...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.

More bad news

As I said earlier...

The really irking parts about this are 1) that the "Oregonian", supposedly the state's Newspaper of Record, would print this, and 2) the trouble they took to find these stupid fucking jamokes to make this up.

Again, if you turn to the newsweeklies you get the straight dope:

1) the poll was "...commissioned by the freakin' Portland Police Association."
2) they polled "...500 Portlanders (far less than 1 percent of the city's voting population)"
(in fact, 500 people is 0.00077 - that's right, a little under 8/10.000ths - of the 2021 city census)
3) "...56 percent of people responded "yes" to the question: "If you could afford it professionally and personally, would you consider leaving Portland to live elsewhere?"
4) As the Mercury points out, "During the period of time this survey was conducted (December 2 to 7), we got, like, six inches of rain." Fuck yes I'd live in Hilo if I could afford it. These are the Dark Ages. They suck enormous ass.
Plus, 5) "Why would a city's cops want to spread the message that Portland residents are shaking in the Blundstone boots every time they leave the house? Well, because they want to convince city officials to give them more money, of course!"

In fact, "crime", however you define it, is 1) extremely rare personally and 2) trending down generally; the FBI statistics show that after the Plague Year drove us mad things returned to the normal low hum of criming. So no, nimrod, your "crime concerns" are baseless claptrap.

Homelessness? We've talked that shit to death. If you're "concerned" about homeless hobo zombies eating your kitty? Fuck leaving Portland. Tax the richie riches instead and use the money to do housing and treatment and social work and jobs and transportation.

But, of course, both the worthless Portland coppers and the clickbait Oregonian won't stop shrieking about fire and murder and homeless hobo zombies because, duh, that's their rice bowl.

This is the "news" the normies are getting, and, just like the other "news", it makes them stupider because fear and fright make you stupid. When you're scared you make dumb choices, or just cower without making choices at all.

And let's not even start with the House Republican "impeachment inquiry"...

What a fucked up timeline this is.

Today in bad news...

This is the digital front page of the Oregonian newspaper's online service "Oregonlive" on December 5, 2023:

Note that the headline story, is a murder/suicide in Vancouver, Washington.

"Below the fold" are three more crime stories; two weapons crimes and a kidnapping, Under the "Latest" banner on the left? two sports pieces, two letters to the editor, a medical story about hot flashes, Miss Manners, a business piece on airline mergers, and the "top 25 Wikipedia pages of 2023."

Here's the front page from the on-line version of one of Portland's two weeklies, the Portland Mercury, on the same day.

Headline story?

The recently-ended teacher's strike and the funding problems it exposed.

Perhaps just as infuriating as the political situation in the 2023 United States is the condition of the public press, and this is a perfect little snapshot of why our First Amendment heroes are such an ungodly shitshow.

The teacher's strike was the ultimate "local news" story; a critical event that stemmed from even more critical public policy failures, and which in turn exposed even more problems and failures running from the individual schools through the city all the way to the statehouse in Salem.

If you get your news from Oregon's only daily public newspaper you have no idea that happened, or how it happened, or why. You'd have no real idea of the political and fiscal issues behind it, or exposed by it. 

You'd sure as fuck know about some rando who killed himself and his family, though, wouldn'tcha?

Blow this up to NBC and CNN and the NY Times and the Washington Post?

And there you have it; one, perhaps THE, massive factor in how fucked we are, from our Gilded Age economy to the fact that an unhinged orange moron is within a whisper of the highest elected office in the nation.

A true democratic republic requires that active, informed participation of the bulk of its citizens. It's not enough for them to just vote; they need to know and understand what their votes are doing, and how.

That's why the "free press" is the first amendment, not the tenth. Because without knowledge and understanding those votes are anything from useless to actively harmful, the sort of votes that brought the original Nazis a plurality in the Reichstag of 1933.

But it's not enough to be "free" if all that means is "free to print idiotic "human interest" and fire-and-murder stories". That kind of "free" just makes you stupider; less knowledgeable and informed only about trivia that makes you more frightened and more angry.

No wonder the average person thinks that crime is out of control, that the economy is awful, that things were "better" under Daddy Trump. Small wonder nobody is willing to do anything to repeal the idiotic "kicker" tax giveaway to help solve our public school problems.

Who's going to help them learn that?

I'm a monstrously literate guy with a passion for history and politics and an obsessive fascination with tracking down sources. I'm probably something like 0.0001% of the US public.

The rest of the country has to depend on the people like who run the Oregonlive website for their knowledge and understanding, and what they get is fucking murderous randos on Page One.

No wonder WASSSSSSSSSSF.

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.

Experimenting with the end of the American Experiment

In 1932 Mr. Justice Brandis wrote: "...(a)state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country."

Today I put to you that if it is, indeed, a laboratory, the State of Oregon is in the process of becoming Dr. Mengele's lab.

The experiment on trial at the moment is to see just how close to death the news media and the Oregon GOP can bring the notion of a "democratic republic".

Let's start here; the Republican Party has made itself widely detested in Oregon.

We are, in large part, what popular culture says we are; a bunch of plaid-shirted, granola-addicted hippies. But in an even larger part we are what I saw back in the Eighties when I was posted abroad; we are Panama.

Just like República de Panamá, Oregon is effectively two separate states.

There's the city - Portland - that is predominantly liberal and Democratic. And the "country", the rural areas outside the metro area, which are largely "conservative" and Republican. Yes, there are some blue islands - smaller cities like Eugene, Salem, and Bend - but the demographic hasn't really budged since I moved here nearly thirty years ago. Slightly more than half of Oregon lives within a thirty-minute drive of downtown Portland, and we vote Left (or left-ish). We broke for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary in 2016, and Hillary in the general.

The remainder lives in the hustings and votes Trump.

And, make no mistake - the Oregon GOP was Trump before Trump was Trump. We had a long period where the proto-teabaggers ate away the GOP's brain from the inside. We had tax revolters and Christopaths and ammosexuals that became the animating force of the Oregon GOP and were, as such, so utterly neofeudal and theocratic and insane with the sort of guns-God-gays cult insanity that now rules the national GOP that they turned the stomach of most of the rest of Oregon outside the real cows-outnumber-the-people yick-a-hoo rural fiefdoms. Oregon has become a deep-blue-purple state not so much because Oregonians are commies, but because the "conservatives" here became red-meat, right-wing whackaloons along with the rest of their Party, and the folks who hadn't drunk the Kool-ade were horrified and repelled.

To the point where the GOP is now a pathetic appendix in the Oregon House and a minority in the Senate.

This is the direct result, let me reiterate not of some sort of weed-induced liberal coup, but of the Oregon GOP's utter batshit teabaggery. The Republicans here have stood for things that even fairly "moderate conservatives" couldn't stomach. They've gutted the tax system and starved the schools. They've let the roads and pipelines go to hell. They've completely resisted even the most mild and sensible firearm regulation. They've tried again and again - since we have the "ballot measure" direct democracy system - to push the queers back in the closet and the rule of law on women's wombs.

They're bog-standard deplorable Trumpkins, in other words.

Here's a perfect example; this is a sample of what's on the Oregon legislature docket for this session:

House Bill 3427, a taxation measure that would fund education through imposition of a "corporate activity tax".
House Bill 2007, which would establish deadlines for cleaner trucks and require large state public construction projects to use vehicles with cleaner engines.
House Bill 2016, a pro-labor bill that would block public access to public employees’ information and lock many requirements that are currently negotiated during collective bargaining into state law.
House Bill 2020, a far-reaching cap and trade plan to limit greenhouse gas emissions in Oregon.
House Bill 3063, which passed the House on Monday and would eliminate loopholes in Oregon’s vaccination mandate.
Senate Bill 750, which Republicans described in their document as the “bounty hunter bill.” It would authorize lawyers to enforce public contracting, minimum wage and other labor laws that currently only state labor regulators and the Department of Justice can enforce, according to a state document.
Senate Bill 978, a package of gun law changes including penalties for some gun owners who fail to lock up their weapons and a provision to allow gun dealers to refuse to sell guns to people younger than 21.
House Bill 2014, which passed the House earlier this year and would lift the cap on damages juries can award for so-called “pain and suffering.”

None of these are particularly looney-left, and several of them - in particular HB3427, HB2007, HB3062, and SB978 - are favored, and favors strongly, by anywhere between a bare majority to a supermajority of Oegonians.

In a functioning republic the legislature would debate these issues but the majority would rule. The whole IDEA of a republic is that the government acts on the citizen's convictions as expressed through the ballot box.

The Oregon GOP could "debate" - but would lose - on these measures because, well, their convictions have been such an anathema to the citizens that their place in government has been reduced to a cipher.

Because a majority of the people of Oregon ain't buying what the GOP was and is selling.

The Republicans' solution?

They've run away.

Seriously.

The GOP legislators have fled the state and effectively stopped the legislature's business by denying the Senate a quorum.

Now...this isn't just a GOP thing. When the Republicans controlled the legislature (which they did until about a decade ago) the Democrats did something similar when the GOP introduced something fairly draconian - IIRC it was an abortion-restriction bill - and forced the GOP to back off.

The difference here is that Oregon in general doesn't give a shit about abortion. Anti-abortion ballot measures have died by big losses every time the bible-bangers have gotten them on the ballot.

This is the Oregon GOP seeing the "will of the people" and telling The People; "Fuck you!"

And what does our Oregon paper of record do about this?

Does the front page of the Oregonian's online newspaper open with the screaming banner headline: "Oregon GOP STILL thwarting the People's Will!!!"?

Ummm...no.

You wanna know about "warding off depression" by drinking coffee? Which of your favorite TV shows got cancelled? "Why moms rank as our No. 1 heroes, while dads come in distant second.", or how somebody fucking shot a fucking dog in fucking SE Portland? The Oregonian is your go-to news site.

You wanna know how your political will is getting fucked by Oregon's Republican minority?

You gotta hunt through the below-the-fold "politics" section, and do it yourself. If you're a "low-information" (i.e. about 85% of the public) voter? You're either gonna give up long before that or not even start.

This - this - is how you take a republic into that laboratory...and inject it with a whomping dose of poison, and fucking kill it.

You ensure that a small group of cult dead-enders place their own fanaticism above the public weal. You ensure that the "news media" either doesn't report it at all, or, when it does, "both-sides" the shit out of it so Joe and Mary Lunchpail can't tell that it's one side that's shooting the hostage. And then you wait, while the bulk of the public doesn't understand why the things they think that a good government is supposed to do - like keep the schools open and keep nutters away from firearms and regulate dangers like dirty air and filthy water - don't get done.

And, eventually, the People give up on government, and either don't care, or openly welcome the Man on Horseback that comes promising that the trains will run on time.

While all eyes are drawn to the freak show in the White House, out here in Oregon we're giving you an experiment. An experiment in terror, frankly, that shows how easy it is to kill a republic.

Nearly 150 years before Justice Brandis concluded that the states would provide lab rats for the American Experiment another pretty well-known public figure observed that the important thing about republics wasn't getting them, but keeping them.

That's not looking particularly good out here in the great Northwest.

Shoeless Ruminations

This post germinated from a couple of seeds.

First, my own body. Because although my surgeon got me a lot of leg length back he didn't get me everything. I'm still about 3/8 to 1/2 inch shorter on the right side than the left. Meaning? That walking barefoot for any distance is fairly hard on me and, in practice, means that I can't go barefoot other than for short distances indoors.

And, second, an article in the World's Worst Newspaper advocating going barefoot as much as possible. I've tried to find it on the paper's website but it seems to have disappeared.

But the gist of it was a local mom (or dad) advocating for kids' playing barefoot as much as possible in the form of an anecdote about her/his kids shucking shoes-and-socks and the shocked reaction of the other parents at the playground.

Note that this is entirely expected here, where a substantial proportion of us embrace every "natural" and "paleo" and "organic" and "local" and whatever-isn't-whitebread-and-mainstream thing you can imagine. Raw milk, antiflouridation, tattoos, kids going naked until puberty, hipster this and hipster that...the people they make fun of on Portlandia? Yeah, that's kind of us. A lot of us, anyway.

Portland, BTW, is very much a Skinnerbox for that particular subset of barefoot enthusiasts, the barefoot runner. Despite our nasty cold, wet winters and our urban setting we have a fairly large number of people out pounding the pavement (or the trail) sans shoes and, often, railing against the shoes as the worst thing to happen to feet since the ingrown toenail.

So I wasn't surprised that Oregon's Newspaper would print something like this. What surprised me was my instinctive reaction to it; that the author made a case that was only effective prima facie, and that there were a lot of potential problems she didn't address.

So do I think that walking around barefoot is a bad idea? Hell, no. I'd love to be able to walk barefoot again. Like running (and playing soccer, and squash, and about a gajillion other things) I am now unable to do that, but I like to kick my shoes off as much as anyone.

At the same time, as a medic, and as someone who has seen something of the lesser-paved parts of the world, and has studied a little history, I also have a certain ambivalence to the notion of the average Portlander (or the average person in an industrial-Western-culture-type society) wandering around barefoot.

For one thing, we're not born to it. Aboriginal cultures that live their lives barefoot typically have a thick layer of callus on their soles that act as form of sandal; most of us don't have that nor do we have the years of ambling about skyclad from the ankle down to develop it.

For another, our industrial landscape is not friendly to bare feet. Pavement is unforgiving and the sort of litter we produce includes some really nasty dangers; metal, glass, plastic, and half a dozen other sorts of objects that will rip the hell out of even the toughest sole.

Another is the sort of historical amnesia you tend to see when antivaccination quacks turn up. Sorry, barefooters, but that's the comparison that comes to mind; you guys just seem very blithe about some very nasty diseases that love to attack your bare feet. It's been so long since most of us had to live barefoot that we tend to forget the hookworm, strongyloidiasis, and cutaneous larva migrans that were fairly common hazards for people before the widespread adoption of shoes.

And people DID widely adopt shoes, long before the coercive power of advertising made having this or that possession the key to coolness and riches and power and getting laid a lot. The Fort Rock people made themselves sandals damn near 10,000 years ago.

Even without the hammering feet take on pavement or the risk of picking up a nasty parasite the universal hazard of stones, thorns, even things like the sharp edges of dry leaves are damn hard on the foot. You could see why as soon as they can people would try and come up with some sort of gimmick to protect their feet.

So I guess that while I'm not completely hating the notion of floating about bare-toed I'm not sure that the idea is right up there with not getting involved in a land war in Asia as a no-brainer.

So, anyway, I'm curious; anybody else got any thoughts on this barefoot thing? Any particular insight or ideas on this? In your opinion is the Oregonian writer spot-on on the wonder of leaping about shoeless, completely off-balance, or is this more a case of being largely where I am; not utterly agin it but with a lot of reservations..?

Just random musing for a Monday...

"Just walk away, Cletus..."

Dear remaining traitors in arms.

No. Not just no, but fuck no.

The only place you get to be a heroic rebel and then use your awesome Jedi mind powers to force the Evil Stormtroopers that you're not the rebellious fucksticks they're looking for is in George Lucas' head.

So when you say:

"We are willing to leave peacefully...if the FBI will let us leave without arrest or forcing us through the checkpoint, we will all go home."

you're talking complete nonsense. It don't work that way, Cletus.

And CNN? When traitors in arms tell you that they will either walk away without facing the consequences of their armed sedition or they will make the earth and sky red with blood? That's not "saying they're ready to leave peacefully". That's demanding that they escape the consequences of their armed sedition and giving the rest of us peaceful citizens the big ol' rebel-in-arms finger.

Figure it out, goddamn.

But you...you're going to get a wonderful choice, my dear traitors.

You are going to get to surrender without being hung out of hand as has been the traditional fate of traitors in arms. You will get an expensive and public trial in which you are very likely to be given a ridiculously vast amount of privilege to spout your idiotic, treasonous nonsense and justify your greedy and selfish seizure of our public patrimony. And, even if you are convicted of the crimes you have so self-evidently committed, you will have careful and relatively benign jailers who will ensure that you are released unharmed to resume your deluded and delusional defiance of both republican government and common sense which I know you will because...well, you're you and can no more stop being you than a howler monkey can stop flinging its poop.

In short, you are some seriously lucky sonsofbitches and you need to accept that and go quietly to the lawmen and surrender.

Before your fellow traitors find out why the snacks were gone.

Because, looking at you?

It's not that hard to guess where all the Cheetos went, genius, and no matter how slow your pals are they'll figure it out eventually and then who's gonna save you when they go all Second Amendment Solution on your porky ass?

Just sayin'.

Joo keep using dat word...

From Sunday's edition of the World's Worst Newspaper:

So. Let's see. "Free federal lands" is Oregonianspeak for these douchenozzles' expressed intention; "take what public land we want, pay nothing for it, and we have guns, so, freedom!"

What a shock!

It turns out that a group of armed traitors to their government believes that their "...government has no constitutional authority to hold vast land tracts" and, instead, think that "freeing" these lands means that they should be able to take them for themselves and do with them what they want.

Free the lands!

Well, okay, free them until I can take them, fence them, and run my cattle all over them.

But oh, you whacky Oregonian editors and your "free"! Are you joshing me, you pranksters, or do you really think that "free" means what these goddamn traitors say it means? Next thing you know you'll be expecting me to believe that "free" means what the North American Man-Boy Love Association says it means; that men should be free to poke young lads up the backside!

Free!

What's infuriating about this - beyond confirming the overall spinelessness of the response to this fucking armed insurrection - is the World's Worst Newspaper being a willing accomplice to these traitors' vomiting their nonsense all over the public record.

The only remotely-nice thing about Oregon's Paper of Record bending over for the Bundy Bandidos like a debutante at a NAMBLA key-drop party is that it allowed my own personal favorite Oregonian Ursula LeGuin to come out swinging her Big Battle Axe of Fuck Your Stupid Bullshit and lop off the empty gourd that this idiot Payne uses to keep his cowboy hat off his shoulders:

Ammon Bundy and his bullyboys aren't trying to free federal lands, but to hold them hostage. I can't go to the Malheur refuge now, though as a citizen of the United States, I own it and have the freedom of it. That's what public land is: land that belongs to the public — me, you, every law-abiding American. The people it doesn't belong to and who don't belong there are those who grabbed it by force of arms, flaunting their contempt for the local citizens. Those citizens of Harney County have carefully hammered out agreements to manage the refuge in the best interest of landowners, scientists, visitors, tourists, livestock and wildlife. They're suffering more every day, economically and otherwise, from this invasion by outsiders. Instead of parroting the meaningless rants of a flock of Right-Winged Loonybirds infesting the refuge, why doesn't The Oregonian talk to the people who live there?

Get some, Ursula!

Erik Loomis over at Lawyers, Guns & Money has some more on this, but for Oregon's only daily newspaper to act as the butt-trumpet for these fetid droppings of the Right Wing fever swamps is unacceptable and beyond a mockery of journalism. But that's why it's the World's Worst Newspaper, after all.

Meanwhile, we're still fucking losing the fucking Whiskey Fucking Rebellion.

Men and leggings and living with them both.

So I open the digital version of the World's Worst Newspaper this morning and there's this:

"Why I Chose to No Longer Wear Leggings...(Veronica) Partridge, a 25-year-old Christian, felt conflicted about modesty, she writes in the post, and talked with her husband about whether or not leggings are appropriate as pants. He told her that it's hard for him not to look at other women wearing the tight athletic wear. She wrote: "And at that moment, I made a personal vow to myself and to my husband. I will no longer wear thin, form-fitting yoga pants or leggings in public."

And I thought, oh, Ronnie.

Ronnie, Ronnie, Ronnie...

You and me, girlfriend. We need to have a little talk.

Well, OK, first, let me admit; this wasn't the first time I'd heard of this leggings-deal. I ran across it the other night skimming Fred Clarke's blog Slacktivist, where he kinda slammed you not for your obsession with "modesty" but for your misprision of the central tenets of your Christianity:

"For white American evangelicals, religion is always about sex — about other people’s genitals, but when Jesus spoke about modesty of dress it was never about sex and lust. It was about money and greed and self-indulgence at the expense of those in need. If you’re striving for “biblical modesty,” that is the core and the whole of what the Bible itself has to say about leggings and yoga pants: “Whoever has two pair of leggings must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise."

Which is in itself all well and good from a religious-good-doing sort of perspective. Though I should note that I tend to agree with Fred that Dale's comment was sort of a dick move. Sorry, Ron, but he was implying that it is haaaard to be faithful to you with those darn sluts prancing around in yoga pants. But that's a whole 'nother thing.

Thing is, sorry, I'm not a Christian like Fred (who is a pretty insightful guy and a fellow Jesus-pesterer; you might give him a read, just sayin'...) I'm just some random atheist. So I can't really help you on the whole "Christian morality" thing.

But.

I, like your husband Dale the "serial entrepreneur", am a guy. Dude. Vato. Hombre. Mensch. Fella. Goombah. We're both members of the He-Man Chest-Beater Club, sharers of the descended testicles, and we have a lot in common, saint and sinner the two of us.

And I thought we should reeeeeeally talk about this whole thing you said Dale said to you. Accoring to your blog "...he told me, “yeah, when I walk into a place and there are women wearing yoga pants everywhere, it’s hard to not look. I don’t, but it’s not easy.”

And, Ronnie, love ya, sweetie, bless your heart, but I'm here as a guy to tell you; Dale's lying his dear little Christian ass off.

"Looks?" Of course he looks. We ALL look.

Why?

Because we like you.

Sure, he loves you as a person, as a wife, mother of your kids, helpmeet, companion, lover. But...he's also a heterosexual guy. So he likes you as a woman.

Meaning he likes women. Women, plural. Women in general.

We're like that, us het guys. We may like some women as individual friends. We may love some - or, one, hopefully as in your case - as our inamorata, our one-and-only, our Bride, our Delight. But those are personality things, emotional things, spiritual things, individual things.

But we also like women. Physically. Generically. Generally. En masse. As a class of beings. We like how they look, how their voices sound, how they move, how they stand. We like how their faces fit together, how their hair falls, how they look hipshot, or sitting, or dancing, or sleeping. We like the high curve of the tops of their breasts, the slender taper of their fingers (or the square sturdiness of their hands - women come in a delightful assortment of sizes, shapes, and proportions, and that's another thing we like about them). We like the swell of their hips, and the roundness of their bottoms, the intricate curve where their belly meets their thigh.

We like how they laugh when they're silly, the frown that furls their brow when they're thinking. And...I hope this doesn't shock you, dear, but we like making love to them and we think about that from time to time when we look at them.

We don't really think about having sex with them when we see those women in their yoga pants and leggings.

Because, I'm sorry to say, dear, we don't need the yoga pants and leggings to think about having sex with them.

We don't need leggings...or yoga pants, or pantyhose or high heels or pushup bras or bustiers. We don't need accessories or special outfits or fetish wear. We're guys, Ronnie. Guys! We can look at a cool stylish matron in a chic suit and think of lust in the back of a limo. Or a ponytailed jogger in Nikes and imagine sweaty gym sex. Or the tattooed barista at the coffeeshop and picture wild lovemaking in a loft full of modern art.

Hell, don't even get me started on burkas or habits or granny shoes, darlin'. We're men and all of life is one ginormous Rule 34 for us. We look, and we think, and...if we love you, that's all we do.

Just looking - and thinking - doesn't mean we're going to tear off their yoga pants in a mad frenxy of lust. It doesn't mean that anytime we see a woman in a cute outfit, or a bathing suit, that we're gonna screw the poor girl to the wall. We may think about how pretty and sexy they are. We may get a little thrill of excitement looking at them.

But then we take all that home and if we're lucky get to feel and think the same way about you.

My own Bride, who is a very sensible and pragmatic woman, has a term for it: "You go ahead and work up an appetite wherever you want, big guy. Just come home to eat."

She knows we look, and she knows we know she knows, and she's okay with that. She's a smart woman and she knows that if what we have is good, and strong, and right that the looking is no more than enjoyment, and that she will reap the benefits.

And so can you so long as you remember this simple little rule: Guys Are Gonna Look - It Doesn't Matter What You Wear

So you pull on those Carharts, Ronnie dear, if it makes you feel better. But just remember - it's not about the leggings. It's about the legs, and he's gonna think about those legs - yours, hers, your Aunt Louise's - and probably will no matter if you and every other woman within sight are dressed in goddamn garbage sacks.

Maundering in the Dead Time

I think I've mentioned this before.

(In fact, I know I did; it was this time last year...)

The week between Christmas and the New Year always seems to me to be a very odd sort of aimless, drifting period; I called it "the Dead Time" in last year's post. Maybe that comes from my Army days, when at this time of year we went to a half-day schedule, loafing off waiting for the holidays to pass and the new working year to begin.

Or perhaps it's just that this is a kind of rudderless time, when many of us just take our foot off the throttle and lay back for a week or so.

The kiddos are out of school and - if the past week has been any indication - are lazing about watching videos and playing videogames.

My Bride has the fortnight off, as well, and is overwatching the larvae to the degree required. My workplace is ludicrously silent. I have about four hours of work today - already receipted and filed - and another four this Wednesday, and then a full day of work Friday, and that's it. I have no friggin' notion of what to do tomorrow. Perhaps in the grand Soviet tradition I will pretend to work and my corporate master will pretend to pay me.

So in the spirit of the week, here are some idle ruminations.

Fallows has a worthwhile article up about the ongoing disconnect between our American pretense of "enthusiasm" for "the troops" and our actual ignorance of and indifference to said "troops". We've talked this one to death - it was the primary subject of last year's "dead time" post right here - but the situation hasn't changed. We the People are still far too well insulated from the geopolitical consequences of our political stupidity as well as the lives and deaths of those we send into the arena to be whipped with rods, burned with fire, and killed with steel.

That cannot be a good thing, for them or us.

And I should add that the one thing the Fallows article discusses is the one thing that really irks the shit out of me about the present reflexive warrior-worship:

"Americans admire the military as they do no other institution. Through the past two decades, respect for the courts, the schools, the press, Congress, organized religion, Big Business, and virtually every other institution in modern life has plummeted. The one exception is the military. Confidence in the military shot up after 9/11 and has stayed very high. In a Gallup poll last summer, three-quarters of the public expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the military. About one-third had comparable confidence in the medical system, and only 7 percent in Congress."

Don't get me wrong. You don't, as I did, spend more than two decades in an armed service without loving the hell out of it. Well, not if you're a 20th and 21st Century American and have other options than those forced on you by Sergeant Winter.

But...I also know all the fucked up and stupid things that my Army and my fellow soldiers and officers did, and do. The U.S. Army is no different than any other immense organization, and there's always more than enough ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision to go around. You know that. You've worked for GigantoCorp, or dealt with MegaLocity, Inc. Throw in the immensely-fucked-up-by-its-very-nature qualities of war? You get a Perfect Storm of fucktardry.

It's inescapable.

The reality is that in war people get killed and maimed and fucked-up, or get other people killed, maimed, and fucked-up, for stupid reasons, or for no reason at all. Weapons and equipment fail (they're made by the lowest bidder, remember..?), lethal stuff goes the wrong direction. Wrong turns, bad choices, confused instructions and, above all, mind-numbingly pointless random shit that just happens.

Shit just happens.

You try to tell normal people this and they nod solemnly like they understand. But they're kidding themselves, and you. They have no idea, and because they have no idea they have no real understanding that every time they support some pencil-headed cracker ranting about "drawing a line in the sand" and "fighting them there" they're inviting all this random shit out into the daylight to kill and maim and fuck-up the people they send to do this drawing and fighting.

Anyway, that's just the Way Things Are and I have no hope that they will change or expectation they will change, but I sure wish I thought that some sort of change was possible.

And while we're on the subject, Ta-nehisi Coates has some smart things to say about the subject of police, society, and how they intersect in the same issue.

Off the subject...

I know sort of in a "I know this exists but don't really pay attention" sort of way that there are all sorts of creative-type people who produce stories and artwork based on George Lucas' Star Wars universe (largely based on my son's early fascination with the brand).

But I'd never seen these: Imperial (and Rebel) propaganda posters.

But...makes sense, right? Two factions fighting for control of the same polity...why wouldn't they have their own Office of Special Services cranking out propaganda. Whatever the Umpteieth-Century version of YouTube videos would be, pamphlets, and, of course, posters.

Cool.

So...speaking of movies and did I mention the Girl's thing with getting up early?

She's always been my light sleeper, ever since she was a tiny. Her current position is that her back bedroom creeps her out because "it's near the basement and there are spiders there". So she wakes up in the early predawn, takes her blanket, shuffles into the front room and curls up on the couch. She usually goes back to sleep (though not always, and often not deeply) so that when I wake up early - and other than Little Miss I am the earliest riser in the Little House - she is there when I get my coffee and settle on the couch to check the weather and traffic. She usually cuddles up to me and we share a quiet time until I have to get dressed for work.

Usually I turn off the television after I get the weather report. There's just not much on the damn thing, anyway, and usually even less at oh-five-thirty. But every so often I spend a moment or two channel-surfing and it was doing that this morning that I blundered across Land of Doom.

The benefits of early-morning television are subtle. For example, had I not encountered this treasure I would have been forever ignorant that in Land of Doom's post-apocalyptic hellscape the one thing everyone will have is...hair.

Lots and lots of ginormous mall hair.

Oh, and studded leather. And vehicles with bizarre, pointlessly jagged (or jaggedly pointless..?) sheet metal finials.

But mostly big hair. Maybe that's what's really in store for us after the Third World War; cannibals, studded leather, and Eighties mall hair.

Or maybe it was just the Eighties.

The best thing about this rascal was that the heroine, "Harmony", had the least-poofy mall hair of any of the leads. Her 'do was downright post-apoca-thenticly ratty looking.

The worst thing, though, was that she also had no visible acting talent, or, at best, no more than the other leads and her character was written so as to expose the worst of her liability - "Harmony" was kind of a grouchy asshole. Understandable in the rapey, leather-studded-mall-hair world of post-apocalyptic whereever, but hard to make her or the actress who played her appealing.

"Harmony"'s lack-of-anything-approaching-charisma actually got me running to IMBD and Wikipedia to track down the woman who played her and, mirable dictu, she turns out to have been a very dim Eighties sort of star; Deborah Rennard, whose claim to what-passes-for-fame is that she played "J.R. Ewing's loyal secretary Sylvia "Sly" Lovegren" (according to her Wiki entry).

Now that may be the most-Eighties-form of "celebrity" I can think of. Seriously. "One of J.R.'s secretaries on Dallas". Is that perfect, or what? Even a recurring part as one of Thomas Magnum's girlfriends or a dancer in a Robert Plant music video wouldn't have touched all the Eighties bases the way that one does. And it also kind of explains why 1) she got cast in Land of Doom in the first place and 2) why she couldn't act her way out of that post-apocalyptic paper bag. I mean..."one of J.R. Ewing's secretaries..." Roll that one around in your brain a while and consider the sort of "acting talent" it implies. "One of J.R. Ewing's secretaries..."

Fucking boxcar.

Anyway, if you're looking for some Eighties post-apocalyptic-mall-hair goodness don't overlook Land of Doom. Heads do not roll. Fingers roll. Four stars for Deborah Rennard for NOT running around the post-apocalyptic wasteland in a studded metal bikini.

Joe Bob says; check it out.

(And from my searching I note with a sort of muted regret that Ms. Rennard appears to be newly unhitched from her husband of 13 years. Girlfriend paid her dues back in '86 when she filmed this turkey, girlfriend, so I'm sorry to hear that. Ouch, Deb. Damn. Sucks. I've been there.)

And...what else do you do in the Dead Time other than watch bad Eighties flicks?

You read, of course.

So...here's what I'm reading, and some hip-pocket reviews if you're interested;

The Enemy at the Gates (Habsburgs, Ottomans and the Battle for Europe), Andrew Wheatcroft 2007

I picked this up to reasearch the next "battle" post, the 1683 Siege of Vienna, and IMO the NY Times review rates it higher than I would. It's not a bad general-history of the conflict between the Habsburg domains and the Ottomans between the late 16th Century and the early 18th, and Wheatcroft does a decent job of detailing the actual conduct of the siege and the engagement of 12 SEP 1683 that broke it and the Ottoman invasion of south-central Europe. He does much less well at trying to explain the complexity of the relationship between the powers and, particularly, how and why the Ottoman Empire receded in the 19th and 20th Centuries. His attempt to link the conflict to the modern troubles between the Islamic World and the West is even less realized and less successful, coming across as a hastily-tacked-on marketing gimmick rather than a thought-out coda to his historical account.

Well worth the effort, however, if you're interested in the military and political details of the 17th Century Austro-Turkish wars. And, winged hussars, man! What could be fucking cooler than winged hussars? Joe Bob says check THAT out..!

Chicacabra (Tom Beland, 2014)

One thing about drawing cartoons is that I am always on the lookout for work I like by others who draw. This little book caught my eye at my local comic shop and I have already read and re-read it a dozen times. It works on every level; as a memoir (the artist talks about how he pulled a great deal of his struggle with depression into the story) and as a valentine to his home of Puerto Rico, as an adventure, as a "horror story", and as a momento mori.

Isabel's - the heroine's - world is full of life and yet full of death; her mother is slowly dying and her father is dead. She has tried suicide before we meet her. But she can't quite escape the lively world of San Juan, her friends, her enemies, and, of course, the titular chupacabra who adopts her (or is adopted by her...) and changes everything. The story is complex and fun, the characters are lively and likeable (even the "bad guy"), and it's above all a hell of a good read.

Of course all of this would be unworkable if the artwork was poor, but Beland finds a nice balance between realism and "comic" in his linework and his composition is outstanding; the story balances his words and his pictures to move forward seamlessly. I admit; I'm a sucker for "clean" lines, and Beland's are impeccable. The rumor is that there's another in the works, and I'm already ready.

Oh...one last item...

Let me start by saying that I yield to no one in my contempt for the Worst Newspaper in the World (by the way...did I ever get around to mentioning that the Oregonian now only actually publishes a print edition something like twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays? No shit. Really. We are a "major city" without a daily paper, not that the O, with it's assload of wire-service copy and idiotic "human interest" stories was any piece of work when it did run every day...) and I like to think that I've been pretty consistent in that contempt here ever since the days of the Death Cat back in 2007.

But.

Every so often I get caught up in one of these moronic "human interest" stories. Usually it involves someone being stupid, naked, or both, but pets may be involved, too, as they are here, in the tale of Camo the Cat and The Giant Box Spring:

"Camo used to like to hide in a hole in her box spring when he was upset. Dufek didn't know that, though, because Crews had taped over the hole and shielded it with boxes when she was using the box spring.

So, when Dufek tried to be a helpful boyfriend and sell her bed while she was at work, he neglected to check for felines in the box spring.

My ass. I call bullshit; I think he was toasted. I mean...think about it. He was home selling shit on Craigslist while she was working? So, unemployed much? So loafer boyfriend smokes a big ol' bowl of now-legal-in-Oregon "Hillsboro Windowbox" and by the time he wrestles the box spring out the door and down to the buyer's car he's so fried he couldn't hear the cat if it had been meowing the fucking Anvil Chorus and hammering on a kettledrum.

Sorry. Anyway...

He realized his mistake minutes after helping the buyer strap the bed to the roof of a car. But by then, Camo was off on his unexpected adventure."

Adventure is right. This poor moggie got rocketed across the Tualatin Valley on top of some joker's car because "helpful" boyfriend sells it along with a box spring, ended up (I'm guessing) tumbling out around the airfield in Hillsboro and spending a week or so lost, frightened, and injured.

But...there's a happy ending; kitty was found and brought back to its owner who - hopefully - either gets a box spring without a cat flap or a smarter boyfriend.

Or both.

That's all I got. Hope your Dead Time is more fun and productive than mine..!

Some son-of-a-bitch would die

Filed under the heading of "can we have a better effing media" is this article from the LA Times; L.A. gun buyback yields rocket launcher, assault weapons.

"A $2,000 pair of pocket pistols and a military rocket launcher -- sans rocket -- were among the 1,673 firearms that Los Angeles residents traded in for gift cards in the city’s gun buyback this weekend."

reads the first paragraph of this little item.

Charlie Pierce goes wild with this, asking;

"Who in the holy hell goes out and buys a freaking rocket launcher? What are you hunting? Traffic helicopters? And then, who in the holy hell turns it in to the cops? Shouldn't this engage the interest of the FBI's crack Set-Up-The-Loonies unit that has been so successful elsewhere?"

and on the face of it, given the newspaper article, his concern seems like a legitimate one.

But - speaking as someone who has had his rocket launchers in the day - wellll...let's just say that there are "rocket launchers" and "rocket launchers".

If this thing was, say, the "launcher" section from an RPG-7, well, that's bad. That really is a "rocket launcher"; you get your hands on the grenade round and you're in business.

But if this thing was - as I suspect it was - the dunnage from an old LAW or an AT-4, well, frankly, that's just a piece of fiberglass pipe. It's expendable, and is somewhere between difficult and impossible to reload. It's issued as a unit, launcher and projectile, and once it's fired the "launcher's" only real use as a weapon is as a bludgeon and not a very effective one, at that.

I will not disagree that the U.S. is pretty freaking ridiculous on who can tote around what weapon and why, but not sure that the whole "rocket launcher" thing here is really the cherry on the top of the self-licking ice cream sundae.

But you'd never know that from this article, and I suspect that there's one of two reasons for that;

First, it's possible that the LAPD did not produce the "rocket launcher" for the reporter, or describe it other than as such. In which case, one would think that the stupid fucking reporter would have asked an actual question, you know, like reporters in movies do, about the exact nature of this weapon.

Or, second, it's possible that the police DID produce the thing, and the reporter stared at it like a cow at the minutes of the Council of Trent, and ambled away as fucking clueless as he was before seeing it.

It's hard to tell which is worse.

But what is telling is that Charlie had a neat little quote from James Madison in his blog the following day:

“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”

-- James Madison to W.T Barry, August 4, 1822

which sums up the utter fuckupitude that this little newspaper article represents.

In our current civilization We the People are asked to make many decisions on issues we have no personal knowledge of, in places we have never visited, and with information perforce supplied by others.

And the only way we can arm ourselves with the power of knowledge on these issues, from wars to traffic law, is through the reportage of others.

But if this article does anything, it shows how a simple question of physical fact - one that could have been clarified with a single, simple question - can be rendered not just completely, utterly useless but actively misleading - "OMFG, there are rocket launchers out there on the streets of LA!!!!" - through the total incompetence and ignorance of one local reporter.

And this is to completely elide the pernicious influence of maliciously deliberate liars of the Glenn Beckian sort.

It remains in me, therefore, no real sense of wonder that we are so thoroughly fucked.

Update 5/24 p.m.: In the Comments section over at Milpub where this was cross-posted, Andy (one of our most reliable regulars here - the next round's on me, Andy...) does his usual thorough job of fact-finding and tracks this nonsense down further. He finds a photo of this fearsome weapon of mass destruction at the Bakersfield TV station site and notes that it is, as suspected, an inerted training aid - in this case, of a U.S. AT-4.

So, no, the streets of LA are not in danger of becoming Beirut or Ramadi, LA Times, as a few simple questions would have established.

Grrrrr.

Why, oh why, can we not have a better fricking media?!?

Here and There

Busy week since the last post.

The Women's World Cup roared into the final with a pair of runaway semifinal matches; one more-or-less as expected with the USWNT defeating the overachieving Frenchwomen of Les Bleues 3-1, the other something of a shock as the Nadeshiko of Japan saw off the Swedes by a similar score.Interesting. Did you know that the nickname of the Japanese women's national team means the "personification of the idealized Japanese woman"? Seriously. And Japan being Japan, this means "acting for the benefit of the family, loyalty, domestic ability, wisdom, and humility"If there was a worse description of the JWNT I can't think of it. Their play was characterized by a ferocious tenacity. In England a certain type of footballer is referred to as a "terrier" and the Japanese women were the most terrorist of terriers in the Cup finals. You could count on one thing - they would keep coming at you. Down a goal to the Swedes, they pulled back first one, then another, and finally a third. They played an surprisingly effective possession game, finished efficiently, and seldom made errors.

By contrast the USWNT played as they had all the way up to the final, combining moments of inspiration with minutes of utter chaos. In particular, the US backline was a trouble spot against France as it was all tournament. Coach Sundhage at least recognized that Amy LePeilbet's lack of speed was a real weakness against decent forwards by shifting Chris Rampone over to left inside back to help her out. The Americans were still level in the second half before two lovely goals within three minutes put them through to the final.

Too much has been written about the final match for me to add much of note. It was a splendid show of football, 120 minutes of turn and turnabout that ended in that most unfortunate of modern accommodations to the tyranny of electronic mdeia, the penalty kick shootout.

The Nadeshiko were worthy champions. As they had all tournament they never stopped, never gave up. Down a goal they pulled one back in regular time; down another, they found an equalizer with three minutes left to play in extra time. Needing to win on penalties they made what they had to make. They lift a well deserved trophy as the best in the world.The USWNT was left with a bitter draught.

Although they were not at fault on Japan's second goal in the run of play the first was a dreadful, fundamental error - fullback 101; never, never clear the ball across the face of your own goal. The U.S. backs were panicked and acting randomly and the Japanese forwards made them pay for it.

The US finishing was appallingly wasteful. Although the Americans took three shots to Japan's one most of their strikes were not on frame. Even though they had about half the possession and many opportunities they could not find the strike to put the match away.

And their penalty taking was just dire. Missing one penalty kick is not good play. Missing three is inexcusable, and the American women will have a long two years to reflect on what might have been.The Japanese team itself, and much of the world's press, have made much of the "triumph" of the Nadeshiko over the tragedy of this spring's earthquake and tsunami, as though a fragile victory on a faraway playing field can rebuild the shattered houses and stores and factories, can console the bereft, can restore the land and people that were broken. And, certainly, for some in Japan there must be some nepenthe in enjoying the success of their women's national team.

But today the wonderful two hours are cold ink on forgotten newspaper, and the people in Tōhoku who celebrated yesterday will waken to face another day of grim rebuilding.Somehow I don't think that they are still celebrating.

In England all the news is about the "phone-hacking" crimes committed by Rupert Murdoch's employees. The English, and, increasingly, other peoples in other nations are heaping coals on Murdoch's head as evidence of his organization's contempt for laws, rules, common decency, and common sense piles up. Much public commentary on the terrible consequences in store for the media mogul amid lots of schadenfreude over the public spanking of the old swine and his lackeys.But, really.

When did anyone, any sane human, any functionally rational hominid with more than a rudimentary hindbrain think that giving this man - or any man, for that matter - the sort of power that Murdoch has over the Western "democracies" was a good idea?

And while Murdoch's personality - a crude, bullying shitweasel lacking anything resembling "morals", "compassion", or "introspection" - makes his immense unearned power all the worse because of the use he puts it to, the entire notion of allowing any single individual that sort of power is deeply, fundamentally flawed.

After all, in our modern far-flung polities we cannot hope to participate in the kabuki of citizenship without information. Information - news, gossip, rumor, research, muckraking - is power, real power. The capability to shape this information is power. And while we in the democracies have jealously doled out our political power in bits to prevent the autocratic accumulation of that power we have carelessly looked on without a murmur whilst this loathsome little man scrabbled up huge masses of it.

Now he is in difficulty because of the very sort of drives that drove him to amass that power - insatiable greed, brutal disregard of anyone's welfare but his own - caused him to break yet another set of rules. And why should we be surprised? The man has been honest about his contempt for the entire notion of "community". He is the epitome of a modern "conservative"; a selfish thug whose only limits are the capacity of his own lusts, a bloated Falstaff with a copy of Ayn Rand in place of his bottle of sack, a cartoon of a plutocrat, sneering and mocking the common scum too little and too frightened to prevent him from taking what he wanted, a caricature of a man who has no respect for anything but a boot in the face. He was born for this.

But more to the point - anyone in his situation would be dangerous, madly, insanely dangerous, as dangerous to democratic government as a viper in an unmade bed, as an unlabeled bottle of toxin in a medicine cabinet. His clutch on the information business should have been a concern of every sensible citizen of the US and UK (not to mention his spawning beds in Australia) years ago, regardless of whether he was publishing paeans to their policies or not. He was and is not the symptom but the disease, the slow, fatal poison of arrogant stupidity and blind partisan rancor that shouts its beliefs so loudly that, regardless of their value, the warnings of danger and threat cannot be heard over the moronic din. In the throes of the late stage Murdoch Syndrome an entire society can strut off a cliff because it is convinced by its own noise that the cliff doesn't exist, and that those tiny voices warning of danger are the rantings of dirty hippies who hate profit and patriotism.

Will anything come of this latest bit of dirty Murdochism?But at this point expecting our debased "democracies" - where elections have degenerated into auctions, and legislatures into brothels sucking and humping for the wealthy and powerful pimps that own them - to actually do anything about the vile Murdoch's grip on information power would be like expecting one of those debased catamites to become Solon.

No. In this, as in everything else, our own luxury, ignorance, and sloth will assure that Cousin Rupert will be invited to continue to grease our long national descent into servitude and ignominy.

And, as if to make my point with a vicious humor, the ridiculous mummery over the U.S. "debt ceiling" continues. I won't even bother to discuss it. What's the point in trying to dissect which bozo is using a bigger hammer to hit himself, his opponent, and every bystander within arm's length, harder than the other bozo?

Make no mistake; the United States has always been an oligarchy.

But at least one time the oligarchs were men who took themselves and their duty to their nation seriously. They might have been rapacious bastards intent on enriching themselves, but they at least did it with a sense of the importance of the stage on which they acted. Now all that it seems to require to take part in the Washington carnival is a monstrous ego and a complete lack of shame or personal integrity. The small handful of decent souls on the Left, like our junior Senator from Oregon, are left, like orphans in the storm, to look around them and wonder what will remain when the foul winds cease and the successors of our idiot polity emerge to claim the ruins.

What degree of fools with they think us, I wonder?

While wide and abroad the ignorant teatards clash by night we here in Portland are enjoying quite the cool, wet summer. The poor Mojo Grandparents aren't quite sure what to say. They've been here visiting for the month of July and so far we've managed to rain on them several times. I tell them it's global climate change and they just look about them in a sort of disbelieving incomprehension. Their little rental place over near Kenton is lovely, though - we stayed over the past weekend and enjoyed the hot tub and the comfortable Pullman kitchen and the high brass beds. The rain shivering the maple leaves and dappling the dark waters of the koi pond was much cozier viewed from a hot morning ofuro and a steaming cup of the richness of Colombian tilth, earthy as soil and thick with cream.

My little girl left me a message on my cell phone at work today; "Hi" she piped "Are you here, or not? Maybe you are having fun but maybe we can do special stuff! Bye!" You are pretty special stuff yourself, little girl.Meanwhile the Big Boy has discovered a "massive multiplayer online" game called "World of Tanks". He enjoys the heck out of it - though I notice that the magic is palling a little lately - even though he appears to be really terrible at it. His gameplay seems to consist of driving around until someone else shoots him up. Hey...so long as the death and destruction are just pixels.But what does make it difficult for the kid is that for some reason the game designers haven't bothered to try and give the game any sort of tactical context. It's just what is says it is - a world of tanks, clanking around spitting out projectile death like big steel bugs. The problem is that my son had to start like everyone else, with one of three types of light tanks - one, interestingly, being the pre-WW2 German "Leichtetraktor", a purely training vehicle that never fired an actual shot in anger.But the little battles he ends up in usually have one or more medium tanks as well, and the larger Pzkpfw-38t and BT-7 lights tear apart the tiny tankettes as they did back in 1939. And by the time the kiddo gains enough experience points to move up to a heavier light or a medium tank he finds himself in simulated battle against T-34s and Panthers, or M-10s and Easy Eight Shermans with his BT-7 or his Panzer III Ausf. A.I tried to explain that he got beat because in real warfare a light tank is a scouting and screening weapon, intended to face nothing more than machinegun fire of the cannons of other reconnaissance vehicles, and than a recon commander faced with a battalion of medium tanks would quickly pop smoke and grab a hat...that his lack of success against the heavier tanks was an artifact of the roles of the different weapons in actual battles versus the demands of his make-believe World of Tanks.

I don't think he got it.

But, speaking of tanks and just for the record: the Panzer IV really was a hell of a good weapon.I'm not a tank man and for me the big steel foxholes always just looked like shell magnets. But in its time the Sonderkraftfahrzeug 161 went wherever it was sent and fought whoever it found there and did its job damn well. Whether freezing cold, baking heat, rain, mud...the Pzkpfw IV was a reliable tool and a tough enemy, and where weapons are concerned you can't give much higher praise than that. The Germans of WW2 were right bastards; outside of the American Civil War South there isn't another cause in history quite as bad as Nazism. But they made some good weapons, and the ugly, boxy, clunky-looking old panzer did good service in its day.

Did you know that the last Panzer VIs fought in the Levant in 1967?No shit. The story I read is that while the Syrians armed themselves from whoever would sell them weapons the largest number of former German tanks came from France, who were also selling weapons to the new Israeli government and felt that they had to be..."fair". So they sold off some dozens of war-reparation Pzkpfw IVs to the Syrians. In the Six-Day War the Syrian armor attacked along the Golan Heights and were defeated, although with some loss among the Israeli tank corps. Several of the Syrian panzers still remain on the heights, silent reminders of battles long ago.Anything else? No? I guess that's all the blogging for today, then. Back later with the Battle for July.