Jakin' it.

Well, shit.

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

Sorry.

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

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

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

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

So...more soon, promise!

Meanwhile, here's a picture of a cat:

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

Sniper!

Emily Sonnett of the U.S. women's national soccer team demonstrates a perfect backflip-tuck-and-roll in the opening minutes of the second half of the Olympic qualifying tournament match against Canada.

Sonnett played centerback here in Portland for many seasons, and was a player who consistently frustrated me because she would play 89 minutes of great, technical defending and then would undergo some sort of brainfart or mental holiday and make a ridiculously massive derp. She did this as a rookie - which is fine, you're a rook - but kept doing it all the way up until she was traded in the offseason last autumn.

Obviously I hope the Thorns pick up a solid CB who won't take those little mental rest breaks to replace her. I won't miss the tooth-grinding frustration of those derps.

What I will miss is...well, Sonnett.

In the oh-so-serious world of professional sport she's a genuine goof, a real character; funny, playful, silly, endearing...I have NO idea what she's like as a person (other than possibly one of those people who you adore while driving you nuts with their antics) but as a player-character she's just fun.

And she had the best, the very best, faces.

You never have to guess what Sonnett is thinking. Whatever it is, it light up her face like a good deed in a weary world.

Dammit, Sonny...now you've made me go all sentimental over you. Good luck in Orlando.

Except when you play Portland, of course.

Sorry. But there's love, and there's soccer; it's not life and death. It's way more important than that.

HIJMS Kirishima, 2019

Interesting footnote to the Second Naval Battle of Guadalcanal; a second underwater archeological investigation of the wreck of the battlecruiser Kirishima, sunk in the action I wrote up back in November 0f 2012. The wreck was discovered in 1992, but the return allowed for substantially better observation of the ship.

If you recall, this was one of the handful of surface gun actions in WW2, in which the new battleship USS Washington hammered the old battlecruiser:

"USS Washington slid through the night, a great gray steel ghost. She had tracked a large radar target but held her fire, unsure of whether the object was friendly or enemy. Finally she was within 9,000 yards, and Kirishima lit off her searchlights and fired on South Dakota. Washington's gunners immediately opened up and pasted the living shit out of the old battlecruiser; at least nine 16" shells and probably something like 40 6" projos impacted within minutes. Kirishima lit up like a balefire. Her rudder was jammed hard over to port, hundreds of her crew were dead, many more maimed or injured. Within minutes the elderly battlecruiser was transformed from a fighting ship into a wreck."

Based on the new investigation it sounds like Washington's shooting was better than we'd thought:

"I believe that it is safe to say that Kirishima was struck between 17 and 21 times by 16-inch projectiles and between 17 and 20 times by 5-inch projectiles." (Lundgren, 2019)

One of the intriguing sidenotes I found in this article was the observation that one of the major contributing factors to the destruction of the Japanese battlecruiser was it's projectile load.

The primary mission of the IJN task force that November night was to bombard and destroy Henderson Field, therefore Kirishima carried a large number of the "Type 3" bombardment projectiles. These were thinner walled than the typical armor-piercing 14" projo but, more critically, were filled with a different explosive.

Both her forward ("A" and "B") turrets were hit hard, and both barbettes - the armored column chambers where projectiles and propellants are stored - were penetrated. Here the USN projectiles would have exploded, and very likely caused sympathetic detonation of the IJN projos.

"Within Turret "A" barbette - assuming the Japanese had pre-positioned ten Type 3 projectiles per gun in advance of the battle - the barbette structure would hold twenty projectiles prior to the battle. Turret‘"A" fired three times during the battle, expending six shells and thus leaving at minimum fourteen projectiles within the barbette and hoists when it was destroyed. Using the figures above, each projectile contained over 44 lbs (20 kg) of incendiary material of which 18lbs. (8.2 kg) was magnesium. With an estimated fourteen projectiles within barbette one ("A" turret barbette) this single compartment had 252.3lbs (114.4kg) of magnesium powder available to burn within barbette." (Lundgren, 2019)

Magnesium is a whole different cat than the usual nitrocellulose explosive. It burns hot, really hot, like 3,000-degrees hot, and can't be extinguished without CO2 firefighting chemical foam.

So the implication is that 1) Washington's 16-inch guns hit and penetrated both Kirishima's forward turrets, and 2) along with wrecking the turrets and killing the guncrews, the USN hits 3) ignited the Type 3 bombardment ammunition, producing the immense flames - burning magnesium can flare as much as 15-20 feet high - that were reported by both Japanese and American sailors. Those fires would have quickly made the battlecruiser unfightable as at the same time more large-caliber hits below the waterline were sinking her.

Worth reading the whole thing.

World War Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

But.

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

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

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

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

Could this sort of mutation occur to the Wuhan coronavirus?

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

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

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

The end of the American Experiment

I know I said I was done wirting about American politics, but this is so ridiculously central to all of our lives that I'll have some thoughts on the United States Senate's decision to transform the office of Chief Executive into an unaccountably sovereign neo-autocrat early next week.

Suffice for now to say that the one thing that never entered my mind, when as a young man I watched the committee hearings on Nixon’s criming that summer of ‘74 - my mother, good American that she was, refused to let me shirk observing a critical moment in our nation's political existence - was that I’d live to see the remake of that picture where the bad guy wins and walks out of the courtroom grinning. If Trumpy had any sense of history he’d pose on the steps of Marine One with both arms raised flashing double “V” signs.

It’s kind of shocking to watch how easy it is for a president to become a king.

It’s just revolting to watch that happen with this fucking guy. Caesar? Sure. Brilliant bastard with a string of Big Wins. Trump? Seriously? We’re gonna pimp our our republic for this low-rent orange shitgibbon? Say what you want about Lenin or Hitler, at least there was some dark genius about them. We’re taking a dump on the 200-plus years of the experiment in republican governence for this sleazy spray-tanned used-car-salesman?

Assuming it will be legal to write honestly about these times future historians won’t have a clue how to present this without pages of baffled speculation and disbelief.

What's really weird about this is how it's all taking place as if it were just any other day.

Friday, while 3,000 miles away the republic I have made my home for more than sixty years, the republic whose uniform I wore, the republic I always assumed was immutable, is being turned into an autocracy by a cabal of venal and cynical men.

And I was driving to work like any other day.

Just seemed like there should have been something more...ominous.

Rain of blood.

Earthquake.

Dead rising from the grave.

Not merely light traffic congestion passing through the Woodburn interchange.