Cui bono?

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

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

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

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

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

Just sayin'.

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

Every. Single. Interview.

Over and over.

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

"No, I expect you to die." 

These fucking people.

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

One more thought.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the MAGAts Trump is running know that. 

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

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

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

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

Unless...

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

Then you can hope to pluck loot from the chaos.

It worked for Attila.

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

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

Nurture

Yesterday I put up a post about the Whacking of The Nancy that included this comment about the woman who was (depending on who you believe) either the éminence blonde behind the entire plot or an innocent wee slip of a girl betrayed by bad company:

"These were people who were just brutally...marginal; sad, hardscrabble fuckups who were often just one mishap away from being human trainwrecks, deadly combinations of barely-bright, poorly-educated, undisciplined-to-the-point-of-undisciplinable. In the Army we called these sorts of people "shit magnets". “Bad stuff” just “happened” to them; car wrecks, arrests...lost time, lost jobs, lost husbands and wives, lost lives. Tonya was a kind of patron saint for those people..."

This is and was a sad fact rather than an opinion; the world is full of such people, and the wreckage that their shit-magnetry leaves behind.

But I should add this:

It's important to distinguish between the effects of behavior and environment, between the hard work of fucking your life up and the good luck of having a life that's fundamentally hard to fuck up.

Unbolt the tits off Tonya and put the resulting body in an Andover and Yale sweatshirt and you pretty much get George W. Bush; an intellectually stunted, emotionally impaired, ethically flat-lined, greedy, egotistical peckerhead.

Tonya is a convicted petty crook. A substantive case can be made, based on the grounds upon which an international tribunal indicted, tried, convicted, and hanged Hideki Tōjō, that Dubya should be a convicted Class A war criminal.

Not just that little pecadillo binds the two together. Look at the pattern of their lives. One fuckup after another, one stupid decision followed by a period of complete nonreflection followed by another stupid decision. These two people made careers out of putting themselves in positions of public confidence only to do something incredibly boneheaded that made it clear that said confidence was utterly and disastrously misplaced.

So why is it that Tonya is living in an anonymous trailer somewhere east of Terrebone while Dubya is still booking speaking tours and lounging about the in-ground pool at one of the family mansions?

You know why as damn well as I do.

So, while it's popular and entertaining to sneer at the Tonyas of the world - hell, there's a whole business of trumping up television and movies and books - and even a gawdawful checkstand magazine sneering and leering at these poor mooks - the only real difference I see between them and the Dubyas and the William Kennedy Smiths and the Alice Waltons and the Kenny-Boy Lays of the world is what Ernest Hemingway supposedly said when Scott Fitzgerald told him that the Rich are Different:

They just have more fucking money.

So I don't want you think that I'm slagging off on Tonya. Yes, she fucked up.

But when she did she had nothing there to protect her from the consequences of her fuckedupitude. She got one shot and when she screwed it up she fell, like Lucifer, never to rise again.

Whilst here in the Land of the Free one of the great privileges of great personal or family wealth is the "right" to fuck up - over and over again - and never pay so much as a moment's regret or a day's liberty for it.

Terror Abroad

In case you were taking a break from domestic news and wondering who's killing innocent people overseas, well, in Bangladesh it's mostly the people working for Bennetton, the Gap, and J.C. Penney;

"The plan would ditch government inspections, which are infrequent and easily subverted by corruption, and establish an independent inspectorate to oversee all factories in Bangladesh, with powers to shut down unsafe facilities as part of a legally binding contract signed by suppliers, customers and unions. The inspections would be funded by contributions from the companies of up to $500,000 per year.

The proposal was presented at a 2011 meeting in Dhaka attended by more than a dozen of the world's largest clothing brands and retailers — including Wal-Mart, Gap and Swedish clothing giant H&M — but was rejected by the companies because it would be legally binding and costly.

At the time, Wal-Mart's representative told the meeting it was "not financially feasible ... to make such investments," according to minutes of the meeting obtained by The Associated Press."

Well, I, for one, am glad that our corporate "citizens" are not knuckling under to the tyranny of those irresponsible Bengalis who seem to hold the misguided belief that things like workplaces that don't collapse or catch fire are some sort of "right" rather than a privilege of being in a Free Market.

I'd have more to say but there's a terrific sale today down at Wal-Mart, and I have got to pick up a pair of Levis; always low prices there, y'know?



Always.

The Rains Come...To Fuck You Up

Now and then I may complain about the rain during our Dark Ages, but our rains don't come like this:

That kind of rain doesn't just keep you indoors and give you the wintertime blues.

It kills you.

It destroys your crops and starves you to death. It gives you typhoid fever and dysentery and liver fluke. It rips your nipa house apart and scatters your life across the wreckage of your fields.

There are reasons to complain about living in the United States. Don't get me wrong. Those of us not in the two-yacht families get reamed pretty hard sometimes.

But not often like this.

Unnatural Hazards.

Haiti, widely seen as a leading contestant on the reality show "World's Most Utterly Hosed Polity", got slammed by an M7.0 earthquake yesterday.

To put this in perspective, the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 - also on a major branch of a strike-slip fault, also in the vicinity of a major city, has been estimated anywhere between 7.5 and 8.25. This was a big earthquake, but not a HUGE earthquake.We think of the Caribbean as being worked over by hurricanes, not earthquakes, but the tectonics of the region are nearly as nasty as southern California, and the Enriquillo-Plaintain Garden fault system, the projected source of the movement, moves about 7 mm/year, "half the overall motion between the Caribbean plate and North America plate" according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Again, to give you perspective, the slip rate on the San Andreas Fault Zone is roughly 25mm to 30mm/year.One thing to think about, though, is that we're going to hear a lot about this as a "natural disaster". But earthquakes have been happening since tectonics first began some time about 4.3 billion years ago. Unless you were spectacularly unlucky, if you lived in a wickiup and hunted or gathered your food, you probably lived through big earthquakes.

But a couple tens of thousands of years ago we began building ourselves permanent houses. Those houses were fairly ramshackle things, and when the ground shook, even moderately, they fell down on us and killed us. As in the Libyan fable, by our own feathers, and not by others' shafts, are we now striken.

We're going to hear a lot of hand-wringing about how awful a "natural disaster" this is. There'll be the usual assistance, the normal pantsload of helicopters, doctors and Red Cross volunteers. But call me a nasty, cynical son-of-a-bitch, but what we WON'T see is what Haiti needed and needs.The last big strike-slip earthquake in the U.S. was Loma Prieta, 1989. Another M7.0, almost exactly the same as this one. Total of 63 dead, some four thousand injured. Lots of homes damaged.

I'll bet that the death toll in Port au Prince will be at LEAST in the low hundreds, probably in the low thousands, possibly even in the tens of thousands...with thousands more maimed or damaged in some way. In a quake almost exactly like the 1989 San Francisco event that killed sixty-fricking-three. Why?I'll tell you why. We have a pretty good idea how to design and build things to resist much earthquake shaking. In an M8+ all bets are off, sure, but for most quakes, we can design buildings and communities to get most people through the shaking alive.

But this takes money. And the political insistence to enforce building codes. And those two things are things that Haiti has in very, very short supply. So today, as always, many Haitians are dead who need not have died. Because in Haiti, as in much of the world, lives are cheaper than structural steel and people are more disposable than dimension lumber.

Sympathy, donations and talk are cheap. Changing the way the places like Haiti function is hellishly hard, and it seems pretty hypocritical to me to talk today about our sorrow for the victims of this while we were perfectly happy to ignore them before the first temblor because it would have required us to give a shit and do something about their crappy "government" and impoverished existence.

So this is an UNnatural disaster. Earthquakes don't kill people - people kill people. Or, to be precise, the buildings we don't build to a standard of practice kill people. Lack of building codes kill people. Governments kill people.We can regret this. We can grieve about it. But until and unless we - and, more specifically, the Haitian ruling classes - are willing to commit large amounts of our money, political will and time to reorder the way people build, work and live in Haiti, we cannot change it.