A brief sunbreak

 I was one busy sonofabitch yesterday and didn't get to see or hear a moment of the inauguration of the 46th President. That was fine with me. I'm not a hopey-changey kind of guy. As you've probably noticed, I think my country is in a very dark place right now and, largely though the dogged efforts of "conservatives" is unlikely to get brighter anytime soon.

The mere fact that the nation was rid of the worst hominid ever to be elevated to its highest electoral office was enough for me.

When I got home last night, though, my Bride wanted to watch the ceremony, so I got to sit (well, mostly sit - the Little Cat demanded play, so I hauled out the jingle-ball-on-a-string that is Her favorite and spent much of the re-broadcast doing neko-jarashii as they'd say in Cat Samurai...) and watch the whole hour or so of lame speeches and political theater.

And then came Amanda Gorman.

And she was transcendent.

I'd read bits of her poem earlier in the day and had thought it was fine.

But in her own voice it was more that fine. It soared. It resounded.

It sang.

There will be dark and dirty, dangerous days ahead.

But every so often it is moments like her poetry that remind me that for there to be light there must be darkness. For there to be dawn there must be night. And that for there to be courage there must be fear, and the two must always be yoked together.

Amid all the refreshingly bland political mummery it took a slender young woman of color to remind me that even in defeat there is honor and glory in facing those fears and dangers bravely and with hope that the fight is worth fighting.

Or, as Gorman put it:

When day comes we step out of the shade,

aflame and unafraid

The new dawn blooms as we free it

For there is always light,

if only we're brave enough to see it

If only we're brave enough to be it.

The Way of the Cat (猫侍 )!

 My Bride bagged the "one-free-month" sub to Amazon Prime late in December. So far she's been disappointed that most of the movies that are worth watching aren't free, and the ones that are free are worth shit.

(I could have told her that before she did, if I didn't value my ass...)

I'm not nearly as arsed about the movie thing (at least, not nearly as pissed off as when fucking Comcast moved the old movie channel ("Turner Classic Movies") over to the pay side, the bastards.) and so I've tooled around the site looking for entertainment options, and in so doing stumbled across 猫侍 - the first season of Neko Zamurai, a 2013 series presumably aired on NHK.

It's just a goof, on both the classic Kurosawa-style samurai tropes as well as cats and cat people in general. It's silly, sometimes serious, often funny, and truly, deeply weird in ways that only genuinely Japanese pop culture is weird.

The macguffin is that our hero, an out-of-work samurai (or ronin) is trying to get hired on with a new daimyo in Edo-period Tokyo. This is working out about as well as you'd think (you might not recall but we discussed the problems the samurai-class ran into after the end of the warring states period back when we talked about Shiroyama in 2011) and he's about at the end of his katana when a flunky for the local mob boss comes to him with an offer.

Turns out the boss has recently become hooked up with a cat and has gone all gooney over the possum, neglecting his yakuza-y business. Flunky wants to pay Madarame - the ronin/samurai - to put a hit on the kitty.

Of course he can't, and the rest of the series is about his misadventures trying to hang on to his new furry friend whilst dodging the Hanzo-the-Razor detective parody, Shimazaki.

Of course there's a cat-crap-ton of other silly business, including Madarame's adorable neighbor Wakana the donut vendor...

...and his local vet and sorta-crazy-cat lady Oshizu who tries to make him smile while teaching him the Way of the Cat (for a guy who's faithful to his wife back in the country Madarame seems to run into all sorts of adorable cat-ladies...).

There's even an Edo-period cat cafe just because, well, cats.

So far it's been good fun (tho it's hard to see how the showrunners will get a happy ending out of it - the detectives are closing in on our hero and he's set himself up to take a dive in the big swordfight against his old comrade/rival, so we'll see...) both on it's own and as a send up of both classic chanbara (チャンバラ) flicks as well as modern Japan, cats, and cat-support-staff (of which I am self-admittedly one).

Very watchable, if you're in the mood for a light and clever trifle.

nyaa! にゃー!

(A note on にゃー!: The Japanese expression for the sound a cat makes is "nya", and the characters in the show use it a fair bit, so I've been hearing it regularly for a while now. 

It still seems very odd, since even as they say it, it doesn't sound like "meow". But just like "wan" is the noise a Japanese dog makes, "nya" is a Japanese cat, and that's just how it is. Funny thing, language.

But what is kind of odd is that the title of this show is written in hiragana as 猫侍. In romaji you'd write that Neko Zamurai and translate it precisely as "Cat Samurai", which makes total sense given that the show is about a samurai that is all about his kitty.

But for some reason the title is regularly given in English as "Samurai Cat";

which totally doesn't work, because it implies that the samurai IS the cat, and is also the title of an actual pop culture thing, the Nineties series of heavy-handed satirical light novels by someone named Mark E. Rogers. 

Nya!)

Talking to the hand

 One thing that has come up repeatedly in discussion of the current state of the Second Civil War - in the "cold war" phase, but, still... - is "how do you back the public away from the abyss" or, as Ael likes to put it, how do "...you start (really) talking to them."

I'll say upfront - I'm all in on jaw-jaw as better than war-war.

My point, and our problem, is that I don't see how there's a "jaw-jaw" that works with the 30% of the US public that's currently stroking their Trump flag and dreaming of revanche.

Back in 2016, when Trump was the frontrunner for the GOP, I characterized it's and his "platform" (as much as there was anything there other than Trump's million lies about criminal Mexicans and his beautiful health care and Infrastructure Week "plans") as fluffing plutocracy and tossing red meat on social issues to the Base.

I think we've seen that proven beyond a scintilla of doubt over the past four years. 

Trump's approval level and the 2020 popular vote suggests that about a third of the US public is hardcore Republican. That tracks with the base-level "crazification factor" of 2008 - about 27% of the public still "liked" Dick Cheney by that point. 

If you're all in for Darth Cheney after eight years of the Dubya Shitshow? You're a hardcore Republican.

So, now that we've seen how many of us they are, and what they are and what they want, what can we do to "really talk to them"? How many will talk back?

Let's take them as the groups in which they present themselves.

The Plutocrats.

The keystone of the GOP Archway to the Gilded Age are the fatcats. The 1%. The plutocrats and wanna-be oligarchs of business and finance. The people that the "Tax Cuts and Jobs Act" of 2017 were written for.

These folks were the ones that were shaved by FDR back in the Thirties and had to bend the knee because an infuriated public had the examples of the Soviet and Italian revolutions to look to, and were at least potentially likely to go to communist or fascist revolution if the US government hadn't done something to ease the brutality of the Dickensian/Randian crony capitalist society of 1929.

They hated that haircut, and have worked tirelessly and successfully to largely reverse it.

The Left has nothing to offer these people except safety from the popular mob. And the current lack of danger from the Left - there's nothing remotely resembling the weird coalition of muckraking journalists, militant (typically socialist or even communist) labor, and political strength ranging from Huey Long every-man-a-king "populist" to noblesse oblige aristos like FDR - means that the "danger" there is nonexistent and the need for "safety" is, as well.

The Rich have neutered "populism" by monkeywrenching the delusions and racism of white people. And since they have nothing to fear from the pop mob they have no real reason to compromise or even talk to the Left. They've succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of the aristos that wrote the Constitution, so why give ground now?

The way arrant nonsense like "trickle-down economics" and "tax cuts create jobs" have succeeded with the public just confirm their wisdom. They're not going to fold unless they lose the bulk of their coalition, of which the next segment we'll talk about are

The Idealogues.

I'm not sure to what extent "true believers" make up any significantly large group within the Republican Party or the US Right in general. To the extent they do I'd have to say that they're living embodiment of Chief's Third Law of Republican Politics: "Any sufficiently ridiculous Republican idea is indistinguishable from magic."

(The other two are "Nobody went broke betting on the stupidity of the Republican voter" and "Never give a Republican the benefit of the doubt.")

I mean...you can't really believe ludicrous stuff like the contents of Atlas Shrugged or the Laffer Curve or the Ledeen Doctrine. Well, I suppose you can, but you'd be such a complete wanker so as to be unable to appear in public because you'd be too stupid to figure out how to unlock your front door.

But to the extent there are people who pretend enough to get the cosplay close to real, well...if you do believe this stuff I can't see a way to wrangle you out of that cult by talking sense to you. 

That sort of belief depends on utter disregard for actual practice and life experience, factual evidence, and common sense. You believe it because you WANT to believe it. It's like a religion or, more precisely, like a cult, and like both of those it's not about "talking" it's about belief.

Which brings us to two related groups,

The Bible-bangers and The QANuts.

I'm sorry, but to me there's no true distinction between "talking" to these two groups of fanatics. They both believe impossibilities so they can both be convinced to do atrocities and they can't be talked down out of their trees.

I'm not talking about nice suburban Presbyterians or douce Catholic church ladies. I'm talking the reeeeeal red-meat foursquare megachurch fanatics and the QANut-Pizzagate-conspiracy-threory-wingnut hordes.

Ever tried to discuss how unrealistic the basic tenets of monotheistic religion are with a real hardcore fundamentalist believer of any faith? The responses are either to simply shut off the conversation, or to respond by saying that faith is belief beyond reason.

I'm not saying "religion is bad"; religious faith has been the engine behind some of the great works of art, music, literature, and even politics in human history. It's also been behind some of the most appalling atrocities and horrors, which simply points up that it's 1) not "religion" per se but the tenets of the religion and 2) not religion but the people who are involved. 

One person creates a transcendent work of art, another slaughters other people for their "sins".

But regardless of the person involved, "talk" is a another term for "debate", and faith isn't debatable, it's based on emotion, not reason.

There's a rather sad little story in a recent NYT about some sort of QANut "meme queen" (paywall, so no point in linking) but the author sums up the whole futility of "talking" to these people pretty well:

“These people aren’t drooling, mind-controlled cultists,” Mr. Rothschild said. “People who are in Q like it. They like being part of it. You can’t debunk and fact-check your way out of this, because these people don’t want to leave.”

There's a sort of bizarre subset of these groups, or a parallel to them;

The Trumpkins.

MAGAts. Trump Cultists. People who either genuinely or performatively believe that Trump is like a living God.

I have NO fucking idea how to "talk" to these people. If you're literally in thrall to this mook after his four year reign of terror? I can't possibly have anything to say to you that you'll listen to, or whether you can get through to them with anything short of those "deprogramming" things they use on other culties

So, "talking" to any these cultists? Not really helpful.

 

The Racists.

Yeah, well.

The only real disconcerting part is how the sheer number of these sonsofbitches seems not to have dwindled since the Civil Rights Era and how, despite all the talking we're already done since the 1950s (and before), how they're still the same goddamn ignorant shithead racist sonsofbitches they were then.

Good luck with trying to talk to them about being less racist sonsofbitches. I'll go get some coffee and wait for you here.

The Gun Nuts.

I'd like to think that there's a reachable discussion here, simply because I'm a gun owner and enjoy both hunting and target shooting.

I think the problem is that there's a couple of subgroups within the larger assemblage of "gun owners" whose obsessions drive them into wildly and irretrievably into Right Wing politics; the "Second Amendment" cultists who have managed to completely blank out the "well-regulated militia" portion of the amendment as well as the documented reasons that it was added, the "Fallujah-cosplayers" who want the military hardware without the nuisance of actually having to join a service.

The bottom line is that there's no demonstrable reason to assume that the Founder and Framers wanted to reserve the "right" of Joe and Molly to overthrow the US government. 

(Hint - That's why we have fucking voting..!) 

But these people - and I think this includes the weird sub-subgroups like the "open carry" loons and sovereign citizens - believe they did, and seem to have gone way too far into the weeds to be talked back; they're the American equivalent of those post-WW2 Japanese troopers who hid out in the jungle.

And the thing is that I've been involved in "talking" to the real hardccore gun cultists and there's always something. You mention background checks and there's always a hardcore that tells you it's a slippery slope to confiscation. It's all paranoia about "confiscation" all the way down, no matter how reasonable you start. The notion that any and every jamoke can tote a semiautomatic assault rifle knockoff isn't really a good idea can't even get through the door because if so, confiscation is next.

I'm not sure these people are gettable. I'd like to think so and I think it makes sense to try and have a sensible discussion of "what is a reasonable well-regulated firearms policy". But given my experience when I've tried? 

I'm not super hopeful.

The Social Conservatives.

I'm calling these the "gays-are-icky" group. They're not the American Taliban-type religious nuts from above that think anything but penis-in-vagina sex is a Sin and that God Hates Fags, but the "I-think-we-should-all-dress-and-act-normal-like-me" people who have been convinced that electing "liberals" mean every kindergartner will be forced to have Drag Queen Story Hour every friday after naptime.

 Here's the thing about them.

They can't have what they want.

They can force the trans kid into a certain potty. They can force the gays or lesbians back into the closet, and by that I mean in any way. They need to accept that other people's behavior (that doesn't involve physical or political danger to others) is neither their business nor their problem.

If they can be willing to buy into that? Fine.

But if "talking" to them includes throwing all those non-cis-het-"normie" people under the bus?

No. That's not okay.

So there's "talking"...but the "talk" has bounds, and if they're not willing to accept those, the talk probably won't convince them of much.

The Rest.

This is where I lump the generic "conservative"; not a wannabe Roeckfeller, not fanatically religious, not a conspiracy theorist, not a crazed Trumpkin, not a lunatic gun-humper. These people are as close to what used to be called "Rockefeller Republicans" as 2021 can come. The groups above probably call these people "RINOs". They accept the fundamental tenets of the New Deal - that unrestrained "capitalism" is dangerously punitive and you need to balance it with intelligent regulations and some sort of "safety net" to help the people run over by corporate power.

It's pretty much what the Master Chief was until Newt Gingrich's Contract on America drove him out of the GOP because he could see through the transparent bullshit.

Can we talk to these folks? Sure. They're not going to agree on everything - they'll want more guns and less butter, for one thing - but they'll agree on enough of the basics that we can at least agree to disagree.

But...how much of the GOP is left for them?

It's pretty obvious that the real nutjobs - the cultists of whatever sort - are by far the dominant force in the GOP right now. I'd say that something like half of the GOP are MAGAts, QANuts, Christopaths, or some version of the gun-nut/sovereign citizen/Klansman type. Another half of the remaining half are plutocrats. 

That leaves only about a quarter - so something like 7-8% of the US public - as the sane conservatives we can talk to.

Which is why I keep coming back to how utterly fucked we are.

If a third of the public doesn't care even though they've lived through the GOP's malfeasance killing hundreds of thousands during a pandemic disease.

And three-quarters of the remaining third are too far gone to even get to the table, much less to some sort of accomodation.

How the hell do you have a "We, the People" left out of the remaining third-and-change?

I truly, honestly, frustratingly don't know.

I know you have to for a functional democratic republic.

But if you don't...if you can't?

That's what really worries me.

Talking about believing unbelievable things...

 ...here's the Little Cat being fooled by digital images of delicious prey:

I've seen videos of cats doing this, but I haven't before lived with a cat that was enticed by video images. Miss Lily loved to sit at the window and imagine massacring the feeder birds, but video didn't elicit the same response.

What was kind of fascinating is that The Girl played a whole series of these "cat video" clips, and the Little One's reaction to them was very different.

As you can see, the birds and rodents were boffo box office. She sat on the couch and followed the bird movements with her head as they flicked across the screen. But the rodents - a mixture of rats and squirrels - were utterly irresistible. She tried to catch them with her paw, and, finally, climbed up to the screen and tried to get behind it to where the rodents "were".

I'm not sure whether she was entertained by all this digital predation or just frustrated that she couldn't taste the sweet blood of her victims, but either way we all had quite the diverting half hour before we cut the cord, she looked at us with disgust, and jumped down to lick her backside.

Cats, go figure.

But now people? 

You'd think that almost two million years of evolution would make us harder to fool with digital simulation.

18 U.S. Code § 2384

Seditious conspiracy
If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.

They even carry the same fucking flag.

 

I warned you.

I fucking warned you what would happen if we let these traitorous sonsofbitches keep running their shit. Instead we coddled them and gave them a lollipop and now look at us.

They have sowed the wind.

They should reap the whirlwind.

They won't.

But they should.

As I said on Facebook today:

"If it was up to me, I would be at these traitors with the bayonet. A bullet is foolish and may go anywhere. The bayonet is wise and knows what must be done to end treason. Bill Sherman’s prescription remains the correct one; for traitors like this, fear is the beginning of wisdom."

If this is not crushed with brutal force we will rue this as the day we made these traitors our masters.

Cheese Medal

 

Back in the day there were certain decorations that pretty much every GI considered good shit. As in, you had that in the fruit salad over your left pocket? You'd earned them the hard way.

The Medal of Honor, obviously. 

Given the number of people who had to get killed to get one - about a third of the guys who got one after 1865 (when they stopped being handed out like candy...) had to get killed to score it - that's pretty much Big Casino. That's why you always salute the Medal holder first, even if they're a slick-sleeve private and you're Chief of the Army Staff. 

Yeah, that.

From there on down there are still some pretty well-respected gongs. DSC? Badass. Silver Star? Yup, you had to go there and do that. 

Bronze Star with a "V"? Yeah, you still had to kick some ass (just a Bronze Star, without the "V"? Maybe. The Army did hand out some pretty sketchy BSMs, although we weren't as fucked-up as the USAF...)

The "service medals", like the MSM, were always accepted as a sort of gold watch or annual bonus - you got them for doing your job and being there.

Then you got down into the weeds, where things got kind of hairy.

The "Army Commendation Medal", usually called an "Arcom", was sorta-kinda...I'm not sure if "respected" is the right word. "Accepted" might be better; you usually had to be doing at least decent work to get one, but not always. Remember that units were expected to hand out awards (and still may be, for all I know) and an Arcom was not outside the "doing what you're supposed to do at the time you're supposed to do it" sort of decoration.

Below that it got kind of ridiculous.

 The Army Achievement Medal, supposedly known as an "AAM" but in my service usually referred to as the "Army Acheesement" (from the expression "eating cheese", meaning sucking up to your superiors) or just a "cheese medal", could literally be had for the asking, and for damn near anything. 

A guy in one of my outfits got one for doing an outstanding job of the extra duty he was assigned as punishment.

Nobody respected the Cheese Medal. I collected, I don't even recall precisely, something like seven of the sonsofbitches. They were "worth" more than a worthless DA Certificate of Achievement only because you got a pretty ribbon to wear, but nobody actually considered them anything of value. In fact, NOT having at least one Cheese Medal by the time you made E-4 was considered a general sign of dirtbagginess or overall useless oxygen-thievery.

If you were too fucked up to have blundered into a Cheese Medal after a year or so in service you were pretty fucked up.

Which brings me to Devin Nunes.

Tubby is said to being prepared to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to this gomer tomorrow. 

Why?

I haven't the slightest. Losing in court to an imaginary cow? Being nearly as batshit as Orange Foolius himself?

Now I don't want to kid you; despite being called the "...supreme civilian decoration..." in Wikipedia it's been handed out to actors, musicians, dead baseball stars (Babe Ruth in 2018), and Fucking Rush Limbaugh. The criteria for the award aren't exactly...ummm...strict. 

Andy Griffith has one. So does B.B. King. Poppy Bush got one from Obama, but so did Chita Rivera and she's got way better legs.

Dubya hung one on Mister Rogers. Colin Powell has two of the fuckers, one from Poppy, one from Bill Clinton. Ronnie Reagan slipped one to Louis L'Amour for writing a shit-ton of potboiling Westerns. The guy who wrote Stuart Little - the kids book about the creepy humanoid talking mouse? - got one from JFK, forchrissakes.

But Devin Nunes may be a Wingnut Too Far. You start handing this sucker out to people like Nunes, for doing Devin-Nunes-stuff?

Pretty soon you're in Cheese Medal Territory.

Just sayin'.

That time when I was brilliant sooner than Paul Krugman

 Krugman has a tweet up talking about Trumpy Bear and the Plague Year:

"A couple of takeaways from this shocking-but-not-surprising description of Trump's refusal to deal with the pandemic. First, character does matter: he's a terrible president in part because he's a horrible person.

Second, his self-absorption was self-destructive: politicians who took the virus seriously were rewarded even when they weren't that successful."

He's right, of course. The nightmare we're living through - those of us who WILL live through it, and damn near half a million may not, when it's all done with us - is entirely the creation of fucking Tubby and the idiot fucking Republican cult. Those places where the people and the leadership did the things that simple public health suggested would limit the losses due to a pandemic disease are doing fine. 

We're an utter shitshow.

So I just wanted to remind those here that I was on this waaaaay back in April:

"And here's the really infuriating part.

It SO didn't have to be this way.

What's most appalling is that in this horrific disease Donald Trump and his GOP pals were effectively gifted the chance to be fucking heroes.

I mean that sincerely. They could have gone down in American history with the pantheon of men...who have saved the Republic. Washington. Lincoln. FDR.

All Trump had to do was what any sane, decent person would have done. Shut his piehole. Listened to people who knew better. Taken their advice to act quickly and competently. Spoken the words of comfort and care. Acted as Lincoln did in 1861 and FDR did in 1941. Mobilized the nation. Produced the tests, provided the ventilators, coordinated the response.

I know I keep saying this, but this was a fucking no-brainer. We've done this before, only it was Japanese, not viruses; we kick the federal money machine into action, start paying people to stay home instead of build bombers, businesses to stay shut instead of make tanks and helmets.

Freeze the nation in place until treatment, and then vaccine, came on-line.

That's it.

That's ALL.

He does that, and he's flying up there with the Greats. Twenty years after his enormous orange ass gets kicked into the hole his meatface is up there on Rushmore right next to Teddy.

But this goddamn fuckstick and his worthless fucking GOP pals couldn't do that to save their (and our) lives.

HE couldn't do it because he's a fucking rodent, and all his pizza-rat brain can manage is his own cravings; his craving for money, for power, to sate his ginormous ego.

THEY couldn't do it because they're fucking slaves, slaves to their bloated ideology where it's a Hobbesean war of all against all, where cash is king, C.R.E.A.M., baby, and it's all about punishing the darks and the bitches and the libs. They could no more act heroically than a dog could resist licking its ass.

That's just...sad.

Here these sorry bastards like to fap to their image of themselves as the latter-day Three Percent, the heroic fighting rebels who would be the first to jump to pledge their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to the nation in time of trial.

And yet...when the trial arrived, all they could do was snivel, whine, try and grift the pandemic, punish the libs, and then celebrate by dipping their balls in the chocolate to enjoy the creamy texture.

And so here we are, ruled by the very worst among us, without any hope for reprieve."

I'm a fairly smart person, but it's not often that I'm that far ahead of the punditorial power curve, and I wanted to shake my moneymaker briefly to note that in this case I sure as hell was.

And don't mistake me; there's a shit-ton of others outside of Orange Foolius who bite off a piece of this clusterfuck.

The entire government of the PRC, that knew they had a deadly pathogen loose in Wuhan but tried to hide and dissemble about it.

Every knucklehead who had to have their wedding or barbeque or beach party regardless of the risk.

But for us here in the US, it was the goddamn brick-brained Chief Executive who:

1) Knew this was going to be bad way the hell back in the winter of 2020 because Xi himself told him so, but

2) Lied about it and either did nothing or actively worked to ensure the spread would get out of control, and

3) Could have done the exact opposite, but didn't, even though doing the exact opposite was so blatantly the obvious route to heroic re-election that it was blindingly obvious to an elderly blogger in Portland Fucking Oregon way the hell back in the early spring.

Not that it really helps you, me, or anyone else, that I was righter than Cassandra and Krugman and Trump altogether. 

We all know what Cassandra got for her troubles.

So, yeah.

Welcome to 2021

Freshly fresh and newly new

 

I've seen sixty-three of the sonsofbitches, but the Year 2020 was, hands-down, the fucking worst of them all.

Mind you, 1968 and 1969 were pretty bad, but then I was 11 and 12 then and too small to really understand how bad things got. 

In the early Seventies we had another dangerously worthless Republican shitbird in the Oval Office, but the wingnut horde was smaller and less nutty and the news outfits less stenographic of Republican lies, so I could remain confident that said dirtbag would be defenestrated, and so he was.

But this one? Yeesh. Good riddance.

One thing that hasn't changed from yesterday to today is my broad outlook as a sort of "optipess".

On the personal and professional side I and mine are doing fine. A little ragged around the edges from hunkering down under the Plague, but otherwise unharmed, and looking hopefully to the deployment of vaccines and some sort of renewal of something approaching a normal life.

On the larger and general side...well, we're soooooo fucked. 

We - as in "the global industrial North" we - are doing...well, not "nothing" but more-or-less "effectively nothing" to prevent the recurrence of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, and while I'd like to thank the fucking wingnuts for that (and they ARE a huge part of the problem) we the human race in general is turning out to be really, really bad at dealing with massively complex global problems. It's almost like we're a pack of over-armed, over-powered apes that have not truly evolved beyond out proto-hominid beginnings. 

Hmmm. 

And on the next level down we - the "We, the People" United States we - have turned out to be a sort of monkeyhouse divided into roughly three tribes of monkeys.

One-third more-or-less sane dwellers of the 21st Century;

One-third a useless lump of fucking ambulatory protoplasm wasting precious oxygen, and;

One-third utterly whack, bellicose, credulous, gormless, meeching, nitwitted feral apes.

That's not really a good thing.

And I have no idea what I can do as an individual to change either of the above. 

Well, I do - I can't. Not as an individual.

I have literally no "influence" even on the tiniest of local scales. Perhaps I can get more involved in local politics, for what that might accomplish. But I'm disheartened by my fellow Portlanders choices this past November. Given a simple, clear-cut choice between a piss-poor past and a chance at future change, a strong plurality of us said "Yes, more piss-poor, please!"

That's...not good. That's...I'm not sure how you move forward from there. We had good people pushing for good things, intelligent, progressive, hopeful ideas. And the People of Portland shot them down. How do I change that?

Well. Damn.

But - and this is the "opti-" part - there's always bad things. The very first thing I saw this new year, other than the dark house and the hopeful coffee, was turning on the television and finding the 1992 flick Body of Evidence on the cable, as if to prove that bad things have happened in Portland all the time.

 (That's Willem Dafoe walking through Lone Fir Cemetery, by the way. It was the most Portlandy image from this dog I could find on the Internet, most of which was Madonna, perhaps the least Portlandy thing about this dog...)

We got through Body of Evidence. 

Perhaps we'll get through this.

Right now, though, what's sort of emblematic is that it doesn't really feel like a "new" year because, like a a bloated orange colossus, Trump still bestrides the narrow world, Twitter whining and bragging, being an asshole, and golfing. We still have three weeks of the fucking idiot and his braindead minions.

It's just a question of survival until then. 

God, I hope so.

Then, perhaps, it'll really feel like a New Year.

Addendum - "But for Wales?"

I won't make a secret out of the fact that I think the idea of taking random eighteen-year-olds and running them through a second-rate engineering school where everybody wears the same clothes in order to produce Army officers is not a particularly good idea.

Far too many kaydets come out imbued with Duty-Honor-Country and very little else of military value. Which is not to say that good soldiers can't come out of West Point. They do, and have. 

But of the officers I served under the very best did not come out of WooPoo, and the very worst did, so that is a small unflattering sample of the place.

But.

If you're going to have an Army officer college, and you're going to make a big fat hairy deal about it as some sort of knightly training school where a brutal and bloody profession is somehow idealized into a noble calling that requires constant harping on some sort of "Code of Honor" as part of that training.

If you're then going to break that honor code for a very prosaic, very grubby outbreak of academic cheating?

You'd impress me a hell of a lot more if all that grubby cheating was for a higher purpose than playing and losing in the...(checks notes)...fucking "Liberty Bowl".

As my old drill sergeant told me once; if you're not cheating you're not trying, but if you cheat and fail?

That's sadder than both the failure AND the cheating themselves.

Welcome to 2021.