Find Out?

Two things about Tubby finally running into the long arm of the law:

1) the Stormy payoff might possibly be the LEAST illegal thing he’s ever done, because…

2) Everyone who is familiar with the joker from his real estate days in NYC knows he’s crooked as a dog’s leg and mobbed-up. He’s just a sleazy little development hustler and always has been.

That means nothing to the GQP/his cult. They didn’t care before and they don’t care now. He’s their crook, and his cons are their cons.

No, the real question I’d ask is “will this change the REST of the country, particularly the mainstream media?”. So far they’ve treated Tubby like any other Republican, meaning when he lies they report the lie rather than simply noting “he lied again” and when he crimes they report it as just a thing rather than "he crimed again".

IF – and that’s s big if and not a given – this gives the press the chance to actually report that this crooked shitbird is a) a crooked shitbird who is b) likely to be elected president again? 

Maybe suddenly the idiot “center” will wake up and turn out against him.

I’m not betting that way.

But at least this is an opportunity.

Wait...

“Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, nicknamed MTG, isn’t afraid to share her opinions, no matter how intense and in-your-face they are. She sits down with Lesley Stahl this Sunday on 60 Minutes."

Okay, we're fucked.

Eveything Old is New Ag...wait, what?

I didn't watch the last State of the Union speech.

Nothing personal. These things are effectively worthless as actual politics, being more or less a sort of brag-session for the current Chief Executive. 

(Given his psychotic level of internal delusion Trump's were, unsurprisingly, appalling, but I had little or no interest in hearing his predecessors chest-thumping, either.)

So I missed, unfortunately, the nightclub-comic slapdown of Empty G and her public lies that her party hasn't had a hard-on for impoverishing old people since FDR got Social Security through Congress.

I mean...c'mon!

I get that the federal government is "an insurance company with an army". I get that a crap-ton of federal money goes to paying old people not to eat cat food and die in a ditch, and that irks the shit out of Republicans because if old people weren't meant not to eat cat food or die in ditches they'd have been born rich like God intended.

But you'd have to be pretty goddamn stupid not to know by now that if the GQP can, it will roll back U.S. society to 1929 or, better, 1899. The GQP has been the party of the Gilded Age as long as I've been alive. Their robber baron donors would stand for nothing less.

Which brings me to my friend Labrys, who writes "What the hell do these people want?"

And, yes, it seems genuinely weird and inexplicable that a fairly large chunk of the American public seems to be pining for...well, a bizarre congeries of generally unpleasant (for most sentient Americans) things that we've spent most of the 20th Century getting shut of because, frankly, they sucked for most people. 

Poverty in old age. Filthy air and water. Dangerous workplaces. Assholes with assault rifles.

I think one of the problems is that the answer is difficult. The answer is "Well...it depends..." because the divisions in these people are legion and they don't all want the same things. 

They're just willing to put up with the others' nonsense to get what they want.

But here's the general outline:

The Plutocrats: The beating (black and shriveled) heart of the GOP has always been the rich.

The fatcats were the rulers of both parties from the emergence of parties until the Nineteen Thirties, when FDR's actions to prevent a red or brown revolution meant nicking a tiny slice of their lucre and they more-or-less permanently moved to the Right. 

And from there to the GOP when the Democrats lost a real "right" in the form of the Dixiecrats.

Oh, sure; if they have no choice they'll buy what Democrats they can - and given the insanely expensive cost of our "republic" it's not all THAT hard to find someone notionally blue who's desperate for cash - but their natural instincts and fundamental worldview sits better with the red side of the aisle.

These malefactors of great wealth want what they've always wanted, wanted ever since they were armed predators lurking in fortifications across Europe and Asia; more money, more power, more fear (or respect, but they'll take fear), and the political influence to gain and maintain them.

Their primary concern in the United States is federal taxation and regulations.

They want the proles' grubby hands off their wallets - i.e. "low taxes", and

They want to freedom to do whatever the fuck they want to get and stay rich - i.e. no "burdensome regulations". 

Work you to death. Dump their shit in your air and water. Cheat you.

They want all that, and because of it any self-respecting 15th Century Raubritter would recognize the DeVoses and the Kochs and their ilk.

They don't give two shits about what the scum do to themselves or each other, so they could care less whether Cletus uses his AR-15 to shoot up his ex-wife and the daycare where she works, and they could care less whether some transgender gal gets murdered, and they could care less who has to hide their pregnancy to prevent the Baptist Taliban from turning them in for aborting the sprog.

Money. Power. That's it.

But...since we're still nominally a republic, their problem is that there's not enough of these bloated hyenas to win elections. 

That's why they need the others. Who are...

The Religious Nuts: of which there's 31 flavors but all of them are what my mother used to call "good haters". Right-wing God-pesterers come in Christian (both the ultramontaine Catholic and fundie Prot variety), Ultraorthodox Jewish, and possibly even some weirdo Muslim, Jain, Sikh...who the fuck can tell with these people.

Their basic problem is with the post-Griswold U.S. there are all these...other people...out there doing...other stuff...that these people don't like and they haaaaate that and those other people.

It's often sex - since there's all sorts of people with peculiar hangups about sex - or just ways of thinking that run counter to the ways these people want other people to think. 

So if you're squicky about men kissing men or girls getting naked with girls or people with genitals who don't think of themselves as that kind of person or - and since religions are strict hierarchies with God on top and everything descending from that - not acting like the God-pesterers think God (or, more specifically, THEY think God) wants those people to act then you want the power to make those fuckers behave.

So these people want the power of law to bind the people they hate - the homosexuals, the gender-fluid, the atheists - and they'll side with anyone who will give them that.

What helps is that very many of these sorts of religious nuts ignore or elide the parts of their religions that insist on squishy stuff like loving neighbors and giving away all your wealth to serve the poor and sick. So they're fine with the robber barons hoarding loot provided the robbers let the God-pesterers hate and kill some homos and women who like to fuck.

So you got fatcats + bible-bangers. Who else?

The Fascists: and by this I mean "people who want "law and order" meaning they want jackboots on the necks of "those people" and they'll vote for thems what'll give that".

This takes in a whole bunch of people.  

Ammosexuals want all the guns, and want the jackboots on the necks of the softies who are sick of mass murder. 

There's also the racists who want the jackboots on the necks of those dusky upstarts who think they should get a piece of the American pie. 

And what I still think of as the hardhats; the mostly-white guys who just reflexively hate the smelly hippies and their "peace and love" and weird clothes and sex and want the jackboots on those hippie necks.

Lots of cops fall in here, too. Plus all the standard freikorps; Threepers, Proud Boys, groypers...all the usual shitbirds.

These people, too, don't care whether the plutocrats are looting the public purse. They just want the liberty to fear-up those people they hate and strut around saying racial and sexual slurs without getting the hairy eyeball.

Notice something?

Yep. Everyone but the country club set is largely driven by stuff they hate.

That's why the richie-riches are using all this "culture war" shit to herd the others. Only the oligarchs have an actual positive goal in wanting money and power to ensure their comfort and influence (sure, it's disgusting, but at least it's moving towards something...).

These others?

They just want to be the boss of the people and things they hate. They all just want to be king shits of their own little Turd Hills.

That they're just soylent green for the oligarchs?

They don't care. 

Provided they don't have to see pictures of men kissing or know that some woman is out there having sex without remorse or that some black kid is getting food without having to beg for it, they will happily be the kapos of the American camps.

Their "freedom" is the freedom to dictate the lives of those they despise.

Like I said; any mook with a sword and a taste for mayhem could tell you about that.

So "what do they want", Labrys? 

They want to be the boss of you. 

They want you to sit down and shut up and (since you're a woman) be whatever some man wants you to be.

And if you won't?

They want you silent. 

Or dead.

These people are damn near 40% of the American public.

And I haven't the slightest fucking idea how you change that.

Some things never change

I woke up this morning worried.

Mostly because my Bride's employer is talking about layoffs. Again. And since she's not just the only regular income at this point but - even more critically - our medical benefit provider that's a little scary.

So, like hanging, the possibility of sudden poverty concentrates my mind wonderfully.

That said, I can't help shaking my head at two fucking haven't-we-done-this-before irritating national news items.

The "big" news item is the now-traditional GQP woody over using the ridiculous "debt ceiling" gimmick to screw the rest of the country out of the New Deal.

I'll spare you my usual "now pay attention" lecture on the why of the New Deal. Suffice to say that the U.S. public, monstrous fool that it is, has no idea what the gutting of Medicare and Social Security would look like because it's been almost a century, but, hint...it looked like this:

You think we have a "homeless problem" now? Yeah...just wait for the New Hoovervilles. Maybe we can call them "McCarthy Manors" to bring the conversation up to date.

The fact that anyone not some sort of lunatic Republican (but I repeat myself) has to argue against the idea that the federal budget needs to be reduced by impoverishing and sickening regular people and not by raising the top marginal rate back to where it was in the Eisenhower Administration and mothballing a couple of carrier air groups just goes to show how utterly fucked our supposed national conversation about this whole business is.

No Republican should be able to even begin to make that nitwit argument without getting pied in the face. That they don't - that the "argument" is actually listened to for more than a nanosecond - tells me that we're pretty fucked already.

So there's that.

The other, national-but-sort-of-local thing is the ridiculous posturing over the murder-by-cop of the latest poor bastard to have been found guilty and executed for the crime of Driving While Black.

Specifically...that somehow what completely exonerates the entire history and existing society of the United States is that the murder cops were all Black themselves.

Okay, now I get that about 99.8% of the American public knows about history what a goat knows about calculus, but the entire notion of one group working for another group (and killing others in theor own group) is as old as...well, Rome, for one. 

Those Black coppers are no different from some Gallic foederatus carrying a sword for the legions against his Belgae or Suebi neighbor. In return for their own protection the foreign mercenaries can and will happily ruin and kill their own; it's one of those deeply human fucked-up things that people do.

This kind of ties in to the nonsense about "critical race theory" being some sort of commie propaganda instead of explaining exactly how - in a nation where a group of people were once defined as 3/5ths of a human because of their skin color - you can end up with that group of people as a largely dispossessed and disenfranchised target of the weight of social, economic, and political punishment but still used as foederati by their masters?

I'd like to think that the people pushing that bullshit know better and are just blowing smoke.

With these knuckleheads it's hard to tell.

And - since we're on this subject - can we just stop with the whole "let's take cops who already think like an occupying army and make them into some sort of Rambo-fantasy outfit designed to occupy fucking Fallujah" thing?

Beyond the stupid idea of WANTING soldier-cops the entire notion that somehow making more and more dangerously-soldierly cops is somehow "keeping us safe"...who fucking thinks that?

The copaganda We the People suck up every day makes it difficult to recognize that, as I said three years ago, these cops AREN'T some sort of "thin blue line" between us and anarchy.

WE are the line. We're, by and large, good citizens and good people. If we weren't no number of soldier-cops could hold us back short of nuking the place from space. 

The cops?

No.

Cops by and large don't "solve" crimes - clearance rates for most city police departments, in every crime category, are embarrassingly low - and they, in the current drive-by-policing-mode of most big departments, don't "prevent" crimes, either.

They largely do what they're designed to do; keep the smelly poor away from the nice white people who pay their salaries, and defend property.

And that's fine, if that's what you want, and many, possibly most Americans either do want that or don't care enough to make a fuss about it.

But that's how our country is, by and large. 

If we don't like it, we need to do the hard work to change it. If we don't want to do that, we should at least have the honesty to tell the poor and dark people who are going to take the pounding that it sucks to be them and then let them decide whether it's worth dying on their feet rather than living on their knees.

I know.

That's pretty bleak.

But I'm feeling pretty bleak this morning, so there it is.

Learned nothing and forgot nothing

 Fourteen years ago I wrote this:

Seven years after 9/11, we're stuck in Groundhog Day and I just don't care anymore. Bin Laden has become, like the flu or like natural male enhancement, something that cynical hucksters use to bilk the rubes. For the past two years I've posted the usual solemn reflection on the innocent people who died that day.

Fuck that.

We lost the right to parade that goddam bloody shirt when the first baby died in a mistaken bomb run over Baquoba or hapless taxi driver got sodomized at Bagram Air Base. 

Now we're just another Great Power on the make, another Smedley Butler racketeer using our dead and our grieving to justify our own damn greed and fear.

Fuck that. Fuck all that. Who'd have thought that we would let nineteen yay-hoos with boxcutters and screwdrivers and a bunch of panicked politicians yank a nation so far off the road of national self-interest and sanity?

I see not the slightest reason to retract or restate any of the above.

I've stayed away from the television and, largely, the internet today simply because I would be irked by the usual hypocritical wailing about the events of the day. I get a sense that they're more muted than ever outside the usual right-wing nimrods, which is both fortunate and long overdue.

But the bottom line is that Dubya and Deadeye Dick Cheney still live in cossetted retirement and Charles Gittings died with his mission of justice unfulfilled.

Get Strapped or Get Stripped

I'm not going to go deep into the weeds on the Rittenhouse verdict. It was prima facie from the moment the trial opened. Between the trial judge's Trumpkin antics to the jury selection, the odds were tilted towards getting the little bastard off.

But when the result of this decision produces crap like this:

Let me phrase it this way. Do you believe liberals need to bring guns to their protests?

Carrying a firearm is a personal decision, and more people on both sides need better education about what it means to carry a firearm in the public sphere so that they can make those decisions for themselves. I’m not trying to get around that question. That is a big, complicated question. And my answer to that is everyone needs more training.

 ...my country has a serious goddamn gun problem. And politics problem.

Yeah, it's Slate. I get that. And I have no idea who "Lara Smith" is other than she's a gormless nitwit.

But one of the most misunderstood Bob Heinlein quotes is that damn "An armed society is a polite society" one from Beyond This Horizon. The context - that the speaker is essentially advocating a sort of eugenics through firearms "kill(ing) off the weak and the stupid" - is never mentioned any more than the "well-regulated militia" part of the Second Amendment is cited alongside the keep-and-bear-arms part.

Because an armed society isn't "polite". It's barely a society at all. When you have to back your political ideas with armed force, every debate will inevitably degenerate into a gunfight. Smith basically admits that; ""everyone needs more training"? Seriously? That's your recommendation when your political opponents come at you armed? Spartakists versus Freikorps in the streets of Portland?

The Rittenhouse verdict sends a clear message to the political opponents of the Three Percenters, Proud Boys, and Oath Keepers - you have two choices; arm yourselves or be at the mercy of being shot down whenever the armed wingnuts show up.

I know what my choice would be.

I also know that if I brought the bullet launcher to a protest that the Portland coppers would be all over me and not to pal around comparing cool rifles. 

As the Homestead strikers or the Stonewall rioters or the Freedom Riders could tell you; the police are the natural allies of the Right. If you're out there raising hell against the Authority the cops are your natural enemies, anyway, and when the Rittenhouses turn up armed and looking for trouble they will get a tongue-bath from the Blue that you, the dirty antifa BLM radical commie hippie bastard, will never receive.

Just like the murderous little bugger did in Kenosha.

Regardless of the circumstances of the individual case, the Rittenhouse verdict presents the American Left with a stark choice.

Arm yourselves, or be destroyed whenever your Proud Boy enemies choose.

And that, my friends, is not a sane way to run a nation.

Bang Bang Crazy (GFT Edition)

 

Over at Nancy Nall's place the inevitable discussion about who gets to get shot down in the streets (grocery stores, rub-and-tug-shops...) because freedum!!! 

One of the commentors made the following remark:

“…let’s give the olde white guys credit in 1787: they’re thinking about muzzleloading black powder rifles…”

To which I replied that I think it’s even simpler than that; these guys were thinking with their wallets. And, to a great extent, their “republican” ideology. It wasn't the weapons. It was the fiscals and the politics.

The thing the gunsuckers always elide is the first section of that amendment: “A well-regulated militia…” The rich guys who wrote the foundational documents 1) were appalled at the expense of a standing army (and navy, which is insane when you think of how important maritime commerce was to the infant U.S., but, Jefferson, FFS…) and 2) were deeply committed to the idea that a standing army was a “danger to liberty”. All those soldiers with no citizen cred, just waiting for the demagogue to come along and coup with them? 

No way, Citizen Jose’!

So their idea was that the Good People of the country would flock to the standards when danger threatened and form “the nation in arms” (and keeping in mind that their model were the colonial militias, which largely kept their weapons (and almost all their propellant – the black powder) in a local “magazine” where it would be issued when that alarm was sounded).

So it wasn’t even the notion of every swinging richard running around with a military-grade firearm that would have bugged them. It was the notion that that firearm was for using on their fellow citizens for random whackadoodle reasons and that wasn’t a good reason to keep those firearms locked up in the magazines.

And let’s not EVEN go into the notion that they wanted every Joe and Molly to have a bang-stick to prevent “tyranny” coming from the new U.S. government, because the moment that happens Shay’s and the whiskey rebels will need a moment to whip the fuck up on your head.

Nope. The current firearms priapism is a symptom of the prion disease that has eaten the brains of waaaaayyyyy too many Americans, including nearly all “conservatives”.

 You'd think that at this point...

 But, no. I mean, Sandy Hook! Rando homicidal looney guns down adorable kiddies. That doesn't shake you? You insist it was a fake, or "crisis actors", or whatever?

The crazy has gone too deep, and there's no digging it out now. 

(And the title of this post comes from Jim Wright's series on this whole nonsense. They're archived here and are all worth a read, as is his "Bang Bang Sanity" essay that discusses some commonsense ideas that will help put a lid on this nonsense. 

Not that We the People will.)

At ease, cats. Back to grim politics.

By now you've probably all heard about the Antifa/New Black Panther riots savaging my city, and held in check only by the mad riot control skilz of Portland Police Bureau and their support echelons from the Federal Agencies That Shall Not Be Named. As you know, we white folks are huddled in our basements, eyes red from the tear gas smoke, dreading the knock that means the BLM Revolutionary Guard has arrived to deliver swift and final Social Justice.

It's true. It's all true, and I have pictures to prove it.

See? There he is! There's 's the black-clad Antifa terrorist, surveying the site of his next atrocity.

It's hell, I tell you, a dystopian hellscape, the American Carnage our President warned us about three years and more ago. We're all doomed.

Ooookay, now, let's quit kidding around and talk some simple facts.

No, there's no mad riots going on downtown. No, there's nothing that Trumpy and the Junior Freikorps need to "save" us from. He's full of shit, they're full of shit, and the Portland Police Bureau is, as usual, full of shit.

No, here's what's going on:

That's the "Wall of Moms" confronting our heroic Law Enforcement Heroes with...a lullaby.

So of course the fucking cops and feds shot them with tear gas and flashbangs.

Here's what you need to know about Portland cops; they're shit, and they've been shit for decades.

Triggerhappy? Check. Racist? Check. Brutal n' stupid? Check. Nazis? Ummm...yeah. That, too; a Portland copper who had a Hitler fetish back when he was a sergeant in the Nineties and Oughts? He made Captain by the mid-teens when his youthful Nazi...ummm..."indiscretions" were erased in 2014. He retired/ with a full pension and some sort of cop medal, presumably to go with his Iron Cross.

So people here in Portland are reeeeally sick and tired of these worthless coppers. We'd like them to be less stupid, brutal, racist, and generally worthless, but we'll settle for burning the fucking plague ship to the waterline, hull and sticks, so something more useful could be built in it's place.

That's why we're SO done with them.

I'm not sure what Trump and his cosplay Guardia Civil want, but my guess is just red meat for the base. He's completely screwed the COVID pooch, so he needs to distract the rubes from the fact their kids are wheezing and Gamma's dead...so, look! Antifa! Ooh! Bad! Scary! Evil!

On the other hand...there is a precedent for this sort of damn thing, paramilitaries doing the dirty work the caudillo can't trust the police or the Army to do for him. The brownshirts - and before them, the real freikorps, in Germany and the blackshirts in Italy. The "dignity battalions" in Panama. AAA in Argentina.

These feds don't have the sack to bring on the Ford Falcons. Yet.

But if you're a small-r republican, you should be alarmed and infuriated that your supposed republic is flirting with making it's very own little Falangist Civil Guard.

I sure as hell am.

But, sadly...I'm too old , too slow, and too liable to the plague to be out there beside the Moms. So you're not going to read a "Letter from Wapato Jail" from me anytime soon. I'll stay boring and safe in my little house in my little job doing my boring little things.

Just wishing the moms and them the best of luck. It's not that I don't WANT to be out there.

Because fuck the worthless goddamn Portland Police Bureau and all its works.

And - this is a larger political point worth making here - it's really time to break up the damn "Department of Homeland Security" (and as an aside I think we can all agree that "Heimatsicherheitsdienst" sounds better in the original German) and restore it's Frankenstein parts back to their original pieces; FEMA to, well, FEMA. The Coast Guard to Transportation. Customs back to Customs, The INS back to Justice (or, better yet, to Labor where it really belongs).

There's no real reason for this monster to exist other than the stupidity and panic that resulted from 9/11. In it's existing condition it is entirely too useful for some Mussolini wannabe like Trump to turn into his goon squad, and it's too sprawling to be useful for actual "security", as the recent goon squad adventures in my hometown show quite plainly.

So while I hunker down in North Portland, let's all see about defunding the damn Portland cop and dismembering the damn DHS.

Time and past time, I'd say...

Hyacinthum hora

"The sun has set, but night has not yet fallen. It’s the suspended hour… The hour when one finally finds oneself in renewed harmony with the world and the light," (Guerlain)

The sun has set on the brightest promises of the American Experiment.

Night has not yet fallen, but the darkness is visible in the person of Tom Cotton, the Republican Prince of Darkness that Charlie Pierce likes to call the "bobbleheaded slapdick from Arkansas" whose editorial in Wednesday's New York Times went full Nazi. He is the competent fuhrer that the GOP thought they had in Trump only to find that, while the Leader can be capricious and inane He cannot be too openly a buffoon.

Cotton is not a buffoon.

Dangerous. Unprincipled. Rapacious. Vicious.

But not a buffoon.

But here's why I think we're done, a dead republic walking; the current protests.

It shouldn't take genius-level civics to understand that a land where the state is openly run by and for the wealthy, where a substantial portion of the "citizenry" are obviously not citizens but subjects, bound by the law but not protected, liable to be arrested, injured, or killed by the state at any time, is not, in fact, a democratic republic ruled by "equal justice under law".

It should be painfully obvious to even the stupidest of inhabitants that if "they" can do to "them" what police regularly do to "them" that there is no legal reason "they" cannot do it to you.

No. The only reason "you" are safe is structural, and that structure is founded on oligarchy and built of racism.

We the comfortable, largely white, majority have never been willing to honestly see - much less actively tear out - the dark pillar of race and the ugly beam of plutocracy that support our house.

To do so would have required long and painful years and even decades of sacrifice and humility to tear down and rebuild our nation without those things. Humans have never been good at that; it's not like we're some sort of uniquely awful nation.

But that remains a uniquely difficult task.

To do the things the protestors are demanding; to rebuild the large police forces (and courts and legal codes...) across the country to provide that actual equal justice, to rejigger the national economy to provide true equality of opportunity, would require an M9-seismic-event level of change.

In a sensible nation, in a true democratic republic, dedicated to ensuring that all people are "We the People" these protests would have caused a massive national reflection, would have sparked a balefire of action, of decision, to make the sorts of changes that would provide and rejigger and do all those things.

Instead, this is a nation where roughly four out of ten "citizens" - who were just weeks ago prancing around with military rifle knock-offs claiming that having to wear a surgical mask and order pizza to go was the most horrific tyranny since the rule of the tsars, mind you - are at best silent and, at worst, prepared to use those rifles on the others of their own fellow citizens who are now in the streets demanding that equal justice.

That part of the People who are huge Tom Cotton fanbois and fangirls.

And because we are in fact a house divided there has been, after nearly a week of nightly protests across the nation, no serious discussion, much less action, about the changes in our nation and in our laws and how they are enforced, that would address what these thousands of people are in the streets demanding.

So it's not so much the line of armed and armored police that stand across the road the protests are trying to open.

Behind them stands Tom Cotton like a colossus and around his feet all the little Cottons who refuse those changes.

And around them...all of those people, like me, who are unwilling or unable to make the sacrifice to bumrush the line and risk ourselves and our lives to make them change.

We the People cannot even force our government to act sensibly about the Plague. We know better, we know how we can save lives, but to do so would require some of us to make sacrifices, to act with humility and patience, to spend money we have in excess but are unwilling to part with.

We won't, because enough of us won't, because enough of us are Tom Cotton and refuse to accept any alternative but a full-on charge through the minefield, because waiting for the engineers and the flail tanks is for cowards and pussies.

If we can't do that - in the face of a pathogen that can kill or maim any one of us - how will we take an even harder and more difficult path to equity when inequity only harms some of us, and those largely "them", the people the Tom Cottons despise?

Here's what I wrote thirteen years ago:

A nation grown suddenly great, enlarged by war, troubled by disturbance abroad and contention at home.
A people divided, made complacent by wealth and power yet enervated by political strife and economic uncertainty.
A government given over to the wealthy, whose vicious infighting consumes their ability to make sound choices for the betterment of the People, or the nation.
A military made hard, and indifferent to democratic ideals, by decades of professionalism and unremitting war.
An economy dominated by great corporations, relentlessly pressing down the opportunities for the individual and the small company.

Even the very structures of civilization itself crumble as, it seems, the nation both implodes and explodes.

So.

No.

It's been a long time fading but now the light seems to be failing fast. The darkness just seems all the more threatening loured by teargas smoke and backlit by the light of the flares and the flash-bangs and the burning barricades.

While we are still suspended in this blue hour it is difficult for me to see anything but darkness in the falling night ahead.

Acting 1SG Lawes reads the morning formation announcements

Comp-ney, Atten-shun!

At ease.

Okay, listen up. Coupla things here, but we got a busy day so imma be quick.

Night bakers.

Can anyone here. Anyone? Tell me what the ever-loving-come-to-Jesus fuck inspired you people to set out what I am led to understand was a "deep fried Mars bar turnover" in the pastry tray yesterday morning?

Was it because you knew the battalion commander would be eating breakfast in our D-fac? And that he would be hosting the Brigade Sergeant Major, who is well known to covet pastries like a huge camouflage-wearing pizza rat covets pepperoni slices?

Because whatever the reason, I have been hearing from that pastry-fattened individual every hour on the hour since then about our dining facility, a circumstance which I am highly displeased with.

Goddammit, people. Donuts, maple bars, and apple-fucking-fritters were good enough for the Children of Israel as well as our hardy pioneer forebears and, as such, they are fucking good enough for our fucking mess hall. Whilst I appreciate your artistic flair and need for new challenges during what the Yadkin Road Ford dealership commercial last evening assured me were "trying times"...KISS, people. KISS. Keep it fucking simple. This is not fucking Kilmarnock and y'all are not standing with Mel Gibson facing down the fucking Sassenachs.

Donuts. And maple bars.

Fried Mars bars. Jesus wept.

Okay, only one other thing.

I am hearing talk about our being deployed to Charlotte or Raleigh to act in support of the civil power given the unrest there.

I am here to remind you that we are United States Army Airborne soldiers. We follow the lawful orders of our civilian leadership. If our national command authority through our corps and division and brigade and battalion orders us to load the riot gear into the 80-pax and hey-diddle-diddle up I-95 to stand around looking all billy badass, we will salute and move out smartly.

However.

Note that I cannot emphasize strongly enough the word lawful.

The Constitution that, if you people recall we all swore to support and defend against all enemies foreign and domestic, guarantees The People the right to peaceably assemble. It guarantees them the right to petition our government for the redress of grievances, and as such to speak freely, including the speech of act and deed. And in another foundational document our forefathers accused his royal highness King George of sending the goddamn redcoats to oppress them and deny them those very rights and that was cause for breaking the contract between citizen and sovereign government.

I am here to tell you people: We. Are. Not. Fucking. Redcoats.

You will need to rely on the Old Man. He is a stand up guy as well as a hell of a soldier and officer. He will not allow us to be used to beat the living shit out of peaceful Americans in the sort of shameful fucking ways that certain of our colleagues were used in the District of Columbia Monday night.

You will need to trust me to follow, and issue, only lawful orders.

I realize that requires a lot of trust. I hope that as your acting First Sergeant I have earned that trust. And I trust that you can and will behave in ways that will continue to earn mine.

But at the final remove you can trust me on this:

We.

Will not be the cause.

For breaking the contract between citizen and sovereign government.

On that you have my solemn fucking word.

That is...no, wait. One last item.

Remember; we are still in the fucking Plague Year. Keep your masks on and do not bunch up! If you do as surely as your doom followeth hard after you Mister Grenade will be there to remind you what a miserable buddy-fucker he is. Judas was a buddy-fucker, people, and look what happened to him.

Now that is all.

Comp-ney, Atten-shun!

Platoon sergeants, take charge.

Blue on Blue

I don't really have anything to add here to the rage exploding across my country other than, yeah, well, what did you expect?

We have, those of us with the attributes that signify "meaningful" in our country; wealth, economic position, political engagement, whiteness...we've been fine that many of our cities are policed in ways that range from unpleasant to onerous to lethal for those citizens that lack those attributes. We didn't have to worry about fixing that busted taillight because we knew we wouldn't get pulled over for not signaling the lane change.

Or, if we did, we wouldn't get yanked out of the car and roughly body-searched and, if we got a little arsed about that, tased or arrested or just plain curb-stomped by somebody who felt no need to stop his inner asshole from coming out to play.

For example, I know for a fact that Portland Police Bureau has been the home for wannabe Klansmen and Nazis for decades. What have I done about that, other than vote for commissioners and mayors who have promised, usually ineffectually, to "do something" about what I knew perfectly well was so baked into PPB that the only way to "do something" would be to do a Saddam's Army on the whole outfit - just fire 99% of the sonsofbitches, burn the bastard to the ground, and start over?

Yeah, nothing. You, too? Thought so. Most of us who aren't a shade darker than that crayon color that used to be labeled "flesh" (and think about that for a moment...) haven't really been troubled enough to get het up over the problems.

So here we are.

Will we do anything about those problems now?

Don't make me laugh. You know better and so do I. We'll throw clubs and gas and "non-lethal" rounds at whoever makes a fuss. Christ on a crutch, we can't even do anything semi-intelligent about a fucking Plague, you think we're going to do anything sane about this, the miserable way we've treated our poor and our former slaves and current subjects, and everyone else who can't play the "get out of jail free" card?

Nope. I got nothin' for you on that.

What I wanted to make a brief comment on, though, was one of the stupider and more irritating American affectations all this rioting and anger over killer cops reminded me of: the "blue line" thing.

You've seen it. Fucker has it's own flag, forChrissakes. Even here in the People's Republic of Portland you see the little blue-line-flag stickers from time to time, on cop cars and even some regular old pickups and sedans and SUVs.

Anyway, the point of this blue line nonsense seems to be to try and impress people that the coppers are the only thing - the "thin blue line" - standing between civilization and a howling wilderness of Hobbsean war-of-all-against-all chaotic savagery.

And, hey...who can blame the coppers for wanting to believe this LARPing fantasy of heroic defenders of civilization, and trying to sell it to the public?

Beats the fuck out of accepting the reality that your grunt-level street cop is basically an over-armed mall security dude with better transportation who spends most of his or her day dealing with crappy little problems that can't and won't be solved by policework (Gee. Somebody clouted your car? That sucks. Well, fill in this report. Bye!) or, frankly, assholes. Any sergeant will tell you that ten percent of your people are the ones who'll give you ninety percent of your problems, and so it has to be with policing. Most of the people your beat cop interacts with are probably assholes, either because they're high and/or drunk, have some sort of mental issues, or are, well, just assholes.

I can see how that would make me want to think that breaking up pukey drunk-fights and dealing with speeders flipping you shit was manning the ramparts of Civilization against the Dark Hordes.

But there's no reason that us Dark Hordes need to buy into this cop cosplay.

Because it's pretty simple; the actual "defenders of civilization" is everyone. You, me, your Aunt Louise. We are the "thin line", and not that thin, either, that keeps our community and nation and civilization going.

Because the reality is that if the vast bulk of human beings weren't quiet and peaceful and generally "law-abiding"?

No number of coppers could stop them from running wild, anymore than the village watchman of Podoloversk could stop the Mongols from tearing the place apart.

No. The "blue line" bullshit is designed to convince us groundlings that whatever coppers do is "holding the line" of civilization against the Darkness. So when they blow up someone's house trying to arrest someone else who isn't there, when they kill someone in the process of "arresting" them for selling loose smokes or just being an asshole - and, let's recall that if being an asshole was a capital crime there's a whole bunch of people, up to and including a fairly significant portion of Trump Adminstration, who're dead meat - or when they go wild and start beating and shooting people, as you do every so often, y'know...to convince us that all this shit we'd normally look at and go "...the FUCK!?" and get agitated about our tax dollars going to fund this idiotic and destructive-to-civil-order nonsense is really Defending Civilization.

But run the numbers.

It ain't.

If We the People wanted to tear the living hell out of "civilization" we could, and no bunch of blue-suited mall cops would be able to stop us.

And the mere fact that this "blue line" bullshit is floating around out there and hasn't been viciously mocked offstage? The fact that paid-for-by-your-taxes coppers are apparently bought into and trying to broadcast the nonsense? The fact that our political "leaders" - from both Left and Right, I'm afraid; this truly IS a "both sides do it" problem - aren't willing to cram down on these idiot coppers and their Dungeon Defenders idiocy and tell them to STFU and go be good public servants and wrestle the pukey drunks and arrest the assholes without turning this into a war between The Force of Law and the people who the law in its impartial majesty prohibits from stealing bread and sleeping under bridges?

Says something very, very problematic about us and the country we've created.

Which, if you've been paying attention, shouldn't be news at all.

I could go on. About the insanity of coppers going Full Metal Jacket on regular people but palling around and sucking face with armed traitors (Amon Bundy, c'mon down! Proud Boys, represent!) and the ridiculous position of the "conservative" talking heads who were foaming with rage about the kneeling during songs that warned us that this day was coming if we did nothing but rage about kneeling.

But what's the point?

You know as well as I what the problems are, what should happen, and what won't.

Nope. That moronic "blue line" flag is really the white flag of our country surrendering to the reality that if you White, you Right.

New GOP campaign slogan: "Your money or your life"

The COVID canary just dropped off it's perch in Iowa:

"Iowa Workforce Development said Monday that failing to return to work out of fear of catching the virus will be considered a voluntary quit, which disqualifies workers from receiving unemployment benefits.

The department urged employers to report workers who don’t return to their jobs for a good reason “as soon as possible.” It warned that the federal law providing an additional $600 weekly in benefits contains “serious consequences” for fraudulent claims.

Workers who do not return can collect benefits only under certain circumstances, such as being sick due to the virus or living with an infected family member."

I told you this was coming.

I fucking told you.

These people have absolutely NO interest in the lives of you worthless proles. You're an "economic unit", and if you value that worthless life more than the value of their 401K? Heh. Too bad for you, dead man.

We really are ruled by the worse among us.

And that's because far too many of us ARE the worst among us. They will revel in this, and cheer as the bodies pile up. They'll glory in "taking the punch".

They are a death cult.

And if we cannot stop them. If we cannot destroy them this November they will destroy us all.

COVID Blues

I was sitting at the kitchen table in the pre-dawn dark - as I do more often than not; my workday starts early and I can't reset my body clock on the weekend - when I realized that I was not just in the dark but in the Dark. My thoughts were unrelentingly grim.

I am living in the Plague Year, and there is literally nothing I can do about that except hide and hope to survive until a vaccine.

I also realized that my work is, frankly, a dreary grind of shitty development projects and doesn't look to be any different anytime soon...assuming that we're not decimated by the coming depression and I am jobless.

And I am living under the rule of greedy, stupid fools who are determined to ensure that the notional rules of the republic we are supposed to be living in don't allow me to defenestrate them, who are bound and determined to deal with this Plague Year in the worst, most dangerous and risky way possible. They will kill me if they can, and the political structures of my country don't let me give them the fucking conge' they deserve.

That's just...well, grim. I cannot sweeten it and I cannot lighten it. All I can do is grind on, doing what I can to make things better around me.

But what I want...well, that's another thing entirely. I'm furiously, incandescently angry at the way that 40 years of Republican malfeasance and liberal cringing have brought us to this. I want to lead the mob up the capitol steps, break down the doors to the congressional chambers and hang Moscow Mitch and Tom Cotton and every other treacherous Republican fuckstick from the Visitors' Gallery, and then on down Pennsylvania Avenue to drag the orange shitgibbon and his slimy pal Miller out into the Rose Garden for a picnic and auto-de-fe, with the two guests of dishonor as the barbecued main course.

But how can that help. We all can see what these bastards are doing. But it's not them. It's that four out of ten other Americans love it, and that just makes me loathe and despise THEM, too. And hating 40% of my "fellow Americans"? That's...not healthy.

So here we are.

Sometimes we just have to bend into the shitstorm and slog on forward. It sucks. It always has. But we just have to hope for better days ahead, and the chance to lay our burden down.

Update 4/14: And here's the really infuriating part.

It SO didn't have to be this way.

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

I mean that sincerely. They could have gone down in American history with the pantheon of men (and, unfortunately, they ARE all men...) who have saved the Republic. Washington. Lincoln. FDR.

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

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

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

That's it.

That's ALL.

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

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

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

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

That's just...sad.

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

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

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

What's Hungarian for " Ermächtigungsgesetz"?

President Trump's EU pash, Viktor Orban, is now officially the Dictator of Hungary.

Somewhere in the bowels of the White House Stephen Miller does a little dance.

I'm as terrified of this plague as anyone, but I'm almost equally terrified of our little American Orbans and their orange Leader. War and pestilence are the great enablers of dictators. It is when We the People are the most fearful and beaten that we are willing to trade liberty for "safety". We will get neither - especially given that these new dictators worship the old Gods of the Gilded Age that mean more profits for themselves - but those of us who prize "security" over that liberty will surely be tempted.

And, given our recent history, I cannot be sure we can resist that temptation. Four of ten Americans have already shown they will gleefully support any amount of destruction to small-r republican mores if it means shuttering drag queen story hour and keeping the dusky heathens in their place.

It will be intriguing to watch the reaction to this from the EU. If the leader of a European nation can become an out-and-proud dictator without consequence, what will stop those others (looking at you, Poland...) who are teetering along the border?

Did I mention lately how I reeeeeeally hate this timeline?

A Year in Solitary

I noted in the update that Mango Mussolini had suddenly been converted from a COVID Truther to a babbling imitation of a "war president" and I wondered what the hell? This joker notoriously never changes the brain cell he calls his mind; he's stuck where he was in the Eighties.

Well, apparently, here's what happened; he read (or, let's not kid ourselves, was probably read-to and given a colorful comic-strip summary of) a study done in London modeling epidemiological responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and the likely outcomes. The "no-action" response - i.e. treat this as a seasonal flu and let it run it's course, essentially the Trumpkins' "plan"?

2.2 million dead just from the disease. And that's without the deaths that will happen because the ICUs are jammed with people in respiratory failure from the disease.

But.

"Suppression" - completely banning all public gatherings, closing shops, workplaces, restaurants, basically making people inmates in their homes...apparently works.

Here's the nut grafs if you don't want to read the whole thing:

"Suppression works! The death rate in the US peaks 3 weeks from now at a few thousand deaths, then goes down. We hit but don't exceed the number of available ventilators. The nightmarish death tolls from the rest of the study disappear. But here's the catch: if we EVER relax suppression before a vaccine is administered to the entire population, COVID-19 comes right back and kills millions of Americans in a few months, the same as before. After the 1st suppression period ends in July, we could probably lift restrictions for a month, followed by 2 more months of suppression, in a repeating pattern without triggering an outbreak or overwhelming the ventilator supply. Staggering breaks by city could do a bit better. But we simply cannot EVER allow the virus to spread throughout the entire population in the way other viruses do, because it is just too deadly. If lots of people we know end up getting COVID-19, it means millions of Americans are dying. It simply can't be allowed to happen."

When do the authors believe a vaccine is likely?

Eighteen months.

So for the next year and a half we will be unable to work, many of us. Theaters, restaurants, bookstores...won't be able to open. How will we live? We will still have landlords demanding rent and banks demanding mortgage payments. We will still have to buy food, pay bills.

As I was saying earlier; the ONLY way I see we will get through this without breaking our society in too many ways to anticipate is for government to, in effect, pay for society to go on for a year and a half while we're all in solitary. Pay wages, pay rent and mortgages, pay shop owners and businesses that can't open.

The alternative?

We emerge from this with a huge mass of impoverished "citizens" ruled by a tiny minority of the obscenely rich who were able to ride this out in luxury.

The problem?

For the GOP that's a feature, not a bug.

Well...shit.

WASF.

Lounging Around the House - for Victory!

Here’s the deal. The closest analogy to the Plague Year is World War 2.

Except instead of getting drafted or building Liberty ships and B-24s that huge part of the public that was "the war effort" in the Forties in the Twenties is going to have to close their shops, lose their jobs, and stay the fuck home.

Now...B-24s were a dead loss to the public weal. Made nobody, everybody, every single American absolutely zero in terms of building the gross domestic product. They were crucially important for the job at hand - winning the war - but basically nothing but a huge metal hole in the sky into which the government threw money.

So the U.S. government’s job right now - right now, right fucking now - is to treat every restaurant the way it treated Consolidated in 1944, and treat every laid-off busboy and bookstore clerk like it treated a welder at Kaiser shipyards and turret lathe operator at Springfield Armory.

Pay them. They’re fighting a war. Pay them for their fight. Pay them for their sacrifices.

That means, no, Republicans, goddamnit, you don't get a goddamn payroll tax cut. That pays for Grandma and Grandpa to stay in their home and not be out under a fucking bridge catching the fucking plague. No, Trump, fuck no, you don't get a massive bailout for the damn fracking outfits or your CEO buddies. They can borrow at zero interest using their assets for collateral.

No, this goes to the troops; the baristas and librarians and truck drivers and (ahem) geologists who are idled in order to prevent this plague from wrecking the economy by getting people tossed out of their homes, gutting their savings, and destroying their lives.

Pay them...or this epidemic will wreck this country as thoroughly as any Nazi could have.

(And don't even get me started about how we're not but we should be cranking out medical supplies - everything from masks and gloves to ICU beds and ventilators - like Sherman tanks and B-24s thundering off the assembly lines in 1944.

The complete and utter clusterfuck that has been the Fraudulency Adminstration's "response" on this one would be legitimate cause for summary execution in any sane polity.)

Update 3/18 p.m.: Trump says he's going to do what he should have done several weeks ago and what I ranted about just above; activate national-defense-level production of essential medical materials under the authority of the "Defense Production Act". So the orange monkey gets "credit" for finally not flinging his poop, I guess, since that seems to be the low bar set for this dingus.

Mind you, this is Trump, so the clueless chucklefuck and his minions have no idea what to DO with this authority:

"Trump declined to say how, precisely, the Defense Production Act would be used and he suggested that the administration is still deciding. He said the administration had “targets” for equipment it wanted but did not say what those targets were."

Christ, what a maroon.

Update 3/20: So here we are, two days after I posted the first update...and Emperor Dumbfuckius Maximus still hasn't actually begun to use the DPA to, y'know, actually produce anything useful. States are still scrambling to find medical necessities like masks and ventilators. My guess? He and his gang can't figure out a way to make a profit out of it. They know if they order their CEO buddy at PharmaCorp to start cranking out masks, and their buddy follows his instincts (which will be to charge $6.95 for a mask that costs fifty cents to produce) they'll get found out and hammered for price gouging (which, in their minds, is just "being smart"; chiseling the suckers while they can which is, y'know, how it works...).

And the rest of the GOP just doesn't want to do anything to suggest that government isn't the problem.

So, yeah...we're still kinda fucked.

Update 3/24: Oh, for fuck's sake!

"From the start, the administration* has treated the DPA as though it were some sort of Damoclean weapon by which it can force compliance from American industries. "Watch out, Ford. Make them ventilators or the DPA’ll gitcha!” This is because, for politicians like Pence, a product of a Republican Party that married itself to supply-side snake oil and disdain for self-government, it is inconceivable to imagine that the federal government’s demanding that industries respond to a worldwide crisis cannot be more effective and efficient than waiting for those corporations to engage their civic consciences to do so. And they will adhere to that faith over your grandmother’s dead body."

These fucking people.

Honestly.

If I was a company commander in the 3rd US Infantry, I swear to God; I'd go through this White House and Senate like a dose of fucking salts. And after every last one of them; Dimwit Donnie and Moscow Mitch and Javanka and all the other rats had been put up against the wall I'd then surrender myself, plead guilty at the court-martial, and happily spend the rest of my natural life as the oldest private E-1 in Leavenworth knowing I had done a damn fine piece of work.

An open letter to my fellow U.S. citizens

I'm sitting in the dark house on a pre-dawn Saturday morning, sipping my coffee and watching Newcastle United look like boys against men in Liverpool, but - seeing how piss-poor the Lads are playing - I'm also parsing my Facebook feed and reading comments about the ill-advised recruiting stunt the Portland MEPs guys and the Thorns Front Office pulled last Wednesday (you can read about it here).

One of the comments is from another GI who talks about how emotional an occasion it is to swear to defend the people of the United States.

And it occurs to me that the Oath of Enlistment says nothing about "defending the people".

The exact wording is: "...support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic..."

Domestic enemies?

That would be..."the people" sometimes, right?

Right.

Which is why past presidents have used us GIs to do things like shoot and kill striking workers, and ol' Dugout Doug MacArthur could use us to attack the Bonus Army of our fellow GIs and their families. If the Constitution in the form of the president or Congress tells us that some portion of We the People are a "domestic enemy"?

We as soldiers are obligated by that oath to use whatever means we are ordered to use to "defend the Constitution".

Kinda scary, innit?

Think about that next time you see one of those "Land of the Free Because of the Brave" bumper stickers, hmmm..?

As GIs you, my fellow citizens, give us a lot of tongue-bathing. You're constantly told to "support the troops". You get a crap-ton of military PR shoved at you, like the recruiting stunt at the Thorns match. And in general that's lovely. We all like to get some love.

But maybe - just maybe - as "citizens" you might want to be a trifle less credulous about all this "support the troops" stuff.

Because it usually takes troops to make "citizens" into "subjects".

Maybe I'm just being a cynical old sergeant. Sergeants are notorious pessimists, the Eeyores of the Army. We always look for the flaws in the officers' plans so we can head them off. And I'm certainly not telling you that my fellow GIs would agree to do that, or would blindly follow orders to herd you into a camp, or shoot you down when you take to the streets if, say, a President were to refuse to accept the result of an election and not yield his power to his elected sucessor.

But...you might want to think about what you're being told.

Just sayin'.

Errata

I don't have much of anything to add or detract from my post of yesterday, except this:

THIS is Nitty Kitty sleeping on the deck. At the time I wrote the post I hadn't downloaded the correct cat photo, so I went with one I had, showing Drachma the Merkitty sprawled on the front steps the previous week. He stretched out there in the heat of the afternoon and just lay around for an hour or so until the shadows moved and he had to retreat from the sunshine. Never did go inside the air-conditioned house.

Goofy cat.

And, though I don't want to rant more about the loss of the America I thought I knew, I came across this piece today:

"Some immigrant U.S. Army reservists and recruits who enlisted in the military with a promised path to citizenship are being abruptly discharged, the Associated Press has learned.

The AP was unable to quantify how many men and women who enlisted through the special recruitment program have been booted from the Army, but immigration attorneys say they know of more than 40 who have been discharged or whose status has become questionable, jeopardizing their futures."

The Army I knew was always hurting for linguists. With a gajillion cabinet wars going on all over the global South as well as southwest and central Asia I can't imagine that things are any better.

So why this, now?

You know perfectly well why, and so do I.

What baffles me is this seemingly insane pursuit of "immigrants", from wanna-be recruits to legal residents with old infractions on the books. This isn't going after badass gangstas. This is exactly what I predicted the Trumpkins' henchpeople would do; pluck all the low-hanging immigrant fruit. Granny in the bodega. Achmed the janitor.

Melania the mail-order bride...no, wait...

But all those little, harmless people would go first. Why risk your ass shooting it out with Hector the Vato when you can just walk up to Nonna Sissi and huck her in the back of the truck and she counts just the same?

If there was some sort of genuine, real, scary social problem here I could almost get it.

Almost; the way Orange Foolius and his mouthpieces are yakking this up as OMFG Alien Carnage!!! is still some seriously fucked-up neo-Nazi shit right there.

But this is a complete nothingburger. There's no "immigrant crisis". Immigration, legal and otherwise, doesn't produce any quantifiable "problems". No crime, no poverty, no threat of insurrection, nothing.

This is government-by-the-fucked-up-things-old-white-people-get-off-FOX.

That's ridiculous, but that's the way my country works right now.

So, just some cute cat pictures and your daily reminder;

Ceterum censeo GOP esse delendam.

Fruit of the Poison Tree

See, here's the thing.

Torture corrupts.

Call it what you want; "enhanced interrogation", "extraordinary measures", "psikhushka". The systematic infliction of suffering is inherently corrupting to the people who administer it and the organizations that employ it.

Because torture is not interrogation.

Interrogation is intended to gain information.

Torture is intended to gain confessions. Confessions that the torturers want to hear.

A person that uses torture to gain confessions becomes useless as an interrogator and deaf to information. The agonized babble of a person suffering beyond coherence quickly becomes meaningless noise. If you are tortured you will say anything, everything, to make the torture stop. If you are the torturer you lose the ability to find the truth amid the pain and fear.

An organization that employs torture and torturers quickly becomes a servant of the propaganda that the torture is meant to support and the presumptions that the torture is designed to confirm.

Armies that use torture begin to become instruments of that propaganda rather than instruments of policy. Intelligence agencies that use torture begin to become guardians of the secrets of and defenders of the barbarities of torture rather than cold instruments of state. Nations that use torture quickly find how useful it is in generating results that they want in the short term. And the spiral of torture, and lying to hide the torture, and lying to excuse the torture, and lying to hide and excuse the lies, works deeper and deeper into the culture of the army, and the intelligence agency, and the nation.

Until first the torturers end up running the intelligence agency.

And then the torturers become the generals.

And, finally, the torturers become the presidents and prime ministers.

The toxic "war on terror" has been the ground that has nursed this poison tree, and has given it the night and fog it needed to grow. To our shame We the People have never insisted on throwing open the doors, letting in the light that would have killed this noxious weed, never dug deep and uprooted and thrown it and the torturers on the fire. In our fear and hate we have let it grow.

If shame were still a permissible public emotion we should be ashamed of ourselves.

But we will not.

And, instead, we will nurture the fruit of that poison tree in our hands and our hearts.

More fucking thoughts and prayers

I see it's time to drag this one out.

Again.

I know this has nothing to do with the results of the 2016 elections, yet I look around and what I see is just a part of the toxic stew of the very worst of my country that seems to be bubbling cheerfully on every stovetop; arrogant, corrupt, ignorant, splenetic...it makes me think of the piece of Robert Graves' I, Claudius where the cunningly-not-really-a-gimping-halfwit emperor turns his appalling heir loose on Rome, whispering "Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out."

What hits me hardest about these nutter shootings is how they never change anything because of the magical incantation "the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" as if the whole "well-regulated militia" thing was a fantasy and the U.S. Constitution is some sort of Holy Writ, handed down on gold tablets never to be altered or re-imagined.

Well, the Constitution once said that black people were 3/5ths of a registered voter, and that it was illegal to drink a beer.

Both of those ideas were fucked up. So We the People changed the Constitution.

So far, the score of the Second Amendment is "resisting tyrannical government", zero; "butchering other Americans", about a gajillion. I note that all these ammosexuals with their arsenals seem curiously mute about "tyranny" like the idea that the government can freely spy on our communications, or take our stuff if we get arrested - not convicted, mind you, just arrested - for smoking weed. So I conclude that the notion that the "right to keep and bear arms" has pretty much zero percent to do with the sort of people doing actual tyranny-resisting and 100% to do with the sort of fucking people who get a woody out of busting out more than thirty rounds a minute.

But who gives an actual fuck?

Nobody is going to do anything about this. Tomorrow another nutter will take another semiautomatic weapon into another school and another N > 0 number of kiddies and teachers and random poor sonsofbitches will die or be hideously wounded. And we'll hear that there's nothing we can do - in the only industrialized nation that this happens regularly - and we need to have more mental health care (but fuck-all funding for it), and we need to send our thoughts and prayers to the new set of grieving parents and lovers and brothers and sisters whose beloveds have been blown away so I can go to the range tomorrow and bust out 200 rounds of 5.56mm in fifteen minutes.

So, fuck it.

Here's a fucking cute picture of a cute fucking cat.

"A Republic, if you can keep it"

We have not.

A tax measure that provides a road map to increased inequality in one of the already-most-unequal industrial democracies and shreds the social safety net woven in the depth of the Depression to prevent a hard turn to fascist or communist revolution, and that is "supported" by, at most, a quarter of the citizens of the affected polity (and that in the midst of a relentless, unashamedly vicious barrage of lies from the ruling party that suggests that at least a portion of that 25% would fall away if they understood how nakedly plutocratic this legislation is) is as close to the definition of "taxation without representation" as I can think of short of a genuine occupation government.

If our political system has devolved to the point where a coterie of neo-Gilded Age fantasists can impose their Sharia Law on three-quarters of the populace, then we have put a wrap on the American Experiment.

In a truly republican nation this would decorate Pennsylvania Avenue with a festive holiday display of heads on pikes.

It has not and will not.

And, as such, we have no one to blame for our failure to keep our own republic but ourselves.