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.

Some things I dread about 2023

 

Hunter Biden.

Let's just start there.

Mind, that's just a placeholder for the tl:dr version, which I now kind of have to explain. So.

There's always a handful of ominous clouds on the new year horizon, every year, things we know are in view but have no way of knowing how they will affect us or even whether they will affect us..

But this one's both a surety and a misery; the GQP's takeover of the federal House of Representatives, which I'll just go ahead and call "Hunter Biden" for short because the coming ridiculous fucking clown show is sure to include massive amounts of the sonofabitch.

(And in case you haven't been following this goat rodeo, the central fact of our next two Congressional years is that the fucking monkeys will be running the House zoo. The steering wheel will be in the clutch of the whackjobs - the Greenes, the Gaetzs, the Gym Jordans...the people who make Louie Gohmert look like a sage.)

As we've discussed here (over and over, because it's the central reality of our current U.S. politics) the modern "conservative" movement has only a handful of actual policies, all of which are loathsome to anyone who can't check all the "rich, "white", "male", "god-botherer", "ammosexual", and "bigoted" boxes.

Popular support for policies like "tax cuts for rich fucks!", "let's make American society socially, politically, and financially more like 1929!", and "let's hand over more political power to big business!" ranges from nonexistent to miniscule to at-least-less-then-two/fifths-of-the-public. 

In a genuinely popularly-elected government flogging those sorts of political goals would get you locked out of the corridors of power for generations if not forever; there's just not enough plutocrats, plutocrat-fluffers, and morons to get you elected.

Since that's all the "conservatives" have, though, they have to spend - and will spend - the vast bulk of their time fapping over ridiculous QANut conspiracy bullshit that is red meat to their lunatic base.

So when Margie Taylor Greene gets her little dickbeaters on the House Judiciary Committee gavel you know damn well she's gonna drag Tony Fauci in front of her to explain why...ummm...well, that's a good question, actually, given that it was Greene's outfit - starting with her Orange Crush - that fucked up the COVID response and managed to kill something like half a million people and all Fauci did was what he could to stop the suicidal morons from killing others along with themselves

Over at wherever Matt Gaetz lands he'll gin up a dozen Hunter Biden "investigations" generating a shit-ton of FAUX "News" content while trying to make Hunter a scandal on Daddy Joe...as if Jared Kusher didn't even fucking exist or if anyone outside the looney wingnut Right gives a shit.

All the while these chucklefucks will deliberately impede every other goddamn thing the federal government is there to do.

Because the bottom line is that these fucking people are 1) dumb as a box of rocks, 2) mean as weasels and 3) convinced that "government is bad" so they're bad a governance.

Which, in a republic where the fucking people are supposed to BE the fucking government, is a nonsensical and dangerous conviction.

Which isn't going to stop these nitwits. 

They'll tie the House, and to the extent they can, the entire federal government and everything that government has a hand in (which means damn near everything, the modern U.S. being an immense industrial nation that cannot continue as an entity without constant and continuous governance in everything ranging from foreign defense to meat-packing inspections...) with their "Hunter Biden"-level foolery.

Which means that the true disaster of our age...

Climate Change

...will roll unchecked.

We've talked about this, too. We're headed straight into the Perfect Storm of the Holocene Thermal Maximum and the Sixth Extinction without the slightest idea what that will mean.

Except not good; we can take that as read.

Will 2023 be The End of All Things?

No, of course not.

But it'll be incrementally worse than 2022 was. More extreme weather. Probably another bad western fire season. Trouble with supply chains. Difficulties in crop yields, and changes in, especially, water budgets that will affect everything from drinking water to fish runs.

It's difficult enough to get even the left side of the political spectrum to pay attention - let alone doing anything genuinely useful - about this stuff. It's complicated (meaning that the vast majority of Americans neither understand it nor appreciate how potentially devastating it will become...) and expensive (meaning taxes, which nobody likes, particularly the rich fucks who have their hand up the typical elected sock-puppet's ass...).

The Right?

Probably 80% still think the whole climate change thing is a Red Chinese hoax.

Yes, they ARE that fucking stupid.

I'm old. I'm not going to live to see how bad this could and probably - at the rate we're going - will get. But my kids will, and I'd just as soon not hand then the mess that it looks like we're going to get.

There's a lot of other shit that we're going to see in 2023 that ranges from "gee, that's kinda fucked up" ro "WTAF!!??"; increasing plutocracy and the New Gilded Age, more COVID (including new strains that we're incubating now because we've effectively given up on trying to run the Smallpox Program and vaccinate the fucker out or existence), and more trouble around the periphery of the former Soviet Union. 

Because...

Wars and Rumors of Wars

...are likely to continue to roil eastern Europe and north Asia as well as all the usual (ahemMiddleEastahem) places.

Ruth Deyermond has a useful Clif's Notes discussion of the problems of Russia and the West, but the tl:dr is Ukraine has made clear if nothing else that the Western (including the U.S.) assumption that the post-Soviet status quo - a chastened Russia unwilling and unlikely to act aggressively outside its post-Soviet borders - is gone so long as the current Putin-led leadership remains in place.

Okay, let me make this clear - I am NOT writing a new Long Telegram for 2023.

Putin Russia is a problem. That doesn't automatically make it OUR problem, or automatically make it a geopolitical-military problem. I'm not arguing for a new Cold War.

I'm agreeing with Deyermond, though, that we need to:

1. Accept that the old energy relationship with Russia cannot be recovered. Communicate this, and the reasons for it, clearly to readers/viewers/voters.

2.  Acknowledge that the need to pay attention to Russia isn’t going to go away and that this requires reorganisation and investment.

Deyermond has a long sub-thread that expounds on how institutional neglect of post-Soviet Russia has gone a long way towards putting us (and Russia!) in a vastly more risky position.

This is a new bud on the troublesome U.S. foreign policy tree, but there's a lot of poison fruit still hanging on the old branches.

Unquestioning support of Israel even now that it has become an openly theocratic apartheid state. 

Ignorance, or, worse, ignorant meddling in internal troubles in subSaharan Africa and the Middle East.

The uncertainty about the PRC's intentions towards it's own "near abroad", especially Taiwan.

Problems in Central America - a lot of this is related to the climate issues mentioned above - and the instability of Mexico in particular brought about by a combination of demographics, economics, the institutional political dysfunction baked into Mexico by its colonial master Spain, and the collision of the Mexican underworld and U.S. drug policies.

Ugh. I won't even want to think about what will happen with all this shit if Trump gets back into the White House in 2024.

But 2023's gonna be bad enough as it is.

Homelessness in Portland

With the defeat of Joanne Hardesty there's no Portland commissioner who will push back against Mayor Wheeler's "might, power, and beatings" plan to sweep the poor people in these squalid camps out of Portland.

So we'll go on with the whack-a-hobo "policy" that's been all the City can come up with to try and figure out what to do with poor people who either can't afford Portland's astronomical rents, or who are struggling with everything from addiction to mental and physical health problems.

And we'll hear the usual bullshit from people like Betsy Johnson about how this is going to "solve" the problem, which is the equivalent of pissing on your head and telling you how lucky you are that the rain is warm.

All the while the City will he shoveling money at the worthless fucking Police Bureau.

Plus there's all the usual bullshit. Payday lenders. Non-alcoholic beer. Bathroom ceiling fans (I'll have a post about that in a bit...) The Fucking Big Bang Theory.

Is there going to be more good than bad?

Christ, I hope so.

But whatever we're going to get, it's too late now. We're gonna get it good and hard.

That time when I was brilliant sooner than Paul Krugman

 Krugman has a tweet up talking about Trumpy Bear and the Plague Year:

"A couple of takeaways from this shocking-but-not-surprising description of Trump's refusal to deal with the pandemic. First, character does matter: he's a terrible president in part because he's a horrible person.

Second, his self-absorption was self-destructive: politicians who took the virus seriously were rewarded even when they weren't that successful."

He's right, of course. The nightmare we're living through - those of us who WILL live through it, and damn near half a million may not, when it's all done with us - is entirely the creation of fucking Tubby and the idiot fucking Republican cult. Those places where the people and the leadership did the things that simple public health suggested would limit the losses due to a pandemic disease are doing fine. 

We're an utter shitshow.

So I just wanted to remind those here that I was on this waaaaay back in April:

"And here's the really infuriating part.

It SO didn't have to be this way.

What's most appalling is that in this horrific disease Donald Trump and his GOP pals were effectively gifted the chance to be fucking heroes.

I mean that sincerely. They could have gone down in American history with the pantheon of men...who have saved the Republic. Washington. Lincoln. FDR.

All Trump had to do was what any sane, decent person would have done. Shut his piehole. Listened to people who knew better. Taken their advice to act quickly and competently. Spoken the words of comfort and care. Acted as Lincoln did in 1861 and FDR did in 1941. Mobilized the nation. Produced the tests, provided the ventilators, coordinated the response.

I know I keep saying this, but this was a fucking no-brainer. We've done this before, only it was Japanese, not viruses; we kick the federal money machine into action, start paying people to stay home instead of build bombers, businesses to stay shut instead of make tanks and helmets.

Freeze the nation in place until treatment, and then vaccine, came on-line.

That's it.

That's ALL.

He does that, and he's flying up there with the Greats. Twenty years after his enormous orange ass gets kicked into the hole his meatface is up there on Rushmore right next to Teddy.

But this goddamn fuckstick and his worthless fucking GOP pals couldn't do that to save their (and our) lives.

HE couldn't do it because he's a fucking rodent, and all his pizza-rat brain can manage is his own cravings; his craving for money, for power, to sate his ginormous ego.

THEY couldn't do it because they're fucking slaves, slaves to their bloated ideology where it's a Hobbesean war of all against all, where cash is king, C.R.E.A.M., baby, and it's all about punishing the darks and the bitches and the libs. They could no more act heroically than a dog could resist licking its ass.

That's just...sad.

Here these sorry bastards like to fap to their image of themselves as the latter-day Three Percent, the heroic fighting rebels who would be the first to jump to pledge their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to the nation in time of trial.

And yet...when the trial arrived, all they could do was snivel, whine, try and grift the pandemic, punish the libs, and then celebrate by dipping their balls in the chocolate to enjoy the creamy texture.

And so here we are, ruled by the very worst among us, without any hope for reprieve."

I'm a fairly smart person, but it's not often that I'm that far ahead of the punditorial power curve, and I wanted to shake my moneymaker briefly to note that in this case I sure as hell was.

And don't mistake me; there's a shit-ton of others outside of Orange Foolius who bite off a piece of this clusterfuck.

The entire government of the PRC, that knew they had a deadly pathogen loose in Wuhan but tried to hide and dissemble about it.

Every knucklehead who had to have their wedding or barbeque or beach party regardless of the risk.

But for us here in the US, it was the goddamn brick-brained Chief Executive who:

1) Knew this was going to be bad way the hell back in the winter of 2020 because Xi himself told him so, but

2) Lied about it and either did nothing or actively worked to ensure the spread would get out of control, and

3) Could have done the exact opposite, but didn't, even though doing the exact opposite was so blatantly the obvious route to heroic re-election that it was blindingly obvious to an elderly blogger in Portland Fucking Oregon way the hell back in the early spring.

Not that it really helps you, me, or anyone else, that I was righter than Cassandra and Krugman and Trump altogether. 

We all know what Cassandra got for her troubles.

So, yeah.

Welcome to 2021

Freshly fresh and newly new

 

I've seen sixty-three of the sonsofbitches, but the Year 2020 was, hands-down, the fucking worst of them all.

Mind you, 1968 and 1969 were pretty bad, but then I was 11 and 12 then and too small to really understand how bad things got. 

In the early Seventies we had another dangerously worthless Republican shitbird in the Oval Office, but the wingnut horde was smaller and less nutty and the news outfits less stenographic of Republican lies, so I could remain confident that said dirtbag would be defenestrated, and so he was.

But this one? Yeesh. Good riddance.

One thing that hasn't changed from yesterday to today is my broad outlook as a sort of "optipess".

On the personal and professional side I and mine are doing fine. A little ragged around the edges from hunkering down under the Plague, but otherwise unharmed, and looking hopefully to the deployment of vaccines and some sort of renewal of something approaching a normal life.

On the larger and general side...well, we're soooooo fucked. 

We - as in "the global industrial North" we - are doing...well, not "nothing" but more-or-less "effectively nothing" to prevent the recurrence of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, and while I'd like to thank the fucking wingnuts for that (and they ARE a huge part of the problem) we the human race in general is turning out to be really, really bad at dealing with massively complex global problems. It's almost like we're a pack of over-armed, over-powered apes that have not truly evolved beyond out proto-hominid beginnings. 

Hmmm. 

And on the next level down we - the "We, the People" United States we - have turned out to be a sort of monkeyhouse divided into roughly three tribes of monkeys.

One-third more-or-less sane dwellers of the 21st Century;

One-third a useless lump of fucking ambulatory protoplasm wasting precious oxygen, and;

One-third utterly whack, bellicose, credulous, gormless, meeching, nitwitted feral apes.

That's not really a good thing.

And I have no idea what I can do as an individual to change either of the above. 

Well, I do - I can't. Not as an individual.

I have literally no "influence" even on the tiniest of local scales. Perhaps I can get more involved in local politics, for what that might accomplish. But I'm disheartened by my fellow Portlanders choices this past November. Given a simple, clear-cut choice between a piss-poor past and a chance at future change, a strong plurality of us said "Yes, more piss-poor, please!"

That's...not good. That's...I'm not sure how you move forward from there. We had good people pushing for good things, intelligent, progressive, hopeful ideas. And the People of Portland shot them down. How do I change that?

Well. Damn.

But - and this is the "opti-" part - there's always bad things. The very first thing I saw this new year, other than the dark house and the hopeful coffee, was turning on the television and finding the 1992 flick Body of Evidence on the cable, as if to prove that bad things have happened in Portland all the time.

 (That's Willem Dafoe walking through Lone Fir Cemetery, by the way. It was the most Portlandy image from this dog I could find on the Internet, most of which was Madonna, perhaps the least Portlandy thing about this dog...)

We got through Body of Evidence. 

Perhaps we'll get through this.

Right now, though, what's sort of emblematic is that it doesn't really feel like a "new" year because, like a a bloated orange colossus, Trump still bestrides the narrow world, Twitter whining and bragging, being an asshole, and golfing. We still have three weeks of the fucking idiot and his braindead minions.

It's just a question of survival until then. 

God, I hope so.

Then, perhaps, it'll really feel like a New Year.

Addendum - "But for Wales?"

I won't make a secret out of the fact that I think the idea of taking random eighteen-year-olds and running them through a second-rate engineering school where everybody wears the same clothes in order to produce Army officers is not a particularly good idea.

Far too many kaydets come out imbued with Duty-Honor-Country and very little else of military value. Which is not to say that good soldiers can't come out of West Point. They do, and have. 

But of the officers I served under the very best did not come out of WooPoo, and the very worst did, so that is a small unflattering sample of the place.

But.

If you're going to have an Army officer college, and you're going to make a big fat hairy deal about it as some sort of knightly training school where a brutal and bloody profession is somehow idealized into a noble calling that requires constant harping on some sort of "Code of Honor" as part of that training.

If you're then going to break that honor code for a very prosaic, very grubby outbreak of academic cheating?

You'd impress me a hell of a lot more if all that grubby cheating was for a higher purpose than playing and losing in the...(checks notes)...fucking "Liberty Bowl".

As my old drill sergeant told me once; if you're not cheating you're not trying, but if you cheat and fail?

That's sadder than both the failure AND the cheating themselves.

Welcome to 2021.

The Last of the Teens

When you stop and thing about it, the "Teens", whether you want to talk about the Nineteen-teens, or the Twenty-teens, were pretty goddamn shitty decades.

The period between 1910 and 1920 brought us the most pointlessly, brutally destructive war in human history. Sure, the second "world war" was worse in terms of pure human misery. But at least that fucking mess settled the hash of the fucking Nazis and Imperial Japan.

The Great War? What a goddamn disaster; millions of dead, maimed, homeless, impoverished, raped...and for what?

And the Twenty-teens? The Rise of the New Fascism? Terrific. I can't see that getting Disney+ makes up for losing the American Right to the freaking looney wingnuts. Sorry. Ain't gonna happen.

Surprisingly, only the Girl had a Happy New Year; she went over to her pal Lucy's house and rocked out with games and treats and fun. The five of them - two girls and three boys (color me a bit shocked - when I was in middle school my parents would no more have been okay with me having an overnight party with girls than they would have been okay with me putting on a dirndl and trolling the docks for sailors).

But the Girl's friend's parents took the whole thing in stride, and so did the kiddos; it was all good fun, and everyone went to bed alone (but not until the pre-dawn - the Girl has now slept most of the afternoon away making up for lost sleep last night...)

The kiddos understand to a point where they stand, and what is happening to the country around them. They hate it, but they are cynical as hell, and don't think there's much they can do about it. They don't understand how old cranky white people can hate their gay friends, or want to hurt poor people, or homeless people, or just plain helpless people...but that's being a kid. As an adult I've seen way too many ruthless, heartless bastards to think that any outfit that promises to hurt the people those bastards hate won't profit from that promise.

But regardless of who and how old we are, here we stand, on the precipice of a new decade.

It is up to us, We the People, to decide what kind of decade we're going to get. Who will rule; will we be the nation of Martin Luther King, or the nation of Stephen Fucking Miller?

I'm an old sergeant, so you know what I think We'll choose. As my old drill sergeant, SFC Harris, famously said; "GI's, eh? Those fuckers'll fuck up a wet dream."

But here we are, nonetheless.

And, for the record, here's the scene at the Fire Direction Center this afternoon; you can practically taste the excitement. The Girl is the large black lump hiding from the camera, by the way. She did eventually emerge to whine about her brother and complain about my dinner selection.

But that's parenting - as I've warned you; it's a contact sport.

But, hey...how about those Ducks!

GFT OPlan for 2017

LOTS of posts discrediting and punching down on His Fraudulency and the GOP Griftopia.

But you knew that.

Battles?

I've only got a couple of battles left that interest me. Sometime in the autumn - probably September - I'm going to work up the 1683 Battle (and Siege) of Vienna, the High Water Mark of the Ottoman Empire.

In June I think I may do Cynoscephalae, the 197BC encounter that put paid to the phalanx for the next 1500-odd years until the Swiss reengineered it.

July will be the naval Battle of Hansan Island, one of Admiral Yi Sun-sin's many asswhippings that convinced Imperial Japan to leave the Hermit Kingdom alone (at least, until it didn't...). I might also do something on the Battle of Talas River, the 751CE engagement that may (or may not) have helped check the Tang China influence in Central Asia and may (or may not) have helped strengthen the Abbasid Caliphate. Good tale full of treachery and intrigue.

October is probably going to be Sekigahara, just because I'm a huge Kurosawa fanboi and I loves me some classic samurai sword-and-geta epic. I may also do the Battle of Buxar, the fight that solidified the John Company hold on India after Plassey.

November? معركة القادسيّة, al-Qadisiyyah, 636CE, the fall of Sassanid Persia and the real beginning of the Rashidun and, later, the Abbasid Caliphate.

Later this month I'm FINALLY going to get around to doing the next part of the Chaco War. Seriously. Promise.

I've only got a handful of "The Army I Knew" posts left, mostly because they're just largely Reserve and Guard stories of the late Eighties and Nineties and the early Oughts, and, as such, not nearly as much fun as my regular Army tales. I've tried to think up any Tales from The Sinai I may have forgotten but I think you've got them all...

Plus the usual ash-and-trash. I've been busy writing soccer for Slide Rule Pass, so that won't show up here, but I suspect that I'll have some Portland material just because...well, it's Portland and I love Portland. Or Oregon, and I'm proud to be a Beaver, too...

Any other suggestions? I'm willing to discuss.

Hope all here are enjoying a good 2017!