Ashokan Farewell

 

My Dearest Martha.

I write from our fall-back position in the former Rose Garden in Albina Park. We had our last hot meal - a warmed-up plate of Pine State cafe' biscuits-and-gravy and some day-old Starbucks dark roast drip coffee - two days ago. Word is that an elite Antifa bicycle-troop strike force used their stealthy nonmotorized stealthiness to ambush our resupply convoy as it left the rest area outside Wilsonville and was trapped in the usual traffic jam at the Boone Bridge.

 

I can't describe the awfull Hellscape that is war-ravaged Portland. There are actual hippies here! Hippies! Long hair! Bellbottoms! Pachouli! Feminists...my Lord, the unshaved armpits that are are terrifying in their contempt for patriarchical standards!

 

We will not abandon the good people of this beleaguered city without doing our utmost to Make Portland Great Again!

 

Yours in Trump:

Caleb

 

It's time for me to write another of those "Acting 1SG Lawes" things again, innit?

Well....fuck.

 

H&I Mission

One of the now-long-forgotten Army things is the "harassment and interdiction" mission. This Texas A&M site sums up this artillery technique as it was used in Vietnam; "(unobserved fire which) engaged suspected targets with no more than a few rounds fired at random intervals throughout the night, and sometimes during the day."

My understanding is that a typical H&I target would have been a crossroads, or some similar linear intersection (bridge, paddy dikes, treelines), where the local S-2 thought that Charlie would be using to move around.

As the A&M site points out, while this sort of shooting could have been at least plausibly effective in a war where you had "enemy" roads, or crossroads, or bridges, doing this in a notional ally's house? NOT a very good idea. Your chance of blowing away some random villager was so high as to be nearly unavoidable compared to the likelihood of catching the NVA 309C Division in the middle of an admin move. 

Anyway, I don't have anything momentous to discuss. I'm threading my way through the Yarmouk references with the idea of getting something out before the end of September. What I really want to do is travel back in time and grab Abdallāh al-Azdī al-Baṣrī by the stacking swivel and choke him until he got a fucking editor! Dude! Seriously! I get that early Arabic writers were mostly in it for the poetry (that's the c.w. on a lot of early Islamic "historians" all the way up to Ottoman times, as I kept encountering writing up Constantinople 1453 and Vienna), but this is ridiculous.

In the meantime I didn't want to leave this joint untenanted, so...

First a quick personal note.

Had kind of a scare the other week. Sight went out temporarily in one eye. No more than three or four minutes, but the doc checked my blood pressure and things there were not good, so off to E.R. I went for the full meal; CT scan, EKG, blood work, all of it.

The end result was:
1) No idea about the vision, even after numerous pokes and peeks at the eye clinic. The term "ocular migrane" was tossed about but in truth nobody really knows.
2) I'm now on BP meds. So far, better, but not perfect. Need to drop weight, too. That'll be fun.

Other than that, the second creature to find itself in trouble was the big fig tree out by the back sideyard...

This thing was a cute little sapling when Mojo bought the house more than twenty years ago. Nobody here really likes figs, so it was just kind of an unminded but seasonally-messy nuisance for much of the ensuing couple of decades...until it got freaking huge. It shaded out the whole back yard, dropped fruit (which was now too high to pick) all through the autumn that drew crowds of aggressive yellowjackets, and we generally a nuisance.

So we lopped the bulk of the thing down:

But there we were stuck.

A handsaw worked well enough for the upper parts of the trunks. But the lower? Yike. That meant power.

Chainsaw power, to be precise.

So off to the local rental store and back with a nifty little electric saw that proceeded to take the bulk of the damn thing down to the ground...

...where I then applied the 21st Century version of the Roman Plow; a full bottle of Round-Up poured directly over the remains.

That will probably have to be repeated several more times this year - the sonofabitch is full of vitality and has already shrugged off a soaking with this poison.

But who's higher on the evolutionary scale, goddamnit. Two of us enter, one's gonna leave, and it ain't you, tree.

Let's see...what else should I send a round out at..?

Oh, yeah; this thing turned up in the World's Worst Newspaper the other day:

Tl:dr, the minor league ballclub that plays out on Portland's western 'burbs is being held up by the big leagues' ploy to extort more money out of the little communities where they play. The bigs are forcing their minor league slaves to force their local governments to pay for ballfields or lose their teams.

Some guy named Knudsen has a nice little takedown of this extortion racket. Keep in mind that, as he mentions, 1) the current minor league ballpark is only ten years old, that it 2) has the capacity for over 4,000 fans, and 3) typical crowds at these Hillsboro team games runs about half that, at best.

So Oram is all in on getting tax dollars for this gimmick.

Which is insane, given that supposedly we can't afford to get our hoboes into apartments or keep our junkies from scaring the normies, but which is also business as usual for the whole sports-owners-and-politicians-frolic-through-the-public-trough tradition.

I'm hoping that the gang over at Field of Schemes will have more on this disgrace before the City Fathers out in Hillsboro can start backing up the dump truck full of cash to the loading dock at Tonking Field.

And speaking of politicians and cash...

Oregon's governor has muscled into the homeless "crisis", shaking out a "task force" that's supposed to provide recommendations on how to rid the parks and streets frequented by the Good People of Portland of smelly poor people.

The whole business is secret, run as a private meeting because it's working under the local business alliance. Many of the usual non-profit and non-commercial suspects (i.e. organizations that work with or advocate for homeless people) are shut out.

My guess is that the business people will recommend the usual - more sweeps, more laws, more jails, more shelters - instead of the simple and practical solution: "tax rich people and businesses, fund jobs programs and cheap housing". That's how these characters usually roll; it's never worked before. That's never stopped them. I trust that the latest round of political circle-jerking will produce nothing practical.

I've seldom been disappointed.

And speaking of politicians living down to their expectations...

Dahlia Lithwick has a good piece at Slate (paywalled, I think, but if you don't go there often I think you can get it free...) that points out how fucked we are because Mittens is as "good" as it gets in the GQP and he's exactly the sniveling piece of pond scum you'd think if you remember his presidential run.

Bottom line? He wants a tongue bath for saying mean things about Tubby...while doing nothing substantial to interfere with all the shit Tubby and his cult are doing. Tax cuts for richies? Sure! Privatize? He's all in! Fuck the poor and the sick? Anytime! 

Oh, and speaking of shitheels...

Here's the thing about this.

First, Boebert is an asshole. Not because of who she is but because of what she does in Congress. This idiocy doesn't change that.

Second, though, is that this says something truly sad about her intelligence.

Because I love Broadway. I've been to two big touring musicals in the past several years; Wicked, back in 2021, and Hadestown this past year. Both wonderful, both memorable, both parts of my life I'll treasure.

Both expensive as a sonofabitch.

I took the Girl, and for both shows we had orchestra side-aisle seats, and for both the seats ran something like $150-$200 each. IIRC orchestra center seats ran $200-300 and up, first balcony and boxes even more - $400-500? Anyway...a LOT of money.

Point is, this isn't 1984, when I could drop into the TKTS booth in Times Square and nick a Sweeney Todd seat for thirty bucks. Musical theater is a big-money event, and tickets are hard to get.

To go to a big Broadway show to vape and grab ass? To be obnoxious to the point where you geet kicked out?

That's just fucking bone stupid. You might as well just set fire to a pile of twenties.

I mean...copping feels in a dark theater is a great tradition...for the matinee of Weekend at Bernie's.

I'm not blaming the woman for being an idiot.

I blame her voters for electing the dumb fuck.

And here we all are.

Jesus wept.

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.

The State of THE Union, 2022

Like any good American, I started this with a long post al about memememememeMEEEEE! because that's who we are. Americans, the People of the Ego. It's ALL about us, speshul snowflakes that we are.

Which, I should add, goes a hell of a long way to explaining WHERE we are and how we got there.

But that's part and parcel of this post, about the city and state and country I (and many of you...) are living in. 

Let's start local; Portland.

I wish I had a nickel for every "OMFG! Portland is OVER!!!" I've read in everything from the local digital fishwrap (since I can't recall the last time I saw an actual dead-tree Oregonian) to national opinion columns. This assessment seems to rest largely on two pillars:
1) The 2020 protests, and
2) the "homeless crisis".

Those, in turn, seem to come from, in order:

1) The reporting on the protests that made it sound like all of the city was in flames because a six- or eight-block area around the courtshouse/Central Precinct cop-shop were Ground Zero for the combat between Portland Police Bureau (and, later, a trashbag assortment of federal cops and cop-like entities...) and people who don't much like Portland Police Bureau. And

2) The frequent, highly visible, presence of homeless people in almost every public space from parks to streets to open waste ground.

Let's take them apart.

The first is pretty simple; Portland is always been a pretty shitty town to not be a straight white guy. And Portland cops - who have always been, like most Portlanders, white - tend be shitty; shitty cops, for one, and shitty people in general.

I mean, you kind of have to be sort of an asshole to be or want to be a cop to begin with. Your job, how you earn your living, is mostly going to involve pushing people around, as well as constantly dealing with shitty, awful people, or people who are having a bad day, or troubled people, or insane people, or just people who are looking for trouble.

Throw in that your job also involves making sure that the Good People - that is, the nice, well-bred, wealthy people who largely pay your wages - aren't bothered by Those People. And that our country's history and many of our institutions ensure that Those People are somewhat darker-colored than the Good People.

Means that you stand s pretty good chance of coming off like a racist bastard even if you aren't personally...

(hint; that's what "Critical Race Theory" pretty much predicts - that we've set things up, even here in "liberal" Portland - so that the effect of the Law In It's Impartial Majesty has the effect of making huge swathes of the U.S. being effectively pretty goddamn racist...)

...which, so far as we can tell, a hell of a lot of Portland coppers are when they're being honest with themselves. And as the link shows; the PPB knows they're hiring these freikorps wannabees and don't care. They just send them out to fuck with the people that you'd expect an American Nazi to fuck with.

So you had a perfect shitstorm; Portlanders - sick and tired of being pushed around by blue bastards and angry because the resurgent Republican "fuck you, I'm a racist Nazi bastard, what you gonna do about that?" crew of Proud Boys, Threepers, and Oathers had been goose-stepping through downtown with the ostentatiously visible love and tongue-bathing of said blue bastards - finally snapped.

And the result was - if you knew Portland coppers - depressingly predictable; the coppers ran wild bashing, macing, and arresting everyone. 

And what happened after that?

Nothing.

Nothing was done to make the Portland cops less shitty, so they're still the same bunch of gormless freikorps-fondling fucksticks they've always been, and nothing was done to make things better for the people they constantly fuck with, Portlandrs of color, the mentally troubled, and the homeless.

But - here's the thing that makes the whole "Portland, it's SO over" bullshit bullshit - it was just downtown, and just a tiny part of downtown, at that.

It didn't make Portland better.

But it didn't make Portland any worse, either. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of Portland and Portlanders had no contact with and were not impacted by the protests or the cop response.

The "reporting" was copaganda crap, and if you believed the reporting you were being played for a fool.

And the "Portland is Over" line is a constant stream of wingnut projectile vomit spewed (mostly) by the "People for Portland" gang responsible for the ads like the one at the top of this section. These jokers want to put the "rich, the well-born, and the able" higher on top and are using this ooga-booga scare noise to try and do it.

They're hard at work state-wide, too, but we'll get to that in a bit.

Now.

Homelessness.

This one is a subject that's hard for me to be objective about, because my part of Portland, North, seems to be overrun with people living in tents amid mountains of trash and shit, or in trashed-out campers parked in our little residential streets.

Plus we had our very own homeless crazy lady parked in our little street, screaming and muttering, taking her clothing off...

(the morning I found her at the bottom of our steps, smoking - and how the fuck do you afford smokes at fifteen bucks a pack or whatever they cost now if you're a jobless homeless crazy lady? - and muttering between bouts of begging remains a pretty memorable one. I asked her to go smoke somewhere else, please, and was met with a screech of nuttiness that culminated in her proclamation that Jesus (her nuttiness had a strong religious taint) wanted me to see her tits and her yanking up her grubby clothing so I could. Let's just say that I'd have appreciated Jesus' ideas more had said tits been both cleaner and more attractive...)

...who had my daughter, in particular, massively creeped out for weeks.

Like a hell of a lot of Portlanders, I'm heartily sick of being run out of our own public spaces by reeking piles of trash and whacked-out campers. Tired of having anything moveable stolen, of having parked cars broken into, of being unable to visit parks and trails without stepping around discarded tweaker trash and soiled underwear.

I just want the problems to go away.

But - and this is what makes this whole thing a lot less simple than "exterminate the brutes" - I also realize the "problems" are other human beings trying to make human lives for themselves.

This isn't some sort of mindless orkish horde invading our city. 

The people making this happen are just people. Some are troubled - with addition, with mental or emotional problems - but a hell of a lot, probably most are just poor and down on their luck in - and this is the most important part - a town that has done nothing and worse than nothing to provide actual places for poor, down on their luck people to live.

It's not fucking rocket science.

Portland, like a lot of the rest of this country, has too few places for poor people to live.

Seriously.

That's it.

It's hard to be poor and find a place to live because your supposed fellow-Americans have either made it hard to find places for poor people to live, or don't care.

Sure, a handful of the people living in the tent camps along the Cut would need more even if you got them into a little house or an apartment. Counseling. Medical care. Social interventions of various sorts.

But a hell of a lot would simply need a home and a decent job and a way to get there and back.

We the Good People aren't doing anything to help with the home. 

We're not doing anything to help with the job. 

And we're sure as hell not doing anything about the "getting there and back" think with our bad-and-getting-worse transit.

What's frustrating as hell to me is that it's pretty simple.

You change the zoning laws and subsidize (or force) building houses and apartments poor people can afford.

You subsidize - or just create - work that poor people can do that pays them enough to afford that housing.

You create enough bus and trolley and train routes to get people to their jobs and back home (since if you're poor all you can afford is a beater piece-of-shit car and those are less reliable and worse for everyone than a bus ride).

You pay for people to help where it's needed; physical and mental health care workers, counselors, addition care people.

And you tax the rich fucks and their businesses to pay for it all.

Will that "solve" homelessness and the attendant problems?

No.

Will it improve the situation, probably immensely?

Yes.

Will it happen?

No. The Portland City government has already given up trying anything but force, might, beatings. The "homeless sweeps" are the "answer", so the City has directed the coppers (see above...) and the city cleanup crews to chase the poor bastards from one place to another.

Like so much else in the U.S. circa 2022, there's an obvious social, political, and economic solution to an obvious social, political, or economic problem.

But because the solution would require Americans to abandon their prejudices and make hard choices and financial sacrifices, they won't even be seriously discussed, let along tried. 

Take all this larger, and you've got the same problems.

Oregon has a bunch of red-state wingnuts roaming the less paved parts of the state.

Do they have answers to these problems outside of blabbering about illegal aliens and woke capitalism?

Don't make me laugh.

Instead they want to join their fellow wingnazis in Idaho. That pretty much tells you about the condition of Oregon's goober politics.

The country at large?

The United States has a massive, indigestible minority - something between a quarter and two-fifths of the country - that want caudillo-style dictatorship if the alternative is not getting all the guns, Jesus, tax cuts, and ability to call people they don't like rude names they want.

They're not going to change. Nothing that we've seen proving the unparalleled shittiness of Republican "policy" (such as it is other than "whatever Donald Trump wants me to suck...") or the hammering that Republican governance will give anyone not in a two-yacht family will persuade them to back anyone other than the reddest of red-meat Bircher Trumpkins.

The institutions and political structures that empower these hayshaking fucksticks mean that they can rule the rest of us unless the other three-fifths of the country 1) gets off their collective dead ass and 2) votes against every one of these C.H.U.D.s...and this is a country where barely two-thirds of the eligible population bothers to even show up in the most important elections.

They have a gajillion reasons, from ignorance to indifference to actual "reasons" (my personal favorite being libertarians, who seem to think that the opposite of "government regulation" is "freedom" and not "rule of the most rapacious and powerful wealthy individuals and groups") but the overall effect is, again, to put these well-funded, rabidly active, right-wing nuts in power.

I have no idea what the hell you do about this.

It's not like the danger is hard to see. It's right fucking there, the iceberg not on a cold dark night but in broad daylight, visible for miles ahead. And yet the fucking U.S.S. Titanic seems determined to ram the goddamn thing, maybe just to see if letting these gomers put a massive hole in the Republic's hull will fucking sink it.

Maybe just for shits and giggles.

Either way?

Pretty soon we're going to have to decide, those of us non-wingnut, whether to bend the knee to these fuckers, or fight.

The only question is how willing I am to die on my feet.

Because when your country becomes Bosnia, you have no other choices.

At ease, cats. Back to grim politics.

By now you've probably all heard about the Antifa/New Black Panther riots savaging my city, and held in check only by the mad riot control skilz of Portland Police Bureau and their support echelons from the Federal Agencies That Shall Not Be Named. As you know, we white folks are huddled in our basements, eyes red from the tear gas smoke, dreading the knock that means the BLM Revolutionary Guard has arrived to deliver swift and final Social Justice.

It's true. It's all true, and I have pictures to prove it.

See? There he is! There's 's the black-clad Antifa terrorist, surveying the site of his next atrocity.

It's hell, I tell you, a dystopian hellscape, the American Carnage our President warned us about three years and more ago. We're all doomed.

Ooookay, now, let's quit kidding around and talk some simple facts.

No, there's no mad riots going on downtown. No, there's nothing that Trumpy and the Junior Freikorps need to "save" us from. He's full of shit, they're full of shit, and the Portland Police Bureau is, as usual, full of shit.

No, here's what's going on:

That's the "Wall of Moms" confronting our heroic Law Enforcement Heroes with...a lullaby.

So of course the fucking cops and feds shot them with tear gas and flashbangs.

Here's what you need to know about Portland cops; they're shit, and they've been shit for decades.

Triggerhappy? Check. Racist? Check. Brutal n' stupid? Check. Nazis? Ummm...yeah. That, too; a Portland copper who had a Hitler fetish back when he was a sergeant in the Nineties and Oughts? He made Captain by the mid-teens when his youthful Nazi...ummm..."indiscretions" were erased in 2014. He retired/ with a full pension and some sort of cop medal, presumably to go with his Iron Cross.

So people here in Portland are reeeeally sick and tired of these worthless coppers. We'd like them to be less stupid, brutal, racist, and generally worthless, but we'll settle for burning the fucking plague ship to the waterline, hull and sticks, so something more useful could be built in it's place.

That's why we're SO done with them.

I'm not sure what Trump and his cosplay Guardia Civil want, but my guess is just red meat for the base. He's completely screwed the COVID pooch, so he needs to distract the rubes from the fact their kids are wheezing and Gamma's dead...so, look! Antifa! Ooh! Bad! Scary! Evil!

On the other hand...there is a precedent for this sort of damn thing, paramilitaries doing the dirty work the caudillo can't trust the police or the Army to do for him. The brownshirts - and before them, the real freikorps, in Germany and the blackshirts in Italy. The "dignity battalions" in Panama. AAA in Argentina.

These feds don't have the sack to bring on the Ford Falcons. Yet.

But if you're a small-r republican, you should be alarmed and infuriated that your supposed republic is flirting with making it's very own little Falangist Civil Guard.

I sure as hell am.

But, sadly...I'm too old , too slow, and too liable to the plague to be out there beside the Moms. So you're not going to read a "Letter from Wapato Jail" from me anytime soon. I'll stay boring and safe in my little house in my little job doing my boring little things.

Just wishing the moms and them the best of luck. It's not that I don't WANT to be out there.

Because fuck the worthless goddamn Portland Police Bureau and all its works.

And - this is a larger political point worth making here - it's really time to break up the damn "Department of Homeland Security" (and as an aside I think we can all agree that "Heimatsicherheitsdienst" sounds better in the original German) and restore it's Frankenstein parts back to their original pieces; FEMA to, well, FEMA. The Coast Guard to Transportation. Customs back to Customs, The INS back to Justice (or, better yet, to Labor where it really belongs).

There's no real reason for this monster to exist other than the stupidity and panic that resulted from 9/11. In it's existing condition it is entirely too useful for some Mussolini wannabe like Trump to turn into his goon squad, and it's too sprawling to be useful for actual "security", as the recent goon squad adventures in my hometown show quite plainly.

So while I hunker down in North Portland, let's all see about defunding the damn Portland cop and dismembering the damn DHS.

Time and past time, I'd say...

Chaincicle

We're still thawing out from the icy depths of Icepocalypse 2016.

It's hard to decide which is sadder; the insane panic that hits this burg every time it snows, or the way that everybody in this burg seems to completely forget what they learned about what happens every time it snows. Until the next time.

For Whom the Excavator Tolls...

Once upon a time, away back in 2007, I wrote a post about the sidewalk corners here in North Portland and how cool they are.

The coolness, what there is, comes from the metal curb covers, artifacts of the horse-drawn wagon days when a sensible municipality provided some protection from the hard wear of the metal wagon-wheel rims at the most likely place for those rims to run up over the softer concrete curbs.

But in these gentler days the need for protection from steel wheels is much less than the need for people who can't walk to get up and down from the sidewalk to cross the street. Hence the gradual replacement of the old steel-rim corners with ADA-standard ramp corners.

The City of Portland has been working its way northwest over the past several months, and just last week we saw the first indication that our old corners are not long for this world.

My kiddos, slaves to the wheel that they are, are very excited about this change for the ease it will provide for cycling and scootering.

I'm resigned but still a trifle saddened. I understand why the change is a good idea but will miss the steel guards, a piece of the physical reality that was Portland in the Teens and 1920's, a steel-and-concrete artifact that have seen almost a century of the people and their passage that make up the city I love.

Oz by night

Since the whackos are out shooting up the mall we decided to play it safe and spend one of our rare rainless December evenings at Zoolights.

Unsurprisingly the kiddos love this Portland Yuletide macguffin. And I have to admit that these nocturnal admissions are the better of the times I've spent with them there.

The thing is, I still can't get around zoos as animal prisons.

All the lockdown behaviors; the pacing, the self-soothing stuff like rocking and repetitive motion, the compulsive grooming...they're all there. I hate seeing these creatures slowing going mad in their miniscule "habitats".

At least tonight the only critters in evidence were the elephants, who were pacing their way-too-small prison yard as always, and the sea otter who was doing rather the same thing only underwater. The sea lions, who usually swim compulsive laps in their tiny tank, were asleep.

This stuff bugs me and I'm never sure how much to talk about it with the kiddos. I think that they would understand, and yet, they genuinely love animals and love the zoo animals in particular. I think that it would hurt their hearts if they recognized their animal friends as desperate convicts locked in stir 24/7. And yet...there they are.

The Zoolights enable us to visit with as little exposure to the convicts as possible, and the light display really is beautiful and creative. The kiddos were sweet, oohed and aahed over the pretty lights, thoroughly enjoyed an illicit late-evening french fry gorge, and even managed to be decent about the loud crowd of Blazer fans on the MAX train-ride back to the parking space.

Now everyone is tucked soundly in bed dreaming of tomorrow, the last day of school for two whole weeks.

But I'm still awake, seeing in my mind's eye the elephants relentlessly pacing in the dark; back and forth, back and forth, their heavy feet falling again and again, soundlessly taking the measure of despair in the cold damp night.

Nibbled by Goats, Gored by Steers

My beloved Timbers are not having a good July.

First the original first-division coach got the sack a couple of weeks back.

That wasn't entirely unexpected. John Spencer, good man that I believe he was, simply wasn't coaching for the 21st Century. His "tactics" seemed to be designed to see how much like the St. Mirren side that barely avoided relegation to Scottish Division 2 in 1963 we could play. Direct, naive, crude...that was Spenny. Nice guy; funny commercial. Just not ready for U.S. first-division prime-time.

But...

His replacement was this guy.

I'd watched Gavin Wilkinson coach the USL Timbers back when we were in the Second Division. He was, fundamentally, Spencer with 90% fewer overlapping fullback runs. Crude? Yep, he was crude. Direct? Like a 2 by 4 upside the head his teams were direct.

So when the owner put him in place of Spencer I have to admit that my hopes weren't...high.

But I really didn't expect anything like this.

Or - worse - this.

As I've written before this; the 2012 season looks to be a truly awful one for the Timbers and, therefore, for us, their fans.

Now let me say this; I still love my Timbers. There's a song we sing after the enemy scores; "Rose City 'Til I Die, Rose City 'Til I Die, I Know I Am, I'm Sure I Am, Rose City 'Til I Die."

And that's how it is; win or lose, I and the other true supporters I know will be there singing for the Boys, for brighter and better days. We have to hope and believe that those days will come.

But it hurts. It hurts to see them play like this.

Onward, Rose City!

Umm...is the liability insurance paid up..?

Went to "Oregonlive" and there's the next-door neighbor of a gentleman whose porch and deck we designed a pile wall to support talking about the landslide that's washing her back yard down the hill;Landslide at Oaks Bottom - Video | OregonLive.com

This sort of thing is what keeps geotechnical engineers up at night, attorneys in business, and homeowners wondering why the hell they bother to buy insurance - since you can't beat an insurance agent hard enough to make him offer you landslide coverage.It's just a tough deal all around.

View from the Bluff

Just finished a couple of cold, rainy days drilling on something called "Oaks Bluff" down in Sellwood.I like Sellwood, one of Portland's older "inner suburbs", much like my own St. Johns. Like St. Johns, Sellwood was a pioneer town in the Portland basin, founded by one John Sellwood, an Episcopalian divine who wandered here in the Earlies and got himself a Donation Land Claim, one of those nifty deals that let you grab up a couple hundred acres or three of rich Oregon bottomland if you got here ahead of everyone else.

Well, except this pesky injuns, but the smallpox and forty-rod'll see them sorted.

Anyway, Sellwood has been absorbed by Portland...

(just as an aside here, I often wonder why the City of Portland doesn't simply move out to the northwest and swallow up the remainder of Multnomah County that lies down the Columbia from the city. As you can see from the map Portland - the red bit - sits smack in the middle with the bulk of unincorporated Multnomah County lies east of the Sandy River, predominantly the Cascade foothills and the western Columbia Gorge along with various little towns such as Dodson, Cascade Locks, and Corbett. The west County is scraps and bits, with the largest single piece the eastern half of Sauvie Island but nost of the rest tiny assarts in Forest Park and oddball little cul-de-sacs between the City and Washington County to the southwest. The City could annex the west County and become the City and County of Portland, and Multnomah County would consist of the eastern part, all the countrified parts. If I was the mayor, I'd go for it. Perhaps it's just as well I'm not, then...)

...and become a pleasant little neighborhood, partly residential and partly semi-trendy little shops in a very Portland-y sort of locals-only kind of way.Mojo's Valentine's present, for example, was a gift card from "Sock Dreams"; only in Portland, and especially in Sellwood, do you get a funky little shop that sells only footwear, from toe socks through cashmere all the way to flirty stockings.

So it wasn't a bad thing, working along the bluff overlooking Oaks Bottom. It's not often that you get to work and watch a bald eagle worrying away at the carp it hooked out of the pond nearby.The days were an amalgam of a Portland February, going from a dim overcast to driving rain and wind, back to high clouds broken by a sunny ten minute springtime, before returning to the mizzling rain. The weather kept the crowds indoors but Portland in winter means rain, and Portlanders still venture out in it, layered in fleece and gore-tex in pairs and alone.

And their dogs, do, too. One of the less pleasant aspects of the trail down Oaks Bluff was the quantity and distribution of used dog food. I once thought that I lived near the Pacific Northwest Strategic Dogshit Reserve, but after two days observing the carelessness with which Sellwood deals with its dog's eggs I'm tempted to race out to McKenna Park up here and roll about in the fetid grass in apology to North Portland's dogs and dog owners. We are paragons by comparison.So the dog plop, and the irking unconcern with which the owners let their dumb chums race about the wildlife area; whilst I'm sure that every doggie mommy and daddy think that they and their furbaby are Portland's Speshul Snowflakes there's about a fucking bajillion mutts running around the Rose City - our parks overflow with them - and only about a dozen bald eagles. You get the rest of the parks, nature preserves, and soccer fields. Oaks Bottom is supposed to be for the wild things.

The wild things were out and about, too, even in the rain. Busy flocks of bushtits, chickadees, and kinglets - the small canopy skulkers that band together in the winter to forage - rioted through the treetops which, given the steep slope, were at eye level with us. Comorants and herons hunted the pond, geese browsed the fields. Even the park squirrels seemed a little more untamed than our NoPo powerline wire-walkers.Another Portlander was out for a walk today, dressed in the usual layers of warm and waterproof, noticible only by her somewhat odd and deliberate pace. Her movement caught my eye but I couldn't see anything to explain the careful way she moved until her path turned along the base of the bluff and she came close enough that I could tell that whilst from the ankles up she was well-protected against the cold rain below that she was completely naked.

It takes a rare and hardy soul to stroll barefoot about Portland in February; inside my insulated, steel-toed boots and wool socks my feet were cold just looking at hers. But she trod along, placing her bare soles down in a manner appropriately cautious in a public place known to contain broken bottle-glass, metal bits, and discarded junkies' works along with the more common if more odiferous unscooped poop. She seemed very confident that her barefoot march would not end badly, and I was fascinated enough to watch her out of sight; she walked unscathed out of my view.We finished our work, wrestled the small drilling rig, the power generator, augers, buckets, the wheelbarrow full of tools and wherewithal down the switchbacks at the end of the trail and out onto the flat, loaded the truck, and the drillers drove off down the muddy track to leave me to climb slowly back up to Sellwood in the early-gathering dark.