Living in RonaLand

I'm in my second week of the Stations of the COVID.

Week one was pretty miserable until the Paxlovid kicked in, and tolerable - more or less just a bad flu - through the weekend. Yesterday - about four or five days after the last Paxlovid dose - the head congestion got worse. This suggests I'm moving into the "Paxlovid rebound" I've read about.

Frankly, if the symptoms get no worse? I'm fine. It's irritating (for some reason decongestants seem to have no effect on this damn bug) but no more than that.

Other than that I've been faintly...amused is too gentle a word for it; I think "scornful" is closer...at the ridiculous antics of my supposed "fellow Americans" who've been sucking on the FAUX News crack pipe.

First, what the actual fuck is this:

Is this some sort of fucked-up Narnia cosplay? Tubby as Emperor complete with lion wingman and some sort of UH-60 pimp-my-ride? Who could actually think of this tangerine-colored crook like this?

Whatever.

Beyond the usual idiocy, though, it's telling that all the news out of MAGAtLand is about various culture war stuff, but what the hell else do these gomers have to sell their C.H.U.D.s? 

"Tax Cuts for Rich Fucks - Now In Your Face!" "Our Insurance Company Bureaucrat Will Totally Fuck Your Medical Care For Good Profit Reasons, Not Woke Shit Like A Government Bureaucrat Would!" "We Promise - Your Grandpa CAN Eat Nutritious Cat Food...and Like It!"

Take away the grade-school-homo-bullying and Bible-banging and what else do the sonsofbitches have, anyway..? I just wish they'd fuck off and do it somewhere that nice people don't have to see it. Like writing and masturbation.

Speaking of lions, though...here's our own domestic predator:

See the bald spot?

That's where the little goof got his flea treatment. It's NOT supposed to do that. Why he got a bald spot there I have no idea, but it might be stress, because he's on a diet and he haaaates it. He woke me as usual the other day:

Cat: Food!

Me: Keep yer fur on. I’m coming.

C: Food!!!

M: Jesus wept. Okay. Here.

C: Nomnomnom

M: (making coffee)

C: Outside!

M: Ooookay, chief. But be advised - it’s fecking cold out there.

C: Outside!!!

M: (opens door)

C:

M: Gah! Hurry up! It’s freezing-ass cold!

C:

M: Well? Don’t just stand there!

C: Feh. It’s freezing-ass cold. Not going.

M: No, duh? Okay, Imma get coffee.

C: Umm…there wouldn’t happen to be a smackerel more cat food just lying about, would there..?

M: Not for your chonky ass, no.

C:

M:

C: What a hellhole this place has become. Okay. Fine. If anyone calls I’m doing some important butt-licking and can’t be disturbed. Just take a message.

 

Well, that's about all I got for now. Time to go lie down and blow my nose for the gajillionth time. Ugh.

 

Ya got me, podnuh

 I got the 'rona.

If you've had it, I feel for your ass.

If you haven't?

Do NOT fucking get this shit.

And I'm fully vaxxed and triple-boosted AND I got on Paxlovid within a day of the symptoms showing up.

Which they did as we were cleaning up the living room walls last Sunday night.

We painted these walls, oh, maybe ten years ago. The paint was a specialty brand called "Devine" that we found at the local Miller Paint store. We loved the smooth shades and cool textures; pretty much the whole Little House is done in this Devine paint of one shade or another.

And we've been very happy with it, by and large. Except the brown color we painted the front room and the hallway.

Not that we don't like the color - we do! - but over the years the walls slowly developed this odd white discoloration. My guess, from the home improvement literature, is that this was "chalking", apparently something that happens the paint deteriorates and the pigment and binder separate.

It wasn't harmful to the paint, just ugly.

I found out purely by accident - cleaning up an area where the Little Cat had shaken her bloody ear (we still miss you, sweetie!) - that windex-type cleaner removed the white discoloration for some time - at least a year. It seemed worth a try to avoid repainting the entire room.

So we moved everything away from the walls and went to work.

It pretty much sucked as much as you'd imagine, and so I wasn't surprised that I was sore and tired when we finished. What was odd was that I was also stuffy and was developing a nasty cough from the drip in my throat.

And that was late evening.

By midnight I was perfectly miserable. Think "the worst flu I've ever had" miserable; congestion like  stone in my forehead, body aches like I'd been pounded with a hammer, sneezing, coughing...ugh. Like I said; miserable.

One of the few good things about getting old is that your immune system has pretty much seen it all. You tend to miss the colds and flus that the younger people around you contract simply because you've had it, or something enough like it, to keep you immune.

So I'd forgotten how utterly shitty it is.

So, yeah. Sunday night (and Monday morning) was a total shitshow. By the time I got out of bed (I won't say "got up" because I didn't get more than an hour or so of badly broken sleep) I was convinced that I had the Plague and, sure enough, the faint line faded in below the "T" that confirmed that, yes, finally, more than three years after it had exploded out of southeastern China the fucking coronavirus had nailed me.

Monday was a misery punctuated by trying to figure out how to avoid dosing three other people in a tiny, 1,100-square-foot house. I did a video call with my GP, who got me a course of Paxlovid that, as sucky as the drive was, I ran up to Janzen Beach to pick up.

Lemme tellya. Paxlovid? That stuff is just better than sliced white bread.

I took the first dose Monday night and had another shitty night, but by Tuesday morning I was feeling more human. By the time I' writing this - Tuesday night- I have a "head cold", no worse.

Mind you...had I not been vaccinated, not been boosted, not had the Paxlovid?

You might well not be reading this.

I've got another four days of Pax before I'm out of the woods, and apparently there's a "rebound" that this fucking Plague slaps you with once you've finished the meds. The damn thing is a genuine threat, and a wag of the middle finger towards the idiot antivaxxers and Republicans who try and pretend otherwise.

K. Well, I gotta go put some pictures back up. Catch ya later.

Update 1/25: So this Paxlovid stuff is the bomb.

Seriously. It's kicking the 'rona's ass (along with the vaccines, I'm guessing). By this morning I was up and running around - mostly getting meds for pets (the cat's flea treatment) and people (more Paxlovid for my Bride, who probably has this damn Plague, too). Still achy down my back and still with headcold gunk in my skull. But otherwise? Good to go.

I'll be around here in a bit, I've got some thought but need to get them organized.

Ceiling

Sigh.

As Driftglass reminds us at the link above, these assholes have been doing this little "locked out of the toilet but I'm busting to piss - on YOU!" debt ceiling dance for thirty years or more.

It's always the same; starve the grannies or we shoot the hostage.

The "reporting" is always the same, too; "conscienceless terrorist holds global economy hostage, but claims to be noble patriot; opinions differ!".

It's always pointless to remind everyone that the GQP is full of shit - if they want to "balance the budget" it's perfectly legit - MORE than legit - to do it on the wallets of billionaires and defense contractors than on granny's grocery budget.

But even if that fact was clearly presented the whole nonsensical farrago is never even remotely close to the truth...because these assholes could give a shit about the budget. 

Proof? The only Trump "accomplishment" - the ridiculously named "Tax Cuts and Jobs Act" - blew a massive, WW2-size hole in the federal budget. And, since it gave tax cuts to fatcats, the Republicans were juuuuust fine with that.

The bottom line with these nimrods is that they want to go back to the pre-New Deal nation of their wet dreams, where the poor were really poor and desperate and the fear of starvation kept the smelly proles silent and afraid.

And I remind you that it WAS a dream - for them - and a nightmare for everyone else. It was never a real thing. It's the usual Republican lie about the "good old days".

The "good old days" were pretty shitty for probably about 60% of the people in this country.

Financial "panics" impoverishing working people. Predatory cartels and trusts. Lethal jobs paying shit. Hopeless poverty once you were too old or too broken to work even those awful jobs.

The pre-Deal U.S. was as often as not a contentious snakepit of class and racial hatred, the only time in U.S. history that an actual socialist party got more than a derisively tiny handful of votes...because so many Americans were furiously angry at (imagine!) the fear of starvation and destitution. The examples of Soviet communism and European fascism were looming threats to the American Experiment.

That wily old plutocrat FDR didn't come up with Social Security because he was a hairy-handed Man of the People.

It was because he was a wily plutocrat and knew that if you imiserated the proles hard enough pretty soon they would decide that it was worth their while to try and put you in the barber chair for a close trim from the national razor.

The modern GQP is a lot of things. But "wily" is not even remotely among them.

So we're going to go through this idiotic piss-dance again.

Driftglass has another bit of wisdom about that:

You can be a good American.

(in the sense of believing in the genuine promise of the United States - equal justice under law)

Or a good Republican.

But not both.

Chicken-mu!

 Tonight we shared this treat:

It's called "장모님 치킨 (Jangmonim Chicken)" and it's apparently a Korean sort of mom's spaghetti-and-meatballs sort of dish in Daehanminguk. 

It hits all the flags on the route: spicy, crispy, moist, savory...its a total winner. The fire direction crew luuurves it (mind...I have to hold a bowl out of the spicy sauce for the Boy. He shuns anything complex like a vampire shuns the daylight...)

The recipe is on-line here. The chef is, I think, a little too aggressive on deep-frying; I've never had to cook the chicken as long as twelve minutes. Four minutes for the initial fry and then maybe another three of four for the second. It's all good though. Man, this is a kick-ass.

 The critical bit is making sure you find Korean radish (조선무, Joseon-mu). I'm lucky in having an Asian grocery nearby (welllll...actually I'm spoiled for choice there: we have the Japanese-centric Uwajimaya, the Taiwanese-centric 99 Ranch, and the Korean-centric H-mart...) to make the "chicken-mu", the chilled and crunchy condiment that goes perfectly with the savory and spicy chicken.

Anyway, the critical part of this post is the recognition that soju goes great with this chicken, and I'm going to excuse myself to go drain the dram and get thoroughly plowed. 

Full belly and clouded mind?

Yeah, I'm good with that.

Fifty Shades of White

Read this over at Yastreblyansky's place today. It's from a New York Times Cletus safari (so it's paywalled, hence the secondhand source) where one of the Cletuses explains why he's yearning so hard for The Return of Tubby:

"Just start putting things back on the right track. It makes me scratch my head that the country never did better than when Trump was president — never. You know what I mean? The gas prices were low. The border was under control. Everything was just great. And he got run out of town just because he sends mean tweets and has a big mouth. They’d rather elect a nice guy and have the country in the toilet"

I read that and my first (last, and only) thought was "Whatchoo talkin' about, Willis?"

I've been an adult civilian under a total of seven Presidents since I ETS'd back in '87; Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton, Cheney (okay, okay....Bush 2), Obama, Tubby, and now Biden.

During that time I'd call out three "big" events that shook the world, including my world:

2001 - the beginning of the Wars of Choice against the world's various political movements,

2008 - the Great Recession, and

2020 - The Plague Years.

And here's the thing about all that:

It made 

No

More

Than

The

Slightest

Scintilla

Of 

Difference

In my life.

I'm a middle-class straight white guy with a college education and a decent professional career. All that stuff? War, recession, disease?

Meh.

I was still in the Army Reserve in 2001, so I was a bit closer than 99.9% of the U.S. public to the wars, but I never deployed so I was never close enough. I don't have any war stories to tell.

My company was rocked a bit by the Recession, but stayed upright, so other than a bit of nervousness looking at my 401K I was fine. I don't have a horrific lost-my-house story to tell.

And I ran and hid from the Plague like everyone but the wingiest of the nuts, but successfully (so far), so I don't have any horrible 'Rona stories to tell.

Looking past the individual and local drama, ranging from divorce to hip replacements to job changes, overall? 

"Everything was just great"? 

"The country in the toilet"?

Get the fuck out, Cletus.

The United States in my adult life has rolled along - steadily growing meaner and harder, steadily less open, more plutocratic and unequal. Yes.

But somehow flipping wildly between "just great" and "the toilet"?

Fucking pull the other one, Cletus.

That this goober can even think, let alone say that, tells me that he's fucking delusional to the point of "beyond electroshock therapy".

Nothing has changed between 2016 and 2023 except we've lost a million or so - mostly of other Cletuses (Cletii?) - to the Plague. The rich are still rich or a bit richer. The poor are still poor. The U.S. is still a massive industrial nation where the vast bulk of us are desperately scrounging to make a fucking buck. The sun rises and sets. The smoke rises. The rain falls.

Obama. Trump. Biden.

The details of policy changed, sure. Obama helped some people get health insurance. Tubby handed stacks of cash to the fatcats. Biden got the fuck out of Afghanistan. 

Us cis het middle-class white guys?

We just rolled on.

And the fact that this clueless dingus thinks anything else?

Just reminds us that these people are the fucking boat anchor of the Republic. They believe nonsense, they're convinced of a bunch of idiocy that's not just untrue but monstrously, demonstrably untrue and in a crudely, stupidly, destructive way.

When chucklefucks like this can believe that the reason the majority of the voters in 2020 wanted to shitcan his Orange Julius Caesar because "he has a big mouth" and not because he was the worst Chief Executive since James Buchanan (at least) who helped kill hundreds of thousands of his own people?

There's no penetrating that degree of stupid.

Yet here we are, stuck with this mouthbreather and millions of his kin. 

I know I'm banging this drum and I'm sure you're tired of the noise.

But these people are the problem.

We've got lots of problems; climate change, vulture capitalism (and those two are twins - I'll circle back to that in a bit), political dysfunction (see above), nonalcoholic beer, MILF Manor...

The problem is these people.

If they really think that us straight middle class white guys have gone from "great" to "the toilet" in two years?

That means they're locked down tight into their darkness of lies and nonsense.

You can't run a democratic republic with that many people believing bullshit that stupid who will fight you rather than give that up.

But I'm not sure what else you can do.

Down, boy

Since I just posted the cat story thing...

In the Eighties I was posted to a location in the U.S. Southeast. It, like almost all U.S. Army posts, had housing for married soldiers. 

In said housing was a happy family; mom, dad, kiddos, dog, the usual.

So you know, these little military neighborhoods make “Nextdoor” seem like an idyll of placid indifference. You’re ALWAYS being looked at; by the neighbors, by your chain-of-command, by the post commander’s organization. There's a gajillion eyes on you and your family.

So it was not hard to imagine that at some point someone; a neighbor, a superior, one of the neighborhood busibodies, noticed that one day the kids were playing in the yard with Spot and the next day…

...no Spot.

The authorities were called in, and, you guessed it; Spot was found neatly dressed out in the freezer.

That's how everyone came to find out that post and Army regs, and state law, forbade you from mistreating your dog. Or abandoning your dog. Or otherwise abusing and being mean to your dog.

But nothing in the law said you couldn’t EAT your dog.

I’ll be the dinner parties on that street were a bit subdued after that, though.

Wednesday morning, 5am

 

Cat: WTF is this?

Me: Your breakfast. Mmmm, chicken hearts, yummy nummers.

C: Where’s the rest of it?

M: That’s it, Senor Chonkorito. The vet says you need to drop some of that pudge.

C: Sez you, fatboy! Well, this is bullshit. I need to speak to your manager.

M: The Bride is asleep and she’s totally onboard with this, so…bon appetit!

C:

M:

C: What a fuckin’ fuckstory. Everyday it gets worse around this hellhole.

M: And did I mention the change in the kibble distribution..?

C: Nomnomno…wait. WHAAAAAT..!!??

Treason doth not prosper

So my (vaxxed, boosted, very-careful-about-masking-in-crowds) friend has the 'rona.

Most likely because someone in the group they met with last weekend had "just a sniffle", didn't mask, didn't stay home, and now has succeeded in dosing them and two others in the group (and probably more who will come back hot in the next couple of days).

Which is a reminder, in case the current U.S. House majority, and the previous Administration, aren't vivid enough warnings, of what my old drill sergeant used to tell us; that the success of our mission depended on the competence of the stupidest person in our unit.

In any group, or any nation, success depends on either those people being 1) willing to learn how to be minimally functional, or 2) being safely sidelined so their incompetence is immaterial to the mission, or 3) being shitcanned entirely. 

The sort of people who infected my friend are and are not likely to be either 1 or 2, and we've given up on number 3.

And I have no idea how we can change that short of an extinction-level crisis like the Great Depression, or a global war that either 1) pulls the general public's collective head out of it's collective ass, or 2) makes the douchenozzles like Republicans (in the Thirties) or fascists (in the Forties) so loathsome that even the morons refuse to touch them and confine their moronity to stuff like pro wrestling.

Especially now, now that Republicans ARE fascists and antivaxxers and QANuts, too?

And some forty percent of the public and the mass media refuses to be honest about that or call them what they are, or despise and shun them for it?

I'm kind of worried about how we move on from there.

And speaking of people doing fucked up things...

I didn't write anything on the second anniversary of January Treason

Mostly because that fucking ship has sailed, hit a sunken rock, capsized, caught fire, exploded, and sank.

The traitors are now a majority in one house of Congress. They - the leaders of the betrayal - paid no price for their treason. 

The goon squads that actually did their dirty work ran off afterwards and had to be slowly, imperfectly tracked down (and largely - to the extent they were - only because some of them took videos and posted to Twitter of them doing a criminal fuckin' conspiracy. Stupid people, right..?)

While in Brazil...

...their own home-grown traitors tried the same shit just now.

It's worth noting that in Brasilia hundreds of these gomers left, not rolling their coal or waving their treason flags but in zip-ties and police vans. The Brazilian Supreme Court has issued warrants for several higher-ups, including a police colonel, who were part of the inside job.

This is Brazil, a barely-Second-World nation without the sort of massive police organization that exists here in the U.S., that managed to put the collar on these dirtbags. 

We'll see if they follow through with crushing the head of the Bolsonario snake, as we should have done with the MAGAts on January 7, 2021.

But We the People already look pathetic in that Brazil, with its long and woeful history of dictatorships and coups, has been harder on their present traitors that we have been on ours, on every level from vaccination to drag queens to actual rebellion.

Whether it's as big as treason against the nation or as small as giving other people your fucking disease, I can only say this again:

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

Tings Bruk Down

 

This is a bathroom ceiling fan.

Specifically, this is the ceiling fan that has been sucking clouds of shower steam out of MY bathroom since long before it was mine (or my Bride's, whose mortgage the Little House was in, and whose name is on the ownership document...). Our guess is that it dates from somewhere around the Eighties; that would be consistent with the provenance of a LOT of the post-Twenties work done on this house.

(Which, I should remind you, was massively fucked with after the house fire sometime around then, when the occupants took the insurance money, spent it all on hookers and blow, or Vegas, or any other damn thing than making halfway-decent repairs on the poor little house...)

Well, about sometime this spring the old fan began making expensive squealing noises and shutting down. I suspected that the fan bearing had worn our, advised the rest of the Fire Direction crew not to use it, and contemplated having to replace it with no real enthusiasm.

After putting the distasteful chore off as long as possible (and long enough for some nasty mildew to build up on the bathroom ceiling) I finally went to the friendly Home Depot folks and bought a new fan.

 
Went to the 1920's attic stairs, pulled them down, and read, stamped on the upper section in 1920's ink:

"Maximum weight: 200 lbs".

I think I was below 200 some time back in 1988, right after I got out of the service all lean and hungry. And since then food and I have been better acquainted, and that weight is long since gone.

Luckily I have good friend who aren't so damn fat. And are also good people, and kindly, and pretty awesome handimen, too, so it was my friend Brent who came over with toolkit in hand and headlamp and power drill, and...

...yanked the old junker, checked the wiring (still good), put in the new fan, tested it to see if it worked (it did), fixed it to the joist, and there we had it; a new fan.

Thank you, Brent! I owe you something nice, really, and that's not even counting for snaking the nasty damn utility sink in the basement that was running slow because of the nasty washing machine lint!

Now I just have to spackle and paint the new L-angle piece of drywall and it'll be a thing of beauty and a joy...well, until the NEXT time it craps out. Hopefully some time in the 2060s long after I'm dead.

When I was with my ex, whose family were very "boat-y" people, they liked to say that a sailboat was a hole in the water into which you poured money.

Yeah, well, home ownership. Let's talk.

And speaking of fucked up things...

I see our new House Republican overlords finally got tired of pantsing Kevin Fucking McCarthy and let the poor stupid sod play Bang the Gavel.

The clusterfuckery was entertaining, yes, but let's not let it distract us from the plot of the story "The Cannibal Children Come To The Birthday Party".

The Traitor Twenty did what they did as much to extort their fap fanstasies of endless Hunter Biden and the other QANut nonsense we're now going to get 24/7/365 from these fucksticks.

But hidden in the pile of MAGAt shit is this tasty little raisin, noted by Kyle Cheney at Politico and emphasized by emptywheel:

Yep.

They're going to use their power to destroy the notes that the DoJ took on their criminal fuckin' conspiracy

So, even as we contemplate the goodness of new bathroom fans and good home improvement news, we need to remember that for at least the next two years we're going to be ruled - to the extent they can - by people who tried to betray the Constitutional requirement to peacefully transfer power to the winner of the general election.

That is, by traitors no different in fact from those guilty of Confederate treason 162 years ago.

And it's also a reminder that the thing that distinguished a criminal like Trump from a criminal like Nixon is that Nixon's crimes were, at bottom, political. 

Nixon had an agenda - loathsome, true - that he wanted to rule by. He had made his bones kneecapping his political enemies in California, and he grew to power with the same vicious political instincts until he finally went too far for even his political party to ignore.

Trump, on the other hand, was just a mobbed-up grifter, a real-estate crook with the instincts of a made guy. His crimes were the crimes of a streetcorner hood, a Mob guy, running his numbers and thumbbreaking his debtors (and stiffarming his creditors).

So it should be no surprise that the remoras that have fastened themselves to the Mob that is the Republican Party are not that much different. They know they're guilty of criminal conspiracy.

And, like their Orange Julius Caesar, they're now trying to use legal bullshit and lies to escape with their gains.

Well, the American people did, at least in this case, vote for these sonsofbitches.

And now, thanks to the people who voted for these sonsofbitches, all of us are gonna get it, good and hard.

But at least I'll have a nice new bathroom ceiling fan when they implode the debt ceiling this October.

Some things I dread about 2023

 

Hunter Biden.

Let's just start there.

Mind, that's just a placeholder for the tl:dr version, which I now kind of have to explain. So.

There's always a handful of ominous clouds on the new year horizon, every year, things we know are in view but have no way of knowing how they will affect us or even whether they will affect us..

But this one's both a surety and a misery; the GQP's takeover of the federal House of Representatives, which I'll just go ahead and call "Hunter Biden" for short because the coming ridiculous fucking clown show is sure to include massive amounts of the sonofabitch.

(And in case you haven't been following this goat rodeo, the central fact of our next two Congressional years is that the fucking monkeys will be running the House zoo. The steering wheel will be in the clutch of the whackjobs - the Greenes, the Gaetzs, the Gym Jordans...the people who make Louie Gohmert look like a sage.)

As we've discussed here (over and over, because it's the central reality of our current U.S. politics) the modern "conservative" movement has only a handful of actual policies, all of which are loathsome to anyone who can't check all the "rich, "white", "male", "god-botherer", "ammosexual", and "bigoted" boxes.

Popular support for policies like "tax cuts for rich fucks!", "let's make American society socially, politically, and financially more like 1929!", and "let's hand over more political power to big business!" ranges from nonexistent to miniscule to at-least-less-then-two/fifths-of-the-public. 

In a genuinely popularly-elected government flogging those sorts of political goals would get you locked out of the corridors of power for generations if not forever; there's just not enough plutocrats, plutocrat-fluffers, and morons to get you elected.

Since that's all the "conservatives" have, though, they have to spend - and will spend - the vast bulk of their time fapping over ridiculous QANut conspiracy bullshit that is red meat to their lunatic base.

So when Margie Taylor Greene gets her little dickbeaters on the House Judiciary Committee gavel you know damn well she's gonna drag Tony Fauci in front of her to explain why...ummm...well, that's a good question, actually, given that it was Greene's outfit - starting with her Orange Crush - that fucked up the COVID response and managed to kill something like half a million people and all Fauci did was what he could to stop the suicidal morons from killing others along with themselves

Over at wherever Matt Gaetz lands he'll gin up a dozen Hunter Biden "investigations" generating a shit-ton of FAUX "News" content while trying to make Hunter a scandal on Daddy Joe...as if Jared Kusher didn't even fucking exist or if anyone outside the looney wingnut Right gives a shit.

All the while these chucklefucks will deliberately impede every other goddamn thing the federal government is there to do.

Because the bottom line is that these fucking people are 1) dumb as a box of rocks, 2) mean as weasels and 3) convinced that "government is bad" so they're bad a governance.

Which, in a republic where the fucking people are supposed to BE the fucking government, is a nonsensical and dangerous conviction.

Which isn't going to stop these nitwits. 

They'll tie the House, and to the extent they can, the entire federal government and everything that government has a hand in (which means damn near everything, the modern U.S. being an immense industrial nation that cannot continue as an entity without constant and continuous governance in everything ranging from foreign defense to meat-packing inspections...) with their "Hunter Biden"-level foolery.

Which means that the true disaster of our age...

Climate Change

...will roll unchecked.

We've talked about this, too. We're headed straight into the Perfect Storm of the Holocene Thermal Maximum and the Sixth Extinction without the slightest idea what that will mean.

Except not good; we can take that as read.

Will 2023 be The End of All Things?

No, of course not.

But it'll be incrementally worse than 2022 was. More extreme weather. Probably another bad western fire season. Trouble with supply chains. Difficulties in crop yields, and changes in, especially, water budgets that will affect everything from drinking water to fish runs.

It's difficult enough to get even the left side of the political spectrum to pay attention - let alone doing anything genuinely useful - about this stuff. It's complicated (meaning that the vast majority of Americans neither understand it nor appreciate how potentially devastating it will become...) and expensive (meaning taxes, which nobody likes, particularly the rich fucks who have their hand up the typical elected sock-puppet's ass...).

The Right?

Probably 80% still think the whole climate change thing is a Red Chinese hoax.

Yes, they ARE that fucking stupid.

I'm old. I'm not going to live to see how bad this could and probably - at the rate we're going - will get. But my kids will, and I'd just as soon not hand then the mess that it looks like we're going to get.

There's a lot of other shit that we're going to see in 2023 that ranges from "gee, that's kinda fucked up" ro "WTAF!!??"; increasing plutocracy and the New Gilded Age, more COVID (including new strains that we're incubating now because we've effectively given up on trying to run the Smallpox Program and vaccinate the fucker out or existence), and more trouble around the periphery of the former Soviet Union. 

Because...

Wars and Rumors of Wars

...are likely to continue to roil eastern Europe and north Asia as well as all the usual (ahemMiddleEastahem) places.

Ruth Deyermond has a useful Clif's Notes discussion of the problems of Russia and the West, but the tl:dr is Ukraine has made clear if nothing else that the Western (including the U.S.) assumption that the post-Soviet status quo - a chastened Russia unwilling and unlikely to act aggressively outside its post-Soviet borders - is gone so long as the current Putin-led leadership remains in place.

Okay, let me make this clear - I am NOT writing a new Long Telegram for 2023.

Putin Russia is a problem. That doesn't automatically make it OUR problem, or automatically make it a geopolitical-military problem. I'm not arguing for a new Cold War.

I'm agreeing with Deyermond, though, that we need to:

1. Accept that the old energy relationship with Russia cannot be recovered. Communicate this, and the reasons for it, clearly to readers/viewers/voters.

2.  Acknowledge that the need to pay attention to Russia isn’t going to go away and that this requires reorganisation and investment.

Deyermond has a long sub-thread that expounds on how institutional neglect of post-Soviet Russia has gone a long way towards putting us (and Russia!) in a vastly more risky position.

This is a new bud on the troublesome U.S. foreign policy tree, but there's a lot of poison fruit still hanging on the old branches.

Unquestioning support of Israel even now that it has become an openly theocratic apartheid state. 

Ignorance, or, worse, ignorant meddling in internal troubles in subSaharan Africa and the Middle East.

The uncertainty about the PRC's intentions towards it's own "near abroad", especially Taiwan.

Problems in Central America - a lot of this is related to the climate issues mentioned above - and the instability of Mexico in particular brought about by a combination of demographics, economics, the institutional political dysfunction baked into Mexico by its colonial master Spain, and the collision of the Mexican underworld and U.S. drug policies.

Ugh. I won't even want to think about what will happen with all this shit if Trump gets back into the White House in 2024.

But 2023's gonna be bad enough as it is.

Homelessness in Portland

With the defeat of Joanne Hardesty there's no Portland commissioner who will push back against Mayor Wheeler's "might, power, and beatings" plan to sweep the poor people in these squalid camps out of Portland.

So we'll go on with the whack-a-hobo "policy" that's been all the City can come up with to try and figure out what to do with poor people who either can't afford Portland's astronomical rents, or who are struggling with everything from addiction to mental and physical health problems.

And we'll hear the usual bullshit from people like Betsy Johnson about how this is going to "solve" the problem, which is the equivalent of pissing on your head and telling you how lucky you are that the rain is warm.

All the while the City will he shoveling money at the worthless fucking Police Bureau.

Plus there's all the usual bullshit. Payday lenders. Non-alcoholic beer. Bathroom ceiling fans (I'll have a post about that in a bit...) The Fucking Big Bang Theory.

Is there going to be more good than bad?

Christ, I hope so.

But whatever we're going to get, it's too late now. We're gonna get it good and hard.