The Formula

 Over at Nancy Nall's joint she complains:

"You guys, I am shocked this story hasn’t gotten more attention from the prestige media. It’s based on a government report, not “sources.” The revelations – that the White House has its own pharmacy, and under Trump, it handed out prescription meds like Smarties on Halloween – are startling. And yet, it seems to have bloomed and withered in one news cycle, and what stories were written concentrated on the cost, mainly of the use of name-brand drugs when generic equivalents were available."

To which my immediate thought was:

Dunno about everyone else, but..."this would surprise you…why?”

Anyone who had been paying attention to Tubby since his Eighties Manhattan heyday knew the guy is a moral shithouse, the reeking one-holer of ethical sewage. So assuming the WH has a dispensary, and knowing how a dispensary run by this human smegma would be run…what ELSE would you expect?

It’s the same way so many other articles about the orange chancre seem incredulous about his lying, or cheating, or petty viciousness, or stupidity…and my response is you’re gobsmacked by this…why? It's not like this is some sort of Scooby-doo mystery. It's all right in front of you.

Look. He’s a garbage human. As such he is surrounded by the sort of people who think “Yes! I WANT that!” So of course this. And the corruption. And the theft of documents and WH gifts. And the racism and sexism and plutocratic…

I guess that's the only thing I don't get; that given how obvious all this Republican QANut fuckery is, how does any sentient human not see it?

The culties do and that's why they love it. But anyone not in the cult should be horrified and furious about it. Yet...here we are. WASF.

 

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.

Chaos agents

When radical right-wing nuts run wild and destroy the functionality of the People's House it may be all in good fun.

But when they do the same thing in the public square?

No, it's not. 

These wingnuts aren't elected, though. They're bought and paid for, hired supposed-servants of the public, our "Thin Blue Line" of coppers that supposedly stand between us the Good People of the Earth and anarchy.

What's their beef?

Well, mostly, it seems, that lots of even the Good People don't like them. Here's their spokescop from the linked piece:

“They’re doing what they were asked to do. The public said they wanted less police involvement. The (Portland) School Board kicked them out of the schools. At some point, people should look in the mirror and take responsibility for who they voted for.”

Okay, first; fuck you runnin', you lying Dick Tracy wannabe.

No, the coppers weren't "asked to do" less policing.

They were "asked" to do less shitty, racist, violent, assholish policing. The kind of policing that the Portland Police Bureau had (and has) done for decades. The kind of policing that got them in dutch with the feds and won them a sort of supervised parole agreement that they've conspicuously ignored.

So, yes; I agree with one point Duin makes in his piece; part of the problem is that the Portland cops are way understrength. There's just too few cops for the number of troubled people running around in public.

But one big reason the PPB is so understaffed is that nobody wants to work for the outfit that a large number of Portlanders neither trust nor respect, largely because of that outfit's own shitty behavior. The Bureau attracted lots of violent, racist assholes because that's how they rolled; those people felt welcomed and at home there.

When large numbers of Portlanders weren't okay with that anymore, those sorts of people had a little hissy and left, or never joined.

And the Bureau has not changed enough to attract any other kind of person.

But here's the thing; like I pointed out earlier in this series; even before their little quiet quitting the Portland cops didn't do a pantsload of "policing". In Duin's piece he cites what's supposed to be a devastating statistic:

"As officers focus on homicides and shootings in the city, property crimes are generally ignored: The bureau’s clearance rate for property crimes dropped from 17.1% in 2009 to 4.4% in 2021..."

Okay, now, four percent is pretty crap.

But notice the clearance rate in the Good Times?

Yeah. Less than a fifth of all thefts - burglaries, car clouts, thievery in general - got solved. That was the "big time" stat for Portland cops. That was their championship season. That was them killing it.

And the perps?

Largely dopers and hoboes. "Professional" thieves, like all professionals in any field, probably make up a pretty small minority of all thieves.

So basically these are poor people who can't or won't work for a living stealing stuff to by food and dope.

And what have We the People done to make that less attractive as a way to get by?

I'll wait.

Here's the point.

It's not fucking rocket science. How do we move towards making this problem less of a problem?

Well, having better cops would help. Burning the existing Bureau to the ground and rebuilding it with fewer shitty, violent, Proud Boy-loving MAGAts and racists.

Then getting the new coppers better, smarter training and methods to deal with people. Getting them more help; Portland Street Response - a program designed to give public safety options other than sending armed coppers to deal with loonies and drugged-out whackos - has been underfunded and mis- or un-used since it was set up. Duin notes correctly that the Detox Center - the tank where narced-out gomers used to get dumped in to get them off the street - has never been reopened.

(Possibly because it's worth noting that the coppers used it as an unlicensed jail. People who didn't meet the bar for actual jailing used to be dumped in Detox, where they could be held for a day without charge. It was partially that sort of abuse that got it closed in the first place.)

But, again...and I know this keeps coming back around every time I write these things...the real issue is money.

Money to find these dopers and hobos work. To get them off the dope. To make places to live. To pay for more courts and diversion programs and Street Response unarmed intervention squads and rehab centers and social workers and daycare and school programs and...well, about a gajillion other social services.

And, yes; cops. And jails.

The bottom line out in Portland Streets isn't really that much different than in the U.S. House of Representatives.

We know what needs to happen to make our lives in general better.

But there's a vocal minority who refuse to consider that loudly being short-sighted, greedy, selfish assholes is not, actually, good public policy, and they continue to stand athwart those things shouting "stop".

In Congress they posture and preen and shove their prejudice and superstition into legislation to prevent anything they hate from happening. Far better to do nothing than to do anything the 14th Century wouldn't approve of.

In Portland they refuse to tax themselves and to allow anyone else to consider how best to use those tax monies to make those changes I've laid out. Far better to piss and moan about homelessless and crime than to make Nike go short a dime.

And until those chaos agents - in both places - are ignored and despised and discarded, we're going to be stuck right where we are.

As Duin says; welcome to the jungle.

The problem being, the problem that he doesn't mention, is that among us are those who are objectively pro-tiger.

The Freedom to Starve

Over at Yastreblyansky's joint he's initiated a discussion of the sort of "freedom" the Trumpenscum and assorted tech billionaires like Musk and Thiel are pimping:

"...pursuing happiness has to be something we do collectively, as social beings. That makes it not only a different list, but also a different concept of what liberty is--I mean, making it into a slogan, the conservative idea is liberty from other people and the liberal idea is freedom with other people."

That's fine, as far as it goes. But I think the whole business is a lot simpler and more primal.

This is simply about a certain sort of person, the sort of person who gravitates towards something like the 2022 GOP and someone like Donald Trump, who wants to do whatever the fuck they want to do without a moment's thought for the consequences.

They don't want consequences, period. They want to be immune from ALL the shit their nonsense stirs up; gunfire, lawsuits, mean tweets, censorious looks...it's all about being able to be what they want without so much as a single hard look in return.

Now.

That's a kind of "freedom".

Tom Hobbes described it as "the war of all against all". It basically comes down to that if you can do what you want to without consequence, I can do what I want to, and if I'm bigger - stronger, smarter, richer, a bigger fucking sociopath - that you are, I can do it to you and you just have to suck it up.

It's the 21st Century Melian Dialogue; the rich do what they can, and everyone else - the poor, the dark, the non-cis-het, the planetary climate, everyone - suffers what they must.

It's not a very new concept, or a very original one.

And it only appeals to the sort of nitwit who thinks there can't be anyone bigger, stronger, smarter, more sociopathic, that they are.

In other words, the stupid, the greedy, and the egotistical fathead.

Which means it appeals to a Donald Trump. And all the little mini-Trumps out there (around here we just call them "assholes") who make up about maybe 60% of the GOP.

(...the other 40% or so are just fucking morons, QANuts and people like Margie Green who couldn't think their way out of a wet paper bag. They're the "lean Objectivist jerky" that Scalzi talked about; the real monsters will, if they're lucky, keep them as pets (Greene will be some plutocrat's muppet as long as she keeps her looks) but in a pinch will make do with them as soylent green)

The problem is that a whole bunch of the inhabitants of the US circa 2022 - not just Republicans, unfortunately - have been so addled by the firehose of chatter they encounter every day that they have become largely unable to think their way through this. 

I mean...it's hard for ME to keep up with the constant stream of lies, damned lies, and commercials - Steve "I Fell Asleep With My Head In The Toilet" Bannon's "flooding the zone with shit" - and I'm a lifelong cynic, skeptic, and political junkie who is utterly immune to GQP nonsense.

So we have people who depend utterly on an impartial government to protect and defend them from rapacious fucksticks like Thiel and Musk and Exxon and Amazon and every other plutocrat who would be their kings...voting for people like DeSantis and Trump who think that they ARE kings and who will let these plutocratic scum BE kings.

(And the problem with Trump himself, of course, is that so long as someone like Thiel sucks his ass and lards him with flattery and bling Trump doesn't care enough about the actual kinging to get in the plutocrats' way. It's kind of ironic that Tubby loves him some Putin, because Vlad the Impaler made damn sure that he put the boot hard on the neck of his plutocrats. For a while after the crash in 1991 it looked like Russia would become just another kleptocracy, with the mob bosses, the New Rich, looting the joint while their pliant figurehead opened the shopping malls and chaired the committee meetings.)

I'm not sure what the hell the rest of us can do about this.

IMO the real issue is that in a massive industrial democracy the only way that the citizens can be involved and informed is through things like newspapers (increasingly irrelevant) and the various electronic media like television (cable and otherwise) and the various internet sites.

The outfits that inhabit these places, the ones that "inform" Americans, seem utterly unable to be clear about the simple reality I've laid out.

I'm not saying they have to be "against" the notion that the strong/rich do what they can...etcetera.

But that they make it clear that is what will happen without some sort of collective protection - whether in the form of a union, or a government (which is needed to back the union against the sort of money power the union's employer will use against it).

Without that?

You as an individual are prey.

Instead, as Jordan Orlando over at Rectification of Names points out (citing John Ganz here):

"An outline of the institutional shape of this politics is coming in to view as well: there’s rich donor oligarchy on top, in the middle there’s the think tanks, magazines, and podcasts that serve as kind of currency exchanges where the coin of mob grievance is turned into respectable notes, and the concerns of elite politics are translated into terms the mob can understand and use, and then there’s the public platforms where little armies of trolls are mustered for whatever task is required by their political masters. 

In short, it’s a model of the kind of corporate society they wish to secure and reproduce on a larger scale: big bosses, middle-management, workers, all happily coordinated and cooperating. No unions, no pesky social movements, no restive professional managerial-classes with their moral pretensions, no federal bureaucracy meddling and gumming up the works with regulations. The “cancellers” will themselves be cancelled: subjected to harassment and intimidation by the mob if they get out of line. There will be no epistemic hierarchy: just “freedom,” an informational anarchy that translates into the impossibility of the exchange of real content and any rational deliberation."

Yep. That's it. That's the plan.

Or, as Driftglass used to sum it up:

There's a club.

And you're not in it.

And people like Trump - and Musk, and Exxon, and Kroger - like it that way.