Troubles

Some good - I'm working in Alaska this week, a place I've never been before (and probably won't be again) - and some...very much not so good.

It's not life-threatening or anything like that. I'm not dying, or, at least, no sooner than we're all headed for our appointment with the Reaper.

But things are happening that are very difficult and stressful, so it's hard to focus on anything else, hence the long silence here.

A lot of this "bad" trouble is still unresolved; though; that is, it's hanging there, ominous, but as yet not quite "as bad as it could be". 

It depends on someone's heart and mind, and those are still as yet unknown. When they become so, it will either be "troubling but hopeful" or "very, very life-alteringly awful".

When that happens, I'll be back here.

The Great Experiment

 Came across this...

...in the Xhitter feed of this guy.

And even given my long attention to and understanding of the fundamental shallow and rapacious shittiness of "conservative thinking" I was kinda gobsmacked.

WTAF? Seriously, National Review? Lights on in your heads, dumbfucks!

"Grand social experiment"..?

Really, which part of high school civics were you Rushbo-wannabees sleeping through that you missed the whole "American Experiment" thing?

"The establishment of our new Government seemed to be the last great experiment for promoting human happiness."
George Washington, January 9, 1790

The promise of these United States - the only thing about them that has value, the implicit promise the Founders didn't realize they'd made - is the idea of the grand noble experiment in self-government for all of We the People.

No kings. No popes. No lords and ladies, no hierophants, no rigid social framework where those born to rule rule those born to serve.

The entire, central fucking IDEAL of the United States, the core tenet of the values that supposedly make this nation different, is that We are embarked in a "grand social experiment" to see if that can work.

The fact that we've fallen far short of that value doesn't decentralize it. The fact that we have to, that we need to, make reparations to those who, because of our prejudices we wrote into our laws and baked into our society, were held back and held behind the ideal of equal justice under law, doesn't change it's importance.

The armed forces of a Republic are representative of - must represent - the ideals and goals of that Republic. If they do not, they must be held to a higher standard than the civil society around them in hopes of reforming that society. Not the other way around.

For those reasons alone Harry Truman ordered the desegregation of the Army over half a century ago.

I'm sure the National Review tut-tutted that "grand social experiment" that time, too.

In the Age of Trump it's increasingly difficult to hide the vicious racist stupidity behind "conservative" politics. But this was stupidly racist even for these gomers.

I think I hated them a tiny bit less when they were just openly honest Klansmen,

Twenty-two

Oh, hey. I almost didn't see you there, sweetie.

C'mere. Siddown for a bit, can you? I'm just finishing this up, I'll be right with you.

That? Oh, it's some sort of IPA. Yeah, cliche, I know. Hey, I like 'em well enough, now that the Northwest is mostly over the "can you top this" bitterness craze. Go ahead, try a sip.

Yeah? Well, it was seven bucks at Grocery Outlet. Probably a reason for that, eh?

It's been a long year, hasn't it?

Retired? Yeah. Still working into that. Your mom is running in circles over at school; more to do, fewer to do it. Kid brother still gaming 24-7, baby sis ready to spread her wings and fly off to college...

Would you be there now?

Getting ready to graduate? Doctor, lawyer, beggarman, thief? Would you be working, instead? Putting in your forty hours behind a wrench or behind a desk?

Would you be cadging a drink from me like this, nasty hoppy IPA or what?

How much else would we have shared?

Your younger siblings share almost nothing with me. Your sister and I are both theater buffs, but she's very different from me in every other way. Your brother? I don't get him and never have.

And I never got the chance to know you.

I wish I had. I wish I'd been able to grow with you, to share your happiness and sorrow. To know you, as I had hoped, all those many years ago. But this day came, and went, and so did you, forever one day old.

I don't miss you the way your mother does. For her you're a huge hole in her heart, a part of her she'll never find, the end of her dreams for and of you.

I miss the you who never was. The little girl, the young woman, the strong daughter who, in the best way of fathers and daughters, stood by me into the grave and carried my memory beyond it.

Instead, we have yesterday, and today, and then you'll be gone again. Here, have another sip. Yeah, it gets a little better after a couple. Still not very good. Seven bucks worth.

But let's have a last round, you and I. And grin and shake our heads and look away, and when I look back you'll be gone.

Until the next time, love. Goodbye. I love you. I miss you.

Goodbye.

Bryn Rose Gellar. March 1, 2002 - March 2, 2002

Whitey on the moon

Turns out that an assload of private contractors (because natch...) put a lander on the Moon.

Apparently NASA was involved, but the primary was something called "Intuitive Machines" that designed and built the actual lander. The Reuters story says that "The NASA payload focuses on space weather interactions with the moon's surface, radio astronomy and other aspects of the lunar environment for future landing missions."

Which just reminds me of 1) how excited 12-year-old me was at the Apollo lunar landings, and 2) how silly that excitement looks with fifty years of perspective.

As adventure? Sure. It was pretty adventurous. The science (at least to my eyes, anyway) cooks down to some helpful planetary geology. Some useful tech emerged from the space program. The unmanned probes like Galileo have produced some immensely valuable knowledge of our solar system, and the various iterations of orbital telescopes some fascinating cosmology.

But Einstein's Wall still stands.

Human extra-atmospheric travel is still hugely impractical, and the notion of space-faring is and will be the realm of fiction.

All this farkling about on the Moon is a simple reminder that the thing is a cold dead rock.

The article goes on to say that this: 

"...marked the first "soft landing" on the moon ever by a commercially manufactured and operated vehicle and the first under NASA's Artemis lunar program, as the U.S. races to return astronauts to Earth's natural satellite before China lands its own crewed spacecraft there. NASA aims to land its first crewed Artemis in late 2026 as part of long-term, sustained lunar exploration and a stepping stone toward eventual human flights to Mars."

Which is just nuts.

There's no value in sending people back to the Moon, and even less to Mars. Like keeping a mistress, the pleasure is transient, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable. There's nothing on either celestial body that a drone or robotic probe can't examine.

FFS let the PRC waste time and money sending people to the Moon.

Right here we can't figure out how to get hoboes out of the fucking public streets. I don't see we're going to learn anything more to spend a ton of money to send someone back to the Sea of Tranquility to kick rocks.

Now if there was some Wensleydale, mind...

The Government in all its majesty...

 Spent a big part of yesterday here:

The reason was classical "DMV 101"; the Social Security Administration had somehow input the wrong birthdate in my daughter's SS data and as you know if you've ever dealt with...well, any bureaucracy anywhere, your birthdate is part of the golden ticket to get anything done.

The problem came to light when I contacted the SSA to arrange one of the oddest pieces of federal largess (and let's not forget that I worked for these rascals a loooooong time, so my N is pretty large for "odd pieces of federal largess") I've ever come across.

I started my retirement benefit application last month, and it turns out that if 1) you're receiving Social Security and 2) you have a minor kid who is either a) younger than 18, or b) still in high school, said kiddo gets some cash from her Uncle Sugar, too.

While I talking to the nice SSA person about that I insisted that her birthdate is X/XX/XX, and the SSA person said, no, it's X/YY/XX. And I looked at the paperwork in my hand and, when we agreed that we disagreed, committed to showing up with said daughter in tow to fix the problem.

So off we went, paid for parking, and entered into the maw of the SSA.

As someone who (see above) has spent a fair amount of time sitting in various US government facilities I have to give the SSA people their due.

The place was clean and well-maintained. The rent-a-cops running the security screening were professional and polite. And the process was orderly enough, given the wild quiltwork of humanity it had to deal with.

THAT was a real novelty to the kiddo. She's not sheltered, and I think she gets that there's a lot more to city life than our little patch of North Portland. But to spend several hours in the Greyhound-station confines of the downtown SSA waiting room? 

That brought those things pretty close.

Was it the dude having some sort of loudly prolonged attack of some sort of scary-sounding respiratory problem in the men's can? The family with multiple crying infants? The frankly-scary-looking dude with more metal in his clothing that I have in my legs?

No, I think it was the elderly lady who had a long, heart-rending breakdown at Window #2 because her landlord (I think) was demanding her Social Security card and she'd tried repeatedly to have one mailed to her but hadn't received it.

She was very forcefully desperate, the unseen bureaucrat behind the glass was subvocally unable to help her, and all this drama played out in front of The Girl, who is very tightly buttoned about drama in general (and especially for a Theater Kid, which is one of her personas...). I think she was a bit shaken about someone's hardships being played out right in front of her.

Plus the guy with the dog...well, you get the idea.

We finally got called to Window #2 nearly at the end of the day, laid out our documentation, got the birthdate corrected with little or no palaver, and celebrated with a stop at St. Honore for a pastry treat. Bureaucracy, hurrah!

Now I just need to go pick up the p-work from her high school.

But before I go I think it's worth noting this...

I have no idea who the hell "Jesse Kelly" is when he's at home. but my guess is he's some bog-standard "conservative" who gets wood dreaming of the social contract of the Gilded Age.

But the notion that the "country cannot be saved" unless We the People return to the pre-New Deal era of widespread common poverty and aristocratic plutocracy seems to have become one of the few actual "policies" of these people.

Which, BTW, is why I applied for these Social Security benefits now rather than waiting until 70 when the real fat paycheck comes due.

I don't trust these bloated hyenas not to pull this fast one when they and their Orange King get their dickbeaters on the levers of power. 

I want to - as best I can - lock in the paycheck I can get, not the bigger one that relies on the social engineering skills of the MAGAt Horde.

I know I keep beating this drum, but if the American Experiment has ANY value at all, it's as a test case for the promise of the Republic to be for all of "We the People" and not - as designed by the Framers - for "the rich, the well-born, and the able".

That promise is a hell of a big ask.

It relies on We the People to be true citizens, to work hard to understand our government, even down to the guy behind Window #2, and make informed, intelligent decisions about how that government works.

To not fall for the "conservative" bullshit about "government is the problem". To make that government work for Our best interests, not those of the wealthy, or the corporate "persons", or the various power-brokers and lobbyists for this and that.

One of the reasons those Framers wanted to restrict the franchise was because they doubted the ability of the mass of the People to do those things.

I can't help but wonder.

But for now, well, the pastries were good. And the Girl gets some college money.

Now you'll excuse me, but the goddamn drywall guy is supposed to be here and I need to let him in or we'll be another day behind schedule.

Remodel Army

 I just peeked into this joint and realized I've been a baaaaad blogger; over a month with no new content.

Frankly, it's mostly because of this:

That's the kitchen. Well, that's where the kitchen used to be. 

The Little House has always been, well, little. It's barely 1,000sf, and it's poorly designed, with small rooms and a cluttered floor plan. I wrote about it back in 2020; the original wasn't great and the remodel the 1970s-80s owners did didn't make it much better. We wanted to open the place up a bit.

Here's what we started with:

And here's where we're going with that:

That's still the plan. But as Clausewitz (drink!) reminds us, between plan and execution is friction. And there's been...a LOT of friction.

Subcontractors not showing up.

Subcontractors showing up and then FUCKING up.

Ice Storms.

It's all been very stressful. I hate not having a kitchen. Cooking on a hotplate on the old dining room table sucks major ass.

That's my excuse, but it doesn't excuse me. I'll try to be better.

In my defense, I'm plugging sway on the promised "Frontiers 1914" post. It's going to be complicated. I've got two major sources right now; Terence Zuber's Battle of the Frontiers Ardennes 1914, and Dennis Showalter's The German Failure in Belgium, August 1914.

Remember that to try and make the post less insanely huge I decided to focus on the reconnaissance/counter-reconnaissance part of the fight. Well, the two sources are diametrically opposed on the subject.

The Showalter book focuses on what the German Army termed "Higher Cavalry Commands" (Höhere Kavallerie-Kommando), HKK, strategic assets directly under the Imperial Army HQ but assigned (sorta) to the Army commanders of the right wing (1st and 2nd) armies.

Their task was more-or-less purely strategic; find the left end of the Allied forces so the big Schlieffen Sweep could turn it. As you can tell from the title, Showalter doesn't think the Germans succeeded there.

The Zuber book, on the other hand, is tightly focused on - also as the title makes clear- the fight between the German 4th and 5th Armies and the French 3rd and 4th Armies in the Ardennes.

The general tone of the two is utterly dissimilar.

Showalter is zoomed in on the failure of the German Oberste Heeresleitung, the overall German Army HQ, to appreciate the criticality of the strategic mission and the degree to which the top brass either permitted (or encouraged) the right-wing HKK to faff about rather then go do what they were supposed to and the utter lack of urgency in applying the air assets.

This was supercharged by the organizational and logistical arrangements made to set up the HKKs (as well as the aerial recon elements, both fixed-wing and lighter-than-air) which helped make them less responsive and thus less useful in the right-wing fight.

Zuber, on the other hand, luuuurves him some German Army tactical training. His thesis is, so far as I can tell, to debunk the post-war French narratives of why the Ardennes sector was such a completely nutty cluster of fuck. He seldom deals with reconnaissance other than to point out the vast superiority of German tactical recon/conter-recon. Zuber seldom, if ever, deals with strategic reconnaissance at all.

(As an aside, Zuber also throws in a - to my mind - highly questionable defense of the German Army reprisals against Belgian civilians. These executions appear in the Showalter text as well, and are largely condemned as excessive responses to German friendly-fire incidents. There's actually a good discussion on the degree of 1) Belgian irregular resistance and the 2) German reprisals for it in the Wikipedia page covering the "rape of Belgium" - loaded term, but that was the most common one used for it...)

It's been a fun research project, but it's rapidly becoming obvious that discussing the subject is too massive for a single post. I'm leaning towards dividing it into three parts; a "Frontiers 1" dealing with the largely-strategic recon/counter-recon of HKK1 and HKK2 and air assets on the German right, "Frontiers 2" discussing the German center and left (including HKK 3 and HKK4 but more closely examining the divisional tactical cavalry, since the lack of open maneuver space tightly constrained the HKK's (and the terrain and foliage greatly limited the aerial recon), and a final "Frontiers 3" summarizing the main concepts of the first two.

So that's the plan, anyway.

Hopefully it goes better than the kitchen.

The Formula

 Over at Nancy Nall's joint she complains:

"You guys, I am shocked this story hasn’t gotten more attention from the prestige media. It’s based on a government report, not “sources.” The revelations – that the White House has its own pharmacy, and under Trump, it handed out prescription meds like Smarties on Halloween – are startling. And yet, it seems to have bloomed and withered in one news cycle, and what stories were written concentrated on the cost, mainly of the use of name-brand drugs when generic equivalents were available."

To which my immediate thought was:

Dunno about everyone else, but..."this would surprise you…why?”

Anyone who had been paying attention to Tubby since his Eighties Manhattan heyday knew the guy is a moral shithouse, the reeking one-holer of ethical sewage. So assuming the WH has a dispensary, and knowing how a dispensary run by this human smegma would be run…what ELSE would you expect?

It’s the same way so many other articles about the orange chancre seem incredulous about his lying, or cheating, or petty viciousness, or stupidity…and my response is you’re gobsmacked by this…why? It's not like this is some sort of Scooby-doo mystery. It's all right in front of you.

Look. He’s a garbage human. As such he is surrounded by the sort of people who think “Yes! I WANT that!” So of course this. And the corruption. And the theft of documents and WH gifts. And the racism and sexism and plutocratic…

I guess that's the only thing I don't get; that given how obvious all this Republican QANut fuckery is, how does any sentient human not see it?

The culties do and that's why they love it. But anyone not in the cult should be horrified and furious about it. Yet...here we are. WASF.

 

Snow and Ice

So we’re on Day Four of the First Snowpocalypse of 2024, and anticipating Icepocalypse: The Sequel later today.

Did the marketing a day early (yesterday) to provision. Schools are closed, so all the students plus Miss Debra, school secretary, are free of the need to travel.

The wild card is power, tho. There are still a crap-ton of outages from the first round of weather, and ice has a nasty way of bringing powerlines down around here. So hoping for luck with that.

Meanwhile I'm working to stay busy. The weather has badly disrupted my kendo practice - the ceiling here is too low for a correct men-uchi, so I'm reduced to trying all sorts of gimmicks to workaround. Plus the little gym we belong to is down a steep hill from St. Johns and, while I'll bet we could zip down it'd be reeeeeal iffy trying to get back up so, no.

I'm writing a lot about Portland soccer - our women's professional team 1) just got sold to a California real estate developer and 2) just made it's 2024 college draft picks, so there's a lot to talk about.

And I'm reading a lot; first Wayne Lee's splendid The Cutting-off Way, a modern analysis of native warfare in Northeastern North America between first European contact and the emergence of the early United States.

Second, several sources for my planned Frontiers 1914 post later in the month (or February), beginning with Showalter, Robinson, and Robinson (2019) The German Failure In Belgium. I've also got Terence Zuber's 2007 The Battle of the Frontiers on order. The more I look into this whole "Frontiers" business the more I want to focus on the issue of reconnaissance and, particularly, cavalry, since it was the horse soldiers that the commanding officers of 1914 presumed would get them the intelligence they needed to carry out their operational planning.

(Yes, the fliers were busy, as well, but I don't get the sense that the maneuver commanders had enough familiarity with how the aircraft worked and how to use the information they could produce to really incorporate that into their planning...)

Anyway, that should keep me busy for a bit.

Meanwhile out in the larger country the 2024 election campaign has begun with the ridiculous Iowa caucuses on the Republican side.

In a shocking upset, Tubby swept the board. Yeah, I know. Pinch me.

There's no kidding ourselves; the Right is gonna return this fucker to us in November. If they can foist him back into power it's gonna suck for everyone not them, and, frankly, that's so obvious that if you're not them and you're not fulminating at the moment you get to vote against them, fight them, and destroy them, you're nuts.

We the People are going to get a very simple choice this year; choose the promise of the better angels of the American Experiment, or choose the original sins of the Founders, the long legacy of slavery and oligarchy.

I know where I stand. Where the rest of my nation will go? I can only remind them that...

Ceterum autem censeo the GOP esse delendam.

All the troubles in the world, January 2024 edition

 Couple of quick thoughts today.

1. Israel vs South Africa in the International Court of Justice

A quick reminder that the ICJ, along with a lot of the other "international law" and "law of war" institutions are effectively creations of the last truly horrific global episode of mass death, the Second World War.

That's why, for example, things like the bombings of London during the Blitz, Dresden, the fire-raids over Japan in 1944 and '45 are now officially the "war crimes" that Curtis LeMay admitted he'd have been hung for had Japan won the Pacifc War.

The supposed key is "proportionality". Even in war, if someone attacks you without provocation ('making aggressive war", also a war crime that George Bush could easily have been prosecuted for going into Iraq in 2003...) you're fully justified in hitting them hard.

But not TOO hard. You can't firebomb their cities and kill millions of their people to get the political and military leaders who war-crimed you when they attacked. You've gotta try and kill those people without butchering job-lots of their countrypeople who had nothing to do with the original crime.

What I think is "wrong" with the ICJ case that South Africa is bringing is that it accuses the Israelis of "genocide".

I don't think for a moment that if the Netanyahu government could genocide the Arabic former residents and descendants of those residents of the Ottoman province of Palestine they wouldn't because they're just nice guys.

They're vicious ethno-supremacists, who have utterly embraced the idea that only they are truly human and the Palestinians are some sort of two-legged humanoid vermin. Don't be surprised; had you asked a typical frontier American anytime between 1750 and 1900 of their opinion of the various native groups they were pushing out of their vicinity you'd have gotten a damn near identical answer.

The Gaza "campaign" is just the hot phase of the war that Israel has been fighting against the Pals since the mid-1940s. Including the long march to apartheid since 1967 - something that a South African would be expected to be brutally familiar with.

The equally vicious bastards who engineered the attack on 10/7 know that better than anyone, and that was their plan all along; to rip the smile off the pretty Israeli girl soldier and bare the teeth behind it. They intended to bait the Israelis into what they're doing. Netanyau's people responded like the junkyard dogs they are, and here we are.

The problem I see is this.

What Israel is doing in Gaza is clearly a war crime. It's not proportionate to kill tens of thousands of innocent women and kiddies who happen to be in the vicinity of war criminals. It's not within the bounds of whatever the fuck "international law" is to be doing ethnic cleansing. We - the U.S., that is - bombed the fuck out of the Serbs for that, remember?

But I don't think it rises to the level of "genocide".

So I think the ICJ will rule in favor of Israel.

Which, as Juan Cole points out here, is troublesome just because "(i)f the justices fail in their duty to uphold International Humanitarian Law in this instance, the failure could be fatal to what is left of the legitimacy of international institutions, throwing us back into the jungle."

I note that, per the BBC today, Israel's "response" to the charge is that they are acting in "self-defense".

I'll keep that in mind the next time my neighbor takes a swing at me. Because when the cops show up at the smoking ashes of his house I can point to the ruins, the corpses of his family, and explain how I was acting in self-defense. 

I'll be curious to see how that'll fly.

2) The airstrikes in Yemen

Bret Devereaux has an excellent breakdown of why a) this is entirely expected and - as opposed to the Israeli clusterfuck we've just discussed - is entirely within the bound of international law, and b) likely to lead to a difficult and troubling escalation.

The real problem is the methods.

Airstrikes are a big, blunt hammer. As John Paul Vann said about how they were useless in Vietnam, the best weapon in counterinsurgency is a knife. You try and "pacify" an insurgency from fifteen hundred feet AGL all you're likely to do is piss off the surviving civilians whose homes, businesses, churches and schools you flattened.

But the alternative is doing a Shores of Tripoli sort of punitive expedition, which in the IED-and-cheap-automatic-weapon-casualty-averse world of Western powers is a nonstarter. There's no way for an Anglo-American landing party to do an O'Bannion in Yemen without a hellishly high risk of losses. 

And if so the Anglo-American public, who in general has no fucking idea where Yemen even is, much less the issues of freedom of navigation, the Saudi-Yemeni War, what's going on in Israel and Gaza, and the geopolitical balance between the Saudi-Gulf States and Iran, would rouse from the latest episode of "90 Day Fiance" in wroth and pillory their various governments for...well, something.

Decereaux sums things up neatly, if ominously:

"So on the one hand, the Houthis are unlikely to back down over just a few airstrikes – they’ve shown tremendous resiliency in the past against air campaigns. On the other hand, Houthis have endangered the vital national interests of many countries which are substantially stronger than they are. Historically speaking, piracy and indiscriminate trade disruption were not long-term successful strategies and states have been willing, when necessary, to employ extreme levels of violence to make those activities stop. I don’t think that has changed. Unfortunately, many of the people of Yemen – who have little say in what the Houthis do – are likely to suffer as the Houthis find out why is has been, historically speaking, a terrible idea to indiscriminately try to close down the seas."

Talk about eating soup with a knife.

Blogrolling, resentment, and pronoun trouble

Paul Campos has a good piece at the Lawyers Guns and Money site that pretty much spells out why our particular system makes these people so dangerous:

“But what gives these paranoid visions so much political power is that there is, in fact, an empirical reality in which the MAGA base is suffering a massive ongoing status degradation. The country is becoming less white, less religious, and less culturally conservative, while people who aren’t part of the increasingly mobile and increasingly credentialed professional classes are bearing the brunt of increasing economic inequality, and the precarity that comes with it.

It’s an oversimplification to say…that the Republican party is now divided between college educated people who are embarrassed by Trump and prefer their tax cuts and cultural reaction is a more genteel form, and a working class base that is all in on the MAGA paranoid vision, but there is something to this.

Trump’s support comes primarily from downwardly mobile less educated white people, small business owners obsessed with low taxes, lax regulation, and good old days (read: white supremacist) nostalgia, along with a non-trivial percentage of ethnic minority members who are attracted enough to the authoritarian patriarchal cultural reaction he represents to ignore their own out status within that hierarchy.

It’s a coalition that reflects a rapidly dying vision of America, but one that may not die fast enough to save an increasingly sclerotic constitutional system that, as almost all the experts Edsall interviews assert, is moving into a potentially existential crisis.”

In a more flexible system such as a parliamentary one the whackos would be firewalled into a Monster Raving Looney Party.

(Which, as Israel is showing us, is NOT a vaccine against these political pathogens – get enough of them who are willing to cooperate and you still get Hitler! – so a lot depends on the sociopolitical bedrock beneath the system…)

But here? They’ve taken over one of the two parties we’re limited to by the Constitution and FPTP voting.

 
Guess what? Turns out that maybe the Constitution IS a suicide pact! Whoodathunkit?

(A brief note re: the graphics for this one. I'm frankly sick of posting pictures of MAGAts to go with these. Instead I'm indulging my fondness for 1) old Warner Bros. cartoons and 2) Hayao Miyazaki. In case you're not familiar with the bottom image, it's Bugs as Howl and Daffy as Sophie cosplaying the iconic scene from Howl's Moving Castle. 

Here's the original:

I totally stan for the revision version's expressions; Daffy panicking (because that's what Daffy does) and Bugs smug and kind of smarmy (because, well...Bugs).

Anyway, even in the darkest timeline there's points of light. Excuse me while I go an rewatch Chuck Jones 1952 classic Rabbit Seasoning...

Oh. and...

 Ceterum autem censeo the GOP esse delendam.

18 U.S. Code § 2384 - A Reminder

Two years ago this day a mob of Republicans, led by their fuhrer, committed treason.

Since then the entire Republican Party has embraced treason in support of its fuhrer.

I warned you what would happen if we let them get away with it.

By so doing we sowed the wind.

Now we're going to reap the whirlwind.

Ceterum autem censeo the GOP esse delendam.

First post of 2024; Hatsugeiko

For several years I lived out on Portland’s west side – part of the Tualatin Valley, the suburban enclave over the Portland Hills from the Beehive of Terrorism itself. New Year’s night there was always interesting, because amid the fireworks was a surprisingly large amount of actual gunfire that would have delighted the guests at an Afghanistan wedding party.

One year that included an immense blast that rattled the windows just past midnight; probably pyro but it sounded like someone had upgraded from small arms to an actual cannon, and who doesn’t shoot in the new year with an artillery piece, amiright?

This year I enjoyed a new experience New Year’s Day; loaded the bogu bag and shinai and played two hours of kendo at the Portland Kendo Club’s hatsugeiko, the traditional “first practice” of the new year, followed by a potluck. 

Part of the fun was the venue itself, "Fulton Park Community Center".

The building is over a century old - 1914 - as a school:

"In 1914, the Fulton Park Elementary School was built. The school housed grades K-8 in its four classrooms all opening into a central gymnasium, complete with a stage. A later remodel of the building included a new kitchen and additional bathroom facilities. The building was designed by Floyd Archibald Naramore, who was the architect and superintendent of school properties for Portland Public Schools from 1912 to 1919."

The old school - and it's still run as a school, a tiny French immersion program (which is kind of ridiculous. French? Allez savoir.) - is utterly Ragtime Era awesome, with all the architectural gimmicks of the era. Not sure which I loved more; the massive wooden timber truss ceiling? The little anterooms at the back of the classrooms with the sliding doors to hide all the coats and hats and the utility sink?

The wood floor was perfect; it's hard to emphasize enough how different floor types are on my legs.

The metal joints are unsparing. They simply don't give and flex like human bones do. So playing kendo - which requires a lot of energetic suburi or footwork - means taking a pounding through the legs. A hard floor, like concrete? Fuuuuuck. I come away from a couple of hours of keiko aching in every knee joint.

But a springy wood floor like Fulton? That's pure energy-giving. I was sore this morning - it was a good hard practice - but my legs? As good as they ever are, and that's terrific.

So. Great kendo, good training, lots of fun with kendoka from all over Portland plus family, big kid energy, great food, just a terrific way to start off the year.

Hope all here have the same.

And, today as every day, this year as every year, as always, ceterum (autem) censeo the GOP esse delendam.