today:

"If it was up to me, I would be at these traitors with the bayonet. A bullet is foolish and may go anywhere. The bayonet is wise and knows what must be done to end treason. Bill Sherman’s prescription remains the correct one; for traitors like this, fear is the beginning of wisdom."

If this is not crushed with brutal force we will rue this as the day we made these traitors our masters."

It wasn't, and we have. As their robed comrades gut things like the EPA and OSHA, as their plutocratic masters engineer the return to the Gilded Age, as Tubby howls and blabbers his way back to the White House, this cannon fodder of the Right, these modern sturmabteilungen, provide the force and fear the wingnuts need to drive the equivocating rabble of "liberal" Americans into the wilderness.

These people are traitors, are the domestic enemies my soldiers' oath demanded I defend the Constitution against.

When will we?

Debtors Prison

It's hard to express how infuriating the whole "debt ceiling" nonsense is.

Partially because it's even a thing, like there's an option to just decide to not pay your bills (which is what this is - it's not about spending, it's about paying off what's been allocated and spent) for you or me or Sears Roebuck. The whole idea is idiotic and should have been taken out behind the shed and shot decades ago.

But mostly because it's just another (stop me if you've heard this before...) way for fucking wingnuts to fuck around without finding out.

The stuff they're demanding or they'll shoot the hostage - things like cutting poor people off welfare and cutting vet's benefits - are massively unpopular. If they tried that shit in Congress the usual way they'd get crucified - even in the popular press where idiotic trashfires like the NYT and CNN will usually just vomit up Republican talking points - before they got out the committee room door.

So they're pulling this shit.

As I keep saying; they're cultist loons. They don't care. If they can't have it their way, they'll burn it down.

You'll note what's NOT on the table, right?

Reversing decades of plutocrat-fluffing "tax cuts"?

Yeah.

Because damn near everybody in US politics - outside the Bernie and AOC "looney left" - loves handing cash to billionaires the way Empty-G loves some CrossFit stud groping for trout in her peculiar river.

(Look that one up..!)

But the same idiotic press is pimping this as "negotiations" and bothsidsing the hell out of it. The Biden Administration looks like they're too scared to tell the wingnut terrorists to fuck off and die in a hole. They'll cave, the idiot public will blame them and elect MORE wingnuts...so we're going to end up right where the wingnuts want us. Poorer. Smaller. Weaker. Stupider. Closer to the plutocratic Christopathy they crave.

All because We the People have been sitting on our hands while these people beaver away rolling back everything our parents and grandparents fought for since the First Gilded Age.

WASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSF. 

Update 6/1/23: So the Wolves of Wall Street got nervous that their Congressional sock-puppets were going to do something stupid and called them off. As Charlie Pierce noted,

"As soon as Wall Street and the financial elite started getting publicly nervous about the possibility of a default, both Kevin McCarthy and, to a lesser extent, Joe Biden, were painted into a corner. All bluffs were not just called, but they were effectively dispatched into an alternate reality, a kind of political phantom zone. The money power was the only thing in this particular reality that was, well, real."

So we're not going to have to find out how to catch and eat starlings before midsummer, so I suppose that's fine.

That said, there's little respite in knowing that the lives and fortunes and sacred honor of countless millions of citizens of this country mean nothing to the vandals.

But their plutocratic masters whims?

To finish with Pierce again:

"In other words, politics as usual, a basic Washington transaction conducted in the most basic of Washington ways, a Swamp Thing from start to finish. And all in service to the money power, to the corporate elite, woke and otherwise."

Cold comfort if comfort it is.

 

 

Stupid laws for clueless people

 Once again the Worst Law In Oregon returns to fuck up my state's fiscal planning:

"The surge in anticipated tax receipts will also likely trigger a big increase in the state’s unique “kicker” tax rebate that taxpayers would receive when they file their taxes next year: $5.5 billion, up from a predicted kicker of $3.9 billion at the last forecast just three months ago, according to economists’ presentation to state lawmakers Wednesday."

"Unique" is a nice way of saying "this stupidest of all stupid fucking ideas".

Imagine if you had to predict how much you'd earn in overtime for the next two years.

Then if you worked more overtime, you had to hand that money back to your employer.

You'd go fucking nuts, right? And nobody would blame you!

Of course, the anti-tax "conservatives" love this thing, but the other obstacle to flushing it is that Joe and Molly love their "kicker", without ever thinking that the eighty bucks they get is a fraction of the $80 million that Flav-r-pac and Stoel Rives and Nike are getting, all money that could be put to roads and schools and building places for all those smelly homeless people they hate seeing in their parks to live in.

Plus it prevents Oregon from setting aside a rainy day fund when times and revenues are good to help pay when times are not.

Sometimes I swear I'm living in the stupidest timeline.

The center cannot hold

 Long read by the High Priest of Centerism William Saletan describing the Fall of the House of Reagan.

I'll make it simple and short for you, though.

tl:dr - the Republican Party is a bughouse full of fascist nuts who aren't going to change and who won't back off until they rule the rest of us.

Those inside who aren't bughouse fascist nuts?

Can't and won't change anything because they believe they are 1) safe from the nutcases coming for THEM, and 2) more terrified of taxes, soyboys, feminism, and drag queens that they are of their country becoming a dictatorship.

The nuts - and the nut-complacent - will not change; there's no reason for them to.

They will rule us, or ruin us. They have no interest - zero - in living in a truly democratic, multiracial, multisocial polity. They will have their God, their guns, their "low taxes", their xenophobia and racist Paradise.

Or they'll burn it all down.

Look, if you dare peer into the abyss, at the execrable CNN "Town Hall" the other night, where a braying Tubby blarted his firehose of lies, other lies, and bullshit out into a baying mob of his CHUDs.

THAT's what lies ahead of us. Fuck, that's where we are NOW; what lies ahead may be even worse.

There is no reasoning with that. There's no "compromising" or "negotiating" with it.

There's fighting and destroying it.

Or being destroyed by it.

The implications are, naturally horrifying. The implications are that more than seventy million of our supposed "fellow Americans" are vicious enemies who won't leave us in peace, who will pursue us until their boot is on our necks, or they are utterly defeated.

I have no idea how the hell you solve that. That's the road to Rwanda. That's The Troubles in Ulster. That's the Greek Civil War, or every other Civil War except our own, where the division was more-or-less neatly geographic.

But that's the reality.

If we want to avoid those outcomes, we need to accept that reality, and the need to do what is necessary to burn out the Republican disease before it metastasizes into the sort of civic cancer that tore Ulster and Rwanda and the England of 1642 apart.

But I don't see my country accepting that; either the reality, or the need.

And that, frankly, angers, and scares the living shit out of me.

There's no England now...

 ...the title of which I ruthlessly pirated from this LGM post discussing the mix of assumptions, illusions, and legal fictions required to gain and maintain sovereignty.

In this case, of Great Britain

As a person I have - no, really, I'm not kidding - absolutely no opinion one way or another on monarchy as an institution in general and the British "royal" system in particular, other than it seems slightly more nonsensical than most human social gimmicks.

You're my boss because your mom and dad were my boss?

Get the fuck out.

But as We the People seem bound and determined to prove, the "Will of the People" can produce equally ridiculous results (Empty G? That you? Siddown and shaddup, girl.) so, well, okay. You be you, Brits. You want some king? Knock yourselves out.

That the current occupant of the throne of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Scotland, and (a little bit of) Ireland seems to be a doddering old goof whose beliefs include a pottage of nonsense and crunchy granola nature-fakery (along with some genuinely sensible love of nature itself...) seems unimportant to the big picture. The job is kind of central to the idea, not the person who does it.

This picture itself says it better than words...

The goofy hat and gold cocktail frock that encases the old white guy IS the king. The old white guy is just the dressmaker's dummy that holds it up.

The Brits want that? Fine. Not my circus, not my gold-encrusted monkey.

What made me think about all this mummery was turning on the television last Sunday morning (looking for the "other" British thing I think about, football - okay, "soccer", anyway...) and the first image that emerged out of the dark was this:

First, no question; the British do this whole "gorgeous, tactically useless, military spectacle" thing better than anyone. Part of it is the outfits; they've had centuries to get the dress uniforms right, and their Class A's (Number One dress? No, the Wikipedia tells me that the formal name is "Full Dress") are fucking sharp as a razor.

(Don't take this the wrong way; there's military and morale value to that "useless military spectacle". A soldier who looks and feels badass, whose unit looks badass, might well be more badass when the military chips are down.

Modern warfare often makes your own combat power invisible. In a world of artillery and tac air to be seen is to be hit and hit to be destroyed, so we do our best to disperse and hide ourselves.

So there's a value to be had in stepping out on parade, looking good and feeling strong. Illusion? Sure! But there's a sort of "dress for the job you want" to it there, too. And the British have got that shit down cold and hard. Drill Sergeant Lawes was all swoony.)

Second, and finally, though, it drives home the ironic point that kings (and presidents and caudillos and juntas and congresses and so forth) are, at bottom, what they are because they're hedged about with those marching troops.

The "importance" of those rulers, in a national and international sense, is almost entirely dependent on all those soldiers and sailors and fliers in their pretty clothes that marched down the wide mall to the pretty palace last Sunday.

Them - and their gajillion guns and tanks and trucks and hordes of ginormous battle ships and aircraft and bullets and missiles.

But in Britain? Now? Pretty soldiers and sailors and fliers on parade?

That's all this king has left.

The massive armies and fleets they symbolize? The storms of bombers? The sort of real military power that those big blocks of marching men (and now women) once meant? The temporal power that made the "King of Great Britain, Scotland, and Ireland" someone who had to be reckoned with?

Gone.

Modern Britain is a geopolitical afterthought. Not quite Andorra...yet. But no longer any sort of real global economic and political power alongside the real Greats.

And that's fine in a human sense. You can have a good and satisfying and happy life in Andorra as easily as in a Great Power. More easily, frankly, than in some - Russia or the PRC, I'm looking at you. For many of us in this Great Power? There's a cost to all those tanks and ships that might otherwise go to our lives. 

Ask some poor sod in a leaky tent down by the Cut in North Portland how that works.

Watching the pretty marching, it occurred to me that habits of thought are as difficult to break as habits of body. 

We think of "The King (or Queen) of England" as Somebody, a person of consequence, because there's still all that Stuff; palaces and crowns and fancy golden wagons. But mostly because of all those marching soldiers and sailors and fliers.

That's how they became kings and queens back in the day, right? Because they were the bosses of armies and fleets of the baddest motherfuckers around. Because swords (and rifles and cannon and missiles) hoicked them onto the Iron Throne and, beyond all laws and rules and customs, when push came to shove, kept them there by naked force, against all enemies foreign and domestic.

The U.S. president, the Russian premier, the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party?

Those people still have that power.

King Charles III?

Does not.

What makes that interesting is that we just talked about a time when that job, and the person who did that job, did have that power. When all those marching guys really did symbolize a scary badass guy's imperial reach, the mailed fist at the end of a very long royal arm.  

Not anymore.

So if I was British I'm not sure but that Sunday morning might have felt really odd, like I was taking part in a MMORPG, a sort of Great Power cosplay. 

All those gilded coaches and gorgeous uniforms and soldiers and sailors right out of the Empire? 

In the words of Bashō:

natsukusa ya
tsuwamono domo ga
yume no ato.

夏草や兵共がゆめの跡

That is to say;

Waves of summer grass:
All that remains of soldiers’
Impossible dreams.

So as not to end this silly rumination on a serious note, here's the "Wins the Internet" comment from the linked LGM post:

"*hushed Huw Edwards voice:
"And now the Rt. Hon. Capt. Penny Mordaunt RN, PC, MP, acting today in her role as Moistened Bint Peculiar, proceeds down the aisle carrying the magnificent Imperial State Scimitar which she will then lob at His Majesty in a part of the ceremony dating back to the time of King Arthur."

Thunder on the right hand

I was still only partially awake - as much as you can still be asleep with eleven-point-six pounds of cat on your sternum - when the light flashed beyond my closed eyes.

"That's lightning" I thought muzzily and, after a long, long pause, the low grumble of thunder confirmed it.

Between that moment and the giving in to the furry supervisor's demand that I get up and deal with the whole Lack of Food Crisis several more thunder rolls broke through the usual background morning sounds; birdsong, the tap of rain on the downspouts, the sussuration of tires in the street out front.

As a child of the East Coast and Midwest I miss those thunderstorms as only you can miss something that is too far away to be a nuisance and too distant in time to be a bad memory. 

The "thunderstorms" here in the Northwest lack conviction. They are more often like this morning's; a subdued series of distant rumbles punctuated with the occasional flash, usually fading after less than a half hour.

That's not a thunderstorm. Where's the crescendo, from far-off subsonic explosion through building flash-and-crash to the climax of blinding-strobe-and-wall-shuddering detonations overhead? And the decrescendo as the storm cell passes, the artillery of Heaven receding "...like troops to fall on other fields and streets"?

I still enjoyed the brief passage this morning, warm and dry and comforted with coffee in the cup as the minor-key thunder passed by.

The photo above is from the east deck during that morning, in one of those weird "the western sky is storming while the sun climbs bright out of the east" moments we seem to have more often than not in our springtime. 

"Sunshowers" they're called, and they're as close as we come to the towering storms of my Midwestern youth. Sad, really.

So. Blogging?

I'm working through another "battle" piece for May, this one the "Battle of Blair Mountain" from the coalfields of West Virginia. It's a real oddity, and I'm having a bit of a struggle finding extensive sources. We'll see how it works out.

As for the rest of life?

Well, we're working up to the biggest remodel we've ever done in the Little House, a completely new kitchen as well as a lot of bathroom upgrades. The whole thing is kind of on hold for the moment, however; the contractor seems to have over-estimated how much structural work they could do without additional foundation support. That wasn't in our initial - high, as it is - budget, so we need to look at that before we decide how to deal with the additional cost.

My Bride soldiers on in our neighborhood school, as Beloved Ms Debra the Secretary. Her friend and work-wife the Principal's Secretaryis retiring at the end of this year, though; she's a treasure, and will be sorely missed.

The Boy is in the local community college, doing what I have no idea. He seldom speaks, and never of his classwork.

The Girl is exploding all over; she's a star for her high school theatre tech staff, the Mistress of the Soundboard, she's going to a theatre getaway this summer, her ceramic art took third in the Potter's Guild show this year, and she finally passed her driving road test, so she's well on her way to freedom.

Me?

I'm knocking about, still working on and off, still writing about soccer and here about everything and anything. Still watching our national devolution into Weimar Germany with a sour distaste for the combination of stupidity and hubris that seems to be the 21st Century American Way. I'm glad, in a sense, to be close to the grave. Between climate and politics I don't want to see what this country will be in forty years.

Oh, well.

Paprika Plains is almost over and I'm off to the gym. If I find anything compelling to say I may be back in a bit. Or you might not see me again until Blair Mountain.

We'll see.