La Boîteuse

One week post-op 2, and it's about like you'd expect. I'm tired and achy, my legs hurt, and to make them "not-hurt" in the future I have to make them hurt worse now - my physical therapy involves forcing joints that are a mess of scar tissue and damaged tendons and tendon sheaths to move through that damaged material, which, obviously, they don't want to. 

It's about as much fun as you'd think. Here's a post-exercise icing session to give you an idea.

Anyway, they're coming along. More slowly than I'd like, but not as slowly as possible, so things cold be worse.

So that's what I'm doing; resting, exercising, resting again, reading, watching television. I'm still in the post-op "not feeling well" phase, so my appetite is poor and I'm too shaky to do much cooking, so I'm kind of at the mercy of my Bride ("If you wait long enough they'll just eat cereal...") so the mess hall has been kind of...iffy.

You'd think this would be opportune for binging TV series, and it is. The weird part of that is the only things I've found to binge are a couple of wuxia series (well, one wuxia and one wuxia-adjacent-sorta show). My favorite is something called My Heroic Husband, a 2019 production from the PRC.

It's pure fluff; a romantic comedy set in some sort of generic medieval-Chinese period. Our hero, the husband of the title, gets time-swapped into the body of a "matrilocal" marriage victim - apparently this means that the husband, instead of being properly Confucian and patriarchal, is a sort of trophy-husband to a more socially powerful wife.

Our boy Ning Yi awakes to find that his knowledge of the 20th Century is intact but he's supposed to be an appendage to Su Ta'ner, his cloth-merchant bride. She, in turn, is vying with her male relatives (as well as her male competitors) to make the Su family store the biggest deal in Jiangning.

So the story consists of our hero using his modern business savvy to McGyver his way out of whatever trouble the various rivals try and engineer for the Su clan. Which he always does and in so doing is winning the genuine affection of his wife (who originally agrees to take him on only until she wins the family business).

The two leads have a genuinely sweet and funny chemistry, the plots are goofy and entertaining, and the heroic husband is proving to be a solid lead character.

The story is taking a much more serious turn, though. Suddenly events outside Jiangning are intruding; the state of Wu our heroes inhabit is nervously eyeing events to the north, where one of the other two major powers looks to be conquering the other. When Jing gets done with Liang it seems inevitable that it will look south hungrily, and the last episode involved some sort of tricky political gimmick where rival players at the court of Wu came looking for "tribute cloth" to send to Jing, and it looks like our gang might be tossed into politics like it or not. We'll see.

I'm all in, anyway.

Speaking of politics (and by the way of political/medical stuff...)

One thing this rehab has given me lots of time for is observing the state of our Union, and, frankly, I'm even more depressed than usual. I mean...look at this fucking idiotic thing.

Of all the fucking weapons-grade stupid ideas...the horse paste is a vermicide. COVID-19 is a respiratory pathogen. You can't fucking treat respiratory illness with a medication designed to kill intestinal worms. Period. There's no physically possible means that the one will interact with the other in any meaningful way. It's like treating a bump on the head by applying skin cream to your foot.

But this is where the GQP is now.

What's frankly terrifying is that this has gone beyond just the "own the libs" contrarianism. This is a full on cult. This is impervious to argument, debate, or reason. To paraphrase Voltaire, whoever can make you believe that a horse de-wormer can treat a respiratory pathogen can make you commit fascism.

Look at the reaction to the equally ridiculous Arizona Cyber Ninja scam.

Having proven to be nothing like an actual "audit", this joke took months and millions only to end up with what we knew almost a year ago; that the Maricopa County voting was perfectly legit and reported correctly.

You'd think that, having had about ten "recounts" by now including this nonsense that ended up in the exact same place, that everyone would throw up their hands and say "Well, okay, there it is."

No.

The wingnuts are still roaring about fraud and preparing to steal the election in 2024. The Trumpkins still insist their bloated nitwit won. Even after all the proof. Even after all the facts.

Roughly a third of the U.S. public is not going to be persuadable by any normal means that anything other than a Trump win is possible.

That's...not workable any more than using horse paste to treat COVID.

And I don't see any way to get back to sanity by somehow managing to brain-wipe that rogue 30% short of bloodshed.

Well...shit.

Anyway, I'm going to get back to my exercises and my heroic husband and try not to borrow trouble. 

I have an unpleasant suspicion that trouble will be coming along all by itself.

Die Straße frei den braunen Bataillonen

 So I came across this the other day and it was so odd that I've been fiddling with it ever since.

The grinning MAGAt there is one Ashli Babbitt, the only one of the treasonous mob shot dead on January 6, 2021 in the failed attempt to putsch Tubby off his golden throne and back into the chair behind the Resolute desk.

At the time if just seemed like just another freakish event in perhaps one of the most freakish days in the political history of the United States.

Since then, however, the wingnut Right - meaning the entire GQP - led by Tubby himself has beavered away to make the woman some sort ot True Christian Martyr cut down in the flower of her youth by communism, immigrants, Antifa, George Soros, or some combination of all the above.

In case you're not a student of Nazi iconography, the title of the post is from Die Fahne hoch, also known as the Horst-Wessel-Leid, the official theme song of the original NSDAP, supposedly written by the original Ashli Babbitt, a fightin' Sturmabteilung street brawler who was given a fatal injection of external lead by his Red Front street brawler enemies. So we've kinda been here, seen that. It's now dangerous and scary because it's Nazis; it's dangerous and scary because it's worked in the past.

Anyway, that's not really the point of this post.

It's that part of the emerging Babbitt the Martyr legend is that she was a veteran of the US Air Force.

Tubby himself has been banging that drum. Dead Ashli was "An innocent, wonderful, incredible woman, a military woman...” according to the President quondam ex futuris. 

Given the tidal level of tongue-bathing the U.S. public gives veterans of any stripe that's not a bad propaganda ploy. Brand your people as Real American Heroes and suddenly any and everything they do is American and Heroic, right?

So I've been kind of following the whole Dead Ashli Saga with a curious and jaundiced eye for a while now but only just this past week came across these two little related items.

1) Babbit had a total of 12 years time-in-service; four active USAF (2004-2008), two AF Reserve (2008-2010), and six in the ANG (2010-2016), all as a "security" specialist, meaning one of the air cops that pull gate guard and provide perimeter security for USAF installations among other things.

2) Babbitt got out as a Senior Airman (E-4), the equivalent of an Army Specialist.

That is intensely weird to me.

I know that it takes longer - it used to take much longer - to make rank in the USAF than the Army. In the 1980s, when I came in the Army if you weren't at least E-4(P) - meaning on the promotable list for buck sergeant -  by the end of your first term you were a total spud. After a dozen years in? A decently competent troop should have been at least an E-5 and probably an E-6 - Sergeant or Staff Sergeant in the Army, Staff Sergeant or Technical Sergeant in the USAF.

To still be an E-4 after a dozen years in?

That seems pretty shocking. You'd have to have been either passed over repeatedly - meaning that your unit commander would have to find some pretty big reasons for not just 86ing your ass the next time your re-up date came around - or you had to have been promoted and then busted...also not a good reason to keep you hanging around the dayroom.

The endless Wars on Terror have forced the services to body-snatch pretty hard, though, so it's possible that Warm Body Ashli was better than a hole in the MTO&E, so there's that.

Still.

I find it intriguing in a not-good-way that the Wingnut Wessel of 1/6 turns out to have been - as a "military women" - kind of a pretty poor sort of "military woman". 

But, then again...why not? She clearly missed the part in the words she swore every time she re-upped where she was supposed to "...support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic..." and became, instead, one of those enemies herself and got killed as such.

But the big picture seems to me that, like Tubby himself, wingnut world seems to find some of the sketchiest human beings on the planet to make into heroes. It's taking a street brawling thug and turing him into one heroic martyr, or taking a sad act air force cop and making her into another.

I wonder whether that says more about the heroes, or the sorts of people who make up Wingnut World..?

Fools Rush In

 I see that the "news" is fulminating about the Senatorial GQP's hard no on setting up an "investigation" of the weird mysterious thing that happened at the Capitol on the 6th of January 2021.

 

 
Ummm...gee. That's too bad. 

Without our solons on the case how on earth will we ever get to the bottom of that mystery, Scoob? Imagine the difficulty of unraveling who might have stormed the seat of government in desperate hopes to change the result of an election they'd been told over and over by their beloved Dear Leader had been "stolen"? Who, on that day, had spent hours listening to Tubby and his minions roaring about how the "traitors" and "thieves" inside the building were going to make that theft official and that how if only brave patriotic Real Americans could somehow, someway, get between these rascals and that process perhaps their dream of an endless reign of Emperor Trumpolean could come true? Who might possibly, just possibly, have been goaded through their gullible rage and credulous stupidity by grifters and conmen into trying their own Orange Foolius Revolution?

Who were recorded on live footage, on thousands of their own cell phones, on Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat and Instagram doing just that and boasting about it?

I can't possible imagine, and now, without that precious commission, We the People will be forever in the dark.

There are many reasons to despair of this fucked-in-the-head country of ours (hi, systemic racism, massive militarization, and climate change!), but letting Joe Fucking Manchin roll over and beg for doggie treats from Moscow Mitch "investigating" whether the sun rises in the east isn't one of them.

 No.

THIS is one of them;

"Yet a full 73 percent of Republicans pin “some” or “a great deal” of responsibility on “left-wing protesters trying to make Trump look bad,” even though both the FBI and Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy have rejected the falsehood that leftist protesters were involved."

Now that's fucked-in-the-head. When you can see something with your own eyes, hear it with your own ears, and yet "not believe" it? What's that line about those who can make you believe absurdities..?

There are things that we can fix about the issues We the People face in the coming years.

This? This intransigent, dangerously belligerent stupidity of the people who have gone all in on the QANut Con?

Is not one of them.

There is no cure for Stupid.

It can only - and must - be utterly exterminated if this nation, as the nation it promised itself it would be, shall not perish from the Earth.

Make Idaho Great Again

 The rump polity that is Oregon's GQP has a brilliant new idea: secede from lib'rul commie hippie dope-smoking latte-sippin' Oregon and join the Real America of Idaho.

The plan, if you want to call "something that appeared to me in a vision after a long afternoon stting in the garage and huffing several spray-cans of Rust-Oleum" a "plan", is to take the unpaved portions of Oregon - effectively everything east of the Cascades and south of Eugene and spot-weld it onto Idaho. Oh, a couple of the more deserty bits of northern California are included, too.

Having lived with these people for thirty years now, I won't even try and argue about this. It would be like trying to teach German irregular verbs to a cat. Let me just point out a couple of teensy little issues with this cunning plan.

The parts of Oregon involved are the least populated and poorest parts of the state. At least one of them - I want to say Gilliam County, but it could be any one of the damn dryland parts - tried to dissolve itself some time back because it was so fucking poor it couldn't pay for stuff like courts and roads and tax assessors.

These places can't survive economically without the engine that is Portland and the Willamette Valley. Oh, and you'll notice that these teatards cut out Bend, too, that immigrant-infested Sanctuary City, so as to prevent even the tiniest hint of solvency from intruding on their White American Dream.

I don't know how Boise feels about this, but if I was an Idaho legislator, wingnut or not, I'd be terrified to see these gomers shambling up to my statehouse doors like so many walking brain-dead under a red MAGA ballcap. If they get their wish the whole fucking place would look Kyrgystan in a week or two.

The complaint that these rural chucklefucks have is that they have no voice now in Oregon. And they're right; the Oregon GOP has become so utterly toxic that it retains only a handful of seats in the lower house. The upper house Republicans have enough warm bodies to deny a quorum, which is their only hope of...well, not really "doing anything" but preventing the rest of the Oregon lege from doing anything, which is why every session now they run and hide. They have no "agenda". All they can do is try and fuck up the rest of the system.

And why is that?

Because back in the 90s - I've told you this before - a couple of fucksticks called Don McIntyre and Bill Sizemore formed something called "Oregon Taxpayers United".

Yep. They were the Original Oregon Tax-Revolters.

The managed to con Oregonians to passing something called Ballot Measure 5 in November 1990. It gutted the property tax system, saving Nonna and Poppy a couple of hundred bucks a year and Intel and Flav-R-Pac untold billions.

But they went beyond that.

The Oregon Republicans became teabaggers before there were teabaggers, and Trumpkins before there were Trumpkins. They went all-in on queer-bashing, immigrant-hate, plutocrat-fluffing, open-carry, sovereign-citizen nonsense before going utterly batshit for Trump. They made the Republican brand so utterly toxic that they managed to lose the fat suburban enclaves of Washington County.

When you're too insane to pander to a Beaverton car dealership owner? You're waaaayyyyy too insane.

Yet somehow, they managed it.

Now this is their desperation play; they hope to leave the fleshpots of Sodom and join the arid manly men of rural Idaho in a MAGAt paradise where men really ARE men (and not he-shes in logging drag), God is in His Heaven, and women are barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen.

You can see how that would appeal to a 21st Century Oregonian!

Anyway, this nonsense isn't going anywhere just for purely procedural reasons. But the mere fact that these nitwits actually want it tells you something about how utterly desperately looney these people are.

And, as I keep saying; a republic cannot function with this level of insanity. At about 30% of the population the pure noise generated by these crazies will drown out everything else.

We can be a republic.

Or we can be Republicans.

But given their current level of insanity we cannot be both.

Even in our own private Greater Idaho.

Darkness and not light

 

Worthwhile read from Fred Clark on the trace of fear, anger, and hatred that connects the current "conservative" panic that has become the animating force of the GQP with the earlier conspiracy-theory pogroms like the Salem witch trials, the "New York Conspiracy Panic of 1741" and the "satanic panics" of the 1980s and 90's like the McMartin and Kern County hysterias.

"Moral panics are not sparked by sincere, well-meaning convictions of those who wish to see wrongs righted and justice done. They are sparked by the sincere, inescapable conviction that, in the words of the prophet Amos, the day of justice would be, for them, darkness and not light. The recognition that justice would not mean well for us."

The link between the QAnuts, the "conservative" hate for the Black Lives Matter protests this past summer, and the "Stop The Steal" idiocy draws all of this together.

The people inside all of these are, more than anything else, terrified of "The Others" gaining the sort of power and control over them that they have always had over "The Others"; these wretched subhumans (who are, however, secretly powerful and dangerous) are using the Deep State or the Swamp or the black power of Antifa to swarm over the Good People who just want to Make America Great.

It doesn't make any sort of sense, of course. It's like the weird Nazi ideology that simultaneously insisted that the Jews were the worthless, degenerate scum of the cursed Earth while also running the political and financial world.

It's exactly the sort of thinking that turns a small-time New York real estate grifter, con man, frightened little germaphobe into a bare-chested hero of the People.

Here's the problem with all this.

As Clark pointed out in a pair of earlier posts, the people involved in all these "moral panics" included some deeply cynical sonsofbitches that pushed this sort of Pizzagate nonsense for the handle it gave them over their marks and dupes.

Those people are just Nazi-grade evil, Steven-Miller-type "first up against the wall" bastards.

But the rest?

There are certainly a large number of stupid and gullible people in that group. But there just aren't enough stupid, gullible people to make up a large enough group to take over the U.S. government for extended periods of time; government is simply too complex and difficult to do for large numbers of stupid and gullible people to do it.

So among this group there has to be a fairly large percentage of intelligent, competent, critical-thinking people who want to believe these implausible, ridiculous fairy tales.

As Clark points out in the last of the linked posts:

"That requires more self-deception than any of us is capable of on our own. That degree of self-deception requires a group.

This is why the rumor doesn’t really need to be plausible or believable. It isn’t intended to deceive others. It’s intended to invite others to participate with you in deception.

Are you afraid you might be a coward? Join us in pretending to believe this lie and you can pretend to feel brave. Are you afraid that your life is meaningless? Join us in pretending to believe this lie and you can pretend your life has purpose. Are you afraid you’re mired in mediocrity? Join us in pretending to believe this lie and you can pretend to feel exceptional. Are you worried that you won’t be able to forget that you’re just pretending and that all those good feelings will thus seem hollow and empty?

Join us and we will pretend it’s true for you if you will pretend it’s true for us. We need each other."

It's sad to think that someone needs something like that to be able to live with themselves.

But how else can you explain the notion that otherwise-competent people believe that someone like bland corporate hack Joe Biden, the guy who represented MasterCard in Congress, is a communist puppet who wants to outlaw guns and Christianity and make every toddler attend Drag Queen Story Hour?

But...how else do you explain it?

How else do you explain things like the Texas governor's reaction to his state's catastrophic public power disaster, or his ramming his citizen's collective dicks into the COVID meatgrinder?

How else, in a pandemic on a scale unprecedented for a century, do you explain this?

I can't. Other than what Clark is talking about; that a relatively huge minority of my supposed fellow Americans want to believe that me and people like me are evil traitors who want to utterly burn down "America".

On the Left there are people who are not happy with how things are. But as Cohen notes, even these people will compromise and cooperate if that means the public good.

On the Right, there are people - in the case of the "Relief Plan" vote in the tweet above powerful, well-educated people, people who are supposedly familiar with the inner workings of the U.S. government and through it armed with all the sources of potential knowledge and understanding of the Plague Year - who have convinced themselves that their political adversaries are literally so evil and dangerous that the most anodyne of their proposals must be utterly, furiously, and sometimes even violently, fought against.

 They will not compromise or cooperate, for who can "compromise" and "cooperate" with Evil?

And that brings us to the point where we're going to discuss climate change