Ashokan Farewell

 

My Dearest Martha.

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

 

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

 

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

 

Yours in Trump:

Caleb

 

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

Well....fuck.

 

War and Remembrance

 Several thoughts about the recent U.S. military in the news:

1) Randomly sinking vessels on the high seas is called “piracy”. Pirates are by definition criminals who are liable to execution when caught in the act.

 

2) Calling it the “War Department” isn’t unreasonable (that’s what it does, basically) and that’s what it was called for decades, so I don’t precisely have a problem with the idea.

 

3) I have a problem with THESE fuckers - Felony Fats and Whiskey Pete - because I think it is a giveaway; that the dumb bastards think “war works” when anyone who’s lived through Iraq and Afghanistan and Vietnam or studied war (Thuycidides and Clausewitz (drink!) are holding on Line 1) knows that the reality is complicated and very dependent on a deep understanding of and clear-eyed analysis of the ends and means and especially the possible unintended consequences.

 

These gormless fucksticks wouldn’t know “deep” and “clear-eyed” if it hit them on the ass singing “unintended consequences are here again”.

 

So I dread the implications of the rebranding. Handing these poop-flinging monkeys a live grenade is…not a good idea.

 

4) So apparently in 2019 the USN ran a covert operation in North Korea that went bad. Which happens. CO are inherently risky.

 

That said…SEALs, WTF? These guys’ record is iffy at best going back to Grenada in ‘83 when a bunch got dropped too far offshore and drowned and another got caught trying to do a “hostage rescue” thing and had to be rescued themselves.

 

Punta Patilla in Panama, 1989. 

 

Several ugly fails in SW Asia.

 

Seems to me like the outfit needs better strategic (or operational) sense to direct their tactical skills…

 

5) I’m reading that Felony Fats’ Operation Big Balls’ Revenge has prompted the GIs to coin their own nickname for the clusterfuck; they’re now “National Gardeners”

 

What’s NOT funny is that the fucker is playing stupid games with Joe and Molly.

 

His buddy Whiskey Pete isn’t transferring funds to the Guard Bureau to cover the costs, so troops who were activated are now being put on inactive status after returning to their home station.

Depending on their drill and activated time that might prevent them from ringing up a “good year” - that is, one that counts toward retirement.

 

That’s 1) bullshit, and 2) totally on-brand for Fats, who’s Art of the Steal has ALWAYS been “stiff your contractors”.

 

And to think that a perfectly good assassin put a bullet into James Fucking Garfield, a pathetic loser nailed JFK right in the ten-ring, Abe Lincoln’s theater evening went completely to hell and yet THIS shitheel is still wasting perfectly good oxygen…

 

There is no justice in this sorry world.

Welthauptstadt Germania; an update on D.C.

So the eagle has landed, and boy fuckin' howdy are the Bad Guys on the run:

"Between the first two nights of the federal takeover, 66 arrests were made, with another 45 being made Wednesday — numbers that Parker argued paled in comparison to the potential millions of dollars the deployment will cost taxpayers.

“In fact, 1,450 officers participated in Tuesday night’s operation to arrest 43 people; this comes to 34 officers per alleged offender,” Parker wrote.

“On Wednesday night, 1,650 officers participated, which breaks down to about 37 officers per alleged criminal. And on Thursday, 20 officers arrested a plainly overwrought man who allegedly threw a sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection agent at 14th and U streets NW. Your tax dollars at work.”

Which takes us back to the first post about this, which asked several questions but not, perhaps, the most important one, which is

"What, exactly, are all these GIs going to actually do?"

These aren't civil cops. They're Joe and Molly, weekend warriors, cooks, bakers, mechanics, grunts, MPs, PAC clerks. You don't enforce law with fucking PAC clerks, you fill in forms.

That has been lingering in the back of my mind since I posted earlier.

Don't handwave. Be specific. What is one of these DCARNG "presence patrols" going to do?

Can you imagine a couple of the guys from your local Guard unit chasing robbers like T.J. Fucking Hooker? Rousting bums from the park? How? At bayonet point? With just their amazing Guard jedi mind trick powers?

Will they walk around hand-in-hand with the newly-federalized D.C. cops the way the Royal Army did the RUC in Belfast?

And if so, why? The IRA was an armed insurgency. Backing the Ulster cops with soldiers made perfect sense (not that I'm arguing that the British occupation of Ireland made or makes sense in any fashion, just that if you're going to try and do policing during a guerilla war you kinda have to do it that way...) but the D.C. cops aren't fighting guerrillas.

So...what? What are all these GIs shambling around the Tidal Basin doing? They're on our fucking taxpayer dime, so I'd sure like to know if my money is being wasted on the military equivalent of a multi-million dollar gold-encrusted fucking ballroom.

Just sayin'.

Update 8/17: So, couple of things. 

First, here's where all these Sicherheitsdienst commandos are strolling:

 

As the Fallows account post that contains this image notes; this ain't where the crooks are.

These are the "good" neighborhoods and where the public attractions like the monuments and other touristy shit are. These jokers are not Crushing Crime. They're wandering around doing fucking presence patrols, and about as uselessly as in Kandahar or Fallujah.

The other fucked-up part? Porky has got wingnut governors tripping over themselves to send GIs; Ohio, South Carolina, and West Virginia.

Okay, now. I mentioned that how you could do this here in Oregon is bus guys from downstate, or out in the Greater Idaho parts of the joint to bust Portland heads, but that the District is too small for that. 

This is how you get around that.

But...South Carolina? Seriously? You're gonna send those fucking crackers to D.C.? Now that's gonna fucking end well. That's just mindbendingly ridiculous. 

I get it; just like the rest of this, it's not about anything real. In this case it's wingnut governors competing to see who can get their tongue the furthest up Tubby'a anus.

Doesn't make it any less goddamn irritating, mind. 

Presence patrol

 Apparently we're doing this... 

 
...because it worked so fucking well in Baghdad and Kabul:

"President Donald Trump announced he is placing the Washington, DC, police department “under direct federal control” and deploying National Guard troops to the nation’s capital..."

It's easy enough to sanewash or handwave why the drooling moron is doing this, but to me the real issues are in the mechanics of the actual doing. Because...

1)  Soldiers are shitty cops.

That's also #2 through infinity.

Soldiers are trained to kill people and break shit. That's the nature of the business. So whenever you try to use them as "cops" (call them "OOTW", "assistance to the host nation", "peacekeeping", "occupation", whatever...) you run a genuine risk that that training will break out in unforeseen and usually disruptive or even dangerous ways.

Think the paras in Belfast, or the 325th in Fallujah. If you put Joe and Molly in a tight spot, they're going to default to their training, which is not "cop".

Mind you, as I think I've hammered hard on here, even "cops" aren't often very good at "peacekeeping". Confronted with people they dislike and distrust their go-to reaction is to pull out the club and the pepper spray and start shit.

So using soldiers to police D.C.? Just in and of itself that's not a smart thing, because

2) The things Trump is telling these GIs to do would be difficult to impossible even for truly gifted and well-led municipal leaders, police and social service organizations and staff.

"The Homeless will have to move out, IMMEDIATELY."

Where? 

How?

As I noted when the City of Portland had this brilliant idea a couple of years back, what the actual fuck do you expect these poor bastards to do? 

"The Good People for Portland are nutty enough about the hobo camps as it is. Can you imagine the reaction to wandering groups of encumbered homeless people like some sort of Mongol horde with shopping carts instead of horses? And this is the supposedly GOOD idea the Portland city government is proposing?"

Yeahno. 

So here's an interesting note on this whole "round 'em up and shove 'em in The Camps" thing.

I had a lovely evening with a dear friend not too long ago. She's a retired elementary school teacher, grandma, traveler, thoughtful and honest and kind. 

(FWIW, the tradition around here is that we don't show people's faces without their permission, but feet are fair game...)

But she's also a longtime Portlander who's had bad experience with homeless/feral street people in the past and, like the rest of us, is sick and tired of the trash and the noise and the apparent menace. 

She's all in on these camps.

"They can get help there. They can get treatment. They can get their lives straightened out".

My response was "Okay, let's say that happens." (thinking "we don't want to pay for that now, why would we pay for that once the hoboes are locked up out of sight..?") "Then what?"

Once you've caught-and-released these people? They're still broke. Still unable to afford a roof, a shower, a toilet. Still unemployed, or underemployed to where they don't make enough to pay for those. 

"We will give you places to stay..."

WTF? Seriously? How? Where? No, show your work. Where are these Homeless Havens? Who pays for them? Who maintains, and runs, and cleans them?

And how do soldiers help do all that?

Is Tubby suggesting that the D.C. Guard set up Homeless Refugee Camps in Bradenburg? Silver Spring? How? Who's gonna pay for that, and for how long?

And while we're on the subject of the D.C. Guard...

3) We're probably not talking the most elite of military material here or the best military experience for doing this, either.

Fatso might think that wearing the tree suit makes you a combination Rambo and Clausewitz (drink!), but in my experience a lot of Guard joes were fairly average at best, and a fair number of them had little or no active time. 

Farkling about Southwest Asia has changed that...but not for the better. So the ones that do have RA experience? A lot of these jokers will have "presence patrol" experience in Iraq or Afghanistan and associate that with policing at best unwelcoming and at worst dangerously hostile places.

Putting someone whose "peacekeeping" experience is Kandahar or Basra or Baghdad in NW Washington D.C.? Probably not a good idea.

I'm guessing that the primary unit that will be tasked for this is the 372nd Military Police Battalion. The D.C. Guard website says that the "Red Hand" outfit...

"...plays a crucial role in conducting traffic control, corrections, security and mobility support, especially during National Special Security Events, like Presidential Inaugurations and when deployed, such as the 276th Military Police Company’s deployment to Guantanamo Naval Base, Cuba in 2016."

So pretty much cage-kickers, with a short c.v. in crowd control. Not sure how that works on the Mean Streets of Foggy Bottom.

So this looks a lot like the "depopulation" thing we just talked about; a "one-simple-trick" "conservative" "solution" to a difficult and complex (and, I note passing, an imaginary-in-the-"no, crime and vandalism and mayhem are not really running wild in D.C."-sense, but that's pointless to drag in because this isn't about an actual thing but the usual "conservative" reality-is-what-I-believe-it-is bugnuttery) problem.

One of the worst aspects of Trumpism is the grinding stupidity of it.

It's exhausting. The daily piling of stupid on nonsensical on corrupt on ignorant all founded on ridiculous 4chan gibberish. Trying to push back against it is like shoveling water; it's ALL just bullshit all the way down, so there's no actual logic or reason or sense involved, there's no bedrock there outside bafflegab, so there's no pinning down these people or their ideas to beat the life out of them. They just ooze from one idiotic notion to another to justify whatever they want to do, because that's all it's really about. 

It's what they want to do and now they can.

And that it pisses their enemies off?

That's just gravy. 

Breeding press

 

 

No. Not that one.

The folks over at Lawyers, Guns & Money have several posts up about "depopulation" and declining birth rates, which are apparently a global trend.

The first linked piece posits that it's cell phones.

Kidding. Sorta. The conclusion is that:

"...we do have this big increase in personal online entertainment, whether it’s watching shows on Netflix, sports bets — online gambling has become absolutely massive across Brazil and Latin America more broadly. You can go on PornHub. Online connectivity enables people to stroll on Instagram, play Call of Duty, World of Warcraft.

So we are all becoming — it’s not just being single — we’re all retreating into this digital solitude. I think that’s partly because technology makes it nicer and easier to stay at home — you can work from home — and some of these apps are so hyper-engaging that you get distracted by the constant stream of dopamine hits as each app, as each technology company competes against others to keep its users hooked."

IOW we have more fun "practicing while I'm alone" than we do with some other human being in meatspace.

There may be something to that, but I'm not sure it's smartphones per se.

I think I've discussed this before. 

(In fact I know I did, back in April)

The thing with kids is that you the parents end up spending LOTS of time and money on kids.

At at time when there's lots of fun things to spend time and money on. Travel. Entertainment. Porn. Games. Sports. Leisure. 

As opposed to changing diapers, taxiing to soccer games, reading bedtime stories, kissing owies.

Are those good? Are they worth it?

I think so.

But based on global fertility? A lot of people disagree.

There are real risks about that, though, including the reality that our modern industrial welfare states depend on a continual supply of people paying into the system to pay for us olds. And for them when they get old. If the pillar becomes a pyramid, with fewer and fewer paying in and more and more pulling out..?

Yike.

The second LG&M post makes a good point about our New MAGAt Moron Overlords, tho; 

"The triumph of the authentic Trumpian stupidity is reflected in the extent to which it has made one particular belief absolutely central to all political discourse in the Republican party, and on the American right wing generally.

That particular belief is the key concept at the core of the stupid person’s world view, and it is this: All of these apparently complicated problems that trouble our society, and that interfere with our impending return to greatness, are actually very simple.  For every social problem there is always a simple solution – one weird trick – that solves the problem perfectly.  All you need is common sense, and an unwillingness to be fooled by the so-called experts.  This is the stupid person’s Nicene Creed.

Moreover, stupid people love simple answers to complex questions, because such answers validate their entire world view."

Yes. Oh fuuuuuuuck yes.

Is there an answer to this slide into a post-population world?

If there is I don't know of it.

But if there is, I do know this; it won't be simple.

Or easy.

Or quick.

The dreams of the warriors

So here's a weird example of how my mind works.

Last evening I drove out to downtown Beaverton and watched the 2009 anime film "Summer Wars". It was great popcorn, gorgeously animated in the best anime style, and hit all the mange/anime-lover (i.e. me...) buttons; high school romance/angst, family drama, high-tech danger, goofy secondary characters, samurai, squid, baseball. It's fun.

After the show I went and looked it up and was unsurprised that the director was the same person who did "Belle", the gorgeous anime version of Beauty and the Beast that my daughter took us too several years ago. 

 

Well done, Hosoda-san.

 

Anyway, as I was reading I was a bit bugged by the title.

 

Yes, it's about a war (well, "cyber-war") and it takes place over two days in summer, so, "summer wars", fine. 

 

But.

 

The Japanese title is "サマーウォーズ in katakana, which is "Hepburnized" in the Wiki as "Samā Wōzu".

 

Okay, now; because I'm me (and do military history and martial sports that have Japanese connections) I'm very familiar with the Japanese word for "war".

 

And it's not "Wozu", it's 戦争, "Sensō". 

 

I tried looking for some sort of katakana or hirigana versions that could be translated as "wozu". 

 

Nope.

 

Then I plugged the katakana title directly into romaji, and Dr. Google gave me this: "Samāu~ōzu".  

 

That's also not "war"; indeed, try and look up "ozu" and all you you get is either a place name or a personal/family name. All the other links went directly back to the film, suggesting that the katakana don't mean "summer wars" in the general sense of "wars fought during the summer" but specifically "the movie "Summer Wars".

 

So now I'm baffled; is the title some sort of phonetic "English"? "Summer" ("sama") "Wars" ("wozu") invented just for the flick? If so...why? Why not just call it 夏戦争; "Natsu Sensō", "Summer War(s)"? Is there some particular reason or meaning for naming it the way they did?

 

I'm now hooked and I want to know.

 

Doesn't make the flick any less fun; indeed, now I want to know more about the movie. 

 

And that's so me. 

 

Sad, but there it is.

 

What fresh hell is this..?

I'm a soccer fan, but one thing I've been able to miss is the appalling "barstool sports" sort of "fan culture" shit. Apparently it's a thing, and not a good one. One of the staff over at Lawyers, Guns, & Money has a post up about this freakish "sports fandom fandom" that cuts to the real heart of our national problem:

"There are so many parallels between the popularity of Barstool and MAGA, it’s frightening. In fact, as this podcast very astutely points out, things like Barstool and Gamergate were very much proving grounds for MAGA. They’re all cults centered around the most toxic idiots on the internet. They’re all troll armies. They all have an undisguised loathing for women and POC. And most importantly they’re all movements and moments that give people permission to be their absolute worst selves.

Editing to say: It really hit me how much MAGA centers on monetizing being awful and how absolutely dystopian that is"

Tl:dr? "MAGA means never having to say you're sorry you're an asshole."

Here's my question, though; what the everlovin' fuck do you do with someone who WANTS to be an unapologetic asshole?

Seriously.

How do you possible "reach" someone like that?

Because the implicit part of being an unapologetic asshole is that you want, expect, and will fight to ensure that the "public square" is asshole-friendly. You're gonna do everything you can to ensure that there's no, not the slightest hint of, pushback against your assholery. You're never going to back down, give up, or give in.

Which is what we've seen from MAGA since Day Zero.

These dickstains have been loud and proud up in the grille of everyone and everything that has tried to stand up to or against them. Now, especially, since they have all the levers of federal power they've forced their opponents to bend the knee. And to their eternal shame, many have; universities, media conglomerates, pundits, functionaries.

Which is why I keep repeating; we, the non-asshole non-MAGAts, need to realize that

We

Are

At

War

with these people and their institutions.

They know they are; their openly stated objectives are to crush us and destroy everything we value. They are not our fellow Americans, not our fellow citizens, but our mortal enemies.

Because that sort of person is effectively unredeemable our battle must not be directed at them but against those around them, the non-voter, the marginal MAGAt (who cannot be won but who can be disheartened or frightened and terrorized into passivity), the "independent".

We have to detach and discourage the auxiliaries if we are ever to hope to crush the MAGAts.

Because that has to be our ultimate goal.

The lessons of Reconstruction, and the post-WW2 occupations, need to be absorbed this time.

After WW2 we hung the enemies, and hunted and terrified their partisans into fearful silence. After our own Civil War we pardoned the enemies and, as part of reconciling our society, let them craft their shitty Lost Cause stories into our national myths.

But. 

Assholes are always gonna asshole. There's no changing them, or that. Instead they must be forced into silence, and since they feel no shame, by fear. Fear of retribution. Fear of consequences. 

After 1945 we learned what we'd failed to absorb after 1865. 

Bill Sherman said "Fear is the beginning of wisdom". 

But for those who choose never to be wise, fear is, at least, the beginning of silence.

In my personal opinion? The best silence for these people is the silence of the grave. As Stalin was wont to say, if people are the problem? No people, no problem.

But I will take living but fearful silence if that's the best we can get from them.