"Siri, what killed the most U.S. soldiers in the final year of World War 1?"

 

Asking for this dumbfuck:

Mind you, this fits with this overpromoted dumbass' worldview, where pushups always trump logistics (yswidt) and military learning. 

His abysmal ignorance of why the US military has been aggressive about things like preventive medicine, field sanitation and hygiene since 1941 explains a lot (tho this jackass is on record boasting that he doesn't wash his hands after dumping a load, so YMMV...).

I wrote a whole series on "The Imperial Japanese Army in WW2: What Went Wrong", and one of the single biggest failures that hammered the 大日本帝國陸軍, Dai-Nippon Teikoku Rikugun was the whole manly-man/bushido cult of warriorness that neglected beans and bullets for swords and spirit. 

The notion that somehow a poorly-supplied, under-resourced and -armed fighting force would beat more logistically and tactically competent enemies because of some sort of mystical whatever-the-Japanese-is for "cult of the badass"?

That's our boy!

So when I see stuff like this sad Fourth Gulf War Navy chow:

 

I think, yep, that's Major Pushups at work.

If the present Administration has a constant through-line, it's that if you can think up some way to do the dumbest thing possible in the clumsiest, most ridiculous way, the Trump people will find some thing that is so much more idiotic to fuck up in a way so ludicrous that you would dismiss it as an improbable fiction? That's what they'll do.

If it wasn't that innocent people will be hurt and killed by this dumbfuckery I'd just laugh.

Instead it makes me so goddamn furious I long for a sharp knife and their throats. 

Treason doth not prosper

So my (vaxxed, boosted, very-careful-about-masking-in-crowds) friend has the 'rona.

Most likely because someone in the group they met with last weekend had "just a sniffle", didn't mask, didn't stay home, and now has succeeded in dosing them and two others in the group (and probably more who will come back hot in the next couple of days).

Which is a reminder, in case the current U.S. House majority, and the previous Administration, aren't vivid enough warnings, of what my old drill sergeant used to tell us; that the success of our mission depended on the competence of the stupidest person in our unit.

In any group, or any nation, success depends on either those people being 1) willing to learn how to be minimally functional, or 2) being safely sidelined so their incompetence is immaterial to the mission, or 3) being shitcanned entirely. 

The sort of people who infected my friend are and are not likely to be either 1 or 2, and we've given up on number 3.

And I have no idea how we can change that short of an extinction-level crisis like the Great Depression, or a global war that either 1) pulls the general public's collective head out of it's collective ass, or 2) makes the douchenozzles like Republicans (in the Thirties) or fascists (in the Forties) so loathsome that even the morons refuse to touch them and confine their moronity to stuff like pro wrestling.

Especially now, now that Republicans ARE fascists and antivaxxers and QANuts, too?

And some forty percent of the public and the mass media refuses to be honest about that or call them what they are, or despise and shun them for it?

I'm kind of worried about how we move on from there.

And speaking of people doing fucked up things...

I didn't write anything on the second anniversary of January Treason

Mostly because that fucking ship has sailed, hit a sunken rock, capsized, caught fire, exploded, and sank.

The traitors are now a majority in one house of Congress. They - the leaders of the betrayal - paid no price for their treason. 

The goon squads that actually did their dirty work ran off afterwards and had to be slowly, imperfectly tracked down (and largely - to the extent they were - only because some of them took videos and posted to Twitter of them doing a criminal fuckin' conspiracy. Stupid people, right..?)

While in Brazil...

...their own home-grown traitors tried the same shit just now.

It's worth noting that in Brasilia hundreds of these gomers left, not rolling their coal or waving their treason flags but in zip-ties and police vans. The Brazilian Supreme Court has issued warrants for several higher-ups, including a police colonel, who were part of the inside job.

This is Brazil, a barely-Second-World nation without the sort of massive police organization that exists here in the U.S., that managed to put the collar on these dirtbags. 

We'll see if they follow through with crushing the head of the Bolsonario snake, as we should have done with the MAGAts on January 7, 2021.

But We the People already look pathetic in that Brazil, with its long and woeful history of dictatorships and coups, has been harder on their present traitors that we have been on ours, on every level from vaccination to drag queens to actual rebellion.

Whether it's as big as treason against the nation or as small as giving other people your fucking disease, I can only say this again:

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

I have SO fucking had it with these people

 So there's not a lot I can do with this damn knee. I can't drive, so I'm locked within the distance I can walk. And I can't walk very far, so I'm pretty much under house arrest. And I can't sit up for long without the damn thing swelling up and bitching at me.

So I spend a lot of time sprawled out on the couch or the bed; reading, cruising the 'Net, dozing or sleeping. It's about as fucking mind-bendingly boring as you'd think, so when there is something to do, I'm all about it.

Yesterday (Saturday) evening the Portland Thorns soccer team was scheduled to play the Washington club here at 7:30. I'm still too banjaxed to go in person (and, frankly, even with the club requiring proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test, not all that excited about mobbing up with people...) but I was really looking forward to enjoying a couple of hours of soccer and cheering for my club over the screen in my lap...until I went to the club site and was met with this:

It turns out the the visitors had a teensy-weensy little pathogen problem:

"Spirit have 4 positive COVID cases; multiple sources also tell me that the club has “multiple” unvaccinated players. One source said # as high as 8."

So. Here's the thing.

NWSL teams roster between 22 and 24 players. So assuming the high end number is correct, a third of the roster is unprotected against the Plague at a time when vaccination doses are aging out for a lack of willing arms to receive them.

Think about that.

A business that is a part of a public accommodation industry - an entertainment or hospitality business that is centered around hosting the public - has not required it's employees to meet the most fundamental of public health measures; preventing or slowing the spread of disease when preventive measures are easily available and free. And the employees have refused to voluntarily meet that simple and logical standard.

As a result the other party, the business that has been responsible (the Thorns roster and staff are fully vaccinated) has lost a massive chunk of revenue and has been put at a competitive disadvantage by having to reschedule this game. And thousands of people like me are out their ticket costs.

Which is better, mind you, than having these disease-riddled harridans show up and breathe the Plague all over everyone.

But.

Here's the thing.

I'm sure that these players had all the usual bullshit excuses. Muh freedums! Don't know what's in it! God will protect me! Personal choice!

To which I simply reply:

You're running a public business that relies on public health measures. You're a restaurant, and an inspection finds that a third of your kitchen staff refuses to wash their hands after taking a dump?

You get shut down. Period. No explanations needed, no excuses accepted.

No health inspector would buy your bullshit that God protects you from getting shit in the food. Or that it's your choice. Or "freedom!" means you get to decide whether to follow simple basic public health regulations.

Kitchen closed. Boom.

And yet...because a bunch of lunatic QANuts and Three Percenters and Republicans and antivaxxers have decided to make "I will wash my hands after taking a shit" into a political issue, the rest of us are supposed to humor these fucking ninnies and accept losing our time and money and health and, possibly, our lives.

I lived with a lurking sort of low-grade fear, like the point man in an ambush terrain, for over a year until I could get vaccinated. It's hard to explain just how liberating that two-weeks-past-the-second-Pfizer moment felt. Finally! I had my MRAP. I had my mine plow! I could look forward to a normal life again. Yay, medicine!

Boy howdy, was I fucking wrong.

I'm SO fucking done with these people.

There's lots of other reasons to be done with them, too. But this - this idiotic demand that the rest of us go live in the QAnon Bronze Age with them when there's an actual modern world just over there - this just sends me into a flame of utter rage. Like the Emperor Caligula I can only wish that they all had one neck so I could choke the life out of them and move on with all the other, less easily solvable, problems we should be dealing with.

But no. And here we are.

Into the minefield, ready or not

 Ah, yes…vaccination.

Y’know, I’m absolutely pleased that my son can have at least some of his senior year back at Roosevelt.

I’m excited that my daughter can see her freshman friends again.

I’m very, very glad that my wife working as the school secretary at Astor Elementary is fully vaccinated against the return of students.

So it’s difficult to express how absolutely, completely, incandescently furious I am that within a month these three will be returning home from interacting with who knows how many COVID-infected randos and bringing who knows how massive a viral load to me, who at 63 is NOT vaccinated and, more to the point, cannot GET vaccinated in time to escape the path through this fucking plague pit because my state government apparently considers me expendable if it means getting the schools open.

At least when I was a GI the Army got me a yellow fever shot before sending me out into the mosquito-infested cuna grass.

I checked everywhere. Under 65? Nope. "Multigenerational household"? Nope. There's just no route for me to get protected from this goddamn disaster. I just have to hope like hell my family doesn't bring home a round for the revolver as we begin to play "COVID Roulette" or dance to "The NoPo Minefield Tango"

I don’t expect anyone in the state government to do anything to help me protect myself, since they obviously knew this would happen when they reopened the schools in March rather than next fall and decided in a very Trumpy way that satisfying the people who have been grousing about online teaching (which DOES suck, I get that...) was worth people like me “taking the (fucking) punch”.

But it doesn’t make me any less furious at the whole pack of sonsofbitches that after nearly a year of me being extra careful and doing all the right public health things I was asked to do that this fucking COVID crapshoot is their gift to me.

Sorry. I’m more than a bit irked with my supposed “leaders” at the moment.

Now and then

Well worth reading discussion of the similarities and differences between the current pandemic and the previous one here.

"It’s really remarkable to me that the flu of a century killed 675,000 Americans out of a population of 110 million, meaning that roughly works out to the 2.2 million upper range guess of projections for COVID-19 by proportion of the population. And yet, the cultural response to it was primarily to shrug our collective shoulders and get on with our lives. It wasn’t total ignorance that created that situation. Some communities did engage in effective quarantining, for instance, and there were real death rate differentials between them. But to my knowledge anyway, sports weren’t cancelled. The World Series went on as normal (and quite famously in 1919!). There was no effective government response at the federal level."

One point I will take issue with, however, is this:

"Basically, what has changed is us. We see ourselves as something closer to immortal today." (emphasis mine) "The only two health crises even close to the flu between then and now were polio and HIV and those are very different types of events. Polio’s transformation into something much more powerful than in the past definitely scared lots and lots and lots of people, but what could you really do? AIDS certainly frightened many, but it was also classified as gay cancer early on and Reagan was happy to let them all die until his buddy Rock Hudson fell to the disease.

We have a culture of immortality. That’s not a bad thing. Science has advanced so far. We think we can protect ourselves from the outside world through eating and exercise and medicine. To an extent, we can. Even though COVID-19 has hit very old people in nursing homes and those with co-morbidities much harder than most people, it’s seen as an unimaginable tragedy to lose these people in a way that the deaths of thousands upon thousands of young parents and workers was not a century ago. To an extent, this is a reminder that human beings are incredibly fragile animals who have bodies where germs and bacteria pass in and out of all the time. We just don’t think about it. Our seeming indifference to climate change is related to this as well. We simply think we will figure it out, just like we figured out polio or the ozone layer or how to make a good television comedy."

I think this confuses correlation with causation.

Yes, we do think we'll "figure it out". But that's because we are accustomed to the - when you think about it - astounding advances in medical practice over the past century.

I mean...the docs in 1919 understood the germ theory of disease and the nature of influenza. They weren't stupid. They did what they could.

But.

At the time inoculation and vaccination was just beginning to become widespread. The notion that "oh, sure, we'll get a vaccine for that" was not just remote, it was nearly unthinkable in many cases. People died all the time from diseases we've more-or-less removed from our experience; typhus, cholera, diphtheria, measles, smallpox. That simply doesn't happen anymore.

So it's not that we "see ourselves as...immortal" or have a "culture of immortality". It's that we have internalized that what is going to kill us is a heart attack, or cancer, or an auto accident, or a random nutter with a firearm. The notion that a simple contagious disease - a sort of superflu - can kill or maim us?

THAT's insane. That's fucking creepy. That's...something that shouldn't be happening.

So we ARE not really treating this plague the way we did a century ago, but not because WE'VE changed.

It's because our fundamental baseline for medical competence and medical success has changed.

We don't expect we're going to die of cholera anymore.

So we're really pissed off and really frustrated and really afraid that this thing has become, despite all our knowledge and skills and learning, the pestilence that stalks in the darkness

Dr. Donald J. Trump on the subject of viral intelligence, April 10, 2020

“This is a very brilliant enemy. You know, it’s a brilliant enemy. They develop drugs like the antibiotics. You see it. Antibiotics used to solve every problem. Now one of the biggest problems the world has is the germ has gotten so brilliant that the antibiotic can’t keep up with it.

We’re fighting…not only is it hidden, but it’s very smart. Okay? It’s invisible and it’s hidden but it’s…it’s very smart.”



Something is intelligent...but I'm not sure it's anything (or anyone) involved in this statement.


And this is the head of state of the most powerful nation on Earth.


We are so, so, so, so, so, so, SO fucked.

Fallout 2020

So Tippy Tanegerino wants to unlock the Chateau d'If and let freedom reign by Easter Sunday regardless of how lethal that may be to old bastards like me, hunh..?

Bring it, bitch.

Bring it.

Lounging Around the House - for Victory!

Here’s the deal. The closest analogy to the Plague Year is World War 2.

Except instead of getting drafted or building Liberty ships and B-24s that huge part of the public that was "the war effort" in the Forties in the Twenties is going to have to close their shops, lose their jobs, and stay the fuck home.

Now...B-24s were a dead loss to the public weal. Made nobody, everybody, every single American absolutely zero in terms of building the gross domestic product. They were crucially important for the job at hand - winning the war - but basically nothing but a huge metal hole in the sky into which the government threw money.

So the U.S. government’s job right now - right now, right fucking now - is to treat every restaurant the way it treated Consolidated in 1944, and treat every laid-off busboy and bookstore clerk like it treated a welder at Kaiser shipyards and turret lathe operator at Springfield Armory.

Pay them. They’re fighting a war. Pay them for their fight. Pay them for their sacrifices.

That means, no, Republicans, goddamnit, you don't get a goddamn payroll tax cut. That pays for Grandma and Grandpa to stay in their home and not be out under a fucking bridge catching the fucking plague. No, Trump, fuck no, you don't get a massive bailout for the damn fracking outfits or your CEO buddies. They can borrow at zero interest using their assets for collateral.

No, this goes to the troops; the baristas and librarians and truck drivers and (ahem) geologists who are idled in order to prevent this plague from wrecking the economy by getting people tossed out of their homes, gutting their savings, and destroying their lives.

Pay them...or this epidemic will wreck this country as thoroughly as any Nazi could have.

(And don't even get me started about how we're not but we should be cranking out medical supplies - everything from masks and gloves to ICU beds and ventilators - like Sherman tanks and B-24s thundering off the assembly lines in 1944.

The complete and utter clusterfuck that has been the Fraudulency Adminstration's "response" on this one would be legitimate cause for summary execution in any sane polity.)

Update 3/18 p.m.: Trump says he's going to do what he should have done several weeks ago and what I ranted about just above; activate national-defense-level production of essential medical materials under the authority of the "Defense Production Act". So the orange monkey gets "credit" for finally not flinging his poop, I guess, since that seems to be the low bar set for this dingus.

Mind you, this is Trump, so the clueless chucklefuck and his minions have no idea what to DO with this authority:

"Trump declined to say how, precisely, the Defense Production Act would be used and he suggested that the administration is still deciding. He said the administration had “targets” for equipment it wanted but did not say what those targets were."

Christ, what a maroon.

Update 3/20: So here we are, two days after I posted the first update...and Emperor Dumbfuckius Maximus still hasn't actually begun to use the DPA to, y'know, actually produce anything useful. States are still scrambling to find medical necessities like masks and ventilators. My guess? He and his gang can't figure out a way to make a profit out of it. They know if they order their CEO buddy at PharmaCorp to start cranking out masks, and their buddy follows his instincts (which will be to charge $6.95 for a mask that costs fifty cents to produce) they'll get found out and hammered for price gouging (which, in their minds, is just "being smart"; chiseling the suckers while they can which is, y'know, how it works...).

And the rest of the GOP just doesn't want to do anything to suggest that government isn't the problem.

So, yeah...we're still kinda fucked.

Update 3/24: Oh, for fuck's sake!

"From the start, the administration* has treated the DPA as though it were some sort of Damoclean weapon by which it can force compliance from American industries. "Watch out, Ford. Make them ventilators or the DPA’ll gitcha!” This is because, for politicians like Pence, a product of a Republican Party that married itself to supply-side snake oil and disdain for self-government, it is inconceivable to imagine that the federal government’s demanding that industries respond to a worldwide crisis cannot be more effective and efficient than waiting for those corporations to engage their civic consciences to do so. And they will adhere to that faith over your grandmother’s dead body."

These fucking people.

Honestly.

If I was a company commander in the 3rd US Infantry, I swear to God; I'd go through this White House and Senate like a dose of fucking salts. And after every last one of them; Dimwit Donnie and Moscow Mitch and Javanka and all the other rats had been put up against the wall I'd then surrender myself, plead guilty at the court-martial, and happily spend the rest of my natural life as the oldest private E-1 in Leavenworth knowing I had done a damn fine piece of work.

A Journal of the Plague Year

Back in February I wrote this:

"The autumn flu of 1918, on the other hand, killed apparently healthy young adults. Millions of them. It ran around the globe doing the same. A third, less-lethal-but-still-pretty-lethal wave ran from the winter of 1918 to the spring of 1919 before finally petering out.

Could this sort of mutation occur to the Wuhan coronavirus?

Of course it could. We won't know until it happens, just like we had no idea that the 1918 flu season would turn lethal until it did.

"Well.

Now we know.

My state, Oregon, has been fairly quick about responding in the only real way that a republic can; closing things like theaters and sports stadia, and - finally - schools. But that's because our government is in the hands of the relatively sane (i.e., not Republicans) and who are dealing with this new plague as it is, not as Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump want them to think it is.

I won't pretend I'm not frightened. At 62 I'm in the gunsights of this fucking thing. I'm relatively healthy, but I'm old, and this kills old people.

I'll tell you what, though.

If this thing is killing me, I promise you this; I will personally do my damndest to escape my deathbed, steal a jetliner, fly to Mar-a-Fucking-Lago, break into the clubhouse, tear off my clothes, and rub my naked dying ass all over that moronic orange chucklefuck. I'll take the stupid sonofabitch with me if it's humanly possible. To think that this country wasted weeks while the dingus played with his phone and claimed that all was well?

Goddamn him.

I haven't words to describe how furious that makes me. While this is a global pandemic, and it is unlikely that ANY President could have prevented it from becoming a national tragedy, it's going to be worse than it needed to be, and purely because this fucking simpleton and his cult members refused to listen to the people ringing the alarm bells in the night.

As of now Oregon is fairly quiet. The usual morons are flooding the grocery stores, but the streets and parks and public spaces are quiet. We're all hunkering down, most of us, which is really all we can do, no different from some 14th Century villein in his cotte and hose, desperately praying to St. Jude that the White Horseman will pass over his house and leave him and his by.

There is no defense against this illness; all the wire and mines and interlocking fields of fire will not save us. If it comes in to us then we simply have to hope that we are not the unlucky few whose bodies betray them in a "cytokine storm", and hope that we will not end up flung namelessly into the plague pit.

Will that happen?

I have no idea.

But it could. And I will simply have to go on, as you will all have to go on, doing what I can to prevent that, and hoping against hope that it will not.

We are all now living in the Plague Year.

Jakin' it.

Well, shit.

I promised content, didn't I. And here it is nearly the end of February and nothing since the beginning of the second week.

Sorry.

I have been thinking...ummm...thoughts. About the coronavirus and the beyond-typically-idiotic Fraudulency Administration "response" (yeah, let's put the guy who doesn't believe in actual 21st Century science and was widely loathed as the governor of his state for his incompetence, and let's do exactly what the government of the PRC did - that is, ensure that ignorant, ass-covering officials are in charge of suppressing or lying about the diesease - that enabled the Covid-19 to escape the infectious disease reporting-and-response protocols enacted after the SARS outbreak of 2003...).

And about the latest Oregon Yik-a-hoo Adventure; the ridiculous "Greater Idaho" redneck rebellion.

And about cops. Portland cops in particular, but cops in general.

And, for the first time since December, 2018, I have a "battle long ago" for March - the Battle of Crossbarry, 1921, part of the chaotic war for independence that turned into a civil war that still has portents for the Ireland and Great Britain of today.

So...more soon, promise!

Meanwhile, here's a picture of a cat:

(This is called "cat therapy", by the way; Mojo or Missy picks up Drachma the Merkitty and cradles him. A sane cat would go utterly insane to be held this way, but the goof just lies there, and the girls cuddle him, for long moments until he finally gets bored and wriggles his way out. You're weird, cat...)

World War Z

As we pause to contemplate the wreckage the GOP has created of the Constitutional framework set in place a couple of centuries ago, it's also worth noting that among other things the Fraudulency Adminstration has gifted We the People is a severely compromised ability to respond to epidemic disease.

"Public health advocates have been ringing alarm bells to no avail. Klain has been warning for two years that the United States was in grave danger should a pandemic emerge. In 2017 and 2018, the philanthropist billionaire Bill Gates met repeatedly with Bolton and his predecessor, H.R. McMaster, warning that ongoing cuts to the global health disease infrastructure would render the United States vulnerable to, as he put it, the “significant probability of a large and lethal modern-day pandemic occurring in our lifetimes.” And an independent, bipartisan panel formed by the Center for Strategic and International Studies concluded that lack of preparedness was so acute in the Trump administration that the “United States must either pay now and gain protection and security or wait for the next epidemic and pay a much greater price in human and economic costs.”

One of the most appalling parts of the GOP cult is it's insistence that, as Saint Ronald of Fantasyland said, "government is the problem".

But for a global pandemic there is no "market solution". Government IS the solution, to the extent that there can be a solution.

The current incipient panic and scaremongering - and, yes, I'm looking at you, Wilbur Ross and Mike Pompeo, you fucking idiots - about the Wuhan coronavirus is not warranted. So far the infection has proved relatively highly morbid (compared to, say, SARS) but with a mortality lower than even a typical influenza. There is really no need for any sort of massive mobilization in the United States.

Which is good, since the Trumpkins have been deconstructing the ability to massively mobilize to deal with a pandemic.

But.

Let's recall that the last pandemic started as a fairly minor flu season.

The initial wave of the 1918 "Spanish" flu passed through the United States in the spring of 1918. It was as bad as influenza got in those early-modern-medical days, but no worse.

Then in the autumn it returned to the U.S., and something in the virus had changed.

Flu typically kills the "vulnerable"; old people, very young people, people with compromised health or immune systems. The autumn flu of 1918, on the other hand, killed apparently healthy young adults. Millions of them. It ran around the globe doing the same. A third, less-lethal-but-still-pretty-lethal wave ran from the winter of 1918 to the spring of 1919 before finally petering out.

Could this sort of mutation occur to the Wuhan coronavirus?

Of course it could. We won't know until it happens, just like we had no idea that the 1918 flu season would turn lethal until it did.

I know it's easy to be fixated on the viciousness and racism and general Know-Nothingism of these idiots.

But it's important to recall that they ARE idiots, and as any good soldier knows, nothing can get you killed quicker than being stupid.

I lathered him with me shillelagh

...for he trod on the tails o' me coat.

Normally it's just the walking stick I use to take the weight off my bad leg. But last Sunday it was me shillelagh as I went walkin' in honor of two men I hold (or held) dear; my own father, and the former Timbers great Jimmy Conway of Dublin.

Conway is dying of the disease that killed my father, robbed of his life by the death inside his own head. He lives on in the hearts of his friends Mick Hoban and "Timber" Jim Serrill and through them to those of us who know them. When Mick sent out a call for the Timbers soccer community to join in the Alzheimer's Walk the past Sunday I was proud to join. I hobbled alongside my Bride as far down the track - the event was held out at North Portland's motor racetrack - as I could before we headed back home. I wish I could do more, but I'm not a physician or a neurologist. All I can do is walk and damn little of that. But walk I can, and did.

To the immortal memory, pop. I hope you and Jimmy raise a glass to yourselves wherever it is that the souls of the living dead are gone.

Woolgathering

No real agenda today. Slow at work so I'm stealing company time to just idle around this shebeen without any actual purpose other than maundering, so please excuse my disorganization.

One thing I completely failed to post about was that the Bride and I had a very muted (Muted? Nonexistent, more like...) acknowledgment of our twelfth anniversary Monday week; it was back in October of 2002 that we wrested legal sanction out of the State of Oregon for our mutual concupiscence.

She was utterly whacked from yet another day tangling with The Boy and I was working late and still trying to get my hands on her anniversary gift. I did get it, a couple of days later, and we had a quiet moment last Friday remembering why we then, and still, long(ed) for one another. Along with her soft green scarf and handmade necklace I gave her this:

Mistress of mistresses, mother of memories,
O you my every pleasure, you my every duty!
You shall recall our pleasures and ecstasies,
The warm peace of our hearth, the evening's placid beauty.
Mistress of mistresses, mother of memories!

Legal sanction is all well and good. But there must also be ecstasies.

Did I mention how I so don't have anything to say about politics because my growing conviction that between the idiot "news" media and the idiot 27% (and you have that pin-up of Cheney in your cubicle so you know who you are...) that we've pretty much achieved Peak Stupid, and that whatever I could say would either be superfluous or ignored?

Yep.

I'm not sure which disgusts me more, the whole "To arms, to arms, the Sunni militia is coming!" nonsense, or the headless panic over a blood-borne pathogen that has a total U.S. morbidity of three and mortality of one.

On the former that fat bastard Brecher has been right all along, and on the latter...well, I don't know how to put it better than Pierce, so I won't:

"There evidently is going to be a strong constituency on the committee for some kind of travel ban on the countries in Africa on which the disease is laying waste, even though every expert in the world is saying that this is a terrible idea. (Governor Rick Perry, whose state is ground zero for Ebola in America, apparently believes there already is a travel ban on flights from Europe, to which he has brought the Spectacles Of Wisdom to "burnish his foreign-policy credentials," which is putting a shine on a sneaker, but never mind. This is leadership? Has anyone told Ron Fournier?) There also is going to be a lot of election-year posturing and political bloviation. Fear will be mongered. Distrust will be sown. And the statistics will tell us that, throughout last year, we lost 30 people a day. No, wait. That was due to firearms. My bad."

My pal Lisa over at RAW had a good point about one of the real problems these fucking idiots should be worried about; that after thirty-some years of treating medicine as a commodity the for-profit medical community has internalized the profit-first-"customer"( i.e. patient)-service-whenever rationale of the rest of the "market". Take it away again, Pierce:

"In case you joined American democracy already in progress, this is the way it is going to work. The private, for-profit hospital in Texas completely screws the pooch. (They sent the tubes containing blood from the late Thomas Duncan through the hospital's general delivery system? This is moronic.) The CDC comes in -- admittedly, after it should have, but there are regulations, beloved of our private-sector fetishists, that got in the way -- and the privatizers and anti-government types set up the CDC to take the fall for the hospital.

(The hospital isn't a terrific place to work at the best of times, as a nurse named Patricia Lawson found out to her sorrow.)

In prepared testimony, Daniel Varga, the Chief Clinical Officer for the Texas company that includes Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas, apologized to the House committee. "Unfortunately, in our initial treatment of Mr. Duncan, despite our best intentions and a highly skilled medical team, we made mistakes. We did not correctly diagnose his symptoms as those of Ebola. We are deeply sorry," Varga said.

Gee, that's awfully nice of you. Anybody get fired yet?"

As my old pal Struthers would have said, what a fuckin' fucked-up fuckstory.

But are We the People going to act with deliberate care, in light of the best information we can glean from scientific medicine?

Fuck, no, why would we want to do that when we can run around shrieking whatever nonsense Laura Fucking Ingraham, the Tammy Faye Baker of CNN, vomits into her lapel mike?

Gah. I say it's nonsense and I say to hell with it.

Speaking of insanely crazy things, how about this: Iceland - yes, Iceland, famed for herring and...well, herring - defeated the Dutch soccer team - the Oranje, the dreaded Clockwork Orange, World Cup quarterfinalists just half a year ago - 2-nil in Iceland.

Iceland! Sure, the goalscorer plays in Europe but I think the Icelandic keeper is the boxroom guy at the Rekjavik Safeway or something like that. These guys are minnows in the soccer ocean.

This was every underdog story come true. My only regret is that there was no Icelandic announcer to go utterly spastic after the victory: "Queen Juliana! Jan de Hartog! Famke Janssen! Eddie Van Halen! Hans Brinker! We have beaten them all! We have beaten them all!"

Don't get me wrong; I have always been partial to the Oranje ever since the disgrace of Argentina in 1978, when the original Clockwork Orange - Cruyff (who refused to play in the bloodyhanded Argentina of the Dirty War), Neeskens, Rep - was disgracefully robbed of the title. But I love to see these little teams upset the big, rich nations, and in soccer, Holland is very much a have and Iceland very much a have-not.

Except for this once. Wish I'd had the under on THAT bet...

There's a million tales in the naked Facebook; this one is mine.

Back when I was in college, and then later for a while when I was in the service, I had a sort-of-girlfriend.

(BTW, in case you aren't familiar with GFT conventions, people whose likeness I am neither at liberty blue to nor desire to seen blued all over the Internet are always shown from the ankles down, if possible. So this is her, over to the right there, and I should add that whilst I yield to no one in my appreciation for my Bride's attributes my old sort-of-girlfriend still rocks the black slippers...)

I say "sort-of" because I could never quite figure out where I stood with her, or what we were doing. I liked her. We were definitely friends. But we were never lovers, and I'm not sure that we were, either of us, really sure what "love" was, or how to love each other.

I know that I wasn't, and while she was, and is, a very beautiful, dear, sweet, kind, and loving woman I'm glad we didn't end up together back then for, as my first wife found out to our mutual grief, I was not then fit company for any woman of worth.

Still, we seemed to have some sort of very-close-but-not-quite relationship for quite some time that finally, as such relationships often do, drifted away when we were separated by time and space. We never even had a "breakup" in any real sense. Our association just kind of...stopped.

Decades later, while searching a completely different subject, I came across a short video clip of my not-quite-inamorata singing (and she had, and has, a lovely voice) that led me to suspect that she had moved to the Midwest and married. Several years later, motivated by a sort of vague nostalgia and curiosity, I looked her up on the dreaded Facebook and there she was. Using her maiden name, so, apparently, divorced or separated. Living in Missouri, and now an ordained minister in one of the UCC congregations there. We then resumed our friendship in the modern electronic-epistolary form of Facebook.

And from what I've seen as she was then she is still today a very good person; full of love and kindness, the very sorts of things that it seems to me to be very good for a cleric to be given the responsibilities of the job; caring for the sick and the distraught, guiding the afflicted, celebrating with the joyous and comforting the dying. She seems to me to be very likely to be a terrific pastor.

It is when I think of her that it occurs to me that one of the things that sickens me most heartily about many "religions" and those that preach them is the often-outspoken belief that having breasts and a vagina and ovaries somehow makes a person less...spiritual, less fitted for the business of contemplating, or interceding - if it is your nature to want to and try to so intercede - with the Infinite.

"Let your women keep silence in the churches..."

Fucking Paul of Tarsus really has a lot to answer for in my book.

My former-almost-girlfriend is too gentle to do that good work, but give me the Wayback set to 42AD and a good sturdy baulk of dimension lumber, and old Mister Road-to-Damascus would have been getting a solid two-by-four upside the head.

Asshole.

Speaking of soccer and patriarchal religions, I finally got to watch the Portland Pilots-Brigham Young University women's match from last week.

The game was utterly one-sided. BYU is for real; those gals are solid from front to back, and UP is gonna have trouble making the NCAA Finals with this year's young squad.

But my real thought as I was watching the play was that "Cougars" is an utterly lame name for teams from a school named for a scarey Victorian theocrat with high double-digit wives. Cougars? When the heck was the last cougar exterminated from around Provo, anyway, something like 1888? And, besides, you and I both know that cougars are not what Utah and BYU are all about, right?

It's all about the Mormons, baby.

So. The BYU men's teams really need to play as something like the "Patriarchs". "The Mormon Battalion" would be fine, as well as historical. Or how about "The Sword of the Lord"? Can you imagine the headlines in the sports section: "Sword of the Lord slays Pepperdine"? "Sword of the Lord beheads St. Mary's"? "Sword of the Lord eviscerates Bulldogs"?

Fucking stone cold awesome.

Then the women's teams, seeing how the Mormon Church feels about women in churches and all, could play as the "Handmaidens" or maybe the "Helpmeets" or the "Yeah, We're The Ones Being Fucking Silent in the Churches, You Happy Now, Asshole?"

Either that or both should play as the "Jackmormons". Except I think there's already a band named that.

Whatever. But "Cougars"? Sorry. WAY lame.

And while we're on the subject of "White People That Colonized Places" along with "Lame Stuff In General" I note in passing that the annual Columbus Day contretemps reminds me of the thing about the Admiral of the Ocean Sea that drives me more wild than anything else; his math.

Because, you see, in order to sell his expedition to the Spanish Crown he had to make the idea of sailing west to reach Japan, China, and the East Indies plausible. The farrago about the world being flat in 1492? Bullshit. Learned people knew that as early as Eratosthenes a couple of thousand years before Greek (and Arabic) scientists had figured out that 1) the Earth was a globe, and 2) that it was about 20,000 miles around, give or take a Roman mile or three.

But our boy Chris had to know that short of a ginormous expedition that Reconquista Spain didn't have the cash, the naval technology, or the inclination to outfit a fleet to sail across some 7,000 or so miles of open ocean. And he had to know that even if they had that there was no way in Hell that Ferdinand and Isabella were going to equip some sketchy Italian adventurer with that sort of fleet.

So - through a combination of ignorance, wishful thinking, and plain damn stupidity, Columbus came up with a figure of about 16,000 miles for the equatorial circumference of the Earth and a completely ridiculous distance of 3,000 miles to Sumatra. Here's a good little summary of the sort of bone-headed mathematical and navigational errors that the cack-handed spaghetti-bender had to commit to manage that.

Samuel Eliot Morison wrote of Columbus: “His calculation is not logical, but Columbus’s mind was not logical. He knew he could make it, and the figures had to fit.” Morison seems to find that admirable. I find it as moronic as panic over a bunch of raggedy-assed Arab guerrillas or a West African disease.

But maybe that's just me.

Okay. Enough meandering. I'll leave you with a couple of images:

You sleep in public in this house at your peril. This is "Drachma the Merkitty"; the thing on his head is supposed to be one of those seashall-bra things that mermaids are supposed to wear, but it wouldn't fit over his head, so its a crown. Little guy didn't wake up during the whole dress-up process, so he was pranked for hours whilst he slept.

I tried to explain that this was Cruelty to Sleeping Pets, but the small people merely laughed and continued to prank the little possum. He was quite the surprised kitty when he woke up, too.

I should add that our housecats have a long tradition of that kind of thing. When Maxine was a toddler she would announce a cat-sighting with a noise we called her "cat-scream", a loud squawk that was Maxine-speak for "Aha! Strange furry creature unlike anything ever seen in my orphanage, I shall pat you now!" and would precede a round of violent head-slapping that was her version of "petting the cat".

The calico, Lily, was smart enough to grab a hat at the sound, but Nitty (a.k.a Few Kibbles Shy Of A Full Bowl) would hunker down on the principle of "if I make myself REALLY small she can't see me". Which worked about as well as you'd think it would.

And this:

...is a mural from Honolulu. Naiad sporting with vicious aquatic pandas? Wahine frolicking in the surf with hairy racoon-like menehunes?

Your guess is as good as mine - I got nothin'. But I liked the image, so there you are.

I should really finish up my Panama stories. Soon. Promise.