No. No, no, no. FUCK no.

Proving that like the Bourbons the people that constitute the "leadership" of the United States government learn nothing yet forget nothing the Obama Administration has gone to the poo-flinging monkeyhouse technically known as the United States Congress for a new authorization to use military force, this time against the congeries of wanna-be Sunni Muslim theocrats that go by the nickname "Islamic State".

"President Obama asked Congress on Wednesday for new war powers to go after the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria...The president’s request would replace the 2002 legislation that authorized the Iraq War but leaves in place a very broadly worded resolution passed in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks."

Proving that you don't have to be a dry-drunk simpleton driving a short-bus-full of rage-drunk idiots and conniving weapons-grade-moron Machiavellis to fail to understand the words "don't", "involved", "land war", and "Asia" as well as the catastrophic decade of clusterfuckery that has followed Dick and Dubya's Most Excellent Middle Eastern Adventure the Obamites seem to believe that they can repeat the procedure without repeating the results.

I have absolutely no idea why they would believe this.

For one thing, the Daesh people (NB: apparently "Daesh" is the Arabic equivalent of the WW2 perjoratives "Huns" and "Nips" - it's the name that these guys' enemies use for it, since "Daesh" sounds similar to the Arabic words Daes ("one who crushes something underfoot") and Dahes ("one who sows discord") would like nothing better than for more U.S. joes to stumble around their 'hood killing people and breaking shit seeing as how that worked so goddamn well in Iraq. Doing what your enemy wants you to do is...well, "fucking stupid" are the words that come to mind but "the opposite of strategy" seems like a more measured way to describe it.

For another, well...fuck. IRAQ. Did we learn nothing? The reality on the ground is that the conditions in Iraq and Syria now are worse than when we invaded Iraq in 2003. There is no "government" in any sense of the word. The place has dissolved into a brawling mess of competing groups and semi-decrepit nation states (Turkey and Kurdistan being something of the exceptions...)

There are only two ways this will go.

The U.S. and it's "allies" will raze Sunnistan - the western portions of Iraq and the eastern portions of Syria - to the ground. They will kill and destroy until, as Bill Sherman would have put it, a crow flying over the Sunni lands will have to carry its own provisions. The U.S. will utterly destroy the Sunni capability and will to fight. And then...

...and then I have no idea. Perhaps the Sunni will consent to live under the rule of the other rump states, Alawite Syria and Shia Iraq, as chattel, as the Britons did under the Romans and the Tamils now do in Sri Lanka under the Hindus. That level of violence can produce submission.

Or, perhaps not.

But short of that level of violence?

I have no fucking clue what will happen. Nothing good, I assure you.

My friend Seydlitz says that the powers that be in the U.S. government have lost the ability to think about geopolitics strategically; to assess the economic, political, and military conditions realistically and then plot a course of action that uses U.S. strengths and the weaknesses of the area under consideration to produce a political, economic, and military endstate that benefits the United States.

I have always considered this optimistic. I don't know if the U.S. government has EVER had this ability outside of brief periods when smart people like George Marshall were running things.

But Marshalls seem to be in short supply, while we seem to have a never-ending amount of Dougie Fucking Feiths and Dick Goddamn Cheneys.

And now this.

Universal Bearing

OK, this is just odd.

Mojo and I found ourselves watching the Miss Universe broadcast the other night, which speaks volumes of how bored we were with whatever else was on the idiot box that evening.

We both agreed - having consented to go along with the silly premise of the magilla - that the young lady from the Philippines seemed head-and-shoulders smarter and more together than the other four gals posing decorously for the delectation of the ridiculously-coiffed Donald Trump, who really is an astonishingly enormous dick in case I haven't mentioned what an astonishingly enormous dick he is lately. But that given that the whole shebang was being filmed from Vegas that the gal from the U.S. would probably get the nod, the fix obviously being in.

And so it proved.

Upon which we laughed heartily and went to bed, forgetting the entire forgettable incident.

Until, while searching the World's Worst Newspaper Website I came across this:

"Monnin, of Cranberry, Pa., wrote on her Facebook page last week that her father had recently pointed out a clause in the Miss USA contract gives top pageant officials the power to pick the top five finalists and the winner. "I was not aware of the clause in the Miss USA contract which says that the Miss Universe Organization, Donald Trump and others have the legal right to choose the top five and winner...irrespective of any publicized selection process."

Gee. I'm shocked, shocked!

So this young lady has been socked with a ginormous fine, and I'm just left with one slightly cynical bit of snark; "Miss Universe"?

It may just be my biased opinion, but it would truly serve the people who put up this pageant, and the other people who actually spend time and money taking this pageant seriously, right if a beauty queen from one of the other sentient species (which presumably inhabit some far portion of our universe) turned up to chastise these jumped-up hairless monkeygirls and -boys for the arrogant assumption that their pathetic little species was, in fact as it seems to be in their overheated imaginations, the crowning glory of the stars.

Along with a cookbook, perhaps?

Dawn Breaks

Just a typical morning; my son is naked and using a stuffed shark to attack my wife, who is barely sentient and either completely baked or still more than half asleep while my daughter does her "drunken hootchie mama" imitation.Sometimes I sit and wonder...what the fuck do normal families do?

ARE there any?

I have no idea.

Wag of the Finger, Shake of the Head

What is it about this spring?

It seems to me like if you look around you see a tremendous amount of business; all sorts of alarms and excursions, wars, rumors of wars, lechery (of course, lechery - nothing else holds fashion), dirty deeds done...well, not cheaply, that's certain. And the wages of wealth seem to be exploding like the flowering spring, as in the stained glass of the megachurch a camel leaps effortlessly through the eye of a needle.

We seem to be busier and more worried than ever. And yet...all of our busyness and worry doesn't seem to be really changing anything, or helping us in any way.

And - I ask this in the spirit of mildest reproof, I swear, - why the FUCK does fucking Blogger insist on inserting this FUCKING "http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif" little html code in my posts? Can you FUCKING tell me that, Blogger? Well?

Fuck me sideways.

Just yesterday the voters in Portland rejected a construction bond for our public schools while in Clackamas County they spurned a measure that would have helped pay to reconstruct the bridge that many residents of the County use to cross the Willamette.

http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

See? SEE? There the fucker is again! Rrrrrrrrr!

Sorry.

Anyway, pretty much everyone in the region agrees that many of our schools are old - not just old but old. I've taught in some of them; the boiler room at my son's elementary school looks like something out of "Titanic", while the school where I did my student teaching, Benson Polytech, is 95 years old and looks it. The entire district is housed in buildings no younger than the last round of major building in the Seventies, while many of the elementary schools date back to the 1920s and 1930s. These schools are OLD.

And so is the Sellwood Bridge.

This graybeard is only 86 years old, a slip of a bridge compared to the Hawthorne but in much worse condition. It was recently downrated to 10 tons maximum capacity, and is consistently among the worst of our Oregon bridges for physical inspection rating. Multnomah County, which owns it, has us residents kicking in about $19 a year to help fix it. Our southern neighbor, Clackamas, generates about 70% of the traffic, but because of another of these fucking "tax revolt" groundswells had to refer a $5-a-year car tag fee to the voters.

They rejected it.

The spokesgomer for these people is some poor unemployed bastard out of Molalla. He is quoted as saying:

“I want the bridge to be repaired, but I want to have a voice in choosing whether I pay this or not,” he said. “Clackamas County money should go to fix our own infrastructure. Are the Multnomah County voters going to pay to help us?”

Well, we're ALL screwed now, dummy, because you won't see further than the wallet on your ass.

All of this frustration was set off by a visit I paid recently to a periodic pullout on my internet highway, "Clueless in Carolina", where Lorrie, the mom who blogs there, had a post up about the final plunge of Osama entitled "Osama Is Dead And I’m Celebrating. Why Are You Shaking Your Finger At Me?" in which she not only says that Dead Osama = VJ-Day but roundly vituperates anyone who DOESN'T agree that Dead Osama = VJ-Day.

And I guess that sort of brought everything home for me.

Here is this woman, an attorney, a former professor, smart, well-informed, the sort of funny, cynical skeptic who could subtitle her blog "detachment parenting" and make you understand where she was coming from. And she's getting all skibbley about the World's Tallest Saudi getting his wet nap. Comparing it to VJ-Day. Rocket's Red Glare. That sort of thing, like she took an entire of bottle of diet pills and chugged a liter of Red Bull. Over one more fucking dead guy in Asia. I mean, are my brothers back home with their families? Are we through spending the rent money keeping the Karzai family in blow and hookers? Are we done trying to figure out why the Muslims we keep bombing don't thank us so much anymore? Anybody? Osama's dead - whoopie! - can we declare victory now? It's VJ-Day!

Right?

And I thought; if this bright, well-educated, fiercely independent woman, if she can go utterly completely gonzo over the 2011 equivalent of Operation Vengeance, then who the hell's to say what's black and what's white.

I just sort of ended up conflating her ecstasy over the latest release in the line of Franklin Mint Signature^TM Dead Guys In Central Asia Commemorative Plate Series like it was the end of WW2 with all the other the ridiculous crap this spring - the looney arabesques in DC over the debt ceiling, Donald Trump, the endless pointless wars in central Asia and the Middle East, the freaking Clackamas County voters cutting off their bridge to spite their face, and with the sorry reality of a nation where a working wage is ever harder to come by, where my Army brothers walk the high plateaus of Asia in pursuit of a policy that never comes, where every day more of us seem poorer, and smaller, and yet work harder and longer to get there.

And where is the wag of a finger for all of this?

Why the hell isn't someone wagging a finger at this nonsense?

Or is it just that useless? Is there nothing to do but the sad, slow, shake of the head that is the rueful acceptance of the endless, limitless, evergreen folly of humankind, the world's only truly free resource, as it propels us ass-first into a pitiless tomorrow?

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled landscapers yearning to trim hedges...

Texas state representative Debbie Riddle has a great idea.You remember those scary, dangerous Mexicans sneaking into our country to speak Spanish, collect welfare, and generally de-caucasianize our great land? And remember how Real Americans (like Republicans) want to make sure we Defend our Borders and other valuable things, like our precious bodily fluids?

Well, Debbie wants to make sure that those Meskins don't sneak in here flouridating our water n' stuff, so she's proposing that hiring one of these sneaky invaders is a "state jail felony" under Title 8 of the Texas Penal Code.

Unless...unless...

...the "actor" (person) hiring said beaner did so "for the purpose of obtaining labor or other work to be performed exclusively or primarily at a single-family residence in which the actor resides..."

Texans, rejoice!Your lawns, babies, clean floors, and cooked meals will remain free - and cheap!

Is there a fucking brain cell left in the Republican Party?

Well, THAT sucked...

Educational software produces some...unexpected...results.

(From xkcd)

WooHoo!!

So it turns out that our bank - and the bank my company uses, too - has failed.WhooHoo!

But the FDIC has our back, right? This isn't 1929, we don't have to run down to the North Portland WaMu and get our money in cash to hide under the mattress or lose it, right?

WhooHoo!

But...what's backing up the FDIC..?

WhooHoo?

(Author's Note: I think one of the really open questions nobody is talking about is the potential effect of the massive consolidation of the banking industry occurring during this immense-public-failure-of-lassiz-faire-capitalist goat-rope. Now that WaMu is J.P. Morgan Chase and everyone else is Bank of America how close are we to having a monopolized banking system? What wil this mean for commercial and personal credit and finance? Will this make credit more difficult for struggling small businesses and individuals? To me the bottom line is: we don't fucking know. As John Travolta famously says in "Look Who's Taking: "Could be lunch meat! Could be peaches! Who knows?" But it COULD be one of the single most life-changing and long-lasting effects to result from the latest blowup of the "free" market system. And yet there has been little if any discussion of this in the Roman circus that is the "mainstream media".)

WhooHoo!