Whooo?

It's suddenly early summer here in North Portland, so I drove up to the north end of North to see if there were any fun new birds showing up to enjoy the weather.

New? No, but I did find these two, a couple of new local residents, along the path to Smith and Bybee Lakes;

Great Horned Owl(lets). This one was a better photo op - the other owlet was tucked in tight next to a nearby tree trunk and screened by branches. So here's the other brother (or sister).

Both were still fairly downy, suggesting that they were no more than a day or two out of the nest. The parents were, or a parent was, probably nearby but were more experienced at hiding. Didn't see 'em.

I'm kind of foolishly pleased with this picture, because I don't have a good "birding camera", i.e. one with a telephoto lens to get up close to birds that, like the owlets, are uninterested in providing good snapshot poses. I have a cheap little phone camera, which when tried captured only a dark blob on a dark tree limb.

So I took my binoculars - and I do have good binos, Swarovski 8x42s, since while I'm not a bird photographer I am a birder and good optics are kind of a basic must-have for that - and held the phone camera up to one of the eyepieces.

It took a good bit of fiddling to get the camera and eyepiece lined up, and that doesn't even count the finger-stretch needed to push the "shutter" button, but the result is...pretty damn good. Particularly given what I had to work with.

 Other than that just the usual suspects. Looks like migration hasn't really reached us yet.

The Return of Baghdad Bob

Soooo..? How's our Splendid Little Gulf War going this week!?

 Well, Felony Fats supposedly gave one of his patented Fireside Weaves Wednesday evening. I say "supposedly" because I didn't listen to it...

(Confession; it's not so much the projectile vomit of lies, more lies, and even weirder "is this even a lie? WTF?" that comes out of Orange Foolius' piehole that keeps me away from his YouTube fodder; it's the tone. The actual sound of him; that nasal, whiny, Queens-white-trash thing he always does. No matter what he actually says - and Jim Wright does a perfectly good job of describing his Wednesday word salad - it's that nails-on-a-blackboard sound of his voice that drives me to instant loathing. So I read the transcript.)

...but apparently we've won. 

But we're going to keep winning for just another Infrastructure-Week-slash-GOP-heathcare-plan-units (hint: two weeks) and then...something something build a Victory Arch.

The IRGC and whoever else is sending the commo check messages from Tehran seem to disagree that "...we are on the cusp of ending Iran's sinister threat to America and the world." and as Clausewitz (drink!) would remind us, the enemy gets a vote, too, so.

Included in that vote are the numerous Iran-connected Shiite militias in Iraq, which, since all this explosive winning ("Their leaders, most of them and the terrorist regime they led, are now dead,") has removed the IRGC liasons that acted as strategic dampers on the angry Shiite guys in the basement of the Basra Rite-Aid, are now coming out of the woodwork, as anyone who'd lived through Dick n' Dubya's Excellent Iraq Adventure would have told you was as predictable as a Republican lying about immigration, health care, or Social Security. 

From the link:

"For years, Iranian-backed groups like Kataib Hezbollah have targeted U.S. and coalition bases, headquarters, embassies and other facilities in Iraq. While these groups have been supported by Iran with funding, weapons, intelligence and command and control, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has also reigned them in. With the IRGC fighting for its own survival now, and its command and control structure decimated, their grip over the militias has loosened."

Y'think? And even if those IRGC C&C operators were in place, why would they want to go all kumbaya on the angry boys from the Muqtada al-Sadr Memorial Marching and Chowder Society? Why would the Iraqi militias want them to?

Fuck. If I were a twenty-something taxi driver in Mosul, y'know what?

I'd be hating on some American ass. Any American. ALL Americans.

Because it'd feel like every ten or twenty years the fucking ferenghis show up and just kill a shitload of people who look like me. 

For "reasons". Kuwaitis. Oil. "Freedom". Geopolitics.

Me in my taxi with the Twelver iconography and the radio tuned to that Emirati pirate hip-hop station? Like I give a shit about the "reasons". These murderous sonsofbitches are about as welcome as a dose of the clap. If I had the chance to blow some Yankee bastard into fun-sized pieces, y'think I wouldn't take it?

Meanwhile back here in the Land of The Free Because Of The Brave? What are We the People getting for all this multibillion-dollar gold-plated explosive winning?

"President Donald Trump on Wednesday said it’s “not possible” for the federal government to fund Medicare, Medicaid and child care costs, arguing that it should be up to the states to “take care” of those programs while the federal government focuses on military spending."

Ummm...

Talk about saying the quiet parts out loud. 

Oops. 

Of course, Tubby's spokesliars had race out and walk, no, run, his blabber back inside the Bodyguard of Lies, because showing the rubes too much of the script behind the GOP kayfabe might actually scare some of the less-uninformed normies:

“President Trump was referring to rooting out the billions of dollars of fraud in these vital programs — and his record proves he will always protect and strengthen Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid,” White House spokesperson Olivia Wales said in a statement. “The President proudly signed historic legislation eliminating taxes on Social Security benefits for nearly all seniors and barring illegal immigrants and other ineligible individuals from fraudulently receiving Medicare and Medicaid benefits. The Trump economic agenda will continue to lower costs, making everyday life more affordable for hardworking American families.”

Okay. "Waste, fraud, and abuse"? 

Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha(gasp)hahahahahahahaha... 

Suuuuure, Livvy. Gotcha. Enter the DOGE Boyz, pursued by a bear. 

Back in the day there was this guy; 

 

Muḥammad Saʿīd Al-Ṣaḥḥāf. He was the Saddam-version of the Nightly News, and was tagged with the nicknames "Comical Ali" and "Baghdad Bob". His job was to rep the Iraqi "version" of what was happening as the Westerners blew the ever-loving hell out of Iraq.

He was widely mocked; ridiculed because his "version" was - had to be, given the one-sided nature of those earlier Gulf Wars - a ridiculous farrago of lies, evasions, bullshit, and bombast.

And, no matter how hard he spun his version, the brutal reality of those wars - that Saddam's Iraq was hopeless before reality, that his master had no plan, no scheme, no one secret trick that would have allowed Bob's bullshit to become fact - meant that in the end he was and is remembered only as a sad, tattered clown whose performance was nothing but a tawdry sideshow, a kayfabe of nonsense that was buried beneath a charnel heap of death.

Whose American authors were, in turn, shown to be fools for the fooling, liars and cheats that lied and cheated for nothing, whose imperial ambitions came, in the end, to ruin and merciless hatred. 

The ironic twist to the end of Tale of Baghdad Bob is that, in the fullness of time and the foolishness of the goddamn American public...

 ...his enemy has become him, the speeches of his enemy's leader have become as bloated with lies and foolishness as his speeches were, and those lies have come full circle, and the meaningless pile of destruction has turned round upon it's maker.

(Cross-posted to MilPub) 

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. 

Chocolate soldiers

You've probably figured out that I hold the current Administration in low esteem.

That said, the "problem" with the United States of America, as currently constituted, is that means that my opinion, and my ability to take any sort of effective action based on that opinion, means exactly jack and shit and, as the saying goes, Jack has left town.

So I'm effectively powerless as an individual.

I suppose I could, if I chose, become a sort of dangerous nuisance. 

Figure out a way to ambush the local ICE thugs. A successful vehicular ambush, especially the first vehicular ambush of a guerrilla campaign, isn't that hard to pull off, provided you can assemble the materials on the downlow and the targets are arrogant and careless.

It's not getting caught putting together the IED, or, if that goes well and the ambush happens, repeating that initial success now that the targets are alerted and proactive that's the hard part. Without an organization larger than myself alone, without a network of intelligence assets, solid effective security, a collection of safe places to hide or lay low, guerrilla allies...there's a reason that most wannabe urban guerrillas have very brief careers.

That game's not really worth the candle. I want to beat these motherfuckers, not get killed or rot in prison just taking down only a handful of their Einsatzgruppen grunts.

No. To defeat these sonsofbitches takes power. And in a republic, notional as our "republic" may now be, power means numbers.

So I went to the meeting of the local "anti-MAGA" organization last weekend.

I'm not going into detail. For one thing, OPSEC. For another, well...let me describe the meeting.

The venue, a run-down sort of backstreet sort of ballroom hung with the faded decorations of a dozen low-budget quinceaneras, was full of Portland lefties. Mostly middle-aged or elderly. Somewhere between late-hippie-chic through solid working class cits to goths and fetish kids. Overwhelmingly white (Portland, y'think?). Lots of teachers or teachery-looking people, and a scattering of pretty obvious union reps.

One of the "organizers", a fairly bougie-looking young-middle-aged white woman, introduced the group by name and a generic mission-statement, and then handed things over to a youngish artsy-looking white woman and that's where, in my unhumble opinion, things started going completely off the fucking rails.

Because she led the group through the music and lyrics, and then the bulk of the group spent the next eight or ten minutes singing a song.

And we're not talking stirring battle hymn. No International here. No Marseillaise. Not even one of the rousing old union battle songs like Bread and Roses.

There was something about love. And being worth fighting for. Not giving up. It was all very affirmative, and uplifting, with not so much as a whisper about hordes of prisoners of starvation, slaves, traitors, or conjured kings.

And that set the tone for the whole thing.

There was a very earnest, collective-wisdom sort of DIYism to the whole magilla, the idea that if people just gathered in little groups they would somehow come up with ideas of how to smash a fascist state.

To me it reeked of how I perceived Occupy back in 2011.  

As I wrote in that post, the Sixties Left has a lot to answer for by the way it convinced many of us on the modern left that simply singing and marching and shouting and sitting-in would beat the massed power of capital, mass media, and all the might of the police-military-industrial-governmental complex.

Compare that to the progressive organizations that succeeded in their resistance. like the SCLC and NAACP and the Civil Rights era groups, the AFL, CIO, UMWA, and the other labor union organizations of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. The Indian National Congress. Solidarnosc. The African National Congress.

All these had 1) an actual strategy that involved an entire range of acts, from pure theater to violent protest, and some notion of how and where these would be applied, and 2) an actual structured leadership - often fractious, even infighting - but leaders and a hierarchy below them that were there actively planning the attacks on their opponents down to the detsils of who, when, where, and with what. 

The New Left's intellectual successor Occupy Wall Street and these lovely people at the quinceanera place all seem to suffer from the goofy fuzzy-logic cloud-leadership that is to my mind the very worst hangover of the Sixties protests. 

People like John L. Lewis and Gandhi and Nehru and MLK were in many ways unlikeable, manipulative, cunning sons-of-bitches. The Left since their time seems to have absorbed the wrong lesson, which is that to get to a beneficent end you need to be a beneficent person, and that to end organized repression you have to be unorganized.

Two years later I quoted Robert Reich on the failure of Occupy:

"But Occupy eschewed political organization, discipline, and strategy. It wanted to remain outside politics, and outside any hierarchical structure that might begin to replicate the hierarchies of American society it was opposing.

So when mayors, other public officials, and university administrators cleared the Occupy encampments by force — encampments that had become the symbol of the movement — nothing seemed to remain behind. Some Occupiers made plans for further actions, but a movement without structure, discipline, and strategy proved incapable of sustaining itself."

Yep. 

The ANC didn't beat apartheid in South Africa because Nelson Mandela was a secular saint or because the cause was just and the arc of history bends towards justice.

No, it won because it was organized. It was ruthless when it needed to be. It won because it worked the press and international organizations and got funding and took appalling losses in lives and careers and health and hopes. And, yes, because Mandela was a secular saint.

But. 

Having UmKhonto weSizwe skulking about in Angola and Rhodesia didn't fucking hurt, either. 

At the end of this thing the original organizer asked the group to say how the meeting had made them feel (in the opening presentation there had been some discussion about "compassion fatigue" and how stressful it was dealing with ICE and Trumpenscum) and got responses like "empowered" and "hopeful" and "energized".

That's when I realized that this had been more of group-therapy session than planning resistance to fascists, more about "self-actualization" and feelings than setting up cells to surveil the fash and resist the cops and soldiers.

Well. Fuck. 

Look, I'm chuffed that the blow-up frogs and dancers and protestors have been fighting fucking ICE here and have to some extent forced the bastards to go low profile. I'm glad that the decent people of Portland want to beat the MAGAt scum, want to damn Trump and all his works.

But...gang, look. ICE is still here. Still doing their evil shit. We haven't "stopped" them.

These damn people don't give a shit whether you feel empowered. They respect nothing but force and fear. If you can't face up to that beating them will require gaining the power to make them fear you, well...if they won't respect law and regulation - and they don't - and if they won't respect your votes - and they won't - what will you do then?

Songs are fine. But, as the song said, you can praise the Lord so long as you pass the ammunition. Real resistance to evil means faith and works. Empowerment is fine, so long as it also includes a healthy dose of steel.

What this meeting thing was?

Was not that. 

As another observer of famous clusterfucks might have said, "C'est ravissant, mais ce n'est pas la guerre: c'est de la folie." - It's cute, but it's not war: it's foolishness.

 Sounded better in the original French, too.

Twenty-four

 

Today looks like it's going to be a nice day, doesn't it?

Not quite as nice as your birthday back in 2002, though. 

That was a glorious spring day, full of life, with flowers, like this one I found down at the Chinese Garden the other day, blooming all around us. The little courtyard at Emanuel Hospital was a riot of colorful beauty the day you were born.

Which just made the day that much harder. I know, I say this a lot, but it was bitter hard knowing that each one of those fragile, ephemeral blooms would live longer than you would. 

Still is.

Today?

Oh, no, it's nowhere near that beautiful. 

Sunny, sure, but cold.

That's the way our winters usually are, y'know; sunny and cold or rainy and not-quite-as-cold. 

I wish you already knew that, that we'd had other winters and blooming springs to remember. That you'd grown tall and strong, in sun and shadow, that we could celebrate this day as a happy one instead as a slowly dwindling memory and a distant grief.

But instead, here we are. Having just this one day to sit together in silence.

And then, as always, you will go. The next day now almost a quarter-century ago when we kissed goodbye, you in your little yellow onesie that you took with you and returned to us only as ash and sorrow.

I miss you, love.

I always will.

I know your mother does, too, and she, and I, will keep your memory alive until it is our own time to get up and pass through that door you closed behind you, all those years ago.

Goodbye, love. 

Goodbye.

 

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

Private parts

 Like Paul Campos, I don't "get" transgender.

It's literally impossible for me to imagine. I'm physically male, and while I can imagine finding other men attractive and desiring men sexually I literally can't conceive how I would think and feel as a hetrosexual (or homosexual, or asexual, or any other sort of...) woman. 

While I don't feel that desire I can see a man and think "Wow, he's (fill in the attractive adjective)." without feeling physical attraction, meaning I "get" homosexuality.

(And bisexuality, and asexuality, and a lot of other "sexualities") 

But I can't feel what it would be like to be female, to think of myself as a woman. I don't "get" that.

And that's just fine. 

I don't have to, to understand that some people do feel that way. I "get" that it's an actual thing, just like I get that there are a whole spectrum of emotional and physical feelings and identities and...well, people, who aren't like me. 

Because people are complicated.

And y'know what?

That's just fine, too. Provided those complications neither pick my pocket nor break my leg, have at it my brothers and sisters and everyone in between.

Y'know what I don't get?

People who seem inordinately obsessed with policing other people's complications enough to do stuff like this:

Who does this serve?

Seriously. What earthly "good" does this do? How does this make anyone's life better or easier or simpler?

The world is full of horrors.

Someone with male junk who doesn't think of themselves as male?

Is not remotely close to one of them.

But apparently the sort of people who now call themselves "conservative" believe that isn't so. To the point of changing the rules to MAKE those people "a problem".

Why?

How does this even make their fucking lives any better?

The cheaper the crook...

 

...the gaudier the patter.

I didn't waste my time watching Felony Fats' Big Beautiful Lie-o-palooza last night. I don't, usually; these things are always polititheater, regardless of who delivers them. I might have listened to FDR, had I been around then, but I can't think of anyone else who's stood up at that rostrum worth spending an hour (or damn near two, in Tubby's case) hearing talk shit about how fucking great things are.

I read some excerpts from the transcript. The best description I've seen comes (as I'd suspected it would) from salty sailor Jim Wright: "If a psychotic off his meds gave a disassociated rambling speech to the inmates in the middle of the dayroom while being chased by the interns at the local home for the criminally insane it would look a lot like this."

Beyond that? I only got two reactions, the first being the quote from the Maltese Falcon that opens this post.

The second, though, was prompted by this line from Fatso's interminable Weave-of-the-Union: "I've always wanted the Congressional Medal of Honor, but I was informed I'm not allowed to give it myself... If they ever open up that law, I'll be there with you someday,"

This isn't the first time this draft-dodging fuck has talked up the idea that his ginormous ass deserves the nation's highest decoration for bravery. Supposedly some time earlier he'd said:

“I decided to go to Iraq. I was extremely brave. So brave in fact that I wanted to give myself the Congressional Medal of Honor, I said to my people, ‘Am I allowed to give myself the Congressional Medal of Honor?’”

There have been some Chief Executives who could have had a legitimate call on a high award for valor. This boastful bastard? Don't make me laugh.

The mere thought of this bloated nitwit in the same grid square as the MOH makes the Army sergeant that lives in my head reach for a sturdy piece of dimension lumber, wishing for ten minutes in a locked supply room alone with his criminal ass to provide him with some wall-to-wall counseling on how he isn't just not just unfit to wear the medal but utterly unfit to empty a urinal overfilled by the lowliest private in military history.