Friday Jukebox: Goodbye, goodbye edition

And this was from 2008, mind, when we THOUGHT things were bad.

Game recognize game

Now.

Then.

These numbnuts are deeply ignorant, profoundly stupid, and utterly incompetent. It's their good luck, and the rest of our misfortunes, that their MAGAt party is even more ignorant and stupid and cares nothing for competence so long as they get the performative spite and malice they crave.

And there is no remedy for them in the Constitutional system. No checks. No balances. Nothing.

The United States is now a Stupid Fascist state in fact, if not in name, and if We the People don't want that, well...history shows the path from autocracy to republicanism is ugly, brutal, and very often futile at least in the short and even medium term. 

The Revolution of 1789 led to military dictatorship by 1800 and decades of ruinous war. The Revolution of 1917 led to partisan dictatorship by 1921 and decades of brutal immiseration. Our own revolution was only prevented from a similar fate by a unique combination of individual probity and isolation from neighboring Great Powers.

So, no. There is no Good Way past this disaster.

The trope of 1776 is that roughly a third of the then-American colonies was Loyalist, a third were rebels, and the remaining third just wanted to keep their heads down. Logistical difficulties, strategic incoherence, and Great Power rivalry with France ensured the rebellion became revolution and overthrow of the ruling order.

We certainly have ruling incoherence and economic difficulty from the fascists.

But we have no Power to come to our aid, and the internal division is even less favorable; the fascists run from about 30% - the true hardcore MAGAts - to 40% and the "heads-down" lumpen herdbeasts are another 30-40%. The police and military will obey The Chief Executive; there is no competing "Garde National" or rebellious militias to opposed regime gunfire with rebel gunfire.

We are, in fact...

 

I honestly have no words of hope or encouragement. I can't figure out a way to overthrow these sonsofbitches short of actual violent rebellion, and history also shows how often that goes badly for the rebels.

The time for phone banking and postcard writing is past.

But I can't stand the idea of simply bending the knee to these people. Is it time for building IEDs? How can that ever work? 

I can only stand, shaking with rage, as my country devolves before my burning eyes.

Make stupid wars. Collect stupid prizes

That the Trump Klown Kabinet could fuck up a military wet dream?

Color me shocked by that. Shocked!

One of the most interesting takes on this is Garrett Graff's piece here:  

It sums up the multivariate fuckups, idiocies, and "scandals" (if such a thing can be applied to these shameless nitwits - you have to have the ability to feel shame to be "scandalized", and these garden tools have none) involved in the now-apparently-called "Signalgate" nonsense.

I don't really give a shit. These people have done and will do worse. This is just another Tuesday in Yemen and the worthless Trump 2: Electric Boogaloo Administration. Oh, wait, more dead people? Yawn.

No.

It's what it exposes about the pure, crystalline stupidity that has been the U.S. "policy" in the Middle East, Trumpian and otherwise.

Seriously...what the fuck did these nimrods think a dozen bombs, smart or otherwise, would do in Yemen?

The place has been a clusterfuck since, well...in the modern era? The Sixties, when the place split into two north-south halves and proceeded to indulge in various bloody debates over who should be the boss of whom.

Throw in the usual - corruption, poverty, famine - and you've got the classic Middle Eastern recipe for misery.

So how does hucking a dozen or so kinetic weapons into random apartment buildings "help" with that?

Hint: it doesn't.

This was, apart from the awesome level of bureaucratic incompetence - people on their iPhones in the Kremlin cafeteria, random journos in on the chat, schoolboy emojis - the ultimate in worthlessly performative "war". This was the equivalent of the story in Tony Herbert's Vietnam memoir where he runs down the list of target effects and comes across one labeled "emplacements destroyed" and wonders how you "destroy" a hole by blowing it into a bigger hole.

For a couple of cool million in ordnance, fuel, equipment wear, and personnel costs this nonsense only made the Yemeni rubble bounce. 

I'm sure Elon Musk will get on this "waste" just as soon as he gets done kicking all us "fraudsters" off Social Security.

WASF.

Twenty-three

 Hey, you! C'mere, let me give you a hug. You're not too big for that yet, are you?

Of course you're not. You're, well, still tiny, still only one day old. This one day, twenty-three years ago, when you left us, your mom and I, just a day after you arrived.

The only place your grew up was in our hearts.

This day, and all those before and after. The days I dreamed of and hoped for and never had. Dreamed of all the things we'd do together; good...and bad, happy and sad, cheerful or angry or bored or silly.

They never happened, did they, dearest?

Now there's only this day, the day you climb up the dark stairwell and sit beside me as I cry.

Because I still miss you.

Oh, yes; there's your little brother and little sister. Yes, they're great. I love them to pieces, and always will.

But today is about you, the big sister they never had, the little girl and young woman I never got to know.

This year was even harder because I'm not just missing you but missing your mom. The first time in twenty-three years we haven't had a partner to console each other, a friend and lover to give and receive comfort. 

I called your mom today. Told her that she was in my heart, and hoped that she could find some solace in that, find some peace. It's hard on her, y'know. She carried you closer than her own skin, slept behind your heartbeat for three-quarters of a year. She dies a little every time this year thinking of and missing you.

And so do I, in a different way.

Because every year, every time this day comes, I look into the darkness for the tiny flame that was your too-brief stay with us, to remember you, to grieve for you. To wish against all the years that we had another chance, knowing we never will. 

To have the years of you, child and girl and woman grown, father and daughter, loving and beloved.

So. Sit beside me for a little while. I promise I won't try and hold you when you have to go. But just now, for this time, just for this day, let me sit and dream the dream I dreamed, the dream of the you that never came.

Bryn Rose Gellar
March 1, 2002 - March 2, 2002

A letter to my sister

My little sis called me today. Left a voicemail about TrumpFuckery, and in particular mentioned Ukraine.

I just didn't feel like spending half an hour moaning and pissing about all that, so I wrote her this email:

 "The reality is that we’re screwed for at LEAST the next two years, and that assumes that these fucksticks’ idiot rampage fucks things up bad enough that even the idiot public gets pissed enough to vote Democratic. Which is far from a given; it’s just as likely that there’s a third party nonsense (which means the GOP wins) or they just don’t vote at all (…so GOP wins…).

 

The Trumpenscum has it all; all three branches, the press licking their taint…all we can do is try and delay and go to court - and that’s a weak reed given the SCOTUS Furious Five - or the streets, and that’s both risky and dangerous, because Fatso WILL invoke the Insurrection Act and become a Fuhrer in fact as opposed to in practice.

 

So everything and everyone we non-scum humans care about - parks, public spaces in general, social safety nets, modern medicine..? All we will have is what they don’t want or just don't want to trash because they’re fucking trash people who are stealing perfectly good oxygen and that's what fucking oxygen-thieves do.

 

Ukraine? Fuck. If the EU doesn’t step up they’re doomed. Palestine? Doomed. Taiwan? If Xi is willing to pay off Fatso? Doomed.

 

I’ll see if I can find the link, but Amanda Marcotte has a piece interviewing someone who’s deep-dived into the wingnut bible-bangers. (It's here).

 

The bottom line? It’s a cult, they’re fanatics, and there’s no reaching them; it’s culture war as ACTUAL war. There’s no going back any more than there was for the Hitler Youth dying in the streets of Berlin or the kamikaze taking off from Kyushu in August 1945. 

 

I’m not exaggerating; we cannot “beat” these people using democracy. They see that as race and religious suicide. They must be destroyed…and that means real, actual, no-shit Civil War. And I don’t see “our side” as ready and willing to do that. I don’t blame them! That’s horrendous!

 

But that’s where we are.

 

I'm reminded of the passage in Tolkien where Frodo is pissing and moaning about how fucked it is that this whole “ring” shit has to happen on HIS watch.

 

Gandalf replies, no shit, Sherlock, really? Word up Frodo, he says; that’s what EVERYONE in this situation thinks. It sucks. It just sucks. 

 

But it is what it is and all you and I and everyone else can do is suck it up. 

 

And so we do. 

 

I'm not saying "Stop fighting". Even if you're doomed to lose, you have to fight. Even if it means you die, if what you're fighting for is worth it, you fight - and die - as hard as you can. Every Nazi you kill in Poland before you die is one Nazi that can't invade France, can't invade Russia, can't defend Normandy or Italy or Berlin.

 

But that doesn't make the dying any easier. 

As we used to say over at Intel Dump:

 

WASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSF!

A bas Citoyen Trump

 

Cui bono?

As usual, the news is overstuffed with Fatso's fuckery and that of his sejanus, Elmo.

It's not worth dissecting in detail; it's just more "Let's do 1929 over only the plutocrats win!" bullshit.

I did want to make a couple of observations, though.

1. If you're really hunting "waste, fraud, and abuse" of federal agencies you don't use racist nineteen-year-old coders. You bring in forty-eight-year-old forensic accountants.

You bring in the ElmoTeens because you want to write in backdoors and hack government servers for a plutocrat whose "businesses" survive on government handouts.

Just sayin'.

2. I want every interview of every Republican official at every level to begin with:
"You (or "your Congressional Republican colleagues") have introduced a plan to cut over 800 billion out of Medicaid, a program millions of your fellow Americans depend on for their health care. This will mean that millions of those people will lose that care. What do you recommend those people do?"

Every. Single. Interview.

Over and over.

Until one of them loses it and responds with Auric Goldfinger's line:

"No, I expect you to die." 

These fucking people.

Every morning I read the news and the thought that keeps returning is "How come you never have a rocket-propelled grenade when you really need one?" 

One more thought.

One thing that I think hasn't been hit hard enough in all the coverage of this TrumpMuskFuckery. The single biggest societal issue isn't just the looting and breaking things. 

It's the fundamental issue with the WAY the MAGAts are going about this.

Societies - settled, "mature", societies, economies, polities - depend on stability.

The way the people within the entities live, if they intend to live a peaceful, productive life, is dependent on knowing that 1) when they wake up today the "rules" - social, economic, political - will be the same as they were when they went to sleep, and 2) if things change, that change is done through a methodical, orderly (and in a republic) public democratic process.

That gives people chance to live stable lives in peace or, if things change, time and resources to either fight the change or adapt to it.

In other words, the laws and rules remain in place until and unless they are changed, and, if changed, are changed through gradual public debate and accountable legal or legislative processes. 

To put it more simply; civic life cannot be Calvinball.

That's the biggest problem with all this GOPFuckery. It speed-runs these massive changes, largely because (I believe) these sonsofbitches know that if they tried it the legitimate, Constitutional, legal ways they'd end up having to explain things that will make them look "bad" and risk getting handed their whole ass.

Because, for the non-billionaire class of citizens, they ARE bad. They will make the vast majority of us poorer, sicker, weaker, less-legally-protected, more insecure, more frightened, less "citizens" more "subjects".

And the MAGAts Trump is running know that. 

The polling on their mercantilist, racist, sexist, imperialist, every-other-Gilded-Age-ist fuckery is awful. When the public - even big swathes of the MAGAt public - knows the actual effects of all this stuff (as opposed to the "woke!woke!woke!" bullshit bullhorn version used to smokescreen it) they haaaaate it.

So even though these people have it all; executive, legislature, courts, every lever of U.S. government...they aren't even trying to do this through the Constitutional framework. They want Calvinball because Calvinball is only fun if you're Calvin. 

For the rest of us it's just scary, stupid, unpredictable, dangerously unhinged chaos.

And you can't run a huge industrial republic on unhinged chaos.

Unless...

You're a plutocrat and you don't have to rely on things like legal rights or poultry inspections or Medicare, or...you think you are that plutocrat.

Then you can hope to pluck loot from the chaos.

It worked for Attila.

Which is an excellent reason not to see how it works here and now. 

Because when society works for barbarism the people inside it have to become barbarians or die.