The Formula

 Over at Nancy Nall's joint she complains:

"You guys, I am shocked this story hasn’t gotten more attention from the prestige media. It’s based on a government report, not “sources.” The revelations – that the White House has its own pharmacy, and under Trump, it handed out prescription meds like Smarties on Halloween – are startling. And yet, it seems to have bloomed and withered in one news cycle, and what stories were written concentrated on the cost, mainly of the use of name-brand drugs when generic equivalents were available."

To which my immediate thought was:

Dunno about everyone else, but..."this would surprise you…why?”

Anyone who had been paying attention to Tubby since his Eighties Manhattan heyday knew the guy is a moral shithouse, the reeking one-holer of ethical sewage. So assuming the WH has a dispensary, and knowing how a dispensary run by this human smegma would be run…what ELSE would you expect?

It’s the same way so many other articles about the orange chancre seem incredulous about his lying, or cheating, or petty viciousness, or stupidity…and my response is you’re gobsmacked by this…why? It's not like this is some sort of Scooby-doo mystery. It's all right in front of you.

Look. He’s a garbage human. As such he is surrounded by the sort of people who think “Yes! I WANT that!” So of course this. And the corruption. And the theft of documents and WH gifts. And the racism and sexism and plutocratic…

I guess that's the only thing I don't get; that given how obvious all this Republican QANut fuckery is, how does any sentient human not see it?

The culties do and that's why they love it. But anyone not in the cult should be horrified and furious about it. Yet...here we are. WASF.

 

Snow and Ice

So we’re on Day Four of the First Snowpocalypse of 2024, and anticipating Icepocalypse: The Sequel later today.

Did the marketing a day early (yesterday) to provision. Schools are closed, so all the students plus Miss Debra, school secretary, are free of the need to travel.

The wild card is power, tho. There are still a crap-ton of outages from the first round of weather, and ice has a nasty way of bringing powerlines down around here. So hoping for luck with that.

Meanwhile I'm working to stay busy. The weather has badly disrupted my kendo practice - the ceiling here is too low for a correct men-uchi, so I'm reduced to trying all sorts of gimmicks to workaround. Plus the little gym we belong to is down a steep hill from St. Johns and, while I'll bet we could zip down it'd be reeeeeal iffy trying to get back up so, no.

I'm writing a lot about Portland soccer - our women's professional team 1) just got sold to a California real estate developer and 2) just made it's 2024 college draft picks, so there's a lot to talk about.

And I'm reading a lot; first Wayne Lee's splendid The Cutting-off Way, a modern analysis of native warfare in Northeastern North America between first European contact and the emergence of the early United States.

Second, several sources for my planned Frontiers 1914 post later in the month (or February), beginning with Showalter, Robinson, and Robinson (2019) The German Failure In Belgium. I've also got Terence Zuber's 2007 The Battle of the Frontiers on order. The more I look into this whole "Frontiers" business the more I want to focus on the issue of reconnaissance and, particularly, cavalry, since it was the horse soldiers that the commanding officers of 1914 presumed would get them the intelligence they needed to carry out their operational planning.

(Yes, the fliers were busy, as well, but I don't get the sense that the maneuver commanders had enough familiarity with how the aircraft worked and how to use the information they could produce to really incorporate that into their planning...)

Anyway, that should keep me busy for a bit.

Meanwhile out in the larger country the 2024 election campaign has begun with the ridiculous Iowa caucuses on the Republican side.

In a shocking upset, Tubby swept the board. Yeah, I know. Pinch me.

There's no kidding ourselves; the Right is gonna return this fucker to us in November. If they can foist him back into power it's gonna suck for everyone not them, and, frankly, that's so obvious that if you're not them and you're not fulminating at the moment you get to vote against them, fight them, and destroy them, you're nuts.

We the People are going to get a very simple choice this year; choose the promise of the better angels of the American Experiment, or choose the original sins of the Founders, the long legacy of slavery and oligarchy.

I know where I stand. Where the rest of my nation will go? I can only remind them that...

Ceterum autem censeo the GOP esse delendam.

All the troubles in the world, January 2024 edition

 Couple of quick thoughts today.

1. Israel vs South Africa in the International Court of Justice

A quick reminder that the ICJ, along with a lot of the other "international law" and "law of war" institutions are effectively creations of the last truly horrific global episode of mass death, the Second World War.

That's why, for example, things like the bombings of London during the Blitz, Dresden, the fire-raids over Japan in 1944 and '45 are now officially the "war crimes" that Curtis LeMay admitted he'd have been hung for had Japan won the Pacifc War.

The supposed key is "proportionality". Even in war, if someone attacks you without provocation ('making aggressive war", also a war crime that George Bush could easily have been prosecuted for going into Iraq in 2003...) you're fully justified in hitting them hard.

But not TOO hard. You can't firebomb their cities and kill millions of their people to get the political and military leaders who war-crimed you when they attacked. You've gotta try and kill those people without butchering job-lots of their countrypeople who had nothing to do with the original crime.

What I think is "wrong" with the ICJ case that South Africa is bringing is that it accuses the Israelis of "genocide".

I don't think for a moment that if the Netanyahu government could genocide the Arabic former residents and descendants of those residents of the Ottoman province of Palestine they wouldn't because they're just nice guys.

They're vicious ethno-supremacists, who have utterly embraced the idea that only they are truly human and the Palestinians are some sort of two-legged humanoid vermin. Don't be surprised; had you asked a typical frontier American anytime between 1750 and 1900 of their opinion of the various native groups they were pushing out of their vicinity you'd have gotten a damn near identical answer.

The Gaza "campaign" is just the hot phase of the war that Israel has been fighting against the Pals since the mid-1940s. Including the long march to apartheid since 1967 - something that a South African would be expected to be brutally familiar with.

The equally vicious bastards who engineered the attack on 10/7 know that better than anyone, and that was their plan all along; to rip the smile off the pretty Israeli girl soldier and bare the teeth behind it. They intended to bait the Israelis into what they're doing. Netanyau's people responded like the junkyard dogs they are, and here we are.

The problem I see is this.

What Israel is doing in Gaza is clearly a war crime. It's not proportionate to kill tens of thousands of innocent women and kiddies who happen to be in the vicinity of war criminals. It's not within the bounds of whatever the fuck "international law" is to be doing ethnic cleansing. We - the U.S., that is - bombed the fuck out of the Serbs for that, remember?

But I don't think it rises to the level of "genocide".

So I think the ICJ will rule in favor of Israel.

Which, as Juan Cole points out here, is troublesome just because "(i)f the justices fail in their duty to uphold International Humanitarian Law in this instance, the failure could be fatal to what is left of the legitimacy of international institutions, throwing us back into the jungle."

I note that, per the BBC today, Israel's "response" to the charge is that they are acting in "self-defense".

I'll keep that in mind the next time my neighbor takes a swing at me. Because when the cops show up at the smoking ashes of his house I can point to the ruins, the corpses of his family, and explain how I was acting in self-defense. 

I'll be curious to see how that'll fly.

2) The airstrikes in Yemen

Bret Devereaux has an excellent breakdown of why a) this is entirely expected and - as opposed to the Israeli clusterfuck we've just discussed - is entirely within the bound of international law, and b) likely to lead to a difficult and troubling escalation.

The real problem is the methods.

Airstrikes are a big, blunt hammer. As John Paul Vann said about how they were useless in Vietnam, the best weapon in counterinsurgency is a knife. You try and "pacify" an insurgency from fifteen hundred feet AGL all you're likely to do is piss off the surviving civilians whose homes, businesses, churches and schools you flattened.

But the alternative is doing a Shores of Tripoli sort of punitive expedition, which in the IED-and-cheap-automatic-weapon-casualty-averse world of Western powers is a nonstarter. There's no way for an Anglo-American landing party to do an O'Bannion in Yemen without a hellishly high risk of losses. 

And if so the Anglo-American public, who in general has no fucking idea where Yemen even is, much less the issues of freedom of navigation, the Saudi-Yemeni War, what's going on in Israel and Gaza, and the geopolitical balance between the Saudi-Gulf States and Iran, would rouse from the latest episode of "90 Day Fiance" in wroth and pillory their various governments for...well, something.

Decereaux sums things up neatly, if ominously:

"So on the one hand, the Houthis are unlikely to back down over just a few airstrikes – they’ve shown tremendous resiliency in the past against air campaigns. On the other hand, Houthis have endangered the vital national interests of many countries which are substantially stronger than they are. Historically speaking, piracy and indiscriminate trade disruption were not long-term successful strategies and states have been willing, when necessary, to employ extreme levels of violence to make those activities stop. I don’t think that has changed. Unfortunately, many of the people of Yemen – who have little say in what the Houthis do – are likely to suffer as the Houthis find out why is has been, historically speaking, a terrible idea to indiscriminately try to close down the seas."

Talk about eating soup with a knife.

Blogrolling, resentment, and pronoun trouble

Paul Campos has a good piece at the Lawyers Guns and Money site that pretty much spells out why our particular system makes these people so dangerous:

“But what gives these paranoid visions so much political power is that there is, in fact, an empirical reality in which the MAGA base is suffering a massive ongoing status degradation. The country is becoming less white, less religious, and less culturally conservative, while people who aren’t part of the increasingly mobile and increasingly credentialed professional classes are bearing the brunt of increasing economic inequality, and the precarity that comes with it.

It’s an oversimplification to say…that the Republican party is now divided between college educated people who are embarrassed by Trump and prefer their tax cuts and cultural reaction is a more genteel form, and a working class base that is all in on the MAGA paranoid vision, but there is something to this.

Trump’s support comes primarily from downwardly mobile less educated white people, small business owners obsessed with low taxes, lax regulation, and good old days (read: white supremacist) nostalgia, along with a non-trivial percentage of ethnic minority members who are attracted enough to the authoritarian patriarchal cultural reaction he represents to ignore their own out status within that hierarchy.

It’s a coalition that reflects a rapidly dying vision of America, but one that may not die fast enough to save an increasingly sclerotic constitutional system that, as almost all the experts Edsall interviews assert, is moving into a potentially existential crisis.”

In a more flexible system such as a parliamentary one the whackos would be firewalled into a Monster Raving Looney Party.

(Which, as Israel is showing us, is NOT a vaccine against these political pathogens – get enough of them who are willing to cooperate and you still get Hitler! – so a lot depends on the sociopolitical bedrock beneath the system…)

But here? They’ve taken over one of the two parties we’re limited to by the Constitution and FPTP voting.

 
Guess what? Turns out that maybe the Constitution IS a suicide pact! Whoodathunkit?

(A brief note re: the graphics for this one. I'm frankly sick of posting pictures of MAGAts to go with these. Instead I'm indulging my fondness for 1) old Warner Bros. cartoons and 2) Hayao Miyazaki. In case you're not familiar with the bottom image, it's Bugs as Howl and Daffy as Sophie cosplaying the iconic scene from Howl's Moving Castle. 

Here's the original:

I totally stan for the revision version's expressions; Daffy panicking (because that's what Daffy does) and Bugs smug and kind of smarmy (because, well...Bugs).

Anyway, even in the darkest timeline there's points of light. Excuse me while I go an rewatch Chuck Jones 1952 classic Rabbit Seasoning...

Oh. and...

 Ceterum autem censeo the GOP esse delendam.

18 U.S. Code § 2384 - A Reminder

Two years ago this day a mob of Republicans, led by their fuhrer, committed treason.

Since then the entire Republican Party has embraced treason in support of its fuhrer.

I warned you what would happen if we let them get away with it.

By so doing we sowed the wind.

Now we're going to reap the whirlwind.

Ceterum autem censeo the GOP esse delendam.

First post of 2024; Hatsugeiko

For several years I lived out on Portland’s west side – part of the Tualatin Valley, the suburban enclave over the Portland Hills from the Beehive of Terrorism itself. New Year’s night there was always interesting, because amid the fireworks was a surprisingly large amount of actual gunfire that would have delighted the guests at an Afghanistan wedding party.

One year that included an immense blast that rattled the windows just past midnight; probably pyro but it sounded like someone had upgraded from small arms to an actual cannon, and who doesn’t shoot in the new year with an artillery piece, amiright?

This year I enjoyed a new experience New Year’s Day; loaded the bogu bag and shinai and played two hours of kendo at the Portland Kendo Club’s hatsugeiko, the traditional “first practice” of the new year, followed by a potluck. 

Part of the fun was the venue itself, "Fulton Park Community Center".

The building is over a century old - 1914 - as a school:

"In 1914, the Fulton Park Elementary School was built. The school housed grades K-8 in its four classrooms all opening into a central gymnasium, complete with a stage. A later remodel of the building included a new kitchen and additional bathroom facilities. The building was designed by Floyd Archibald Naramore, who was the architect and superintendent of school properties for Portland Public Schools from 1912 to 1919."

The old school - and it's still run as a school, a tiny French immersion program (which is kind of ridiculous. French? Allez savoir.) - is utterly Ragtime Era awesome, with all the architectural gimmicks of the era. Not sure which I loved more; the massive wooden timber truss ceiling? The little anterooms at the back of the classrooms with the sliding doors to hide all the coats and hats and the utility sink?

The wood floor was perfect; it's hard to emphasize enough how different floor types are on my legs.

The metal joints are unsparing. They simply don't give and flex like human bones do. So playing kendo - which requires a lot of energetic suburi or footwork - means taking a pounding through the legs. A hard floor, like concrete? Fuuuuuck. I come away from a couple of hours of keiko aching in every knee joint.

But a springy wood floor like Fulton? That's pure energy-giving. I was sore this morning - it was a good hard practice - but my legs? As good as they ever are, and that's terrific.

So. Great kendo, good training, lots of fun with kendoka from all over Portland plus family, big kid energy, great food, just a terrific way to start off the year.

Hope all here have the same.

And, today as every day, this year as every year, as always, ceterum (autem) censeo the GOP esse delendam.