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.

...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.

Fifty Shades of White

Read this over at Yastreblyansky's place today. It's from a New York Times Cletus safari (so it's paywalled, hence the secondhand source) where one of the Cletuses explains why he's yearning so hard for The Return of Tubby:

"Just start putting things back on the right track. It makes me scratch my head that the country never did better than when Trump was president — never. You know what I mean? The gas prices were low. The border was under control. Everything was just great. And he got run out of town just because he sends mean tweets and has a big mouth. They’d rather elect a nice guy and have the country in the toilet"

I read that and my first (last, and only) thought was "Whatchoo talkin' about, Willis?"

I've been an adult civilian under a total of seven Presidents since I ETS'd back in '87; Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton, Cheney (okay, okay....Bush 2), Obama, Tubby, and now Biden.

During that time I'd call out three "big" events that shook the world, including my world:

2001 - the beginning of the Wars of Choice against the world's various political movements,

2008 - the Great Recession, and

2020 - The Plague Years.

And here's the thing about all that:

It made 

No

More

Than

The

Slightest

Scintilla

Of 

Difference

In my life.

I'm a middle-class straight white guy with a college education and a decent professional career. All that stuff? War, recession, disease?

Meh.

I was still in the Army Reserve in 2001, so I was a bit closer than 99.9% of the U.S. public to the wars, but I never deployed so I was never close enough. I don't have any war stories to tell.

My company was rocked a bit by the Recession, but stayed upright, so other than a bit of nervousness looking at my 401K I was fine. I don't have a horrific lost-my-house story to tell.

And I ran and hid from the Plague like everyone but the wingiest of the nuts, but successfully (so far), so I don't have any horrible 'Rona stories to tell.

Looking past the individual and local drama, ranging from divorce to hip replacements to job changes, overall? 

"Everything was just great"? 

"The country in the toilet"?

Get the fuck out, Cletus.

The United States in my adult life has rolled along - steadily growing meaner and harder, steadily less open, more plutocratic and unequal. Yes.

But somehow flipping wildly between "just great" and "the toilet"?

Fucking pull the other one, Cletus.

That this goober can even think, let alone say that, tells me that he's fucking delusional to the point of "beyond electroshock therapy".

Nothing has changed between 2016 and 2023 except we've lost a million or so - mostly of other Cletuses (Cletii?) - to the Plague. The rich are still rich or a bit richer. The poor are still poor. The U.S. is still a massive industrial nation where the vast bulk of us are desperately scrounging to make a fucking buck. The sun rises and sets. The smoke rises. The rain falls.

Obama. Trump. Biden.

The details of policy changed, sure. Obama helped some people get health insurance. Tubby handed stacks of cash to the fatcats. Biden got the fuck out of Afghanistan. 

Us cis het middle-class white guys?

We just rolled on.

And the fact that this clueless dingus thinks anything else?

Just reminds us that these people are the fucking boat anchor of the Republic. They believe nonsense, they're convinced of a bunch of idiocy that's not just untrue but monstrously, demonstrably untrue and in a crudely, stupidly, destructive way.

When chucklefucks like this can believe that the reason the majority of the voters in 2020 wanted to shitcan his Orange Julius Caesar because "he has a big mouth" and not because he was the worst Chief Executive since James Buchanan (at least) who helped kill hundreds of thousands of his own people?

There's no penetrating that degree of stupid.

Yet here we are, stuck with this mouthbreather and millions of his kin. 

I know I'm banging this drum and I'm sure you're tired of the noise.

But these people are the problem.

We've got lots of problems; climate change, vulture capitalism (and those two are twins - I'll circle back to that in a bit), political dysfunction (see above), nonalcoholic beer, MILF Manor...

The problem is these people.

If they really think that us straight middle class white guys have gone from "great" to "the toilet" in two years?

That means they're locked down tight into their darkness of lies and nonsense.

You can't run a democratic republic with that many people believing bullshit that stupid who will fight you rather than give that up.

But I'm not sure what else you can do.

Portland Cops are crap, Part the Infinity (Proud Boys Edition)

 They knew who killed this guy.

They just didn't give a shit because he wouldn't suck up to their blue asses and his murderer would.

Another day in the "Portland Police Bureau is a wretched hive of scum and villainy much like a huge proportion of U.S. police agencies" life.

And because they're crap to people We don't much care about - the queer, the dark, the young, the troubled and homeless - we're pretty much okay with that.

Which is why they can continue to be crap and not have to bother even pretending to be better.

Bang Bang Crazy (GFT Edition - Uvalde, Part 1)

 

I'll be back with some thoughts on the latest watering of the Tree of Liberty, but let's get this out of the way first - here's an observation from an old GI:

 

A school shooter - hell, almost any "shooter" in a civilian setting - is pretty much the exact equivalent of an "ambush" in a military setting.

You're doing the civilian equivalent of diddy-bopping down the trail - studying, serving macchiatos, shopping - when someone does the equivalent of blowing the claymore and opens up from the tules and you're caught in the dead center of the kill zone. 

 

You - unless you're insane-grade paranoid - are completely unprepared both physically and mentally to respond with quick, accurate, deadly force. So - like the GIs inside the ambush kill zone - what you pretty much almost always do is; die.

 

So the people who are running this "arm and train" level of bullshit aren't telling you that to "arm and train" anyone, be it teachers, bank tellers, grocery clerks, won't do more than provide another target. 

 

Because the third part that has to follow "arm" and "train" to make a difference - the part that they don't want you to hear - is that these armed and trained people would have to walk around like a grunt in a weapons-free ROE combat environment; on the immediate, hair-trigger edge of a violent response to the slightest hint of danger.

 

Now think of your fourth-grade teacher being there through the whole fucking school day.

 

And...seriously?

 

(Next: To Protect and to...what? Are you fucking nuts..?)

Another mystery

The new book Nightmare Scenario limns a gruesome picture of the ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision inside a Trump administration confronted with a pandemic microbe several orders of magnitude better organized and more intelligent:

“One of the biggest flaws in the Trump administration’s response is that no one was in charge of the response,” Abutaleb and Paletta write. “Was it Birx, the task force coordinator? Was it Pence, head of the task force? Was it Trump, the boss? Was it Kushner, running the shadow task force until he wasn’t? Was it Marc Short or Mark Meadows, often at odds, rarely in sync?”

“Ultimately, there was no accountability, and the response was rudderless,” they conclude.

So...wait. We needed a whole book to tell us this?

The choice was to throw in a picture of Trump, or a picture of one of the Scoobies, and, duh, Velma is both way smarter and way-smokin'-hotter, so...

For fuck's sake. This bloated nincompoop pranced around on live television suggesting that the solution to an epidemic pathogen was bleach, shoving lights up your ass, and malaria drugs while ignoring every single piece of public health knowledge about epidemic pathogens developed since the fucking Plague of Athens.

Everyone outside the bubbling MAGAt kool-ade vat knows that the simple stooge couldn't have figured out what he was supposed to do, and if he was told to sit down, shut up, and follow his epidemiologists' instructions how to do it would have just dipped some crap out of his diaper and thrown it at them like the shit-flinging toddler he is.

This is the least-difficult mystery that Scoobies ever solved. Trump did it, regardless of where the bug came from or how or why. He was told that a deadly pathogen was coming - by the damn Chinese premier, forgawdssake, so it wasn't like the guy didn't know what he was talking about - and he was too shit-scared that his rating would tank to actually do what the South Koreans did.

The problem here doesn't seem to be that there's no way to tell how these things happened or who was responsible. Instead it's more magical thinking; I don't WANT it to be that way, so I won't believe it.

Speaking of the whole "where it came from",question related to this magical thinking is the whole "Wuhan lab leak COVID genesis" thing.

Frankly, it isn't something I'm particularly spun up about. We know that biolabs have killed people before...but so have - a lot more often - zoonotic pathogens. The chance that this is an intentional PRC bioweapon are vanishingly slim. For one thing, you develop the vaccine FIRST, so you don't end up killing shitloads of your own troops (Unit 731 is holding on Line 2...) with your own pathogen. For another, a bioweapon that kills old, sick people and is usually ineffective against healthy young ones? Not much of a weapon.

No. The probability is that this is just another in the long line of zoonotic South Asian pathogens in the great SARS/MERS/seasonal flu tradition.

But. Even if it's not, even if this is something that was cooked up by the tricksy Chinamen, that doesn't tell the story the MAGAts want it to.

Because a lab leak doesn't mean we get to sling a nuke at the PRC. Or even fight one of those good and easy-to-win trade wars against them.

For because the world is bound with strands of aircraft aluminum and kerosene aviation fuel it means that it's in our interests to ensure that we 1) know as much as possible about what's going on in Chinese biolabs, and 2) ensure that those labs are as well-designed, well-equipped, well-trained, and well- managed as possible. It means more, closer engagement with the loathsome government of the PRC, not less.

Well...dammit.

When it comes down to cases, I think we're seeing here the functional end of what happens when humans are confronted with difficult, complex, frightening things, especially when the hardscape around those things point towards conclusions those humans dread and fear.

If working through that country forces you to agree to and believe things that you hate with all your heart...it will make you happier not to believe them. If you can settle on a simple, clear answer - even a simple, clear wrong answer - that backs up your hopes and beliefs?

You'll go with that.

Problem?

Climates and pathogens and armed men don't care what you want to believe. If you get them wrong they'll kill you and all yours deader'n shit.

Governing yourself by whatever stupid thing you want to believe?

That's a real good way to make that happen.

They cry peace, peace, but there is no...what, what?

I've tried to avoid the toxic fever-swamp that is the GOP convention like I try to avoid bad beer, vegan barbeque, and sleeping with people crazier than I am. But it's really hard to keep out the sickly stench of the hate, paranoia, rage, and fear that seem to rise from off that seething heap of "conservative" pismires like stink off a fresh pile of park dogshit.

I have no sympathy for that niddering throng of past-their-sell-by-date-Eurocentric/Christopathic-morons. Largely because of their weapons-grade stupid rallying whimper:

Make America Great Again!

I hear that and I can't help thinking; seriously, people? Because we're living in a post-apocalyptic hellscape? WTF?

But then I pause for a moment and think about the sort of input we're exposed to in the present Information Age. Ed over at Gin and Tacos had a sort of paranoid-fear moment the other day:

"With the unbroken string of horrible, crazy shit that has cast a pall over the world in the last few months, and without the events in Dallas, in St. Paul, and (the first) Baton Rouge being fully digested and comprehended, there was no part of me able to even take in another story along the same lines. Throw in the major European/Asian terrorist attack of the week and I didn't just ignore the news on Sunday. I actively avoided it."

Yep. Especially if you're a news junkie. CNN and MSNBC and (of course) Fox "News" is full of this shit. If you take their "reportage" at face value you'd begin to believe that we really ARE living in the End of Days. Wars, rumors of wars, fire, murder, headchopping Muslims, cats and dogs living together...

But.

Stop. Think for a moment.

When was the last time your entire town or city was burned by an invading horde of horse nomads?

When was the last time your neighborhood was shadowed by a towering pyramid of the freshly-harvested skulls of your family, friends, and neighbors?

When you consider the sort of fucking ginormous catastrophes that litter human history – famines, plagues, folk-migrations, full-on civilization collapse – we really are living in pretty tranquil times.

That doesn't sell advertising minutes on CNN, though, so you'd never know it. But, really.

It kinda amazes me when I stop and think of CNN covering the Black Death, or the Mongol invasions of Eastern Europe. THAT would have been epic.

That frame for the story helps me keep my perspective.

That, and avoiding fucking CNN like I try to avoid bad beer, vegan barbeque, and sleeping with people crazier than I am.

Into the Crimea again...

I've been fascinated and sort of apalled watching the southeastern Ukraine delaminate and the Russian Federation do...well...something. With marines. Or soldiers. Or both. Somewhere.

The whole thing reminds me of the sorts of bizarre wars the South American countries used to fight, where armies would just disappear into the Atacama or the Chaco or some other damn place and the New York Times would print some sort of vague description two months later full of errors and guesses and the whole business would eventually be described in histories as something completely different.

I honestly have no idea what the hell is going on in the Crimea, but whatever it is it does not appear to be a Good Thing. Another reminder of the immense pile of clusterfuck that was Russia and then the Soviet Union and then Russia again. Whatever else the place has or is - and it has been and is many wonderful and admirable human things - what is has never had and does not have now is a decent form of government. Neither does Ukraine, for that matter. Or a hell of a lot of the rest of the world. My country is no prize, but, fuck, we're better off at the moment that these poor bastards.

Mind you, Teabaggery could still change that.

Still. Troops are matching through the Crimea. Again. Some places seem to attract history like a pretty girl on a barstool late on Friday night.

Crimea seems to be one of them.

Sherman's March

I watched the Seattle-San Francisco football game this past Sunday. I watched the whole thing through the final whistle so I got to see Sherman, the Seattle right corner, make a hell of a play to send his team to the championship game, and also enjoy his hyperkinetic rant after time ran out and some sideline reporter was stupid enough to jam a microphone in his face.

I didn't have the same reaction my friend Labrys had or, frankly, that Charles-whose-wordprocessor-I-am-not-worthy-to-reboot-Pierce had.

Because I used to play soccer goalkeeper.

Because of that I completely understand exactly where Rich Sherman was that night, and, no, I don't think it had anything to do with brutality (and, yes, it is a pretty goddamn brutal sport) and, no, I don't think it had anything to do with racism or being an uppity Negro (and, yes, he was rude and loud and obnoxious, and in this country if you're black that will earn you a pantsload of ignorant racist bullshit).

It had to do with playing on the side that doesn't have the ball.

Attackers, whether they're soccer strikers or football receivers, get to do one particular thing that we football cornerbacks and soccer goalies don't and usually can't do; they get to score points.

In most sports let's face it; that's the fun shit.

That's the glory noise, the big news that makes the headlines and gets you on cereal boxes and into lucious television contracts. How many cornerbacks can you think of sitting in the ESPN booth right now? Kasey Kellar is the only keeper I know of that works the booth and that's largely because soccer in the U.S. is frankly weird and keepers are often the only player most Americans outside soccer fanatics actually know.

But playing offense is a self-licking ice cream cone.

Any sports nut can tell you how many points so-and-so scored, how many assists, how many yards he ran for or threw for, how many goals he scored. Any casual fan remembers the quarterbacks and the receivers, the strikers and the wingers, the goal-scoring centers and the point guards.

Who the hell remembers whose tackle saved a sure goal? The stick save, the deflected pass, the steal? Who recalls who batted the possible winning touchdown pass away for the interception that saved the game and the conference championship?

I'll tell you this; they'll damn well remember who did that for Seattle in 2014.

But it's more than that.

Defending is about plain and simple defiance.

It's about raging and hating to lose. It's about pure anger.

It's personal. It's about wanting to ruin the other person's day.

Stopping his best shot. Tackling him when he's got a clear run at goal and stripping the ball off his feet. It's about getting out to full stretch and palming his sure game-winner around the outside of the post. Pushing his slam-dunk back in his face. Sending him to the ice with the puck skipping away.

Sure, you saved your team the points, or the game. But other than that what's the reward for this hard work?

I'll tell you.

It's looking at the striker's face, seeing in that quarterback's eyes, the knowledge that you bested him. That he gave you his best shot and you were better. That he came straight at you with all his skill and strength and you slapped it down like it was a little baby's patty-cake pat. It's watching his sad little face get all puffy and red, watching him watch you with cautious hatred, and loving the feeling that you crushed his hopes and blighted his dream.



We all feel that way.

Sherman just said it.

I know, because of the night the striker on the team sandbagging down to our sad, low co-ed Division 4 level ran in on me as I collected the ball on the ground and kicked it straight back into my face and broke my nose.

(Then had the gall to complain to the referee that I was bleeding on the field.)

So after I stonewalled the sonofabitch the rest of the match - making save after save to deny him the win he so badly wanted - I walked up to him with the bloody twists of paper sticking out of both nostrils and got right in his face and smiled.

He shoved me and I cocked a fist and both teams jumped on us and hauled us away.

And, broken nose and all, I was a happy man.

Because I owned his sorry ass, and he knew it, and I knew he knew it, and that knowledge filled me with joy.

That's a very low human emotion, I'll admit, but that's the sort of thing that builds good defenses.

And empires.

And to make this about race or civility or something like that is just silly. If you did, or do, you really need to borrow my gloves and go get between the posts and I'll hammer some shots at you and dare you to stop me and we'll see how you feel about that.

Impartial Majesty

Here's the thing: by UCMJ, the guy is guilty as hell of the charges he was convicted of.

And the news, as it has always been, has been and is going to be about this one guy, himself, and all his little quirks and tics and the "inside baseball" of the trial and the implications of the not-guilty verdict on the charge of "aiding the enemy". All sorts of people in the U.S. are going to have little hissy fits because this joker is going to jail for being guilty of the crimes that...well, that he did knowing they WERE crimes under the UCMJ.

But here's the other thing; focusing on Manning the man and his trial, is part of the whole damn problem that Manning's acts and his trial throw a damning light on.

Manning uncovered tens, maybe hundreds, maybe even thousands of cases of every sort of problem and trouble in our country's doings both here and abroad ranging from individual and official malfeasance all the way up to arguable war crimes, doings that had been kept from us, doings that We the People as the putative sovereigns of the United States might have been well advised to be knowledgeable of.

We the People responded to that knowledge with a massive collective yawn and a fucking shrug.

The problem we're facing in this country isn't that PVT Manning is going to lose the rest of his life at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks. Hopefully he knew what he was doing and did it anyway, knowing that he was going to take the fall for the rest of us.

The problem - and hopefully Manning himself would be the first to agree - is that nobody else, nobody named in all those documents he stole, nobody in the ginormous chain of liars, thieves, grifters, thugs, and butchers that got us into Iraq ten years ago, not a goddamn one of the people responsible for all those deaths, all that loss, all that pain and suffering and misery is going to lose so much as a fucking lunch break over their actions.

And I don't know which is more infuriating; that that pissed me the hell off, or that the rest of my country doesn't seem to give a damn.

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.

Blown Away

Two thoughts:

First; what kind of fucking idiot takes his small children to film a burning fucking fertilizer plant?

Hearing the sonofabitch's kid begging the father to get them out makes me want to do something very medieval to the parent. What. A. Fucking. Tool.

In case you don't know - and I can't imagine anyone who wouldn't know this - ammonium nitrate, the primary component of nitrate fertilizer, is related to other nitrate compounds (such as nitroglycerine) and is a powerful oxydizer. Back when the Army still trained the Special Forces to run guerrilla groups behind enemy lines instead of teaching government goon "armies" to blackmail kebab-stand owners and use power drills on people's kneecaps it loved these things. Fertilizer plants (and grain storage facilities) are basically explosions that haven't happened yet.

And both of them - along with fuel storage and refining plants and God knows what else - are mingled into all sorts of places in Texas, where things like zoning and development regulations are part of the liberal commie Agenda 21 plan to choke off our natural American right to work for shit wages in dangerous places and get whatever hand-me-downs our corporate masters choose to bestow on us.

When I lived in Houston my rundown shitheel apartment was two streets away from some sort of chemical plant. When the wind was right you could get a contact high just breathing, and the air had a sharp, dangerous smell that made me think of open drums of something dark and fuming. I still have no idea what the hell they were brewing over there, but had it been toxic I suspect the first we'd have known about a spill would have been the moment our lungs stopped functioning.

Second, this is exactly the reason I have nothing but loathing and contempt for the sorts of people who try and convince me that American "conservatism" is all about liberty and "personal responsibility" and FREEDOM! in its consuming greed for union-busting and regulation-smashing.

It makes absolutely no sense to me - worse, it stands sense on its head - to insist that "government bureaucrats" - making reckless, boneheaded decisions without popular consent, destroying jobs, issuing edicts, "taking" money in return for nothing - are the embodiment of Pure Evil while insisting that the same sort of actions when taken by corporate bureaucrats or individuals are the highest, best, and noblest acts of civilized mankind.

Texas was where this sort of idiocy took physical form.

Everywhere I went in West and South Texas I saw this sort of shit; dangerous, obviously un-inspected, unregulated commercial outfits shoehorned into little crapped-out towns and rundown parts of the cities, just like my nasty chemical plant. I hadn't been out of the active service for long at that time and sometimes the old mindset would kick in as I drove by some reeking fertilizer plant or immense grain silo across the street from a row of houses; man, give me a rucksack of C-4 and some det cord and I could flatten this whole shitty little town, I'd think, forgetting that this wasn't the Soviet Ukraine and these were my fellow citizens and not inhabitants of some enemy country I'd been tasked to terrify.

But I was young and stupid then, and just passing the time of day.

Today children, men, and women are ripped to bloody rags in West, Texas, because no one bothered to make rules or enforce the rules that might have kept their homes away from the West Fertilizer Plant.

Who was being the young and stupid one during that time, eh?

Scouts out!

On the subject of Boston yesterday, LTC Bateman Explains It All For You



As we would have said in the infantry, fucking-A right, sir.

No News Today

How's YOUR day going..?

Clackamas Slayride

Another shopping day 'til Christmas, another whackadoodle takes his his buddy's rifle to the mall.

We could blog the hell out of this.

But why bother?

We pretty much know already what stories will come out of this. The shooter will turn out to be either the scary loner with the gun collection (He used to scare the kids! We almost never saw him but when we did he was a freakazoid!") or the sweet boy who seemed so normal ("He used to mow our lawn." "He was always so polite...").

The police will conclude that there was nothing that could have been done that wasn't.

The usual suspects will fulminate about how the loon managed to get his hands on an AR-15. The other usual suspects will bloviate about how a sturdy yeoman with a Glock could have put one into his brain housing group and stopped the rampage before it began.

The usual ghoulish fascination will erupt through the daily fire-and-murder-news cycle for a day or so and be off the heavy rotation by the week's end.

And the sad reality is that we know, we simply know, how to make these random nutter shootings more difficult. Firearms, especially autoloading firearms, make it ridiculously easy to kill random strangers. If this zombie had to indulge his bloodlust with an axe, or a scythe, or even a bolt-action rifle it would have been orders of magnitude more difficult for him.

It's really that simple. Really.

But autoloading firearms are also just plain fuckin' fun to shoot, and we love our shooting fun, and we, We the People, are perfectly content to let others die or live with their wounds so that we may have our fun.

We're just too canny to come out and say it that way.

But, hell, y'all know that.

In fact, we discussed the hell out of it back in the spring when another nutter went and shot up a theatre in Colorado.

So. Silent Night Deadly Night. Chopping Mall. Whatever.

What else is new?

Couple of quick observations:

First, we really live in an extraordinarily safe time and place. As little as three hundred, five hundred, a thousand years ago we'd be shocked if most of the people we knew weren't dead of the Plague, or raped, butchered, then raped again in the latest fill-in-the-blank invasion/civil war/pogrom. I think that's why these random mad minutes make the news; they shatter the illusion we live in that our lives and our homes are so perfectly safe. They're a little teensy one-nutter Mongol Horde thundering in over the horizon to rape and pillage.

Then we really need to start accepting that so long as we're going to be okay with widespread private firearms that these occasional nutter-shootings are just going to happen. They are. And nothing short of a violent change in the way American society and public law works will change that.

And the final, simple, reality is that humans kill each other, always have and probably always will. Homo homini lupus; Man is a wolf to Man. This little fracas is just another in the unbroken line that starts back with the first australopithecus that went doolally with a camel thighbone and brained some of the gang around the waterhole and will continue on until the first flare of the solar nova bakes all humanity to a delicate crunch.

Really...what else is there to say?

Only what we say here in Portland; forget it, Jake; it's Clackamas County.

Update 1, 12/12 p.m.: Here's some more detail on the idiot who did the shooting. He apparently lifted the Armalite from a pal, and for the record here's the part that gets me: "...the rifle jammed during the 22-year-old's attack, but he managed to get it working again."

So this numbnuts steals what we'll have to assume is a weapon he's completely unfamiliar with, manages to get it to double feed (or either fail to feed or fail to eject, all fairly typical AR-15-type malfunctions) while he's capping sweet white-haired grannies and grampies, and then manages to do some sort of immediate action and gets it working again.

This is the thing about firearms; they're fucking easy. They're simple to work, especially modern military-style firearms which are designed to be used by deadhead draftees and Somali teenagers. They're quick to debug if they malfunction. And they're easy to use; just point at the nearest toddler and shoot.

It takes some strength, some determination, and some damn deadly difficult-to-learn homicide skills to kill someone with a nunchuck. Or a pickaxe. Or a bread knife.

But an AR-15?

Easy-peasy lemon squeezy, as the little ponies say.

Update 2: Charlie Pierce, as usual, has more, and better, to say.

Mama, I want my Wawa!

Via Fallows, a snapshot of the Romneycade beating the hustings for votes, and the Borg discovers the wonder of...Wawa!

"Romney on the stump, at a historic iron furnace in Cornwall, near Lebanon, using the hoagie-ordering experience at the WaWa as a parable for what's right and wrong in America. (Wrong: a doctor told him that he had to fill out a 33-page change-of-address form, several times, to get the post office to send his mail -- including reimbursement checks -- to his new location. That is what happens with government-run organizations where you have "no competition." Right: at WaWa, great hoagies. Also, very efficient touch-pad ordering system. This is what you get with competition.)"

It's hard to know just where to start with this fucktardry, but let's try starting with the Wawa.

I used to live in the northeast and these things are the local 7-Eleven-equivalent there. They make decent hoagies (sub sandwiches, to you fellow Left Coasters) but not that great; any local hoagie shop is usually better, and most Northeast towns have several. I've had a couple of Wawa hoagies and they're usually distinguished by the same qualities all fast food enjoys; a sort of "enh" flavor resulting from cheap products cranked out in volume. Processed cheese, mass-produced meat; you know the drill.

And here's the thing; they, like most chain stores, use their bankroll to do their level best to put those little local hoagie shops - the ones that do actual interesting things with local produce, cheeses, sauces, and meats - out of business.

So the local owner loses his business, and (if he's lucky) ends up a wage slave making hoagies for the Wawa down the street. This is good, because it's "competition"! Freedom, amiright! In the same way that putting a pair of ten-ounce gloves on you and putting you in the ring with the guy who's just gone fifteen rounds for the pro welterweight title at Caesar's is "competition". Competition! Amiright?

I have no idea what the "touch-pad ordering system" is or what it does, but, really, who gives a fuck? What benefit do I get out of it? Why is it better than, say, talking to a real live person and ordering a hoagie? Or, worse - what if it puts that person out of a job? Why is that "good", competition or no? I've actually started avoiding the auto-checker at our local Fred Meyer because, frankly, I don't want to give Kroger (the way-the-fuck-back-East ginormous grocery chain that bought our local Portland chain and gave us their fine Kroger products in place of the local stuff that Fred's used to stock) the excuse to lay off a live person.

"Competition", frankly, is one of those tidy little Republican myths, like the welfare queen and the anchor baby and the birth-control-abortion, that looks less impressive the more you look at it. Turns out that many forms of "competition" provide benefits mostly for the people who own the companies, and result in lower wages and fewer jobs as companies "compete" to sell cheaper crap for lower prices.

That is when they're not actively colluding to sell cheap crap for HIGH prices - try and drive around your town and find a gas station making a profit on the volume of selling gas for "low, low prices!!!". Sheeyeah; call me when you find one.

So I'd expect a Republican to be as stupid as a bag of hammers where "competition" is concerned.

But then there's that damn 33-page form, the paper embodiment of Evil Big Gummint.

Which is where I wish that these gomers had actually been forced to serve in the military.

Because Romney - like every GOP sunofabitch that draws breath - luuuuurves him some military. The U.S. fightin' men and women are just jake with him; they're the living embodiment of everything Good^TM and Right^TM about America. Amiright?

But if he's pissed off about all that non-"competitive" government bureaucracy what effing world has HE been living on?

Because there's no bureaucracy in the world like the U.S. Army.

Because armies - like insurance, like firefighting, like policing - aren't in the business of doing something cheap at low price. They need to do things that other people can't or won't do (unless they're ridiculous or insane, like the sort of people who fight for pay) and they need to do it right the first time.

So governments tend to be all about rules and making notes to file and filling in forms. That stuff gets out of hand, oftentimes, but the mere existence of a long form has absolutely nothing to do with the "value" of government and what it does.

In fact, the rottenest thing about the modern GOP and their current nominee is their and his insistence on the zombie Reagan lie about how "government is the problem".

Why would anyone running for political office insist that the very thing they want you to elect them to do is a "problem"?

Unless they want you to think of that thing as bad, unless they want you to expect that thing to BE bad, so that they can then do it badly and not get beaten to a bloody pulp for it?

Or unless they want you to forget that if you aren't part of governing your nation, if the government is a problem and "goes away" that you remain a single, relatively powerless individual and that there will be someone - something - still there to seize onto that power the failure of government leaves as a vacuum.

Oh. Yeah. Them. Riiiiight.

Y'think?

Gah. Honestly, the mere fact that this lying sack of shit is within a couple of percentage points of becoming the next President makes me very, very tired. If we're not lucky this November we're going to get the government we deserve, and while I will derive a certain vicious satisfaction in that my schadenfreude will be very grim indeed.

Kevin, the INTERNET is for porn...

...and the passing lane is for passing. And - this is just advice, mind you - you're supposed to pass a crime scene, not drive into it.

"When officers found the driver, identified as Kevin Signalness, they said he had his pants unzipped and a pornographic magazine laying on the passenger seat."

IMO this guy gets convicted on the mug shot alone. One thing I love about my hometown; even our criminals are weird.

Stay classy, Portland.

Sunday Morning 11:30am

We've had a lovely Labor Day weekend. Yesterday's morning cleanup yielded a deucluttered house, the trip to Oaks Park was fun, and the planked salmon made a delicious dinner.

This morning we had an "Avatar" sort of morning, enjoyed good coffee and bacon, looked at wedding pictures (again) to sate Little Miss' desire to see Mommy in her pretty dress. And we're getting ready for the Nickel Arcade.

So I had just a moment to stop and read the news. Which is, as always, filled with the most ridiculous crap - it is an ever-verdant source of wonder to me how much bandwidth the three (what, five?) conglomerates that own the news media can cram with worthless celebrity gossip and badly-informed "reportage".

So I pretty much skimmed over most of the "news". But this BBC article caught my eye. It's not really "news" to anyone who a) has been paying attention and b) isn't viewing the world through their "war on terror" goggles. This phrase caught my attention;

"Yet many Iraqis fear that with the Americans no longer here in force, and the Iraqi army and police still lacking sufficient training, the violent extremists on both the Sunni and the Shia sides could start fighting again."

And I paused, for a languid Sunday morning moment and wondered just exactly how many times we will have to hear that phrase again.

The U.S. Army and the various mercenary organizations associated with our mess-o-potamia have been "training" the IA and IP since, when, about 2004? At least since 2007 or 2008. So the senior IA units have at least 2-3 years and possibly as many as 6 years of guerrilla combat time?

And this isn't exactly crossing the Rhine or meeting the GSFG in the Fulda Gap, here. It's your basic light-infantry fight; IMTs, squad-to-company tactics...shoot, move, communicate. Basic trainees get it in 13 weeks. I went from civilian to combat unit in less than a year, expected to perform under fire. Entire armies like the Kitchener battalions of WW1 learn to do it in months, certainly in under a year.

How t'fuck much "training" do these mooks need..?




Just a idle thought for a holiday Sunday morning.

(Crossposted to MilPub)

H&I

I have an odd sort of love-hate for Michael Yon.

He is one of the few journalists really willing to spend a LOT of time in some of the filthiest ass-end parts of the world finding out what's happening there. He also knows soldiers and soldiering in a sort of latter-day Ernie Pyle way, and I like that.

On the downside, he's a sort of dirty-boot Bob Kaplan, Tom Clancy with a notepad, a guy who's never met gee-whiz cool Aaaaaarmy training he didn't love. He's sort of a man-size eleven-year-old that way, and he commonly mistakes technical and tactical proficiency for strategic and geopolitical competence, and he always assumes that the GI's are the epitome of studly cool and the fuzzy-wuzzies are dirty rats.I love the fact that he has some great pictures and a nice little article about the gunners at FOB Frontenac (although, Mike? That'd be "Cobra Battery, 1st Battalion, 17th Artillery - the 17th Infantry are those guys walking around with the teeny little bullet launchers, remember?).

But as I'm enjoying the pretty night fire pictures I come across this:

"Sometimes the crews fire “H & I” or “terrain denial” missions. Harassment and Interdiction missions are fired at terrain known to be used only by the enemy at certain times, and so anytime the enemy feels like rolling the dice, they can move into that terrain. Such missions also provide influence for “shaping” the battlefield. If the commander is trying to flush the enemy into a blunder—maybe an ambush—or maybe to cut them off from an escape route, he can have the guns pound into a gorge, say, that is used as an enemy route. Or maybe he just tries to persuade the enemy to take a route where we have sniper teams waiting. The battery can be used in many ways that do not include direct attacks on enemy formations."

Yes, indeed.

When I was just a mere slip of a redleg, my FDC Chief taught me that H&I fires in a LIC were the worst way of substituting motion for direction, a bad excuse for shooting unobserved rounds at a grid coordinate, a waste of rounds and a good way of pissing off the locals at you.We did this shit a lot in Vietnam, where my Chief got sick of it. Typically you had no eyes on the "target", which could be a trail junction, the edge of a treeline, a river ford, anywhere. And since you were also typically in the middle of a farming district, these were also typically used by local Romeos slipping out to see their hootchie Juliets, woodcutters, farmers, enemy runners, monkeys, roebucks...just about damn near anything. But the point was that - despite what Yon thinks - you never really knew. It was a statistic, a way that the artillery battalion or brigade could say "We fired XYZ missions on Targets Able, Fox and Whiskey"

I have no idea if H&I fire is any better in A-stan than it was in Vietnam. But the fact that we're doing it at all...?

Hmmm.

Extinction: Beat It Through Self-Hypnosis

Saw something the other day about pandas.

Seems that a Brit wildlife type made the suggestion that pandas are a sort of evolutionary cul-de-sac and that we should let 'em go.

Mind you - the critters were doing fairly OK until - imagine - humans came along and turned their bamboo forests into farms and timber tracts...

Now personally I'm fairly immune to the fabled panda "charm";...they always seem faintly silly to me.

But going in and fucking up their home and then blaming them for not doing their evolutionary best?

Seems pretty hypocritical to me.

This particular panda does seem like the poster panda for the shallow end of the panda gene pool.