Friday Jukebox: Goodbye, goodbye edition

And this was from 2008, mind, when we THOUGHT things were bad.

Game recognize game

Now.

Then.

These numbnuts are deeply ignorant, profoundly stupid, and utterly incompetent. It's their good luck, and the rest of our misfortunes, that their MAGAt party is even more ignorant and stupid and cares nothing for competence so long as they get the performative spite and malice they crave.

And there is no remedy for them in the Constitutional system. No checks. No balances. Nothing.

The United States is now a Stupid Fascist state in fact, if not in name, and if We the People don't want that, well...history shows the path from autocracy to republicanism is ugly, brutal, and very often futile at least in the short and even medium term. 

The Revolution of 1789 led to military dictatorship by 1800 and decades of ruinous war. The Revolution of 1917 led to partisan dictatorship by 1921 and decades of brutal immiseration. Our own revolution was only prevented from a similar fate by a unique combination of individual probity and isolation from neighboring Great Powers.

So, no. There is no Good Way past this disaster.

The trope of 1776 is that roughly a third of the then-American colonies was Loyalist, a third were rebels, and the remaining third just wanted to keep their heads down. Logistical difficulties, strategic incoherence, and Great Power rivalry with France ensured the rebellion became revolution and overthrow of the ruling order.

We certainly have ruling incoherence and economic difficulty from the fascists.

But we have no Power to come to our aid, and the internal division is even less favorable; the fascists run from about 30% - the true hardcore MAGAts - to 40% and the "heads-down" lumpen herdbeasts are another 30-40%. The police and military will obey The Chief Executive; there is no competing "Garde National" or rebellious militias to opposed regime gunfire with rebel gunfire.

We are, in fact...

 

I honestly have no words of hope or encouragement. I can't figure out a way to overthrow these sonsofbitches short of actual violent rebellion, and history also shows how often that goes badly for the rebels.

The time for phone banking and postcard writing is past.

But I can't stand the idea of simply bending the knee to these people. Is it time for building IEDs? How can that ever work? 

I can only stand, shaking with rage, as my country devolves before my burning eyes.

Make stupid wars. Collect stupid prizes

That the Trump Klown Kabinet could fuck up a military wet dream?

Color me shocked by that. Shocked!

One of the most interesting takes on this is Garrett Graff's piece here:  

It sums up the multivariate fuckups, idiocies, and "scandals" (if such a thing can be applied to these shameless nitwits - you have to have the ability to feel shame to be "scandalized", and these garden tools have none) involved in the now-apparently-called "Signalgate" nonsense.

I don't really give a shit. These people have done and will do worse. This is just another Tuesday in Yemen and the worthless Trump 2: Electric Boogaloo Administration. Oh, wait, more dead people? Yawn.

No.

It's what it exposes about the pure, crystalline stupidity that has been the U.S. "policy" in the Middle East, Trumpian and otherwise.

Seriously...what the fuck did these nimrods think a dozen bombs, smart or otherwise, would do in Yemen?

The place has been a clusterfuck since, well...in the modern era? The Sixties, when the place split into two north-south halves and proceeded to indulge in various bloody debates over who should be the boss of whom.

Throw in the usual - corruption, poverty, famine - and you've got the classic Middle Eastern recipe for misery.

So how does hucking a dozen or so kinetic weapons into random apartment buildings "help" with that?

Hint: it doesn't.

This was, apart from the awesome level of bureaucratic incompetence - people on their iPhones in the Kremlin cafeteria, random journos in on the chat, schoolboy emojis - the ultimate in worthlessly performative "war". This was the equivalent of the story in Tony Herbert's Vietnam memoir where he runs down the list of target effects and comes across one labeled "emplacements destroyed" and wonders how you "destroy" a hole by blowing it into a bigger hole.

For a couple of cool million in ordnance, fuel, equipment wear, and personnel costs this nonsense only made the Yemeni rubble bounce. 

I'm sure Elon Musk will get on this "waste" just as soon as he gets done kicking all us "fraudsters" off Social Security.

WASF.

Cui bono?

As usual, the news is overstuffed with Fatso's fuckery and that of his sejanus, Elmo.

It's not worth dissecting in detail; it's just more "Let's do 1929 over only the plutocrats win!" bullshit.

I did want to make a couple of observations, though.

1. If you're really hunting "waste, fraud, and abuse" of federal agencies you don't use racist nineteen-year-old coders. You bring in forty-eight-year-old forensic accountants.

You bring in the ElmoTeens because you want to write in backdoors and hack government servers for a plutocrat whose "businesses" survive on government handouts.

Just sayin'.

2. I want every interview of every Republican official at every level to begin with:
"You (or "your Congressional Republican colleagues") have introduced a plan to cut over 800 billion out of Medicaid, a program millions of your fellow Americans depend on for their health care. This will mean that millions of those people will lose that care. What do you recommend those people do?"

Every. Single. Interview.

Over and over.

Until one of them loses it and responds with Auric Goldfinger's line:

"No, I expect you to die." 

These fucking people.

Every morning I read the news and the thought that keeps returning is "How come you never have a rocket-propelled grenade when you really need one?" 

One more thought.

One thing that I think hasn't been hit hard enough in all the coverage of this TrumpMuskFuckery. The single biggest societal issue isn't just the looting and breaking things. 

It's the fundamental issue with the WAY the MAGAts are going about this.

Societies - settled, "mature", societies, economies, polities - depend on stability.

The way the people within the entities live, if they intend to live a peaceful, productive life, is dependent on knowing that 1) when they wake up today the "rules" - social, economic, political - will be the same as they were when they went to sleep, and 2) if things change, that change is done through a methodical, orderly (and in a republic) public democratic process.

That gives people chance to live stable lives in peace or, if things change, time and resources to either fight the change or adapt to it.

In other words, the laws and rules remain in place until and unless they are changed, and, if changed, are changed through gradual public debate and accountable legal or legislative processes. 

To put it more simply; civic life cannot be Calvinball.

That's the biggest problem with all this GOPFuckery. It speed-runs these massive changes, largely because (I believe) these sonsofbitches know that if they tried it the legitimate, Constitutional, legal ways they'd end up having to explain things that will make them look "bad" and risk getting handed their whole ass.

Because, for the non-billionaire class of citizens, they ARE bad. They will make the vast majority of us poorer, sicker, weaker, less-legally-protected, more insecure, more frightened, less "citizens" more "subjects".

And the MAGAts Trump is running know that. 

The polling on their mercantilist, racist, sexist, imperialist, every-other-Gilded-Age-ist fuckery is awful. When the public - even big swathes of the MAGAt public - knows the actual effects of all this stuff (as opposed to the "woke!woke!woke!" bullshit bullhorn version used to smokescreen it) they haaaaate it.

So even though these people have it all; executive, legislature, courts, every lever of U.S. government...they aren't even trying to do this through the Constitutional framework. They want Calvinball because Calvinball is only fun if you're Calvin. 

For the rest of us it's just scary, stupid, unpredictable, dangerously unhinged chaos.

And you can't run a huge industrial republic on unhinged chaos.

Unless...

You're a plutocrat and you don't have to rely on things like legal rights or poultry inspections or Medicare, or...you think you are that plutocrat.

Then you can hope to pluck loot from the chaos.

It worked for Attila.

Which is an excellent reason not to see how it works here and now. 

Because when society works for barbarism the people inside it have to become barbarians or die.

Coup-coup for Cocoa Puffs

 Liz Warren lays it down about the theft of federal financial secrets by Elmo the Musk.

Yeah, this fucking guy:

Here's the worst thing about this dipshit stealing the federal wallet.

It's not that he's a ketamine-addled neo-Nazi illegal Afrikaaner immigrant from apartheid South Africa. Or that his primary "genius" seems to be hoovering up federal funds while being a ginormous asshole.

That's just him.

It's that the fucker is SO fucked up; so doped up, so mobbed up with foreign influence and fascist scum, that if the federal government wasn't run by another adderal-addled fascist clown he couldn't get further than the fucking Top Secret clearance he has and barely even hang on to that. 

The linked article noted in December that:

"SpaceX lawyers and executives reportedly concluded that if the company sought a higher level of clearance than Musk currently holds, he risked being turned down and potentially stripped of the clearances he currently holds."

I had a fucking Top Secret clearance. I was a sergeant running an ambulance section in Panama.

If your dog was a good dog he could get a fucking Top Secret clearance.

But fucking Elon?

"According to the (Wall Street) Journal, Musk’s lawyers outlined scenarios in which he might inadvertently disclose secrets to foreign officials with whom he regularly speaks, including the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, with whom he is reported to have been in regular contact since 2022. Musk’s use of another semi-legal drug, ketamine, in pursuit of what friends call “pure creativity”, along with reports of LSD, ecstasy and magic mushrooms, could also be an issue."

Y'think..?

In a sane polity this goofball would no more be permitted a sniff of governmental authority than he'd be permitted a permanent resident visa. Yet here he is, with mine and every other citizen's social security number, tax and income information, and Dog knows what else. What the fuck is he gonna do with it?

Why should he be able to do anything with it?

The Second Fraudulency Administration has spent it's first month speed-running the Fall of the Roman Republic by empowering thieves and bastards and thugs (and other loons - looks like we're getting that brain-worm nitwit RFK the Lesser for HHS...) and doing every ridiculous crime they can think of as rapidly as possible.

But this?

This is just beyond stupid.

C'mon, MAGAts! You're supposed to hate immigrants! How about deporting THIS goof? What's the downside?

I know the GOP wants to crash the "safety net". They've had a hard-on for Social Security, Medicare, AFDC...pretty much everything that FDR enacted to prevent a fascist or communist revolution in the Great Depression. They hate that they have to see poor people get anything; desperate poverty worked so well for the rich in the original Gilded Age! Desperate people will do anything, degrade themselves, and others, to find a way out of poverty.

But this?

It's just...

It's so blatantly in-your-face ignorant and shitty. It's a total dick move. 

I read somewhere that what this feels like is the good old "Coalition Provisional Authority" of the 2003 Iraq Occupation. 

I agree; it's got the same feel; gormless, clueless, cocky and greedy Republican nitwits swaggering into the palaces, posing amid the looting, sure of their brilliant "plans" and how they're gonna "move fast and break things" in ways too clever for the normies to grasp.

While in the reedbeds along the Tigris, the mujahedeen foregather by night.

A Gentle Reminder...

...that crowning a clown doesn't make them noble.

It just makes the throne the driver's seat in the clown car.

To make this a perfectly shitty year, I saw the neurologist last Tuesday.

It's Parkinson's.

So I'm on borrowed time. My great hope is to borrow enough time to outlive this shitheel in order to sneak into Mar-a-Lago and piss on his grave. 

I have no words, no profanities strong enough for my supposed-fellow-Americans, both those who voted for the bozo, and those who just didn't show up to vote against it.

We're gonna get it good and hard.

Today is a reminder that the "arc of history" is bullshit. "History", if it means anything, is an endless, remorseless grind of fighting people like these MAGAts, fighting their idiotic simpleminded "solutions" to complex problems, fighting their childish insistence that there was a former time of "greatness" that can be recalled if enough of the "wrong" people are exterminated. 

This past year We, the People just couldn't be arsed to do that, so here we are.

I've seldom been more ashamed of being an American than I am today.

Speak

Speak, your lips are free.
Speak, it is your tongue.
Speak, it is your own body.
Speak, your life is still yours.

See how in the blacksmith's shop
The flame burns wild, the iron glows red;
The locks open their jaws,
And every chain begins to break.

Speak, this brief hour is long enough
Before the death of body and tongue:
Speak, 'cause the truth is not dead yet,
Speak, speak, whatever you must speak.

~ Faiz Achmed Faiz.

I'm not sure I can adequately describe how both terrified and infuriated I feel.

Terrified because I'm old, and weakening, and poor, and alone. My supposed "fellow Americans" just spit on everything I believe, empowering the worst of our nation's past, present, and future. I am confronted with the horrifying certainty that I will be faced with the awful choice between Vichy and Resistance, knowing the gruesome fate awaiting most resistants. 

Yet I am so furious I cannot lie down before this. Especially now that the Traitor Trump has promised to use my Army for the greatest treason since the War of the Rebellion, using my brothers to round up other Americans - knowing that they WILL take them up, innocents alongside all the drywallers and berry-pickers and bodega grannies and the layabouts, petty crooks, and assholes, for the "crime" of just being here - to herd into the camps practically identical to those that we built for the last betrayal, to punish our fellow Americans for the crime of being Japanese.

And I'm insane with fury that I'm forced into this, like a man caught in a moving train, for no more reason than millions of dumb fucks couldn't vote for a woman, didn't understand fiscal reality, or were terrified that the cutie in the corner booth was sporting a cock under her cocktail frock.

I don't want to have to face down angry cops. I don't want to have be arrested, gassed, beaten. I don't want to risk jail, or worse, for standing up for simple human decency and political sanity, and I'm viciously enraged that millions of people have forced that on me.

But I don't see how I can not do all those things, run those risks, and live with myself at the end of the day.

And that's terrifying.

Today in "Republican is the New Stupid": How do you say "Deportee" in Japanese?

Scott Lemieux at LG&M has a long-form piece on the disaster-to-come that will be the Trump47 deportationpalooza. This from Radley Balko:

"Trump approached the presidency like he ran his businesses — like a mob boss. He thought the Justice Department should have been his personal law firm, and has vowed to weaponize it against his opponents should he win again. It isn’t at all difficult to imagine how, once in place, this deportation force might be used to enforce Trump’s other authoritarian impulses and campaign promises, like infiltrating blue cities to “fight crime,’“ arrest homeless people, or to beat — and possibly shoot — people who stage protests against his policies.

Deporting even a fraction of 15 million people would also wreck the economy. Inflation would soar (especially when combined with Trump’s plan to slap a 10 percent across-the-board tariff on imports), and the U.S. would likely spiral into a recession, possibly a depression.

Naturally, House Speaker Mike Johnson has expressed his enthusiastic support.

Trump and Miller aren’t going to deport 15 million people in four years. It just isn’t possible. But the important thing — the thing that ought to be immediately disqualifying — is that they plan to try"

Very much yes.

But - here's the Extra Stupid Special Sauce; you want to see an industrialized nation with what amounts to  a de-facto complete immigration ban?

Japan.

"The number of vacant houses in Japan has surged to a record high of nine million – more than enough for each person in New York City – as the east Asian country continues to struggle with its ever-declining population.

Abandoned houses are known in Japan as “akiya” – a term that usually refers to derelict residential homes tucked away in rural areas.

But more akiya are being seen in major cities, such as Tokyo and Kyoto, and that’s a problem for a government that’s already grappling with an aging population and an alarming fall in the number of children born each year.

“This is a symptom of Japan’s population decline,” said Jeffrey Hall, a lecturer at Kanda University of International Studies in Chiba. “It’s not really a problem of building too many houses” but “a problem of not having enough people,” he said."

No matter what fucking Nick Fuentes - a Peak Republican Dumbfuck if ever breathed - "thinks" (if that's a valid term for the residual electrical impulses in his fat head), the American public, and American women in particular, aren't going to start popping out his sprogs enough to wash the dishes, wipe the asses, pick the crops, and clean the chicken carcasses.

Kids are fucking expensive! And hard, unpaid work! Remember the GOP mantra: "If you can't feed 'em, don't breed 'em." Amirite? Well..?

Kiboshing divorce and abortion ain't gonna help, either.

The bottom line is that most large industrial nations see an overall decline in native resident births as the dearth of needs for farmhands and shop assistants become obvious and kids become, in effect, a luxury good, an indulgence.

The planned Operation Endlösung (look it up...) is fucked up for many reasons.

But, like so much of Trump47, the bottomless stupidity is one that is far too often left unsaid.

Again, I'm not nearly so arsed at being ruled by evil traitors.

It's the being ruled by these fucking dumbfucks that really stings.

Update 11/14: Bill Scher at Washington Monthly has a worthwhile long read: 

"Overall, immigration is good. You wouldn’t want to live in a country where nobody wanted to get in. Without a steady flow of incoming workers, businesses—particularly in specific sectors such as agriculture, meatpacking, and construction—would strain to find workers. Some companies would shutter, and others would provide clunkier service while increasing costs. Small-to-mid-size cities would lose population and revenue, forcing cuts in schools, police, and so on.

However, too much immigration in a short period causes acute disruptions. States and cities struggle to find sufficient lodging. Schools can’t handle sudden increases in students who need to learn English. As with just-right inflation, Goldilocks immigration policy engineers an amount that’s just right—relatively slow, steady, reliable, and predictable."

I've been banging this drum for literally decades.

"So instead we get this idiotic argument that all we need to do is fence these little heatherns out and everything will be Good. God will once again be White and in His Heaven, the food will magically get harvested, processed, cooked and served by Real (i.e. white) Americans who will suddenly, magically, want to work for the pittance we want to pay for these jobs to prevent our food, clothing and service costs from reflecting what it would cost to pay humans actually living wages to do these things.

As Hadrian himself might have said: Nam tua res agitur, paries cum proximus ardet.

It is your business when your neighbor's house is on fire."

Fuck but these people are so goddamn stupid it's astounding they remember to breathe. The problem is vast and involves dozens of polities and millions of people. Using "deport the brutes" to solve the problem is like trying to fix a pocketwatch with a hammer.

But watch these idiots do it.

Arming up for the new civil war

Paul Campos has it exactly right:

"Donald Trump won the election, and that reality has to be acknowledged and lived with, because at least for the moment the alternative is worse. But the last thing Democratic elites ought to be doing at the moment is signaling any willingness to cooperate with his completely explicit goal of trying to destroy the democratic process that just put him back in power. When dealing with fascism, the difference between cooperation and collaboration is non-existent, and statements like this obscure that critical absence of a distinction.

The options for defenders of liberal democracy are to resist, flee, or surrender. Bipartisan cooperation isn’t on the menu with Trump and Trumpism, and anybody who claims otherwise is either a fool, or thinks that they can cut a deal with Donald Trump while somehow still keeping their own hands clean at a time like this"

There is little enough I - an old man alone in a shitty Northeast Portland apartment, struggling with late-life health issues, post-divorce loneliness, and the blues - can do to "resist".

But what I can do, I will. Starting here.

I will be "the enemy within" of all things Trumpian, MAGAt, Republican, fascist (but I repeat myself) and any and all who "cut a deal" with them.

I will use my words. If need be, I will use my body.

I cannot see how it ends well. They control all the levers of power and a monopoly on force.

Most partisans are killed.

 

But I can't keep my own hands clean. Not and live with myself.

"We" also know who "We" aren't "The People"

Yes, it's a shithole.

But I have friends I stay in touch with on what I usually refer to as "The Goddamn Facebook" and I'm too lazy to use old-school snail mail.

One of them - a former GI who worked for me - posted this picture yesterday.

I lit up.

"Seriously? I'm supposed to be all cool and polite about how we're "one nation" when millions of people voted to come after my Social Security and Medicare, come for my gay and lesbian friends, come after my daughter and her OB/GYN if her pregnancy goes wrong, come after me - since I despise Tubby I'm "the enemy within" - and my liberal pals, come for my investments (fucking "Tariff Man? Fuck right off with that Gilded Age horseshit!) and probably my Army retirement, too? Because we're "We The People"? As the old joke goes, what you mean "we", kimosabe?"

Once I'd cooled off, though, that got me thinking. 

Who, by our new Leader's own words, a no longer going to be part of "We The People"?

Well, me, the enemy within, that's for sure, and my dirty hippie liberal commie pals.
Anyone not straight.
Anyone Muslim, and probably anyone not the "right kind of Christian", if they're troublesome enough.
Anyone poor, especially anyone who needs "entitlements" like Social Security and Medicare to get by (that's me, too, BTW...).
Anyone darkish-looking; Tubby wanted to shoot at the BLM marchers, so Black Lives Don't Fucking Matter anymore, if they ever did.
Anyone who criticizes The Leader or any of his goons. Hi there, Bezos? You think sucking up is gonna save you if your paper reports the gross corruption we're gonna see from Tubby again? Hahahahahah..!
Anyone who runs crosswise with the no-longer-standing-back Proud Boys.
Anyone with a pre-existing medical problem.
Anyone whose pregnancy goes dangerously wrong.
Anyone who tries to save the pregnant woman and in the process has to take a risk that it will kill the kid inside.
Anyone protesting anything Tubby does; the BLM thing again, he wanted to shoot "rioters" and you know fucking well that the slightest violent act will be enough to make any street protest a "riot".
Anyone else Tubby hates and, as I've probably mentioned, he's a real good hater.
Anyone...

Should I stop? I can go on. There's LOTS more people the MAGAts hate.

That doesn't even take in the people outside this country who need its help; Taiwanese and South Koreans and Ukrainians. 

Anyone on Tubby's pal Vlad's hit list. 

I'm sure I can think up more if you want.

Oh, and while I'm here...

I know this is like bitching about the boring TV programming in the middle of a typhoon, but...

81 million of you turned out to vote against Tubby in 2020.

Only 67 million - so far - bothered to vote against him yesterday, when it was obvious that he's crazier and more vicious than a shithouse rat than he was four years ago.

 

Where the fuck did 14 million of y'all go? Disneyland?

 

Tubby got 2 million FEWER votes than he got in 2020. If y'all had showed up...

Well..?

Well, at least we know who "We the People" are...

In a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity the American public has chosen to elect a gibbering idiot who pines for the Gilded Age and dreams of Hitlerian policies towards everyone he hates - and he's a good hater - and his clutch of little Nazis who will take an axe to the 20th Century to ensure that no drag queen ever reads "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" to second graders again.

To the extent they can, the GOP will root out workplace and environmental regulations and undo the already too-threadbare social "safety net". They will increase the already too-high economic inequality to ensure we become ever more an oligarchy.

Their open lunatic anti-vaxxer, anti-"Obamacare" crowd will undo public health and make us sicker and weaker.

In 1933 the German public had endured war and starvation, hyperinflation, militias fighting in the street, the punitive effects of Versailles...and STILL did not vote in the Nazis.

What's our excuse? That the cutie in the corner booth might be a transwoman in a cocktail frock?

That the roofers next door might be here illegally?

At this point all I can do is echo this comment from the election thread over at Lawyers, Guns & Money:

"The bottom line is that there are more fucking assholes in America than anyone wants to acknowledge.

More immature, misogynist, racist, greedy, myopic fucking assholes than anyone is comfortable admitting to; more really rotten, selfish human beings who choose hate over love, exclusion over inclusion and "fuck you, I got mine" over any sense of humanity.

It's time to face the facts. The fucking rot is wider and deeper than any of us want to admit, and it's growing.

It all makes me want to puke, and the worst of it is that I honestly don't know how to combat it all. All I DO know is that we must all keep fighting, because to capitulate is to descend into madness."

The madness is upon us.

We're in a Project 2025 World now.

Updated 11/6 p.m.: I know this is like bitching about the boring TV programming in the middle of a typhoon, but...
81 million of you turned out to vote against Tubby in 2020. 
Only 67 million bothered to vote against him yesterday, when it was obvious that he's crazier and more vicious than a shithouse rat than he was four years ago.
Where the fuck did 14 million of y'all go? Disneyland?

 Tubby got 2 million FEWER votes than he got in 2020. If everyone who voted for Biden turned out yesterday...

Well..?

Weave Eve

On top of everything else - the threat to my income (Army pension, Social Security), my healthcare (Medicare, Tricare), my investment portfolio - that that orange lunatic proposes to take a hammer to, the idea that tomorrow millions of my supposed fellow-Americans want to force me to listen to the unhinged sonofabitch's goddamn addled "weave" for FOUR FUCKING YEARS makes me furious that you never seem to have a rocket-propelled grenade when you REALLY need one.

Snapshot from a vacation

My kid sister came out to visit last week.

We did Portland then drove out to the coast, so we had a long car ride just to talk. During a conversation about politics sis mentioned unnamed “friends” who were Republicans but were “nice people”; not overtly racist, sexist, etc. She lives in a piece of rural New York state, so I find that entirely believable that she knows these kind of people.

“They’re Nazis.” I replied. “Nazis are never “nice people”; they’re Nazis. We fought a whole war and incinerated whole cities full of them.”

“But…these aren’t bad people.” she insisted.

“Yes. They are. Just like there were sweet old grannies and kind men and cute kiddies in Dresden, they’re Nazis. You can’t excuse them because they’re “nice”. They have to be fought, and, if need be, killed.”

She was silent. But couldn’t agree. Just didn’t want to face that.

And that’s why we’re here.

“And when their Orange Fuhrer wins, and he sends his soldiers out here to Portland, and they shoot me down in the street because I’ll fight rather than surrender to Nazis, your “nice” Republicans will be happy about that, now, won’t they?”

And she had nothing to say.

Update 10/28: Bret Devereaux says the same things better and more completely.

"And while right now you may have many reasons and many concerns, if you sign your name to this fascist and a fascist government takes power as a result…your many reasons will no longer matter. No one really cares what Franz von Papen or Victor Emmanuel III or NSDAP or Blocco Nazionale voters were concerned about or their pet issues. It no longer mattered. Once a fascist government took power…they were fascists.

And that was all that ever mattered."

As Tubby himself said; this may be the last time you get to vote.

Sporting my canvas

Quick personal update as I scrounge for source materials on 1914 reconnaissance.

The divorce proceedings move on, with the "settlement" (the draft of the final decree) being in process. Nothing dramatic, just the slow dissolution of twenty-two years. Sad. I already miss my wife, and to a great extent, my kids. Even the cat.

And, to a surprisingly great extent, my old house. Where, in one of those "what the fuck..?" things, I ended up back working, taking down the old fence we built decades ago. Here's what the front of the house looked like in April 2003, several years after we moved in:

That's the left front of the house looking northwest. The former owner had planted tulips all along the top of the retaining wall that the cats are inspecting. Here's the opposite corner:

Some time in the next couple of years we built a picket fence along the wall, both to keep The Boy and Quinn the dog from catapulting off the edge. Here's the same corner as in the second photo above in March 2007:

We're already working to change up the suburban dream; the bulbs are still there, but we've planted a couple of natives. Pacific wax myrtle in the corner and the vinca at the base of the dogwood is already beginning to crowd out the non-native stuff. 

The fence outlasted Quinn and the Boy's random running days, but not time and the Northwest weather. It was a good fence. But it was time for it to go.

So...

Wednesday while Mojo was at work and the grown children doing...something, I drove around with wrecking bar and power drill and sawsall.

The panels came off and took a one-way trip to the Metro dump...

The Girl asked me to save the posts; she says she wants to run espalier wires or a trellis. So I took only the two interior posts, and replaced the rotting bannister on the lower steps, then painted everything with that thick "Kilz" anti-mildew paint.

 Panels off, pre-paint:

And post-paint:

Drachma, the idiot, insisted on sleeping in the work area. Of course, he got painted (a bit) too...

Thursday afternoon it was all done, painted and pretty:

And then I took my soon-to-be-ex-wife out for a beer.

It's...very weird. I really LIKE her. A lot. More and more I'm missing Mojo the friend, the good companion, the funny one, the salty, smart, wisecracking long time sharer of confidences, hopes, fears, and dreams.

Lovers? Those come and go.

But friends? Real good, solid, dependable, heartfelt friends like her?

Goddamn it, they're beyond price.

Well.

Last weekend I had my first political ground-game work; canvassing in the spendy Southwest Lake Oswego district. Hours of pounding pavement and ringing doorbells. Nice houses, polite people.

But.

My first encounter with The Portland Voter In The Wild was...not reassuring.

Lots of "well, I'm not really sure..." and "I'm pretty much an independent..." as if this November wasn't a black-and-white choice between a bog-standard corporaDem and a raving headcase of a lunatic egotistical madman and his pack of loony little fascist running dogs intent on a New Gilded Age.

What the fuck, over?

I'm back at it this coming weekend, too. Plus writing postcards (?) to hesitant voters.

Which is nice. But I'm getting to the point where I want to be throwing fucking bombs, not writing fucking postcards. I can barely open the news without losing my composure. It's not enough to "beat" these goddamn people. The GOP needs to be destroyed, root and branch, burnt hull and sticks, plowed under and the ground sown with fucking salt.

Oh.

And as a reminder that I'm Old, between all the canvas walking and being a good lad and riding the stationary bike once I got back in my legs thanked me by spasming and cramping so badly I was up half Saturday night and slept through kendo practice Sunday morning.

Ugh.

The only thing worse than aging is the alternative.