Another day ending in "y"...

...bringing with it more Trumpfuckery. 

Given the utter firehose of stupid shit these nitwits produce it's hard to decide whether to yawn, scream, or try and find discounted dimension lumber for the many, many guillotines this Evil Clown Posse so desperately needs and deserves. 

I do have a couple of random links to read and ponder before that, though.

First, from the ever-useful Techdirt, this extended discussion of the recent release of a couple of Elmo's DOGEboys stumbling and blabbering about the fundamentally ignorant and nihilistic methods, if such they may be called ("I see no method at all, sir..."), they employed in doing whatever the fuck they were doing. 

It's good that Masnick lays out the indictment of these callow techboys, and yet...what the fuck else should anyone have expected from this whole DOGE nonsense?

It was obvious from the jump that Elmo didn't actually give a shit about federal government "efficiency". What he wanted was to get inside and wreck the place. 

 

Like almost all these tax-fattened scabrous techbros he hates the entire notion of collective governance if it doesn't further fatten his wallet or pimp his ride. The whole fucking point of DOGE was to insert these gooning wankers inside the GSA to yeet confidential information useful for making money and in the process jerk the public around to increase skepticism in the notion of government of, for, and by the People.

You need fucking TikTok videos of a couple of these useless DOGE wingnuts actually saying the quiet parts of all this out loud? 

That just confirms that you were way too credulous and gullible in the first place, to the point where it should be a matter of real weight whether or not you should be issued a credit card or allowed to operate heavy machinery. 

Then, from the military history blog A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, another extended rumination, this on the Fourth Gulf War. 

Bret Devereaux breaks it down - the preconditions, the circumstances leading to the initial attacks, the current situation, and the potential likely outcomes - in a clear and easily understandable fashion.

The nut graf, in my opinion, is that the whole "who's "winning", who's "losing" arguments miss the point; that there's a reason that, as irking a geopolitical irritant the mullahs have been to the Gulf region, there were damn good reasons that U.S. governments all the way back to Reagan's time resisted the impulse to do more than huck the occasional round downrange at them.

Many of those reasons are all over the current news cycle; Iran's response attacks on regional neighbors, effective closure of the Persian Gulf, and the potential long-term destabilization of the region, or many parts of it.

Worse, as Devereaux points out:

"And you may then ask, here at the end: if I am saying that Iran is being hammered, that they are suffering huge costs, how can I also be suggesting that the United States is on some level losing?

And the answer is simple: it is not possible for two sides to both win a war. But it is absolutely possible for both sides to lose; mutual ruin is an option. Every actor involved in this war – the United States, Iran, arguably Israel, the Gulf states, the rest of the energy-using world – is on net poorer, more vulnerable, more resource-precarious as a result.

In short, please understand this entire 7,000+ word post as one primal scream issued into the avoid at the careless, unnecessary folly of the decision to launch an ill-considered war without considering the obvious, nearly inevitable negative outcomes which would occur unless the initial strikes somehow managed to pull the inside straight-flush. They did not and now we are all living trapped in the consequences."

Although it's also worth pondering this, from earlier in the piece; that the U.S. airstrike on the purported Iranian nuclear storage/production facility back in June of 2025 wasn't just a bit of the usual big-stick Great Power dick-waving..

(which I, at least, thought at the time given that it didn't seem to make sense any other way.) 

...but was actually a major geopolitical mistake because:

"The problem with that strike is that attacking in that way, at that time, meant that Iran would have to read any future attacks by Israel as likely also involving attacks by the United States. So Iran would now have to assume that an Israeli air attack was also likely an American air attack (emphasis mine, not Devereaux's). 

It was hardly an insane assumption – evidently according to the Secretary of State, American intelligence made the exact same assessment.

But the result was that by bombing the Iranian nuclear facilities in June of 2025, the Trump administration created a situation where merely by launching a renewed air campaign on Iran, Israel could force the United States into a war with Iran at any time. (again, emphasis mine)

It should go without saying that creating the conditions where the sometimes unpredictable junior partner in a security relationship can unilaterally bring the senior partner into a major conflict is an enormous strategic error, precisely because it means you end up in a war when it is in the junior partner’s interests to do so even if it is not in the senior partner’s interests to do so."

It's funny - in a "not-funny-like-a-clown" but in the funny-how-sometimes-something-that-looks-idiotic-really-IS-idiotic way - that Trump, a living embodiment of insecure manospheric compensatory tics, who insists that only HE is "the decider", that he's the Ultimate Alpha Male, was trick-fucked into becoming Bibi Netanyahu's Bitch because he's some combination of too stupid, gullible, aggressive, and ignorant to realized that before waving his kinetic dick back in 2025.

 
But, yeah, here we are.

To me the even-bigger problem is that probably about a quarter of the U.S. public are actually okay with all this stupid fuckery, and there's probably another third that either doesn't know, doesn't care, or doesn't understand.

Meaning here we will continue to be.

Is there a way out of this dystopian mess?

Without a better electorate in a better country?

I don't see it. 

Independence

This year's national birthday celebration seemed very...troubling.

It was hard to wave a flag and celebrate the nation's government that has spent the past half-year speed-running every fucking thing that provoked the white guys who mattered in the British colonies to piss and moan about their government to the point of rebellion:

"He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation."

What the actual fuck has Donnie Dollhands done that his counterpart George of Hanover didn't? Substituted his immigration Gestapo for "foreign Mercenaries"? Yeah, right.

Is there any particular reason that anyone not completely in the basket of deplorables would WANT to be part of that shit? The 1776 crowd would have rebel against his ochre-colored ass as they did against the king of their day, and we owe it to them to rebel against the modern version of German George.

Fuck that 1776 noise; there's an old school 1789 solution to King Trump, and rather than bands and fireworks, using it on him and a whole bunch of the crowd of MAGAts clustered around his golden throne seems like a much more joyous use of the day we mark the founding of this nation.

Because the country I served, the country I believe in, is the mirror image of the white man's neighborhood Trump and his the Trumpers believe in.

It's the one where anyone can be "American". No matter who they are, no matter where they were born, no matter what language they speak. All that's required is a fervent, passionate belief in the ideals of this country; equal justice under law, the republic that the foundational documents - ALL the documents, including the important changes wrought by the Civil War amendments that define the Second Republic from the slave-holding First - promises.

Ken ("Popehat") White has a moving story about what that means - or meant - in practice:  

"The people I despise, and who despise me, believe America’s values and goals are blood, soil, swagger, and an insipid and arrogant conformity. They are the values of bullies and their sycophants. They may prevail. There’s no promise they will not...I am just more acutely aware that doing better will not be easy and may not be peaceful, and that doing it will require fighting people just as dedicated to low and ugly values, and that we may lose.

America’s history is the story of people — like those Filipino-Americans — who had much less and faced far more daunting circumstances and kept fighting. It would be shameful to give up that fight. The bullies may win, but they will not win by default, and they will not win without a bloody battle."

The thing is...I'm old. Dying slowly of a neurological disease. Tired of "fighting", fighting what is now the weight of my own government. Tired of re-fighting battles I thought we'd won and settled long ago.

Last night sort of reminded me how ridiculous this nonsense all is.

Several years ago the City of Portland passed an ordnance prohibiting personal fireworks during the summer. It made total sense; we're highly flammable in July. Turning thousands of knuckleheads loose with pyro? NOT a good idea.

For years the family used to go north to Washington - where "projectile"-type fireworks were legal - and haul back a load of mortars, rockets, and roman candles to fire off in the blacktop playground behind Astor Elementary School. 

It was a critical part of "fun" on the 4th, history and patriotism be damned. It was all about the pyro.

But the City was right; it's a damn dumb idea. So they banned it.

Well, turns out that here, in the neighborhood around my new condo in the Lower Depths of St. Johns, we laugh at your silly fireworks ban, Portland. The firefight was in full swing moments after sundown.

At which point, sitting out on my porch to admire the lawlessness, I discovered two things:

1) Someone in the demo site down at the end of the street had some really BIG explosives. Either a seriously big-ass mortar or just the old "M-80" quarter-stick dynamite-type charges we used to use to blow our fingers off as kids in the Sixties. Big. Loud. I mean seriously loud.

So interspersed with the "regular" fireworks every so often there'd be this ginormous flash and BOOM!! when one of these things would go off, rattling the windows and shaking the tree branches.

And...

2) Someone else had set his car alarm, including the fucking motion detector.

Which went off every time Person #1's bombs would explode.

Which meant that all evening we were serenaded with a fusillade of smaller pyro, a massive blast, and then the whooping of the fucking Car Alarm of Freedom.

"Boom-crackle-boom-pop-pop-crackle-boom-BOOM!!!whoopwhoopwhoop!"

It that doesn't say something about the State of This Goddamn Union right now, I can't think of a better.

 

Damn it. I miss my country.

Empire of Fools

Day 2 of Trump 2: Revenge Boogaloo! and Tubby the Stable Genetic Engineering Genius has determined that there are two and only two human genders...

...so by executive order the incredibly weird, complicated diversity of the human genome can…ummm...just stop being weird, diverse, and complicated and start being...ummm...what a bunch of ignorant bigoted MAGAts want it to be. 

 
Day Fucking 2. 

TWO. 

We’ve got something like another thousand days of stupid shit like just this.

At LEAST this stupid. 

Let's not even start on tariffs.

This, perhaps more than anything, more that the racism, more than the bigotry, more than the oligarchy, more than the hatred, more than all the other vile, shitty things that Republicans want and are, is what's so infuriating about my second go-around of MAGAt rule.

It's the stupid, stupid.

These people want - and what my own crowd didn't loathe and fear enough to show up to stop - incredibly simpleminded "solutions" to complex, difficult problems. 

They want, let's be blunt, stupid things.

No, tossing out immigrants of all varieties isn't going to "solve" anything. Not low wages. Not high prices. Not the increasing enshittification of American life.

Immigration, transgender people, "DEI", "wokeness" aren't the reasons America isn't Great for you and the other non-plutocrat Americans. 

Income inequality and poorly written tax codes and other laws, corporate greed and monopoly power, and regulatory capture are.

Immigrants aren't the reason your health care sucks; greedy insurance companies and greedy medical providers and wealthy people and corporations and poorly written laws and tax codes are.

Immigrants aren't the reasons your rent is so expensive; greedy landlords and NIMBY neighbors and poorly written zoning and development codes are.

Transgender people aren't the reason your kids are struggling; greedy college administrators and poorly written financial aid codes and corporate degree-gatekeeping are.

All these and more problems are extremely complex and difficult because We, the People, have allowed these problems to burrow deep within our already-flawed governmental systems. 

We've sat on our asses, most of us, fiddling with silly nonsense about Drag Queen Storytime and Bud Light ads whilst the wealthy and powerful whose primacy was written into the foundational documents regained all the power they'd lost (and more!) since the last time they shit the national bed in 1929.

The bottom line, as any Roman of the late Republic could warn you, is that you can have great disparity of wealth or a republic.

But not both.

And the simpleminded, in their search for a "simple" solution to this complex problem, have chosen the worst possible "simple" solution:

Just fucking elect the greedy fucking plutocrat and by inference all his greedy billionaire buddies.

Jesus wept.

I honestly don't have any idea how you fix this. There's even a saying: "You can't fix stupid." 

How do you show someone who doesn't believe that pouring literally billions of tons of things like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere can raise global climatic warmth? How do you convince someone who thinks that China pays tariffs on Chinese exports that something like "health insurance" is nothing but a greedy middleman that helps increase medical costs while adding nothing of value? How do you prove to someone who thinks the President dictates the price of eggs that supply problems related to avian flu are the reason for the high price of eggs?

"Solving" all these things would require incredible knowledge, hard work, and patience to understand, and incredible levels of effort to deal with, especially given that the people and organizations that profit from stuff like corporate and personal profits will fight like ten thousand devils against you.

Instead, well, how about going for the con man who tells you that trade wars are fun and easy to win? That your relationship problems are because uppity bitches? That your egg prices are because you have to press "one" for English?

Is that fucking stupid?

Of COURSE it is!

But it's simpler and easier that putting in the hard work of self-governance.

So here we are.

I have no idea where this will end up. And given my neurological problem, whether I'll even be alive to know.

But from here?

It doesn't look promising.

To be ruled by competent evil is appalling.

But to be ruled by stupid fools..?

"We" also know who "We" aren't "The People"

Yes, it's a shithole.

But I have friends I stay in touch with on what I usually refer to as "The Goddamn Facebook" and I'm too lazy to use old-school snail mail.

One of them - a former GI who worked for me - posted this picture yesterday.

I lit up.

"Seriously? I'm supposed to be all cool and polite about how we're "one nation" when millions of people voted to come after my Social Security and Medicare, come for my gay and lesbian friends, come after my daughter and her OB/GYN if her pregnancy goes wrong, come after me - since I despise Tubby I'm "the enemy within" - and my liberal pals, come for my investments (fucking "Tariff Man? Fuck right off with that Gilded Age horseshit!) and probably my Army retirement, too? Because we're "We The People"? As the old joke goes, what you mean "we", kimosabe?"

Once I'd cooled off, though, that got me thinking. 

Who, by our new Leader's own words, a no longer going to be part of "We The People"?

Well, me, the enemy within, that's for sure, and my dirty hippie liberal commie pals.
Anyone not straight.
Anyone Muslim, and probably anyone not the "right kind of Christian", if they're troublesome enough.
Anyone poor, especially anyone who needs "entitlements" like Social Security and Medicare to get by (that's me, too, BTW...).
Anyone darkish-looking; Tubby wanted to shoot at the BLM marchers, so Black Lives Don't Fucking Matter anymore, if they ever did.
Anyone who criticizes The Leader or any of his goons. Hi there, Bezos? You think sucking up is gonna save you if your paper reports the gross corruption we're gonna see from Tubby again? Hahahahahah..!
Anyone who runs crosswise with the no-longer-standing-back Proud Boys.
Anyone with a pre-existing medical problem.
Anyone whose pregnancy goes dangerously wrong.
Anyone who tries to save the pregnant woman and in the process has to take a risk that it will kill the kid inside.
Anyone protesting anything Tubby does; the BLM thing again, he wanted to shoot "rioters" and you know fucking well that the slightest violent act will be enough to make any street protest a "riot".
Anyone else Tubby hates and, as I've probably mentioned, he's a real good hater.
Anyone...

Should I stop? I can go on. There's LOTS more people the MAGAts hate.

That doesn't even take in the people outside this country who need its help; Taiwanese and South Koreans and Ukrainians. 

Anyone on Tubby's pal Vlad's hit list. 

I'm sure I can think up more if you want.

Oh, and while I'm here...

I know this is like bitching about the boring TV programming in the middle of a typhoon, but...

81 million of you turned out to vote against Tubby in 2020.

Only 67 million - so far - bothered to vote against him yesterday, when it was obvious that he's crazier and more vicious than a shithouse rat than he was four years ago.

 

Where the fuck did 14 million of y'all go? Disneyland?

 

Tubby got 2 million FEWER votes than he got in 2020. If y'all had showed up...

Well..?

Troubles here and there

 The past week has been...interesting.

In the "big news" is obviously the conviction in criminal court of a former U.S. president.

Why this is "news" is kind of peculiar, because this particular jamoke has always been and is the most obviously incompetent, corrupt, and criminal individual to ever disgrace American presidential politics, and when you consider that includes people like Warren Harding, James Buchanan, and Franklin Pierce that's a pretty high fucking bar.

Convicting this scumbag of several of his many visible crimes was, as it should have been, as hard as hitting water when falling out of a boat.

No, what's "news" - in the sense of "revealing" - has been the reactions of the Republican Party.

In a sane world this would give the Party of (Cash, Guns, Jesus, and Whiteness) Personal Responsibility the perfect option; dump the dick.

You want a loudmouthed nitwit for President?

Margie Greene is right there!

The GQP could use this as a lockdown "It's not you, it's me!" moment and pivot towards some other loudmouthed but less facially corrupt nitwit. Gaetz, Lee, Tuberville, Boebert...I mean, goddamn, the party's chock full of 'em.

They didn't. They won't, because it's obvious that they can't.

Because, apparently, Trump scratches some sort of weird precognitive itch in Republicans. It always seems to me to be a sort of reflex rather than a thought-out decision. Tubby is the Perfect Own-The-Libs Storm, and that seems to be what gets the bulk of these people going.

Mind you, the overall GOP pyramid hasn't changed.

As they did in the pre-Q Era of the Eighties through the early Teens, the plutocrats at the top are using all this wingnut id to get the New Gilded Age they crave. They give a shit about trans women and abortion; (or, if they do, not enough to interfere with their pursuit of) low taxes and deregulation are their goals.

They're using these shiny objects to harvest the morons' votes.

And right now all the morons want is Moar Trump. So they'll get it.

And if they can turn that into Electoral votes in November so will we.

Good and hard.

So there's that.

While at home...

The divorce machinery grinds forward.

We've engaged a mediator, and part of that process means collecting every scrap of information on our financial lives. Mojo is doing the heavy lifting there as she has throughout our marriage.

And what's increasingly apparent is that we're...not rich.

Right now we're getting by.

But I'm pulling in retirement - Army retirement and Social Security - and contract work here and there. She's got her paycheck which is less than that...

Given how hard she works, and all she does for little Astor Elementary?

That's a shame and a hissing to you, Portland Public Schools.

As a unit we're doing okay.

As individuals?

Things get kinda scary.

So scary that the other night Mojo was up until midnight, sitting alone on the darkened deck, her mind so filled with fear and worry that she couldn't sleep.

It tore me. I'm not where she is; she's still my dear, still my best friend. It's murder seeing her like that.

So I made an offer. A very odd one by modern marriage standards.

Let's put a pin in divorce, I said.

Not call it off. I get it, you're done with me. But...let's give it time. Let's live together, friends, "roommates", business partners, for four years. Until the kids are through college and our expenses drop to the baseline.

Then? We go our ways.

The thing that had occurred to me as I watched her agony was that this was what millions of people did for thousands of years. They needed to stay solvent. They were rich and wanted to be richer, or poor and didn't want to be poorer. Or merchants and wanted business, or nobles and wanted land.

So they made a deal to work and live together.

This was the deal on offer. A deal that would give us breathing space and time. Time for her to find a better-paying job. Time to grow our investment wealth, time and space to better figure out how to find our ways as single people, instead of the current rush to be separate.

Unlike a lot of those people, we aren't strangers.

We were friends, and so far still are.

I think we could make that work.

I also don't think she'll take it.

But I had to make the offer. She IS my friend, my dearest friend, and regardless of everything else, I owe her every effort to help her to the best life she can.

I already miss her.

And, sadly, I'm afraid both that that will not change, and that, soon, it irrevocably will.

Today in bad news...

This is the digital front page of the Oregonian newspaper's online service "Oregonlive" on December 5, 2023:

Note that the headline story, is a murder/suicide in Vancouver, Washington.

"Below the fold" are three more crime stories; two weapons crimes and a kidnapping, Under the "Latest" banner on the left? two sports pieces, two letters to the editor, a medical story about hot flashes, Miss Manners, a business piece on airline mergers, and the "top 25 Wikipedia pages of 2023."

Here's the front page from the on-line version of one of Portland's two weeklies, the Portland Mercury, on the same day.

Headline story?

The recently-ended teacher's strike and the funding problems it exposed.

Perhaps just as infuriating as the political situation in the 2023 United States is the condition of the public press, and this is a perfect little snapshot of why our First Amendment heroes are such an ungodly shitshow.

The teacher's strike was the ultimate "local news" story; a critical event that stemmed from even more critical public policy failures, and which in turn exposed even more problems and failures running from the individual schools through the city all the way to the statehouse in Salem.

If you get your news from Oregon's only daily public newspaper you have no idea that happened, or how it happened, or why. You'd have no real idea of the political and fiscal issues behind it, or exposed by it. 

You'd sure as fuck know about some rando who killed himself and his family, though, wouldn'tcha?

Blow this up to NBC and CNN and the NY Times and the Washington Post?

And there you have it; one, perhaps THE, massive factor in how fucked we are, from our Gilded Age economy to the fact that an unhinged orange moron is within a whisper of the highest elected office in the nation.

A true democratic republic requires that active, informed participation of the bulk of its citizens. It's not enough for them to just vote; they need to know and understand what their votes are doing, and how.

That's why the "free press" is the first amendment, not the tenth. Because without knowledge and understanding those votes are anything from useless to actively harmful, the sort of votes that brought the original Nazis a plurality in the Reichstag of 1933.

But it's not enough to be "free" if all that means is "free to print idiotic "human interest" and fire-and-murder stories". That kind of "free" just makes you stupider; less knowledgeable and informed only about trivia that makes you more frightened and more angry.

No wonder the average person thinks that crime is out of control, that the economy is awful, that things were "better" under Daddy Trump. Small wonder nobody is willing to do anything to repeal the idiotic "kicker" tax giveaway to help solve our public school problems.

Who's going to help them learn that?

I'm a monstrously literate guy with a passion for history and politics and an obsessive fascination with tracking down sources. I'm probably something like 0.0001% of the US public.

The rest of the country has to depend on the people like who run the Oregonlive website for their knowledge and understanding, and what they get is fucking murderous randos on Page One.

No wonder WASSSSSSSSSSF.

This is fine, too...

Responding to what seems to have now become a relentless drumfire of "WTF-how-does-this-even-republic?" shit from the Party of Gingrich Roy Edroso, whose opinions I normally respect, says that therein lies a seed of hope:

"I talked the other day about a Wall Street Journal poll that had the right-wingers convinced America had lost its way, at least partly because it showed that a lot of people didn’t share their narrow point of view. Polls are also showing that the wingnut campaign to make normies adopt their swear-word “woke” ain’t working.

And we all saw the recent election results in Chicago and Wisconsin. As with the “red wave” that never came in November 2022, the voters knew something that the wingnuts and trimmers predicting defeat didn’t know — that conservatives are actively and obviously fucking shit up and normal people want no part of them."

To which my response is: yeah, and normal people don't want any part of murderous thieves and criminals, and, yet, it took the Red Army and D-Day and the fucking 8th Air Force to beat down Nazis and Fascisti, and tens of thousands of dead on Okinawa and the smoking ruins of Tokyo to whack Imperial Japan.

When I look around me what I see is:

On the Right, a frothing shitpile of - thanks, Driftglass - bigots and imbeciles enthralled by plutocrats into jamming the 20th Century into the woodchipper for fear that their sprog might just possibly see a Cambodian ladyboy in a cocktail frock.

On the Left, a handful of powerless savants like Sanders trying to prevent that , and

In the middle a bunch of gormless flour sacks who can no more govern themselves than a cat can understand medieval Latin.

Self-government is HARD. 

Fucking hard.

You've got to pay attention. You've gotta read - especially read, since video "news" is not "news", it's "entertainment" and has to be by the design of the medium - and think and then act. You've got to look behind what public figures say. You've got to - and given the history of anti-vaxx I hate to use this term but it is what it is - do the research. You've got to understand history, and politics, and human nature. You have to listen to others, and do more than just suck in what they say but watch what they do, who with, and why.

So I get it. There's probably about a quarter of the human race that can do all that AND make a living AND have a social life, and if push comes to shove it's the "self-governing" thing that gets the push.

But that - now more than ever - is a problem.

Because the Right has figured out that they don't need to win over everyone, or even a majority of someones. If they have enough bigots and imbeciles - and enough people who don't know or understand or care what the bigots and imbeciles are doing - they can run the table.

I don't get the sense that those people in the "middle" are getting better at knowing or understanding or caring. More importantly, if they are, voting like they are. 

Or voting at all.

If they did no Republican would get more than 27 percent - the Dick Cheney crazification value - of the vote. Ever.

But they do.

Often.

And then they do shit like they did in the Tennessee lege, and the public response - outside the dirtbag Left - is "Ho hum. Those whaaaacky Republicans! How about those rascals?"

So no, Roy. This isn't a seed of hope. This isn't fine.

This is how you lose your fucking republic.

So the choice seems pretty simple to me. 

But, then, I'm headed to the fucking camps when the MAGA Regime takes over in 2024, so I got skin in the game.

Interestingly, in his usual Friday blog post Edroso seems to get it. While discussing "Why Republicans lie all the time" he says:

"Contradicting reality makes them feel powerful. They're not gonna pretend to care about what people they despise think because they believe themselves beyond the reach of voter consent. It's up to their enemies to show them they are not."

And there, my friend, is what I've just spent 500 words pointing out:

If you're not willing to whistle up the B-29s, then sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up, because the liars, bigots, and imbeciles have won.

It's really just that simple.

Twenty Years Ago...

...a dive-bar's-full claque of criminals, fools, grifters, and clowns let slip the dogs of war and drove the foreign policy bus off the Iraq cliff.

I've already written everyfuckingthing I can say about that. I can't say it any better than I did ten long fucking years ago:

"The persistence of these Tin Gods in the public life of our nation is, and should be, a great enduring unbearable shame to us, all of us, us the We the People who were entrusted with the honor and truth of this nation. We have chosen to be a nation of Men rather than a nation of Law, chosen comfortable dishonor above painful rectitude, chosen the deaths of others rather than to sacrifice ourselves.

When our generation is remembered it should be for that, and for that above all. Whatever good we have done, whatever kindnesses we may do, the crimes for which we hung the defeated leaders of Nazi Germany, the crime of making aggressive war, the "crimes against peace" of Nuremberg; the crimes of others that by our acceptance and indifference we have made our own, will remain with us always. 

Like the unquiet ghosts of the dead of Baghdad, Ramadi, and Basra, like the mournful fragments of the GIs flown home inside plastic sacks, and like the cries of the headscarved women, weeping for sons and fathers and lovers vanished in the morning mists that rise above the Tigris as the merciless dawn floods the watermeadows with light as red as blood."

So all I can do is spit on the ground and curse the nation that considers a transgender kid more worth persecuting that putting scum like Yoo and Wolfowitz and Perle and Dubya and Dick on trial and in prison.

In the Time of Trump we are surely getting what we deserved when we let that trash walk away from the bloody disaster they made smiling and whistling.

I'm old and tired of returning to the pointless runaround of "who fucked up Iraq", and we have newer and Trumpier scumbags we should be trying and jailing, anyway.

Whether we will do that will say a lot about what we are as a nation.

Let's just say I'm not optimistic.

The Politics of Stupid

So here's what's been bugging me.

This past November the voters of Oregon went marginally in favor - 50.6 to 49.4 - of a ballot measure, 114, that imposed some restrictions on firearms.

Those included:

• requiring permits issued by local law enforcement to buy a firearm;
• requiring photo ID, fingerprints, safety training, criminal background check, and fee payment to apply for a permit; and
• prohibiting manufacturing, importing, purchasing, selling, possessing, using, or transferring ammunition magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds and make violations a class A misdemeanor.

 And y'know what?

That's just fine as far as I'm concerned. 

It doesn't infringe the "right to keep and bear arms". It infringes the non-right to keep and bear certain types of magazines, to keep and bear arms without being evaluated for things like criminal records or knowing how to use the fucking things, and being on record so that IF your bang-stick gets used for bad purposes it can be chased back to you.

If I'd have been the ballot measure writer I'd have added some of Jim Wright's "bang bang sanity" proscriptions like making "accidental" shootings crimes that would lose you your "right" to fuck up other people with the weapon you obviously don't know how to use and have no business having and requiring people to store the things like we did in the Army, locked up right.

So vox populi vox Dei, right? Gonna get right on that, sheriff. Right?

No.

Because if you're a wingnut ammosexual then the public spirit only bloweth where wingnut fap-memes listeth, and so, of course, a judge in West Buttfuckistan (or Harney County, which is effectively the same thing...) heard a suit brought by a bunch of these clucks and, of course, has been hammering down Measure 114 because...reasons.

Well.

I don't really need to go over - again - why fewer people with smaller, slower, less capable firearms is good.

It's the same reasons that a NASCAR-grade Camero isn't street legal. What soldiers need in war is the exact opposite of what Sparky needs behind the counter of the 7-Eleven.

But because the Right has spent more than sixty years grooming these chucklefucks to scree like wounded eagles anytime some sensible reduction in the mad carnival of firearms is proposed here in the Land of the Free trying to make that obvious fact a reality is damn near impossible.

Different day, same nitwit wingnut shit, though, right?

Here's the problem with just shrugging about that.

These dopes are making life harder for all of us, and not just about firearms.

Some of the things they want - more racism, more prejudice, more ignorance, more misogyny - are 1) irritating and vile as well as 2) predictable, but are baked into them and can only be ignored when trivial and mocked and slammed down when violent. 

Any sensible government - any sensible organization - can and will do that. Even corporations, sociopathic sonsofbitches that they are, realize that gays and immigrants and dusky people buy toasters, so being associated with redneck shitbirds is bad for business.

No. It's the other political obsessions that they're being talked into now that are so fucked up.

These ammosexual rule-free Days of Jubilee are one of them.

If you think we're bad here in Oregon look at Florida, where their Wingnut Jesus wants to enact "constitutional carry", meaning that any and everyone can walk around strapped. No rules, no license, no training, no nothing.

Imagine how your average rural Florida deputy sheriff - Nobel Prize winning philosopher and gentle soul that he will be - is going to act now that EVERYone he meets is packing heat?

You think we're way ahead of the mean on copper shooting of randos now?

Oh, and try pulling that shit if your skin color is marginally darker than a sheet of notebook paper.

Fuuuuuucccccckkkkkk.

But even beyond how fucked up that is, is the wingnut neediness to repeal the 20th Century.

When I was learning my trade, an older engineer told me that things like building codes and design requirements were enacted "one death at a time".

Because we would do our best to head off fucked up things like deadly building fires or earthquake collapses based on our best guess on how bad those fires or earthquakes could get.

Then a worse fire or earthquake would come along, kill a bunch of people, we'd learn from that and revise our codes and designs to head off those worse fires and earthquakes.

If you look at public health and safety rules - things like OHSA regs, vaccination requirements, medical practice - between 1900 and 2000 you see a fairly broad, if uneven, progression from "we don't understand and couldn't do anything even if we did" to "oh, okay, here's what's happening and here's how we can prevent or mitigate that."

No everyone was on board with that - look back at the "polio monkey serum" shit that the Birtchers ran with back in the 1940s and 50s - but the public in general agreed; safer is better in the general sense.

So it was less fun to drive with seatbelts and sober. But it was safer for everyone.

It wasn't much fun to get measles shots. But it was safer than getting measles, safer for everyone.

It was more irking to have guards on saws, and rules for ladders. Some things - like the tipping toddler on 5-gallon buckets, seemed even silly and excessive.

Taking the handle off the pump sucked. But shitting yourself to death from cholera sucked worse.

The general public consensus was that this stuff was a minor issue compared to, say, dying horribly of smallpox and cholera or being paralyzed by polio.

Now that consensus is in ruins, and it's for a simple, horrible, stupid reason;

Because the political right's policy goals are subjectively shit - plutocracy, oligarchy, theocracy - they need red cultural meat to feed their C.H.U.D. hordes, something like 40% of the U.S. public, and they've chosen things like democracy, equity, and, yes, public health to feed this ignorant beast.

As the linked article points out, it's killing those CHUDs.

And, as the article also points out, the CHUDs don't care. 

If those cultural "wins" kill those they hate and "own the libs"?

They'll die happy.

How the fuck do you fight that?

That's whackadoodle cult thinking.

That's hashishin thinking, the kind of thinking that made blissed-out drug-addled assassins that you had to kill to stop.

And, as I've also said here before, if that is the case...

...and I believe it is...

...the implication is that our choices are grim; give up all the social and political and economic and even medical gains of the 20th Century,

or,

Kill them.

I know which I think is the worse option.

But I also know that I'm rolling a massive rock uphill to even begin to clue the vast bulk of my supposedly-fellow citizens in that that's even a possibility, much less a necessity.

And so here we are.

They will kill us before they let us take the fucking handle off the fucking pump.

And that, my friend, is a Peak Fucking Stupid way to die.

Why we can't have nice things.

So my "news" is alive with "revelations" that the tax outfit that worked for the Trump Organization for a decade or more has bailed.

Yawn.

Here's the thing; all this sketchy Trump shit has been right out there for decades. 

He was a joke in the Eighties when he was bankrupting casinos and running as Veep for looney third party candidates. 

That, and he was an obvious ginormous asshole personally. 

He was a nitwit then. Spy magazine was the one that christened him the "short-fingered vulgarian" and everyone who didn't have to depend on him for income laughed. He was a punchline. 

He was also mobbed-up - mind you, it's hard to work in Manhattan real estate without being mobbed-up, but Trump was a freak even then by being out and proud about it. He was too much of an asshole to even hide it or have the social grace to pretend to be ashamed about it.

But that was Trump; lots of people knew him, lots of people despised him as a worthless, idiotic, asshole-ish if supposedly-"rich" dirtbag.

But now he’s got a third of the country willing to commit treason for him.

 

How fucked up is that? 

 

In a weird way I can get being in thrall to a hero conqueror like Julius Caesar or a charismatic maniac like Adolf Hitler, or a grim tyrant like Josef Stalin. 

 

But to be barking mad enough to go to war, to kill yourself with COVID, to try and overthrow your republic for Donald Fucking Trump? 

 

That’s like being willing to die for the Trix rabbit. Or a box of granola. 

 

That’s just so far beyond “stupid” as to change the meaning of the word “stupid”. 

 

I just don’t get it.

 

I mean...I get that the average GOP voter is all about "owning the libs". 

 

(That's kinda all they have at this point. Who's gonna vote for more COVID, or another tax cut for plutocrats?)

 

Problem is that if the result is that Trump is out there “leading” you in "owning the libs" a person with anything more than a room temperature IQ should have their bullshit alarms shrieking like a horn concerto. 

 

Buying ANYthing Trump markets is the political equivalent of dining at The E.coli Buffet.

 

Of course, these nitwits have been letting Rush Limbaugh take a dump in their skulls for the past thirty years, so there's that.

 

But that's kinda the problem. We're infested with these bucketheads; damn near a third of the public. That's enough to be a problem in and of itself, but in an open society like ours, where it takes a small handful of assholes to utterly fuck up the public space for everyone else?

That's lethal. There's no way a civilized society can work with that level of dysfunction.

 

Movement conservatism is a repulsive shitpile of Gilded Age plutocracy, Jesus humping, racist bull crap and magical thinking. But when somebody like Barry Goldwater was the figurehead you could, looking at it, at least pretend that an otherwise normal human could buy into it.

 

But when your god is fucking Trump?

 

You’re a turnip-grade moron who shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce.

And yet...there they all are. All the Second Amendment Solutions in the world won't solve them, and short of an extinction-level genocide event, what else you gonna do..?

Nope.

WAJSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSF. 

So since I respect all Internet traditions here's a picture of a cat.

Chumps, Suckers, and Losers

We're now apparently supposed to be all aghast that the Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. military thinks that people who get killed wearing a uniform are "suckers" and "losers".

 (pausing here to note that many of these same pearl-clutchers seemed juuuust fine with the same individual when he was raging and threatening any and all of his fellow citizens who happened to disagree with him politically in fine caudillo style. But we're not here for partisanship at the moment...)

Here's the thing.

If you are a GI, or someone who loves or cares for a GI, or just someone who “supports the troops”...at the very least be honest. 

Those of us who wear the tree suit are tokens in the Game of Thrones. I'm not whining about that. That's the nature of the business. We knew that when we took the re-up bonus. When it comes right down to it our job is, at the final throw, to be used - and spent, if need be - gaining or trying to gain some geopolitical thing.

We can hope that those spending our health and lives and futures are doing that wisely, judiciously, frugally, and for only the best and gravest of reasons.

All the while knowing that the opposite is very often the case; we will be thrown away for ignorance, pride, hubris, and foolishness. Our lives, or some portion of them, will often be wasted.

That's what we get paid for. That's our bottom line. That's the bargain we've made.

 And if you don’t like that, or that saddens or appalls, or horrifies you?

You need to be better citizens. Learn the issues. Question authority. Support people and policies...or protest against them! Vote...and vote with your head, not with FOX or Facebook or your old high school buddy’s latest email attachment.

Voting for some trashbag or fool or madman, or not even bothering to vote when there's a chance that trashbag of a human being might be elected, means that you lose the privilege to be shocked, shocked, when that trashbag trashes your precious "troops". 

We are your responsibility. We the People are supposed to be sovereign in this republic. So We the People are the ones who ultimately decide whether our futures are hoarded, or wasted.

If someone you helped vote into power - or someone you're not fighting with all your might to keep from power - is disparaging, or mocking, or wasting your soldiers’ lives?

It’s not their problem.

It’s yours.

Momento Mori

I never quite know how to deal with this day.

Typically I simmer all day in a sort of low, sullen anger like a peat fire deep below the surface. The clueless, careless, indifference of my fellow citizens is bitter gall to me, and the unfortunate alternative is a kind of fawning reverence for some imaginary soldier who has "fought for their freedom" that is almost more clueless than the indifferent and even more irking.

I dimly understand that most of these people are trying to say or do something "nice" on a day that has been set aside for what they dimly sense as a sort of patriotic celebration of GIs. They usually have no clue that this is something different from Veterans' Day, and, like a drunk at a wedding, proceed to either offend with their gaucherie or by their tiptoeing around the abyss that is death in war.

I want them to just say it; these men and women died not for me but because of me, because of my choices, or because I chose not a make choices. And many of them, and all of them that have died since the end of the Korean War in 1953, died for nothing, died chasing the ghosts of my fears and ignorance. They died because I thought of dominoes, or of Evil Empires, or of fighting them there so we wouldn't have to fight them here. They died because I let unscrupulous men lie me into fear, into foolish anger, into hate. They died because I was a bad citizen.

And I have never come to terms with that. I've never admitted that, or repented of that, or apologized to the dead for my acts or my indifference.

I know that won't happen, and that galls me, too. We Americans are bad at things like regret, repentance, and apologies.

So I'll say it here.

Fuck, I'm sorry, guys.

I fucked up. I trusted people I never should have. I didn't rage with fire and steel against those people who killed you. No, not the people you fought. The people who sent you to fight for nonsense, or hubris, or greed, or stupidity. And once I knew that they were fools, or criminals, or both I did nothing to punish them for murdering you. They still live, many of them honored and respected, while you are nothing but dust and ashes.

I am ashamed.

All I can promise is that I'll try and do better in the future. I'll try and make sure that they can't make more of you.

That's all.

Take a break in place and smoke 'em if you gottem.

And, as always on this day; this.

Acting 1SG Lawes reads the morning formation announcements

Comp-ney, Atten-shun!

At ease.

Okay, listen up. Coupla things here.

First.

Y'all continue to ignore the Brigade Sarn't Major's directive on not wearing y'all's PT shorts whilst exercising, not in formation. Now far be it from me to suggest that our Brigade Sarn't Major is a nitpicky ding-dong with Wheatina inside his fucking brain housing group who should really have better things to do than obsess about what y'all are wrapping around your asses when you go for a jog down Ardennes Street. That would be unprofessional and disrespectful to our chain of command.

So I will simply remind you that, while possibly being the sort of thing that only a nitpicky ding-dong with Wheatina inside his fucking brain housing group who should really have better things to do than obsess about what y'all are wrapping around your asses when you go for a jog down Ardennes Street would do, that directive has the force of law in this here outfit.

I personally could not give a rat's ass if y'all sashay down the street in a pink tulle' tutu. But, after this formation, you will put the PT shorts up and wear them only when in morning PT formation so you will not incur the wrath of said Brigade Sarn't Major onto this company and the First Sergeant thereof, that being me, who is infernally tired of the goddamn Brigade Sarn't Major and who, if lectured one more time on this issue by that infernal product of an incestuous union will take it out of your ass, seriatim. Is that understood?

I thought so.

Now. Second.

I have received word from Battalion that this Division is going to be tasked to provide a brigade to march in some sort of parade in Washington D.C. Now y'all know my feelings about parades; the pleasure is fucking transient, the position is goddamn ridiculous, and the expense is completely and utterly ridiculous.

However, due to certain feelings of masculine inadequacy of certain persons in certain elected positions this parade will happen and it is entirely likely that this brigade will be tasked, given that Second Brigade in march order looks like nothing so much as a traveling leper colony, and the less said about what will happen if First Brigade is allowed out amongst unprepared civilians the better, although my hyfuckingpothesis is that there will not be an un-emptied bottle of spirits or an unmolested domestic animal within ten kilometers of their line of march.

Now. I still remember the last time we did this, and I will not have a repetition of some of the things you people thought up last Fourth of July.

No, AT Platoon, your vehicles are not public conveyances and you are not authorized to give "free joyrides" in them.

No, Medics, you are not, I say again, not qualified to perform pelvic exams.

No, Commo, you are not "DJ Slicky" and you cannot play Lady Gaga's "Sexxx Dreams" on the brigade command push. Or the battalion command push, either. And don't even think about my company net.

Yes, y'all will be issued MRE meals on the day of the parade and, no, you cannot trade them to civilians for Bonus Jacks, Whoppers, or any other sort of civilian chow. Y'all will keep your assigned weapon with you at all times, and that includes not encouraging civilian women to "touch your gun", Specialist Black. I got my eye on you, heee-ro.

And before you ask, no. I have no fucking idea what the fuck this is for. It ain't no victory parade that I can think of, 'cause we ain't beat nobody's ass lately. If it's a "thank you for your service" thing we can get enough of that at the goddamn airport. If the idea is to scare our enemies then they should really make the Navy do it, because I dunno about anyone else but the Navy scares the hell out of me, floating around the ocean somewhere with nuclear torpedoes an' shit.

But here's the bottom line, people; we are GIs, and we got our orders, so our mission is to salute and move out smartly. Including down fucking Pennsylvania Avenue for a big ol' goat rodeo, if that's what the country wants, God in his wisdom knoweth why. Are we clear on that?

Good. That is all.

Comp-ney, Atten-shun!

Platoon sergeants, take charge.

Acting 1SG Lawes reads the morning formation announcements

Comp-ney, Atten-shun! At ease. Okay, listen up. Coupla things here.

First.

I've been hearing a bunch of you he-roes prancing around the dayroom talking smack about how y'all are "the best 1 percent this country produces".

I hear tell that y'all got that shit from some jarhead, and a jarhead general at that.

Now y'all know how I feel about jarheads. So hearing y'all woofing because one said something about how “We don’t look down upon those of you who that haven’t served. In fact, in a way we’re a little bit sorry because you’ll have never have experienced the wonderful joy you get in your heart when you do the kinds of things our servicemen and women do.” just means that the overpromoted shavetail doesn't know about the kinds of things our servicemen did down at the Flaming Mug last week and, yes, I'm looking at you, AT Platoon. I've got my eye on you, slickyboys.

So before you get all "Ooo-rah! We bad, we bad!" take a look to your left and right flanks. You know as well as I do what that guy next to you is capable of. We all went to high school with that guy. The dude that locked himself in the last stall in the boys' bathroom in the B-wing and had to get pulled out by the school cops?

That's him.

The joker that useta take polaroid dick pics and put them in the romance novels in the library?

That's him.

And don't get me started on surfing the fucking storm drains on their sleeping mats, am I right, Blackie?

The "best 1 percent" my rosy red ass.

The civilians are too fucking busy shoving their tongues up your collective fourth-point-of-contact to remember this, but y'all, at least, should know that y'all are the same jocks, nerds, stoners, wierdos, brainiacs, goofballs, and just regular American dipwads they went to high school with only now y'all wear the same colored clothes. Raisin' your right hand didn't suddenly make any of y'all smarter, braver, more honest, or less likely to fuck up a wet dream and yes, I mean you, night bakers. I saw your fuckin' mess hall this morning and we gonna have a little come-to-Jesus chat right after this formation.

Y'all are good troops, and that's what you're supposed to be. But don't let that make you think that you're some sort of national gold standard. That's how good troops end up getting waxed in combat.

Y'all get free food and clothes, y'all get to get all-expenses-paid vacations to the shitty parts of the world to fuck up things there. Don't let that make you kid yourselves about what a bunch of special fuckin' snowflakes you are just because some goddamn gyrene general who probably hasn't actually seen one of y'all in his natural environment since he was a itty-bitty lieutenant. Those fuckin' star-warriors run around in a little general-officer bubble and they have no more idea of what y'all are really doing out here than a cow knows about the fuckin' Council of Trent.

So. Get over yourselves, people. Like I tol' ya last week; thinking you're all better than civilians is a straight-up dick move, and I won't tolerate that shit in my company, regardless of what the Old Man tells you about how awesome you are.

OK.

Second.

Rumor has it that the Brigade Sergeant Major is gonna be in the company AO this Friday. Y'all know that dick as well as I do, so I highly recommend that you ensure that those "extra" toolkits find their way to SSG Reye's garage, Commo, and Medics? The quarter-ton y'all keep "forgetting" to turn in? That sumbitch needs to go live in the woods starting Thursday night.

Oh, and I will be doing a walkthrough tomorrow at fourteen hundred hours and if I find more pogie bait in your walllockers I will go medieval on your ass. Are we clear on that?

I thought so.

Comp-ney, Atten-shun!

Platoon sergeants, take charge.

Acting 1SG Lawes reads the morning formation announcements.

Attention! At ease. Okay, listen up. Coupla things here.

First.

All this horseshit about how kneeling during the playing of "To Anacreon in Heaven" is somehow spitting on the graves of soldiers?

Get over it. There hasn't been a single fucking American soldier who served, fought, was wounded, or died for "freedom" since 1953 (and that was the freedom of the people of the Republic of Korea, people, know your fucking history).

There are a handful of living veterans of Korea and WW2 who might qualify and you're welcome to ask them THEIR opinions, but all the rest of us fought for "national interests"; we helped secure a tank of gas, or navigation through the Panama Canal, or for diddly-shit Great Power games in the Middle East.

The U.S. of 2017 uses armed force like any Great Power, people.

This isn't 1776.

Grow the fuck up.

Second. I've seen fellow GIs get all whip out their DD214 on people who haven't served to beat them over the head with the "right" to be all pissy about people protesting the fact that coppers are WAY more likely to kill your ass if you're not White Like Me.

That's a dick move, brothers.

Those despised "civilians"? They're OUR FUCKING BOSSES.

If they want to protest, or shout at us, or dance naked in the streets...our job, our ONLY fucking job, is to salute and move out smartly. THEY are the true "guardians of liberty", not us. We're here to keep the outside out. THEY are there to make the "inside" truly free, truly just, true to the promise of "liberty and justice for all"...or not. It's up to them, and not us to lecture or hector them about what they do or how they do it.

S&T Platoon. Imma see your ass in the motor pool after this formation and we're gonna talk about your fucking Conex.

That is all.

Platoon sergeants, take charge.

Final Fantasy IV; Malheur Moron Mulisha Edition

This article talks about the Malheur Moron Metal Mulisha and how their cunning plan was to Free the Federal Lands! from the oppression of the Evil Empire of the BLM and then a thousand Make America Great Again flowers would bloom in Harney County.

(h/t to Nancy Nall who linked to it today)

There was only one teensy-tinsey little problem with that; geography and topography. Which is to say...reality.

Because Harney County – just like every other deserted shithole part of rural America – is WAY the hell out in the middle of nowhere; it’s almost perfectly equidistant from anywhere in the Northwest where people live and people want to live; the population centers of Oregon to the west, Nevada and Utah south, Idaho and Washington north and east. Shipping anything to market is punitive, given that wetter places (better for timber, grain, and livestock) are closer to those markets.

Badtux the Rural-travelin' Penguin encountered a similar sort of place out in the Mojave, of which he notes:

"These people are stranded, like so many other Americans, stranded in the desert of what was once the American Dream but now is just a hardscrabble existence in a harsh and brittle place. I haven’t looked around to see if I can see lots of red caps. But I bet I’ll find plenty of them there. Because where the American Dream has died, something evil this way comes."

Harney was homesteaded back in the 19th Century and an overwhelmingly large number of those operations failed. The distances were too large, the transportation grid too poor, and the water too scarce. The place is scenic as all hell…but not great for small farming or ranching without serious white-people welfare (a.k.a “farm subsidies” and below-market-low grazing fees).

What makes it even more fucked-up is that the collapse of places like Harney County wasn't a mistake or an accident. It was engineered by a combination of greed, stupidity, and unscrupulousness.

The “great plains” and the intermontane deserts of eastern Oregon were shrub- and grassland steppe for a reason and the Plains tribes and the high desert outfits like the Northern Paiute weren’t horse nomads because they were easily bored with the local scenery.

Without large-scale irrigation the bulk of the lands West of the Mississippi and east of the Sierras/Cascades are too arid to support tilth agriculture. Even pastoralism (for European cattle, anyway...) was fairly iffy in a lot of places.

But “real estate developers”, manifest destiny floggers, and grifters – the 19th Century Trumps – conned tens of thousands of proto-Trumpeters into believing nonsense like “rain follows the plow” (the theory that tilling semiarid grasslands releases soil moisture that then returns as rain. Seriously; I shit you not people believed that stuff…). Plus the U.S. government wanted white farmers to replace the Dangerous Savages.

So what would happen is that every couple of decades North America would get a change in the ENSO (the “El Nino/La Nina” variation) and the Plains would have a couple of wet years or five...enough to get a bunch of sodbusters through the winter. And the homesteaders would proliferate; suddenly Harney County was Great Again!

Aaaaand…then the climate would return to the semiarid norm, crops would fail, cattle starve, the homesteaders go bust. The bank would foreclose, everybody would move on...until the next wet cycle.

Wash, rinse, repeat; this happened something like 3-4 times between 1865 and the beginning of widespread irrigation in the Fifties - a change that was hugely supported by those damn imperialists of the BLM and the U.S. government irrigation programs.

As P.T. Barnum would have said; there’s one born every minute…

IF the federal drylands were opened the only real claimants would be the big timber and big ag outfits, if them, simply because only those deep-pocketed corporate entities would have any hope of making a go in Harney County and that only because of their ability to cover bad years and their economy of scale.

Nope.

The fantasies nourished by Bundys across the West (the so-called “Sagebrush Rebellion”) and the people in these dying places are as invasive, useless, and destructive as the tumbleweed that we mistake for authentically Western but are, in fact, a pernicious Russian weed…much like our new President-elect...

Service in the time of Trump

I never really feel anything but a mild irritation on this day. THIS today the irritation is less mild and is overlayered with a sort of sour contempt.

A large minority of my fellow citizens has chosen to put over me as my nation's Chief Executive a man that I would have done my best to chapter out of my Army had he come through my training unit when I was under the hat; a compulsive liar, a man who shirked his own service then boasted that prancing around in some sort of silly military school uniform was "just like serving", a bully and a con man and a thief.

This man, and his party, will over the next four years attempt to destroy the America I grew up in. They will attempt to reverse, repeal, and destroy the liberal and progressive and egalitarian and regulatory acts that have changed the face of this nation since 1929.

I've been Chief Executive-d by knaves and bastards before. I despised Dubya, had little but personal contempt for Bill Clinton and his wandering penis, thought Ronnie Reagan was a bloviating idiot. In a sense I tolerated them and the people who elected them because their elections owed more to We the People's ridiculous optimism and poor education and, sometimes, their venality and greed. They promised us "stuff" and we gave them power. That's how people are and that's how "leadership" has always been since the days of bread and circuses.

I'm not pissed off that my nation has elected this con man because he promised change in the form of doing the awful things to the sorts of people and things they hated, and people responded to that with unfounded optimism and poor education (and some venality, greed, a smidgen of racism and sexism and hate).

No, what irks the shit out of me is the fucking stupid of it. Bone-stupid. Thermonuclear stupid.

It was such a...cheap, obvious, lame-ass con. From the fucking idiotic Wall to the impossible promises of those millions of beautiful jobs it was a con so visible and so clearly ridiculous that only a real simpleton would have believed it. But millions of simpletons fucking did. I hate to think that so many of my fellow Americans are Just That Stupid that they'd buy a Gilded Age thinking they were getting a raise and a week's vacation at Sandals. But, apparently, they are.

Goddamn it but I wish I had their e-mail addresses so I could run one of those Nigerian oil-minister scams on them. I'd be a fucking millionaire.

I remain stubbornly proud of my service and the ideals of my country that led me to that service.

But of the country itself, its "leaders", and many of its people, I am today less proud than ever.

The Care of Devils

It goes almost without saying that a huge part of me is equally revolted and angered at the ridiculous carny show that has become the Republican Party and its loathsome Presidential candidate field. Krugman is perfectly correct; the obviously lunatic, con-man, and carny currently running ahead of the rest of the klowns is only less acceptable as the potential Chief Executive of the most powerful polity in the Western world because of the obvious unmoored insanity of his personality, not his "political positions" (such as they are) which are, in many cases, mildly less loathsome than those of his supposedly more conventional competitors.

But, much as I hate to admit this, the current widespread enthusiasm for the vulgar talking yam - among both the public and among the press - is horribly fascinating as a glimpse into mind (also such as it is...) the American public.

The degree to which the Presidency of Barak Obama has completely unhinged a certain proportion of the public has always amazed me. Here's a guy who is pretty much a 1950's Eisenhower Republican or, at least, has governed as such...and, yet, I have heard from friends whose relatives, or acquaintances, or casual correspondents hate Obama, hatehatehate him with a passionate intensity.

It's not like I don't understand "passionate hatred" for politicians; I've loathed a few myself.

But Obama? Obama?

I can't imagine a more perfectly innocuous corporate suit, whether it's his personal style or his governing. He's...well, he's kind of a suit.

And yet, I read people saying they HATE Obama so much (or Clinton, another perfect corporate suit) that even though they admit, or even insist, that Trump is, indeed, a dangerously mendacious fool that they will vote for him when he receives the GOP nomination. I find this literally incomprehensible; it's like saying "Well, the food at that Korean joint was pretty awful, so instead let's just stay home tonight and eat a big ol' bag of camel shit."

Obviously most of these sorts of people don't admit that Trump is an unhinged looney. They say he's a "truth-teller" or not hidebound by "political correctness", as if lying was some sort of version of saying unsayable truth.

But he clearly is, and their kidding themselves is patently ridiculous.

And herein lies the most incredible aspect of this election.

If you had tried; if you had carefully, deliberately, painstakingly crafted the most perfectly disastrous sort of human being to be placed in a position of immense power I cannot imagine crafting someone more catastrophic than Donald Trump. He's like one of those the wartime caricatures of Hitler, or Tojo, or Mussolini; an embodiment of everything utterly incompetent put in charge of a Great Power.

It doesn't matter WHO his opponent is, outside of zombie Iosef Stalin or Satan or another equally gross cartoon villain. There's just no reason any sane person would vote for Donald Trump for President if the alternative wasn't a bloody-handed mass murderer.

So this November will of interest to me only in what it will reveal about my "fellow citizens".

The percentage of the general public who will vote for this scumbag is directly proportionate to the percentage who are utterly unfit to be citizens of a self-governing republic. They are sheep who would vote to make the wolf their king because they are afraid and he is "strong". They are the slaves who would vote to make the slavedriver their king because they want to hate the Others and he is "honest" enough to say so out loud.

And I very much fear, that in the words of Mr. Paine, that I am infidel enough "...as to suppose that He has relinquished the government of the world, and given us up to the care of devils..."