All the Troubles in the World

 Ugh. Sooooo late.

A section of the historic carousel in the little Willamette Valley town of Albany

Sorry. Sorry; I know, I promised something right after my latest "WTF is wrong with these people?!?" rant back in June. Had some ideas for that post, too, and then...

Well, life got in the way.

Since then things have changed enough that the central idea of the original post has been blown apart and shattered by the month-and-change of utterly nutty nonsense that passes for U.S. "politics" and "foreign policy" (if such terms can be used to describe the idiocy, stupidity, and the random free-association that dominate both of them), that being what you get when your national government is dominated by an addled moron and his remoras looking for loot, power, plus whatever loathsome ideas are leaking from their heads.

But let me try to get back to where I was originally starting from and see if I can rebuild something out of what I've got now.

Crystal Springs Garden in Southeast Portland

Okay. So. 

The last time I sat down to type I wrapped up that post with... 

"Looking at this Sunday evening's trashfire at the supposed People's House, it's hard not to believe that the white trash is winning. And difficult to imagine how the rest of us can fight our way out of the binding they're working constantly to impose on all of us they hate and despise.

(Next: Okay, well...how's it going out in the People's Republic of Portland, then..?)"

At the time I had a specific Portland thing in mind; this.

"It is in the public interest to avoid supporting animal cruelty, unsustainable environmental practices, and zoonotic disease risks by removing force-fed products from the marketplace. It is also in the public interest to codify values related to the humane treatment of animals, public health, and environmental stewardship. Therefore, the Council finds it necessary to enact this regulation in the City of Portland in order to achieve these goals."

This is the concluding paragraph of Portland City Ordinance 192190, enacted into code on June 4, 2026.

What it does is ban the sale of foie gras.

 

Tom McCall Natural Area, Mosier, Oregon

Okay then.

I honestly have no dog (or goose, or duck) in this fight. I don't have the taste for, or the grocery budget for, the bloated internal organs of domestic fowl. But I also don't think that all the other aspects of commercial poultry production, from the chicken farm through the poultry processing plant, is anything but an enterprise that needs to be punitively overseen and regulated.

Commercial aviculture, like a lot of other commercial food production, is about making foods relatively cheap and affordable. A lot of the things that everyone involved has to do to make that happen, from the farmers/ranchers through the transporters to the meat-packing plants to the groceries, ranges from quick and dirty to downright revolting. There's a reason that parents don't encourage their kids to dream of working in a North Carolina chicken plant. Gross.

But...cheap and available food? Ask any peasant or smallholder or urban laborer in a pre-industrial or early industrial society how they'd respond to knowing that their lives weren't liable to be upended at any given moment by a killing frost or an avian flu or just a series of poor decisions by their lords and masters. Wars. Famines. Shortages that raised the bare-minimum cost of even the most basic foods like bread beyond the means of the common folk - which in most societies in most of human history meant something like 96% of everyone in that society - and meant that you starved, or rebelled (and were killed anyway, after you starved for a bit...).

So I kinda get both viewpoints.

Making intentionally-diseased bird livers by tube-feeding ducks like suffragettes in Holloway Prison?

Ew.

But if you like and want to buy and eat that stuff?

Whatev'. I don't see the point in making law about it, and here's why it did make me swear and take the piss.

Portland City Council has a whole lot of shit it needs to deal with.

We're stony broke, for one thing. Just like always. If you believe what out local pols tell us about it.

Bills don't stop coming in - roads, schools, fuckin' cops (remind me, Siri, what completes the following statement: "Portland Police Bureau is fucking _________"), firefighters, public buildings - while everybody pisses and moans and, most importantly, votes against raising any sort of tax revenue. 

The constant message coming out of City Hall (and the County offices, and fucking Salem, for that matter...) is "OMFG we just have to cut (insert public good here; parks, pools, roads, daycare, mental and physical health service) because we don't have enough money!" 

It's the same we hear from here all the way to D.C.; fuck your medical care, Gramma, don't you see that Elon Musk (fill in the plutocrat name here) needs another trillion bucks?!?! 

So it kinda chapped my ass that, in the middle of this usual annual budget-crisis-oh-woe-is-us-athon that City Council had five minutes to waste (and money to spend, mind you; someone is gonna have to deal with renegade duck liver pate' smugglers and underground foie gras dealers. I'd love to be a fly on the wall as the Central Precinct command group assigns coppers to the undercover Foie Gras Squad) fucking around with poultry guts.

Adorable child meets adorable woman with fanciful ornament, Cathedral Park Jazz Festival

 
Okay, but.

That was before this bullshit blew up all over the front page:

"The (Portland Trailblazer’s) majority owner, Tom Dundon, is trying to iron out a deal with the city for a major, state-of-the-art renovation of the Moda Center that could cost (the public) more than $600 million."

Now this joker Dundon?

He's a reeeeeal piece of work.

A perfect symbol of the Trump Era, a human-shaped cockroach who made his pile off shitty payday-loan-style predatory loan-sharking and now looks for stolen glory off owning sportsball teams. In this case, Portland and Oregon's only "big" major league sport, NBA basketball.

The scumbag has serious fuck-you money - serious as in this $600M is kind of a rounding error of his tax accountants -  and so far his whole "negotiating" approach to this whole I-need-you-proles-to-gimme-money-for-my-basketball-hobby-farm with the public has been pretty much just "fuck you".

Here I have to confess: I'm totally not a basketball fan.

Despite having spent a chunk of my young-adulthood around Philadelphia in the Seventies and early Eighties glory years of the Julius Erving 76ers...not a damn thing. Not so much as a trickle of hooping excitement trickled into me.  

I had to go to my friend Will, Portland native, massive Blazer fan (as in "still remembers vividly every moment of the 1977 NBA Finals and Championship") and stand-up civic and social justice soldier. I figured if anyone would be in the "let's-do-what-we-need-to-keep-the-team" house it'd be Will.

Nope.

It didn't take ten seconds for my friend to express his down-to-the-ground conviction that our new basketball billionaire can fuck right off with his "pay me you scum" shit.

Which, yeah. I totally get. It took me less time that that. Seriously, Oregon and Multnomah County and Portland pols. You're gonna tell me we're broke, we can't afford to find the jack to do so much as the "something" about the horde of homeless gomers you keep freaking out about 24/7, but somehow we can find enough spare change in the sofa cushions to pay this plutocratic fuckstick to keep keeping his basketball toy here?

My ass. 

And, still...here we are. The public, the City Council, the County Commissioners, even the State legislature and the governor, they're all still dicking around with this damn thing, trying to find a way to ease some simoleons out of the public vault instead of telling the Dundon Organization to either pay for the damn arena themselves or shut up and fuck right off.

Random barn along Highway 99W, somewhere in Polk County

 
You want more? Ohfuckyes there's more.

From the statewide ballot in November there was this:

"The People of Oregon therefore propose the People for the Elimination of Animal Cruelty Exemptions (PEACE) Act to amend Chapter 167 of the Oregon Revised Statutes—which currently provides unnecessary exemptions to laws governing animal abuse, animal neglect, and animal sexual assault—in order to reduce the suffering of animals and improve their quality of life."

That's right; the idea was to allow the Good People of Oregon to vote to outlaw hunting, fishing, livestock raising, chicken ranching, pretty much all meat and poultry production, from your "pets or meat" rabbits in the backyard to the King Ranch.

Driftwood patterns, Otter Crest, Oregon

I have no words for how fucking pointlessly stupid that is beyond "Wow, that's amazingly fucking pointlessly stupid." It's like making hamburgers illegal. Or vodka. Or shoes. Even if it was politically do-able, it's economically and socially impossible. 

And, just here in Portland, was this:

"The ballot proposal aims to use 25% of the Portland Clean Energy Fund’s annual revenue to hire 400 officers. That would divert roughly $50 million from climate programs to hire more officers and provide training."

Riiight. Siri, what was that line about the fucking useless Police Bureau again..?

And this, too:

"Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process where residents of a municipality deliberate and directly decide how to spend a portion of a public budget."

(I got to talk to an actual person who was collecting signatures for this one.

(Oh, right. You might not have these "direct democracy"/ballot measure things where you live. The basic deal is that there has to be a "petitioner", an organization, or individual, who draws up one of these proposed pieces of rule- or legislation-changes or additions.

The language has to be approved by whatever the political authority of the polity you want the thing to apply to - the "PEACE" thing was statewide, so the Oregon Secretary of State's office, the other two were City of Portland, so some suit at City Hall - and then you have to get enough valid citizen signatures to get the wording on the ballot. I ran into one of the people they hired - and these folks are almost always paid temps - and we had a long talk about it.

And I kinda-sorta didn't hate it. But. I had and have real questions and problems with the way the proponents and my signature guy hand-wave away the whole issue of "how to these "PB proposals" actually work in practice?" How do you get the public involved? How does the whole "refine ideas into feasible projects or programs" process work?

My concern is that, watching the U.S. public loll about in the firehose of idiot shit issuing from the government, the government's ass-kissers and fluffers, and the "news media" stenography of the two, without so much as a skeptically raised eyebrow, the chances of this process becoming a nutzoid Skinnerbox of foie-gras-sale and dairy-cow-insemination criminalization seem insanely likely.)

"Corgi Beach Takeover", Seaside, Oregon

 
Well.

What's the sitch on all this political galaxy-brain nonsense?

Two of these proposals  - the PEACE no-chicken-schwarma thing for the state ballot, and the cop-fluffing "Safer Portland" one for the City - died stillborn for lack of valid signatures, and I'm not sure how.

Supposedly both petitions had more than the required minimum when they were turned in to the various elections people, but what I'm reading is that the State and City's name-checks (presumably to ensure that the signatures belonged to living people who are actual citizens of Oregon and/or Portland) tossed so many that the both were 86ed.

(Oh, and the cop-fluffers were bashed repeatedly for their paid harvesters just blatantly lying their asses off about how the funding gimmick actually worked. Which would certainly fit with Portland Police Bureau's methods.)

The PB/community funding one made it, I think. We'll see if it shows up in November.

The foie gras ban is in effect, so no fatty goose liver will henceforth soil our Portland charcuterie anymore. 

St. Johns City Hall (1907), North Portland, Oregon

 
The basketball arena tax-money-giveaway scheme?

Oh, Christ, no; nothing definite and all parties are still dicking around about it. The usual "business community leaders" are still trying to stuff dollars in Dundon's pockets, but every dickish move the team owner makes (and he's made a lot) clarifies the suspicion that, yes, he's just an ginormous dick who can't be trusted. Neil deMause over at Field of Schemes has the deets if you care enough. 

This has all been entirely too verbose, but I hope you get the gist. We really are living through the shittiest timeline. 

We've placed far too much power and influence in the keeping of far too many people who are unscrupulous, or foolish, or ignorant, or greedy, or shortsighted, or simplistic, or some combination of all the above, and we've forgotten that one of the hardest parts of citizenship is that you can't just ignore what those fucking people are up to. Citizenship requires the citizens to stay alert, stay informed, stay involved, and, if it comes down to it, stay - or become - fiercely protective of their rights and duties.

Sometimes...that means a violent - emotionally, politically, and, yes, physically, if it comes to that - collision with the "authorities" that you've elected.

The alternative?

They are your kings, and you are their subjects.

Or their slaves.

Portland Japanese Garden, winter, 2026

(This one was so depressing I didn't have the heart to illustrate it with political imagery. So these are photos from my expeditions out and about my hometown. I hope you like them. At least more than the tales of wretched scum and villainy they illuminate.) 

Decoration Day 2026

 

As is my wont this day, I left North Portland early to visit Willamette National Cemetery and spend some time with my Army brothers.

It was...well, you know what it was, because I do this every year, and if you're one of the few people still reading this (and, yes, that "few" is my own fault for being a Bad Blogger and not posting more content. I get it.) you've read these Memorial Day posts and know where I go and what I do.

The big burying ground was its usual serene and manicured self. The visitors were sparse, as always in the early morning, although a bit more numerous in the newer, outer areas, where more of the dead from what I think of as "my generation" of wars are buried.

Still vastly out-buried by the crowd from the mid-Twentieth-Century wars, mind. As the generation born in the 1920s and 30's goes down to the grave in hastening numbers the space for my people, the younger troops from Iraq and Afghanistan (and the other farcical imperial adventures like my own Caribbean vacation of 1983 or Panama in 1989), is grossly over-filled with our parents or grandparents.

So much so that I was almost shocked to find someone who was actually killed in Iraq, a Marine staff sergeant whose luck finally ran out on his third tour in June of 2007. 

I took the time to look him up; when he bought the farm he was working as a bomb-disposal guy, presumably hunting for IEDs. His obit said he'd joined as a 17-year-old kid who had wanted to be a rodeo bull rider and Marine, had volunteered for the 2336 MOS after a bunch of embassy guard tours, and had ended up in Anbar Province where some anonymous muj had built for him a bull he couldn't ride.

As always, I poured out a beer to him and all my brothers; not gone, just marching far away, and explaining that I'd be there soon; sooner than I'd hoped, anyway. 

And, as always, I apologized, for not being a better citizen and keeping them from wasting years or their lives in pointless wars in distant places because I'd let the lies and foolishness and stupidity and evil of my "leaders" go unpunished. 

I mourned for them, and for myself, that the ideals and illusions they and I had been raised on - of our country and our people - had turned out to be nonsense, a tissue of credulous fables spun around promises We the People had never fought and worked hard enough to redeem.

 
And then I left. 

Down the green and shining hill, up onto the freeway that took me back through the busy outlands of southeast then northeast Portland to the patch of grown-over waste ground that is now the Whittaker Pond greenspace, where I took up my binoculars and spent a quiet hour looking and listening.

To the sounds of wind and water. To the hushed noises of business and traffic. To the quiet life of the city around me, doing it's daily business through wars and rumors of wars.

And then I went home.

Don't get me wrong.

I'm still incandescent with rage at the wreckage the parcel of greedy fools led by a bloated moron has done to my nation. I'm still fulminating because of the betrayal of people like me, soldiers and sailors and airmen and marines - and all those we have been and will be sent to kill and maim - who have been and will be carelessly tossed in harm's way for a bump of the Dow or some AI-slop social media shit.

But I'm still here. 

Not dead yet.

And as I promised my brothers; if I can summon the sheer gall and anger to be there to piss on all their graves, every one of the sonsofbitches?

I will.

Until then?

Here's to us.
Who's like us?
Damn few,
And they're all dead.

------- 

As always on this day; this.

Chocolate soldiers

You've probably figured out that I hold the current Administration in low esteem.

That said, the "problem" with the United States of America, as currently constituted, is that means that my opinion, and my ability to take any sort of effective action based on that opinion, means exactly jack and shit and, as the saying goes, Jack has left town.

So I'm effectively powerless as an individual.

I suppose I could, if I chose, become a sort of dangerous nuisance. 

Figure out a way to ambush the local ICE thugs. A successful vehicular ambush, especially the first vehicular ambush of a guerrilla campaign, isn't that hard to pull off, provided you can assemble the materials on the downlow and the targets are arrogant and careless.

It's not getting caught putting together the IED, or, if that goes well and the ambush happens, repeating that initial success now that the targets are alerted and proactive that's the hard part. Without an organization larger than myself alone, without a network of intelligence assets, solid effective security, a collection of safe places to hide or lay low, guerrilla allies...there's a reason that most wannabe urban guerrillas have very brief careers.

That game's not really worth the candle. I want to beat these motherfuckers, not get killed or rot in prison just taking down only a handful of their Einsatzgruppen grunts.

No. To defeat these sonsofbitches takes power. And in a republic, notional as our "republic" may now be, power means numbers.

So I went to the meeting of the local "anti-MAGA" organization last weekend.

I'm not going into detail. For one thing, OPSEC. For another, well...let me describe the meeting.

The venue, a run-down sort of backstreet sort of ballroom hung with the faded decorations of a dozen low-budget quinceaneras, was full of Portland lefties. Mostly middle-aged or elderly. Somewhere between late-hippie-chic through solid working class cits to goths and fetish kids. Overwhelmingly white (Portland, y'think?). Lots of teachers or teachery-looking people, and a scattering of pretty obvious union reps.

One of the "organizers", a fairly bougie-looking young-middle-aged white woman, introduced the group by name and a generic mission-statement, and then handed things over to a youngish artsy-looking white woman and that's where, in my unhumble opinion, things started going completely off the fucking rails.

Because she led the group through the music and lyrics, and then the bulk of the group spent the next eight or ten minutes singing a song.

And we're not talking stirring battle hymn. No International here. No Marseillaise. Not even one of the rousing old union battle songs like Bread and Roses.

There was something about love. And being worth fighting for. Not giving up. It was all very affirmative, and uplifting, with not so much as a whisper about hordes of prisoners of starvation, slaves, traitors, or conjured kings.

And that set the tone for the whole thing.

There was a very earnest, collective-wisdom sort of DIYism to the whole magilla, the idea that if people just gathered in little groups they would somehow come up with ideas of how to smash a fascist state.

To me it reeked of how I perceived Occupy back in 2011.  

As I wrote in that post, the Sixties Left has a lot to answer for by the way it convinced many of us on the modern left that simply singing and marching and shouting and sitting-in would beat the massed power of capital, mass media, and all the might of the police-military-industrial-governmental complex.

Compare that to the progressive organizations that succeeded in their resistance. like the SCLC and NAACP and the Civil Rights era groups, the AFL, CIO, UMWA, and the other labor union organizations of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. The Indian National Congress. Solidarnosc. The African National Congress.

All these had 1) an actual strategy that involved an entire range of acts, from pure theater to violent protest, and some notion of how and where these would be applied, and 2) an actual structured leadership - often fractious, even infighting - but leaders and a hierarchy below them that were there actively planning the attacks on their opponents down to the detsils of who, when, where, and with what. 

The New Left's intellectual successor Occupy Wall Street and these lovely people at the quinceanera place all seem to suffer from the goofy fuzzy-logic cloud-leadership that is to my mind the very worst hangover of the Sixties protests. 

People like John L. Lewis and Gandhi and Nehru and MLK were in many ways unlikeable, manipulative, cunning sons-of-bitches. The Left since their time seems to have absorbed the wrong lesson, which is that to get to a beneficent end you need to be a beneficent person, and that to end organized repression you have to be unorganized.

Two years later I quoted Robert Reich on the failure of Occupy:

"But Occupy eschewed political organization, discipline, and strategy. It wanted to remain outside politics, and outside any hierarchical structure that might begin to replicate the hierarchies of American society it was opposing.

So when mayors, other public officials, and university administrators cleared the Occupy encampments by force — encampments that had become the symbol of the movement — nothing seemed to remain behind. Some Occupiers made plans for further actions, but a movement without structure, discipline, and strategy proved incapable of sustaining itself."

Yep. 

The ANC didn't beat apartheid in South Africa because Nelson Mandela was a secular saint or because the cause was just and the arc of history bends towards justice.

No, it won because it was organized. It was ruthless when it needed to be. It won because it worked the press and international organizations and got funding and took appalling losses in lives and careers and health and hopes. And, yes, because Mandela was a secular saint.

But. 

Having UmKhonto weSizwe skulking about in Angola and Rhodesia didn't fucking hurt, either. 

At the end of this thing the original organizer asked the group to say how the meeting had made them feel (in the opening presentation there had been some discussion about "compassion fatigue" and how stressful it was dealing with ICE and Trumpenscum) and got responses like "empowered" and "hopeful" and "energized".

That's when I realized that this had been more of group-therapy session than planning resistance to fascists, more about "self-actualization" and feelings than setting up cells to surveil the fash and resist the cops and soldiers.

Well. Fuck. 

Look, I'm chuffed that the blow-up frogs and dancers and protestors have been fighting fucking ICE here and have to some extent forced the bastards to go low profile. I'm glad that the decent people of Portland want to beat the MAGAt scum, want to damn Trump and all his works.

But...gang, look. ICE is still here. Still doing their evil shit. We haven't "stopped" them.

These damn people don't give a shit whether you feel empowered. They respect nothing but force and fear. If you can't face up to that beating them will require gaining the power to make them fear you, well...if they won't respect law and regulation - and they don't - and if they won't respect your votes - and they won't - what will you do then?

Songs are fine. But, as the song said, you can praise the Lord so long as you pass the ammunition. Real resistance to evil means faith and works. Empowerment is fine, so long as it also includes a healthy dose of steel.

What this meeting thing was?

Was not that. 

As another observer of famous clusterfucks might have said, "C'est ravissant, mais ce n'est pas la guerre: c'est de la folie." - It's cute, but it's not war: it's foolishness.

 Sounded better in the original French, too.

Ashokan Farewell

 

My Dearest Martha.

I write from our fall-back position in the former Rose Garden in Albina Park. We had our last hot meal - a warmed-up plate of Pine State cafe' biscuits-and-gravy and some day-old Starbucks dark roast drip coffee - two days ago. Word is that an elite Antifa bicycle-troop strike force used their stealthy nonmotorized stealthiness to ambush our resupply convoy as it left the rest area outside Wilsonville and was trapped in the usual traffic jam at the Boone Bridge.

 

I can't describe the awfull Hellscape that is war-ravaged Portland. There are actual hippies here! Hippies! Long hair! Bellbottoms! Pachouli! Feminists...my Lord, the unshaved armpits that are are terrifying in their contempt for patriarchical standards!

 

We will not abandon the good people of this beleaguered city without doing our utmost to Make Portland Great Again!

 

Yours in Trump:

Caleb

 

It's time for me to write another of those "Acting 1SG Lawes" things again, innit?

Well....fuck.

 

Last vacation snaps

 On our last day we visited "Pittock Mansion", the West Hills digs of a former Portland newspaper baron:

I'll say this for the old plutocrat; he had style.

Showing off wealth in an almost Trumpian way except with less gold leaf:

Mind you, here's where I'd have come in back in the day; the servant's entrance:

Last random snaps, kiddo:

Patinopectin (middle Miocene) Astoria Formation, Beverly Beach

Stone lion, Japanese Garden:

You at the Zen Garden:

Izakaya Kinchito:

The Inn from Otter Crest:

Sunset:

Moonrise:

Lighthouse Keeper:

Thanks for coming, sis. It was fun.

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.

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.

...but even tougher for the dead guy, eh?

Headline in today's online Oregonian:

The context here is, as it always seems to be, supplied by the Mercury newsweekly:

"(Note: When the cops were finally forced to accept body cameras, which departments across the country have been using for years, PPB spokesperson Lt. Nathan Sheppard had this to say: “This is huge and it’s long overdue.” That's funny... according to every report available, the PPB and union has been fighting against the idea of body cams since 2014, when the Department of Justice first ordered them to start using cams.)"

Couple of things here.

First, this is BTDT with cops. Portland cops, yes, but "cops", generally. Copaganda portrays these jokers as the "thin blue line" but, again, it's you and me who are the first and second and every other "line" against criminal anarchy. If we're not generally decent people, nothing but a full-on occupying army of coppers could hold that line.

The degree to which coppers shoot people is ridiculous given the not-Somalia-like state of American society. The cops are being trained to think and act like soldiers, and that's bad for them and everyone else.

That said...

The other part of this is that, as we've also discussed to death here, there's too many goddamn guns out there and too many dipsticks who have no business walking around strapped walking around with them.

So the eagerness of the coppers to bust a cap in people's ass can't really be separated from the likelihood that the sort of people they are forced to interact with are armed. That makes "shoot first" the sensible reaction to those interactions. The cops may be a problem, but the guns are the problem.

What's really frustrating about ALL of this is that there's absolutely zero probability that any of this - cops, guns - will change anytime in the foreseeable future. The political will isn't there. If Sandy Hook couldn't produce meaningful change in firearms law, well...

And the coppers?

The City of Portland has never really tried to do anything about the toxic mess that is Portland Police Bureau. As time after time we run into the reality that PPB is a sinkhole of incompetent and racist assholes that somehow never translates into actions that would make PPB more competent and less racist or asshole-y. We just throw a crap-ton of money at these jokers.

Like so much of our politics, there's simple and sensible alternatives that are utterly un-doable because of a hard knot of utterly impossible people who refuse to even consider doing them.

Merry Leafmas!

Once a year the good people at the City of Portland Bureau of Transportation (i.e. the Streets people) come around and hoover up the leaves that fall in the streets and on the "city strip", the string of land between the outside of the sidewalk and the curb.

This is called "Leaf Day" because that's what it is; a single day (which varies depending on where you live) where this process takes place.

Ours here in the "97203" was yesterday, 12/18.

Note that the idea here is that the City is removing the "City's" leaves; the ones that fall on City property but are a more general mess and potential catchbasin plug.

So of course every Portlander worth their "Keep Portland Weird" bumper sticker cheats like a motherfucker; front yard, side yard, back yard...if a rake can reach it, the leaf falling in those private properties goes into the gutter for the City to haul off. Everyone politely pretends this doesn't happen.

So, like any good holiday, the key is in the anticipation and preparation; raking, sweeping, and blowing the leaves out into the street. Waking up early (or staying up late) to move cars and trucks out of the street out front to invite the City crew in.

And then the magic begins!

First the front-end loader shows up. The basket thing piles up the leaves and bundles them down to the street corner. There another loader with a standard bucket loads them into one of the City dump trucks cab-ranked nearby.

This, as you can imagine, is not really surgical. A lot of gunk and leaf debris remains behind:

That's why the water truck comes along and sprays down the street, washing this junk into the gutter.

Finally the sweep/vacc truck hoovers up this stuff, leaving the street sparkling clean for, well, at least the rest of the day.

And the wonder of :Leafmas is done for another year.

What's kind of sad is that I realized that "Leafmas" is as much or more of a genuine holiday for me than the big conventional holiday it's always adjacent to. Christmas is kind of "meh" for me. I have not a shred of religiousity, and the current American commercially bloated "Christmas" is an embarrassing  travesty.

But Leafmas?

It's both practical and satisfying, a sort of community ritual that pushes all my civic buttons. Like the ideals of religion, it brings us together in a common cause to make our world a bit better.

So a merry and peaceful Leafmas to all who celebrate!

You WANT to die on this hill..?

 My Bride and the Girl are still in Teacher Strike Stasis, waiting to see if the two sides will settle today.

As I think I said earlier, the union has repeatedly climbed down from its initial (eminently reasonable!) list of objectives because the cheapskate state legislature made it clear that it's more important to hand out tax breaks to gajillionaires than to pay for 21st Century education for everyone.

The final obstacle to settlement is this: "class size committees".

Since the State of Oregon can't be arsed to pay for enough teachers or educational assistants to bring class sizes down to a reasonable level, the proposed "solutions" are to 1) pay teachers more for doing crowd control over those teeming hordes, and 2) refer the worst of the scrums to a committee at each school if the horde gets to be just too huge.

Per the link, this committee will "...negotiate how to resolve class sizes or student loads that exceed agreed-upon limits if the principal, the affected teacher or teachers and a representative of the union don’t agree on a solution."

The union and the district both agree to this thing. What they disagree on is how it should work.

For one, the district wants to appeal process to stay in-house. The union wants to be able to rope in a state-level mediator if they don't agree with the district superintendant's ruling,

For my money? I wouldn't trust the Supe, either. I'm stickin' with the union there.

But the other big disagreement?

Parents.

"Under the union’s proposal, the class size committees could include two parents if school administrators and the teachers union agree to add them."

The district didn't want Joey's mom and Andie's dad, but eventually gave in on the parents. But they want to restrict what the parents (and these committees) can do: "The committees would not be allowed to discuss and make recommendations about class size issues in specific classrooms but would instead be limited to collaborating on potential solutions regarding class sizes and caseloads at their school more generally."

So I get that the primary reason the teachers proposed this is to get public support. They look more parent-friendly if they're pushing for parent involvement.

But, c'mon. Seriously?

You have to deal with these people, teachers. Are you telling me with a straight face that you don't know who is most likely to end up on these committees?

The crank. The obsessive. A Mom For Liberty, a Dad for Anti-Vaxx, and every other socio-edu-political whackadoodle out there in every school intake area.

Oh, fine, okay. Maybe not every parent...but you know who you're most likely to end up with, right, teachers?

And you want that?

Here I just finished ranting about how in the international news governments and "statesmen" are running around wanting things that are stupid things and making plans that are stupid plans...and right here on my street there's...this.

I have no idea how the union and the district will resolve this mess.

But that they started here? That they want this goofy thing?

That's...not particularly encouraging.

Today in Responsible Gun Ownership

The dude in the SUV has just killed the other dude lying there on the street, and he's going to shoot the third dude, the one who's taking the photo, through both legs, shattering one of his femurs.

The story turned up in my Xhitter feed the other day as a "OMFG CRIME IN PORTLAND!!!" headline (except without the actual headline, of course,  because Elmo don't roll that way anymore...).

It linked to this story in the digital version of our "local newspaper", which you can't read because it's behind a fucking paywall - local news, my ass - but trust me; it plays all the hits; it mentions "downtown violence", "unrest", "drug use" and "homeless".

In the Xhitter comments we filled in the last of the bingo card: "Democrat city" and "gun control" (as in "how's that gun control working out for you now, libs?!?")

Y'know what it DIDN'T mention?

"Financier". (or "Banker" or "Rich Prick" - y'know, coded words for "wealthy white dude"), or

"Legally owned handgun".

 Because that kinda kills the whole Portland Is Over - Downtown Hellscape Edition vibe, dunnit?

You can't gin up the whole Scary Doper (Probably Colored) Hoboes theme if the nutter shooting is being done by some rich white normie with a legally-obtained concealed carry permit who's just a fucking hair-trigger asshole with an anger problem and a round under the fucking hammer, amiright?

So it's critical to rope in all that other stuff, so the rubes and MAGAts and the other FAUX-addicted ClackaCrackers can continue seamlessly hating on Portland, liberals, and the smelly poor.

But I might as well ask a dog to stop licking it's balls as expect the so-called "news" media to stop throwing this red meat to the numbskulls. I've been ringing this bell a loog, looooong time. It does no good at all. The 2nd Amendment has become why people like this rich fuckstick get to drive around fully loaded and kill people.

And, short of solving the sort of people who keep voting for "2nd Amendment Rights" over everything else?

It's not going to be solved, either.

Independence Day 2023

 I don't really think much about this day, even on the day itself.

For one thing, the celebration of my country's "liberation", if you will, has been marked by some form of aggressive action by my country against someone else's "liberty" - whether that "liberty" is a particularly human good or not - all my adult life.

I recall thinking back when I was desperately trying to become part of an Army unit that had been set up to ostensibly help fight other peoples' guerrilla "wars of liberation" that the unit had spent much of its existence fighting and helping other people fight against "wars of liberation".

I like a lot of things about the United States. As nation-states go, it's one of the more decent (low bar? Fuck, yeah! But, hey, think of how many don't clear it...).

But it's hard to just get too flag-wave-y when you get to know enough about how hard We the People have fought against the most noble promises in the very document we are celebrating today. 

And how much harder it is when the nativist Right is roaring and shrieking that "...all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"...unless they are gay. Or nonbinary. Or immigrants. Or Black.

And let's not even get into that fucking awful Lee Greenwood song.

I'm tired of watching the dumbfuck "conservatives" grab onto today and hug it like a rubber love doll.

It's possible to love this country without being blind to its problems.

Indeed; to me the only way to love this country is to be resolved to fix those problems to the extent they can be fixed.

So. Happy Birthday, US. 

May you always be right. 

And may I always be all dead square up in your ass if you're not.

(And Charlie Pierce says all the same things, and better, than I just did. Worth a read.)

As for me?

Well. Couple of things.

Finally got my Army retirement straightened out, so I'm getting a grand or so a month from Uncle Sugar. Trying not to blow it all on booze and hookers.

I'm also winding down my geotech work, and finding I don't miss it much other than the impetus it gave me to get up and outside every day. So trying to find other reasons for doing that. Picked back up kendo, something I did thirty years ago, and am finding that what my mind recalls my body scoffs at performing. 

Inside my head I may still be 36, but my muscles and bones are 65.

Oh, and I don't recall if I mentioned this earlier...

So there was a tax issue around my parents' retirement accounts which were passed on to my sister and I after my mother's death in 2019. The financial management company that managed the transfer reported the full amount - more than a quarter million - as taxable and submitted a 1099-R as such.

We didn't, and last August the IRS came after the full about, to the tune of penalties and interest of more then $80,000.

I then spend the next damn-near ten months going back to the feds - over and over - trying to get them to accept that, no, I didn't have a quarter-mil shells stuffed in a sack or stashed in the Caymans. It was in an "inherited IRA" just where it had gone back in 2020.

Well.

Finally in February we got a "Notice of Deficiency" telling us we needed to pay up, or file a petition in U.S. Tax Court.

We filed.

Got a docket number - and a letter from the IRS recommending we hire a tax attorney.

Figuring that if we were going to pay someone $80K it might as well be Uncle Sammy instead of some tax shyster I hunted around the legal aid outfits. No joy; we 're "too rich" (retired geologist and public school secretary? I know, right?) to get gratis legal help. Ugh.

Anyway, the tl:dr is that last Friday we got a call from the tax court attorney. K, he said, we've accepted your contention on the Carol IRA transfer. Still got a couple of little sums (2020 was a weird year in a lot of ways, and not getting (or not submitting) the 1099-Rs was one of them...) to pay down, but the damage is $2,600, not $82,000.

So. Good.

Mind you, still fucking irritating that Donny Trump cheated like a motherfucker on HIS taxes and hasn't paid so much as a nickel. But that's how that skeevy bastard rolls, and We the People let him. So.

Oh! Almost forgot this.

So my back went out this past weekend, and so I slept on the couch last night. It's not as soft as the mattress, so easier on an ouchie back.

But it's also closer to the street, and on a typical July 3rd I'd have had a mad minute all night, seeing as how shooting off pyro was how we roll here in the People's Republic. I even wrote a whole post about this ten years ago.

Last night?

Nothing.

We're in the middle of a long dry summer. The City of Portland, aware of the potential for pyromaniac inferno, issued a hard "no" to pyro this summer, warning the good people of Portland that the coppers would aggressively cite anyone caught making red glare.

So...my question is; was last night's quiet because the People of Portland sensibly realized that unless your aim was to set your garage on fire it wouldn't be a good idea to be shooting pyro all over the yard? Or was it purely fear of the heavy hand of the Law?

Given my general opinion of We the People?

My guess is that the dumb clucks forgot that it was a holiday, seeing as it's a Tuesday, and who the hell does holidays on a Tuesday?

So happy Tuesday, and hoping you and yours have a fire-free holiday.

Go Directly To Jail

 

This is what was left behind when the funny farmers came and hauled off our "Jesus wants me to show you my tits" homeless Crazy Lady last May.

Now, our Portland area "Mr. Potter Association" (People for Portland, two lies for the price of one, since these folks are not "people" in the humane sense and they're certainly not "for Portland" in any way but "make Portland more like Lake Oswego") have a new homeless-question poll out.

"Portland-area poll finds huge appetite for tougher tactics on homelessness".

Because of course it did.

Because a huge chunk of people want simple answers to complex problems, want a hammer to make everything that bugs them into a nail.

Lots of people are assholes, too, but that's a whole different thing.

But think about this.

What are "tougher tactics"?

Force.

That's the bottom line, isn't it?

"An overwhelming majority of Multnomah County voters say...people in crisis living on the streets should be required to undergo addiction or mental health treatment.Only 25% of Multnomah County voters said that treatment for people experiencing mental health or substance use disorder should be voluntary; 67% believe “we need legal tools to encourage and compel people to get help. "

How?

How do you "require" some doper to get clean, or some nutter to take their meds?

"Legal tools"? A band saw? Pliers?

"Legal tools". Just say it straight; you junkies and loonies are gonna get straight or go to fucking jail.

Because we have all the money and jail space to shove a bunch of crazy junkies for being crazy junkies, right?

Fuck me runnin'.

"Nearly three-fourths also back a proposal by Mayor Ted Wheeler to enforce a citywide daytime camping ban..."

That's the latest Wheeler gimmick, BTW; force the hobos to pack their shit every morning. And then...what? Hump their ruck all over town? Drive their RV up and down Interstate Avenue from 8am to 8pm?

The Good People for Portland are nutty enough about the hobo camps as it is. Can you imagine the reaction to wandering groups of encumbered homeless people like some sort of Mongol horde with shopping carts instead of horses? And this is the supposedly GOOD idea the Portland city government is proposing?

Nothing has changed since I wrote about this last time. Or, for that matter, since I first wrote about it two years ago. And nothing has changed the conclusion I wrote then:

"...there he is, with his tent and his trash and his stolen bikes and his encroaching on your public space with all of that and his personal problems. You drive him away and he just becomes some other Portlander's problem and the people those Portlanders drove away come to camp in your patch.

So I still don't have a good answer to the "homeless problem"; the solution will take time, money, and interest we aren't willing to invest, and without the solution we're stuck with these filthy camps in every public space."

Except people like "People for Portland" and the angry Potters they polled are more angry and more vicious and less willing to invest time, money, and interest in actually figuring out ways to get these poor bastards out of the parks and off the streets rather than fantasizing about jailing them.

Am I happy about the "homeless problem"?

Look back up at the picture. That was just one person, in one place. That's unacceptable for a dozen reasons. 

No, I'm not "happy" about the homeless situation.

But I'm at least realistic about it.

While the big megaphone in the hands of these People for Portland is just shouting their nonsense, as random and pointless and unrealistic as the ranting of the Jesus Tits lady, all over the sky above and with about as much hope of actually solving the problem.