Breeding press

 

 

No. Not that one.

The folks over at Lawyers, Guns & Money have several posts up about "depopulation" and declining birth rates, which are apparently a global trend.

The first linked piece posits that it's cell phones.

Kidding. Sorta. The conclusion is that:

"...we do have this big increase in personal online entertainment, whether it’s watching shows on Netflix, sports bets — online gambling has become absolutely massive across Brazil and Latin America more broadly. You can go on PornHub. Online connectivity enables people to stroll on Instagram, play Call of Duty, World of Warcraft.

So we are all becoming — it’s not just being single — we’re all retreating into this digital solitude. I think that’s partly because technology makes it nicer and easier to stay at home — you can work from home — and some of these apps are so hyper-engaging that you get distracted by the constant stream of dopamine hits as each app, as each technology company competes against others to keep its users hooked."

IOW we have more fun "practicing while I'm alone" than we do with some other human being in meatspace.

There may be something to that, but I'm not sure it's smartphones per se.

I think I've discussed this before. 

(In fact I know I did, back in April)

The thing with kids is that you the parents end up spending LOTS of time and money on kids.

At at time when there's lots of fun things to spend time and money on. Travel. Entertainment. Porn. Games. Sports. Leisure. 

As opposed to changing diapers, taxiing to soccer games, reading bedtime stories, kissing owies.

Are those good? Are they worth it?

I think so.

But based on global fertility? A lot of people disagree.

There are real risks about that, though, including the reality that our modern industrial welfare states depend on a continual supply of people paying into the system to pay for us olds. And for them when they get old. If the pillar becomes a pyramid, with fewer and fewer paying in and more and more pulling out..?

Yike.

The second LG&M post makes a good point about our New MAGAt Moron Overlords, tho; 

"The triumph of the authentic Trumpian stupidity is reflected in the extent to which it has made one particular belief absolutely central to all political discourse in the Republican party, and on the American right wing generally.

That particular belief is the key concept at the core of the stupid person’s world view, and it is this: All of these apparently complicated problems that trouble our society, and that interfere with our impending return to greatness, are actually very simple.  For every social problem there is always a simple solution – one weird trick – that solves the problem perfectly.  All you need is common sense, and an unwillingness to be fooled by the so-called experts.  This is the stupid person’s Nicene Creed.

Moreover, stupid people love simple answers to complex questions, because such answers validate their entire world view."

Yes. Oh fuuuuuuuck yes.

Is there an answer to this slide into a post-population world?

If there is I don't know of it.

But if there is, I do know this; it won't be simple.

Or easy.

Or quick.

RTFM

Speaking of the Army I Knew...

So I retired from the rascal about twenty years ago - back in '05, IIRC.

By that time I had twenty years in - twenty-three, to be exact. I wanted to make 1SG - I cared less about the top spot (I had no interest in nagging troops about their haircuts or boots and area beautification...) but I'd always wanted to be a First Shirt.

But.

I also had a new wife and a one-year-old and there were guerrilla wars going on in Southwest Asia and the wife - who is a treasure and a darling and has always been there for me in all other paths of life - had just suffered through the death of our firstborn.

She told me that she couldn't live through a year-and-a-half deployment.

So I pulled the pin.

Anyway, point is that at the time, and all through the time since then, I was fully employed, well-paid, and, frankly, over time lost track of the whole "retirement pay" thing.

Until I retired from my day job.

Then I got to thinking, y'know, it'd be a nice little tickler to have a couple of hundred bucks a month or so to buy a beer now and then or to pay the gas bill. So I yarded out my old Army orders file and looked for my "20-year-letter" etc. to see about asking Sammy for some jack.

And right there on the first page of the retirement packet it read in black-and-white;

"Current policy requires the retiree submits retirement application about 9 months but not less than 90 days prior to 60th date of birth..."

Which was...ummm...five years ago.

Duh!

So, important safety tip:

Read The. Fucking. Manual. 

I called the nice people at Ft. Knox, who said that, yes, I was a fucking idiot and that, yes, I could still apply.

That is all. Platoon sergeants, take charge.

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.

Treason doth not prosper

So my (vaxxed, boosted, very-careful-about-masking-in-crowds) friend has the 'rona.

Most likely because someone in the group they met with last weekend had "just a sniffle", didn't mask, didn't stay home, and now has succeeded in dosing them and two others in the group (and probably more who will come back hot in the next couple of days).

Which is a reminder, in case the current U.S. House majority, and the previous Administration, aren't vivid enough warnings, of what my old drill sergeant used to tell us; that the success of our mission depended on the competence of the stupidest person in our unit.

In any group, or any nation, success depends on either those people being 1) willing to learn how to be minimally functional, or 2) being safely sidelined so their incompetence is immaterial to the mission, or 3) being shitcanned entirely. 

The sort of people who infected my friend are and are not likely to be either 1 or 2, and we've given up on number 3.

And I have no idea how we can change that short of an extinction-level crisis like the Great Depression, or a global war that either 1) pulls the general public's collective head out of it's collective ass, or 2) makes the douchenozzles like Republicans (in the Thirties) or fascists (in the Forties) so loathsome that even the morons refuse to touch them and confine their moronity to stuff like pro wrestling.

Especially now, now that Republicans ARE fascists and antivaxxers and QANuts, too?

And some forty percent of the public and the mass media refuses to be honest about that or call them what they are, or despise and shun them for it?

I'm kind of worried about how we move on from there.

And speaking of people doing fucked up things...

I didn't write anything on the second anniversary of January Treason

Mostly because that fucking ship has sailed, hit a sunken rock, capsized, caught fire, exploded, and sank.

The traitors are now a majority in one house of Congress. They - the leaders of the betrayal - paid no price for their treason. 

The goon squads that actually did their dirty work ran off afterwards and had to be slowly, imperfectly tracked down (and largely - to the extent they were - only because some of them took videos and posted to Twitter of them doing a criminal fuckin' conspiracy. Stupid people, right..?)

While in Brazil...

...their own home-grown traitors tried the same shit just now.

It's worth noting that in Brasilia hundreds of these gomers left, not rolling their coal or waving their treason flags but in zip-ties and police vans. The Brazilian Supreme Court has issued warrants for several higher-ups, including a police colonel, who were part of the inside job.

This is Brazil, a barely-Second-World nation without the sort of massive police organization that exists here in the U.S., that managed to put the collar on these dirtbags. 

We'll see if they follow through with crushing the head of the Bolsonario snake, as we should have done with the MAGAts on January 7, 2021.

But We the People already look pathetic in that Brazil, with its long and woeful history of dictatorships and coups, has been harder on their present traitors that we have been on ours, on every level from vaccination to drag queens to actual rebellion.

Whether it's as big as treason against the nation or as small as giving other people your fucking disease, I can only say this again:

"If this is not crushed with brutal force we will rue this as the day we made these traitors our masters."

Nice try, slick...

 

One of the people I worked with at my last job ("last" as in a week or so ago, mind...) apparently just went to the HR department and - according to my ex-chief-engineer - "threatened" to quit.

Now. This person may well be the single most appalling individual I've ever had the misfortune to work with. He's surely the worst I've ever had work for me.

He's a toxic combination of 1) illiteracy (his daily reports are unreadable, and the thing with these is they're nearly 95% pure boilerplate - you just copy what the go-by says and change the location and date - and he'd been given the go-bys within a week of his hire and shown how to use them. Didn't help; his stuff read like it was written by someone whose English was their third language), 2) obliviousness (which is deadly in his job, which is to be the engineers' eyes and ears on the jobsite, so he is supposed to see, hear, and record everything that happens...), and 3) a bizarre creepy/nasty personality (one of his other coworkers used to refer to him as "school shooter" and remark that if anyone shot up a Safeway or elementary school in his home town we'd know exactly who was responsible...)

He had the annoying habit of disappearing; he lives more than an hour from the central Willamette Valley where his job takes place so it's not like you could drive around and knock on his door. When he'd ghost on e-mails and phone calls and texts? He was unreachable.

You can imagine how well that worked with scheduling.

When the chief engineer told me about this "threat", I replied:

"How could (name of dirtbag) "threaten" to quit? You can "threaten" to quit if you're a critical employee who has skills your employer will find difficult or impossible to replace. If you're a tech and in grossly incompetent one, at that? The only reasonable response to your "threatening" to quit would be a sincere goodbye and wish for success at your next career at Jiffy Lube."

Apparently HR responded just so, and the gomer handed in his two weeks' notice. Good riddance.

I tend to be unsympathetic to the chorus of job-creators whining about how nobody wants to work anymore. No, they want to work just fine. Just not at your shitty job for shitty pay under shitty conditions.

But.

I gotta admit, I've been seeing some pretty goofy hires lately.

Maybe it's my old outfit; I'm not sure their hiring-fu is strong. But I wonder...this guy. The dude who quit before him who wasn't creepy and incompetent but just dumber than a bag of hammers. The other dude whose literacy was even more precarious than this goofball and who quit just ahead of getting canned...

Meanwhile the great people this outfit brings in leave, largely because the work is grim; endless brain-destroyingly dull development construction work, spending hours a day watching dirt move and arguing with people who tell you to believe them and not your lying eyes.

But this guy...wow. That's really special.

I think I'll make sure I go to Oil Can Henry's next time instead.

Blue on Blue

I don't really have anything to add here to the rage exploding across my country other than, yeah, well, what did you expect?

We have, those of us with the attributes that signify "meaningful" in our country; wealth, economic position, political engagement, whiteness...we've been fine that many of our cities are policed in ways that range from unpleasant to onerous to lethal for those citizens that lack those attributes. We didn't have to worry about fixing that busted taillight because we knew we wouldn't get pulled over for not signaling the lane change.

Or, if we did, we wouldn't get yanked out of the car and roughly body-searched and, if we got a little arsed about that, tased or arrested or just plain curb-stomped by somebody who felt no need to stop his inner asshole from coming out to play.

For example, I know for a fact that Portland Police Bureau has been the home for wannabe Klansmen and Nazis for decades. What have I done about that, other than vote for commissioners and mayors who have promised, usually ineffectually, to "do something" about what I knew perfectly well was so baked into PPB that the only way to "do something" would be to do a Saddam's Army on the whole outfit - just fire 99% of the sonsofbitches, burn the bastard to the ground, and start over?

Yeah, nothing. You, too? Thought so. Most of us who aren't a shade darker than that crayon color that used to be labeled "flesh" (and think about that for a moment...) haven't really been troubled enough to get het up over the problems.

So here we are.

Will we do anything about those problems now?

Don't make me laugh. You know better and so do I. We'll throw clubs and gas and "non-lethal" rounds at whoever makes a fuss. Christ on a crutch, we can't even do anything semi-intelligent about a fucking Plague, you think we're going to do anything sane about this, the miserable way we've treated our poor and our former slaves and current subjects, and everyone else who can't play the "get out of jail free" card?

Nope. I got nothin' for you on that.

What I wanted to make a brief comment on, though, was one of the stupider and more irritating American affectations all this rioting and anger over killer cops reminded me of: the "blue line" thing.

You've seen it. Fucker has it's own flag, forChrissakes. Even here in the People's Republic of Portland you see the little blue-line-flag stickers from time to time, on cop cars and even some regular old pickups and sedans and SUVs.

Anyway, the point of this blue line nonsense seems to be to try and impress people that the coppers are the only thing - the "thin blue line" - standing between civilization and a howling wilderness of Hobbsean war-of-all-against-all chaotic savagery.

And, hey...who can blame the coppers for wanting to believe this LARPing fantasy of heroic defenders of civilization, and trying to sell it to the public?

Beats the fuck out of accepting the reality that your grunt-level street cop is basically an over-armed mall security dude with better transportation who spends most of his or her day dealing with crappy little problems that can't and won't be solved by policework (Gee. Somebody clouted your car? That sucks. Well, fill in this report. Bye!) or, frankly, assholes. Any sergeant will tell you that ten percent of your people are the ones who'll give you ninety percent of your problems, and so it has to be with policing. Most of the people your beat cop interacts with are probably assholes, either because they're high and/or drunk, have some sort of mental issues, or are, well, just assholes.

I can see how that would make me want to think that breaking up pukey drunk-fights and dealing with speeders flipping you shit was manning the ramparts of Civilization against the Dark Hordes.

But there's no reason that us Dark Hordes need to buy into this cop cosplay.

Because it's pretty simple; the actual "defenders of civilization" is everyone. You, me, your Aunt Louise. We are the "thin line", and not that thin, either, that keeps our community and nation and civilization going.

Because the reality is that if the vast bulk of human beings weren't quiet and peaceful and generally "law-abiding"?

No number of coppers could stop them from running wild, anymore than the village watchman of Podoloversk could stop the Mongols from tearing the place apart.

No. The "blue line" bullshit is designed to convince us groundlings that whatever coppers do is "holding the line" of civilization against the Darkness. So when they blow up someone's house trying to arrest someone else who isn't there, when they kill someone in the process of "arresting" them for selling loose smokes or just being an asshole - and, let's recall that if being an asshole was a capital crime there's a whole bunch of people, up to and including a fairly significant portion of Trump Adminstration, who're dead meat - or when they go wild and start beating and shooting people, as you do every so often, y'know...to convince us that all this shit we'd normally look at and go "...the FUCK!?" and get agitated about our tax dollars going to fund this idiotic and destructive-to-civil-order nonsense is really Defending Civilization.

But run the numbers.

It ain't.

If We the People wanted to tear the living hell out of "civilization" we could, and no bunch of blue-suited mall cops would be able to stop us.

And the mere fact that this "blue line" bullshit is floating around out there and hasn't been viciously mocked offstage? The fact that paid-for-by-your-taxes coppers are apparently bought into and trying to broadcast the nonsense? The fact that our political "leaders" - from both Left and Right, I'm afraid; this truly IS a "both sides do it" problem - aren't willing to cram down on these idiot coppers and their Dungeon Defenders idiocy and tell them to STFU and go be good public servants and wrestle the pukey drunks and arrest the assholes without turning this into a war between The Force of Law and the people who the law in its impartial majesty prohibits from stealing bread and sleeping under bridges?

Says something very, very problematic about us and the country we've created.

Which, if you've been paying attention, shouldn't be news at all.

I could go on. About the insanity of coppers going Full Metal Jacket on regular people but palling around and sucking face with armed traitors (Amon Bundy, c'mon down! Proud Boys, represent!) and the ridiculous position of the "conservative" talking heads who were foaming with rage about the kneeling during songs that warned us that this day was coming if we did nothing but rage about kneeling.

But what's the point?

You know as well as I what the problems are, what should happen, and what won't.

Nope. That moronic "blue line" flag is really the white flag of our country surrendering to the reality that if you White, you Right.

Acting 1SG Lawes reads the morning formation announcements

Comp-ney, Atten-shun!

At ease.

Okay, listen up. Coupla things here.

AT Platoon.

I understand that, as those fucking pizza commercials keep reminding us, we are in "trying times", by which I mean both this fucking plague AND the fact that in this training cycle y'all have been down to the anti-armor range twice a day every day for three goddamn weeks. But if I get one. More. Phone. Call. from Brigade whining "Why are your AT vehicles parked in the B-Lane?" I will make it my personal business to go down to Willy's Speedi-Tow, requisition one of their goddamn trucks, and personally snatch your asses up and drag you back down to the motor pool.

You know the rules. I know the rules. And, unfortunately, so do those fucking Karens up at Brigade. So load and unload most quick smart and then park in the goddamn motor pool and walk back to the company area. Sergeant Morrow, you and me, after this formation. Am I clear? Thank-yew.

Now.

I am led to understand that there are certain individuals in this formation who are sick and tired of all this Plague Year shit. Who want to unmask, who want to slink back to the fucking Lizard Lounge so their Jody asses can get busy with rando grass widows, not that I'm being judge-mental or anything. I am led to understand that this commotion is all about "freedom", and that "your fear doesn't trump my freedom" and, yes, I see what the fuck you did there.

Let me remind you people.

We are STILL in the fucking Plague Year.

I trust that you, being the out-stand-ing airborne soldiers that I know you are, are familiar with the means and methods for the battalion in defense outlined in chapter three of Army Techniques Publication Three-dash-twenty-one.

That being said, how would you assess the behavior of, say, Private Black, here, if he proudly announced that he had no intention of digging a fighting position, that he would not submit his freedom from overhead cover to your fear of getting blown to small bloody independent republics by enemy artillery fire, and that he, in fact, intended to exercise his right to walk around the main line of defense wearing a pink tulle' tutu drawing fire whilst y'all cowered fearfully in your holes?

Anyone?

Thank you, Specialist Echevarria!

Yes. You would call him, and correct me if I am misquoting you here, Specialist, a "brain-dead fucker of whom the best portion of which ran down his mother's leg". Yes, indeed.

There are things you are supposed to be afraid of, people. Things that the fear is telling you not to fuck with, because they will fuck you up. Enemy artillery. Non-alcoholic beer. Payday loans.

The Plague will fuck you up like a one-five-five HE round. You are not brave and free if you walk around while the rounds are impacting your position, people. You are being fucking stupid and endangering your fellow troopers and compromising your airborne mission.

I trust this will be the last I hear of this nonsense. Keep your fucking masks on, people. Keep your distance. That's good practice for GIs anyway; remember - every time you bunch up you invite Mister Grenade to your party, and Mister Grenade is not really your friend.

Finally. Medical platoon.

You will be doing yourselves, this organization, and the nation a massive solid if you will kindly transfer those two empty shipping crates from your loading dock where they have been standing proud since, like, the last fucking fiscal year, to their forever home in the dumpster.

I spoke to Private Black about this the last time I ran into him on the loading dock and, frankly, I am not sure that I completely buy his explanation that they are part of what I believe he described as a "living art project" of Sergeant Carter's. Feel free to correct me after this formation if I am being overly skeptical, Sergeant.

Good. That is all.

Comp-ney, Atten-shun!

Platoon sergeants, take charge.

Wild, wild West

Just got back from a bunch of days in the field up the Columbia, on the deserty side of the Cascades. Pretty country there but...spare. Sparse. Not much out there other than the grass, the rock, the wind, and the sky.

Mind you, that's not what I'm thinking about. I had some idle thoughts about the latest bang-bang-crazy, as Jim Wright likes to call it.

And, because I'm a callous sonofabitch and nobody got killed in Vegas or Texas who I know or remotely care about, my main idle thought was this:

What the fuck is it about these ammosexual gun-licking nuts and the Black Stick?

If I had a choice I can't imagine a less-fun rifle to own than an AR-15 or one of its clones. I mean, seriously? I was assigned an M-16 for many years. I was decent with it - a workman should know his craft, after all - but I never liked the goddamn thing.

I'd say that for me it was just a tool, like an axe or a hammer, except it wasn't nearly as useful at its trade as a hammer or an axe at theirs.

The worst part about it was that it was chock-full of fucking irritatingly tiny little parts. Sure, it knocked down and went together easy, that comes with being a modern battle rifle. But when you had it knocked down the little fucking parts had an immensely irritating way of hiding or rolling away - don't get me started on the firing pin retaining pin! - unless you had a perfectly flat, well-lit, clean place to put them.

Then it was hard to clean. And you had to KEEP it clean; if it got fouled - and all those tiny little parts were easy to foul - it tended to malfunction, usually either in the form of a clogged gas tube and a short-recoiling bolt carrier, meaning either a failure to extract, a failure to eject, or a failure to feed. Double feeds, too, which were a stone bitch to clear, weren't uncommon in a dirty rifle.

My understanding is that the early 1960's issue models also suffered because the ammunition propellant burned dirty, gunking up the inside of the rifle with soot and crap and increasing the fouling problem. I can't imagine that cheap civilian 5.56mm ammo is all that much better.

Plus, frankly, what benefit is there to have a "hunting rifle" that can crank out a round every couple of seconds? Elk aren't going to shoot back. And a 5.56 round seems less optimal for knocking down something bigger-than-human-size. It's either going to tumble and tear up the meat, or its gonna break up and scatter nasty little lead bits into your venison.

I have a Short Magazine Lee-Enfield No. 1 Mk III* that has served me perfectly well for years as both hunting and target rifle. It's fun to shoot and relatively accurate given it's long life and relatively hard use. I've debated several times whether or not to hang a rifle scope on the thing. It would make my shot group tighter, but I love the history of it and wouldn't want to just slap a modern scope on the centenarian. Yet the original Periscopic Prism Company scope and mount is an awful abortion, only 2x magnification and, worse, offset to the left of center which is the kiss of death for me, a left-handed firer.

But I've let myself get off the damn subject.

The point is, what gives? What the hell makes so many of these people crave the AR-15 in all its flawed avatars?

The impulse to kill people? I get that. Just thinking about the dumb fuckers who gave us the Fraudulency Administration makes me want to go all St. Bartholomew on their asses.

But to do that with a shoddy tool? One that makes it harder to do a decent job of work?

Who the hell needs that?

I swear. People are just weird.

Bearing Arms, Badly

One of the things about the Second Amendment crowd that kind of irks the shit out of me is how bad they are at this "keep and bear arms" stuff. Today's case-in-point of an Armed But Stupid Fucking Citizenry is Ms. Jamie Gilt of Jacksonville, Florida:

"Jamie Gilt, 31, who posts about firearms on her social media accounts was driving through Putnam County, Jacksonville, Florida, on Tuesday in her truck when she was wounded after the toddler picked up the weapon and shot her in the back. Her four-year-old son picked up a loaded .45 semi-automatic handgun from the back seat, pointed it towards his mother and pulled the trigger. The powerful round went through the front seat and passed through Gilt's body. Gilt and her son had been traveling to pick up a horse from a relative when the accident happened."

The weapon used by young deadeye when he put one through mommy's eight-ring was a "Kimber" M1911 knock-off, and that in itself makes me really pretty pissed off.

Because the M1911 and its variants may be the most mechanically safe handguns ever constructed.

Unlike most semiauto pistols that have no more than a single pushbutton or trigger safety the M1911 has three: a thumb safety (which is the equivalent of most modern semiauto's pushbotton/trigger safety), a half-cock safety (a very old-school sort of mechanism that was really a 19th Century military firearm hangover) and a grip safety, which requires a firm stock-weld with the firing hand to allow the hammer to fall.

The M1911 is a damn safe weapon, is what I'm saying. Even moreso if you follow Rule 1 of Handgun Safety; Never Chamber a Round Until You Are Ready To Fire.

It's really that simple, and the fraction of a second it takes to work the slide is not going to make half a nickel's worth of difference in "defending yourself". If the person threatening you has the drop on you to the extent that you can't chamber a round? You're pretty much fucked, anyway. But no more fucked than you are walking around with a live round under the hammer, as Mommy Gilt found out when little Chuckles picked up her hogleg and ventilated her ass.

In order to enable her spawn to put a live joe through her Mommy Dumbass must have, at the very least, had a live round in the chamber. The rest of the sequence is hard to figure out. Assuming the the hammer was uncocked little Nemo must have cocked it, which seems unlikely, so strike two against the Stupid Mother of the Year; she must have cocked it.

The other thing that the kid had to do was somehow grip the stock hard enough to engage the grip safety, which seems hard to believe for a four-year-old. Had Mommy gimmicked the grip safety somehow? If so, strike three, Mommy, and you're out with a bullet through the back.

So it's not their guns I fear. It's them. These fucking people. They're like an avalanche of Stupid, and they're Armed.

Did you think of that, Mister Madison? I sure as hell wish you had.

Update 3/23: So even in Florida you can be too goddamn stupid to carry a firearm. Turns out that the Mother of the Year is going to be charged under some kind of child-endangerment statute (I think...). But the new explanation - that Mombo had her hogleg lying around on one of the front seats, it slid under the seat (or possibly through the seat between the back and the cushion) into the back footwell where little Bubbles had unbuckled his carseat belt - still begs the question. Dumbass still had to have had a round under the hammer. I can't imagine that the little bastard knew to thumb the hammer back so the hammer must have BEEN back and the thumb safety off. And how the heck the kid managed to engage the grip safety I still don't know. The whole thing stinks, frankly, and just reminds me that this woman has NO business within the same grid square as a firearm.

Worth a thousand words

This pretty much says it all.

Look at this fathead; standing on his beater-ass Dodge p-up on a road in eastern Oregon, all camo'ed up with what looks like his ballistic vest, boots and K-pot like he was going in to clean out Fallujah.

The American in me wants to take a piece of dimension lumber upside his helmet for being a dumbass seditionist supporting armed treason.

The drill sergeant in me wants to lock his friggin' heels.

"Sweetbabyjesussonofabitch what fucking dumpster did you dive in to get that outfit, precious? Did you wanna play Army like the big kids, or were they just our of warm clothes down at the Rescue Mission? And who taught you how to lace those boots, hero, your baby sister? Have you ever SEEN a can of boot-polish, slick, or was your plan always "Rub my boots in the dirt"? Or did you rub them on your ass, since you look as dark and dirty as a fuckin winter day?

Fasten that goddamn chinstrap, you sorry oxygen-thief, and what did you shave with, a cue-tip? Have you EVER shaved, or did your mommy teach you not to play with sharp objects? I've seen less hair on my dog's ass, sweetheart, and unless you feel like finding my boot in yours I suggest you get a goddamn shave, lace and polish those boots, and square that helmet away and all in about ten picoseconds or you are likely to have a fucking close encounter with a fucking cattle prod..."

Honestly. These people.

Let's you and him fight

Believe me whan I say that I am seldom surprised when the stupidity and overall fatuousness of the U.S. public is exposed.

Still, this brought even me to a standstill:

The graphic is from a Fallows post in his Chickenhawk Nation series and in the manner of pictures is worth a thousand words.

This image makes me almost physically ill. Almost two-thirds of my fellow "citizens" want to fight the Islamic State; want to send their fellow citizens - again - to fight a land war in Asia against jihadis who want my Army brothers there killing people and wrecking shit because of the success it brought them when we tried and inevitably failed in Iraq. Almost the exact same proportion of these cowardly shitheels want someone else to do the actual fighting, someone not their precious snowflake selves.

I don't think that my country has changed all that much over the years. Enough retrospective accounts of the "Greatest Generation" have emerged to correct the wartime propaganda tales of American heroes fighting to get at the dirty Japs and filthy Huns. Were there a lot of volunteers? Sure. Were there also a hell of a lot of people looking for cushy Stateside billets, cozy hidey-holes in noncombat service jobs, and deferments? You bet your ass.

But this...this is really beyond disgusting.

First, because the entire notion is both stupid (it failed huge when we tried it when the Iraq-Syria was still actual sorta-kinda Westphalian states instead of the colossal shitmire of failed-statedom-and-Sunni-rebellion it is now) and obviously so. It's not like we don't KNOW that this hasn't worked and why.

Second, because the geopolitical setting for this stupid is completely different from the sort of problem we faced in 1941. Germany and Japan had actual armies, navies, and air forces. They could have really defeated our armed forces and destroyed the United States. There was really no other option between victory and defeat. This is, instead, a classic "cabinet war", something that We the People can choose to do or not do without risking any real danger more serious than that presented by the random drunk driver or household slip-trip-fall.

Worse. Shoving U.S. armed force into this meatgrinder - short of deciding to become an open empire and conquering and occupying the places the Ottomans themselves couldn't hold - is in itself a defeat; as Sun Tzu would remind us, if you are fighting without an obtainable goal you have already lost.

But damn near two-thirds of my "fellow Americans" are too fucking stupid to see that and too fucking selfish to put their own asses on the line to back up their own stupidity.

Honestly. These fucking people...

Climate Change for Dummies

One thing that makes me despair for my species is the appallingly chasm-like abyss of derp that you encounter whenever you say the words "climate change".

I mean, yes, it's a science. But it's not fucking rocket science.

What's the one single thing that we hairless monkeys have been doing more than anything else since the end of the Neolithic?

No, not screwing. We've been doing that forever and will continue so long as we have teensy tinsy little stupid-brains in our genitals, sort of like the ones that the big therapods had in their butts to help control their back ends. Except the genital tillermen and -women are usually busy driving us into a freaking tree in pursuit of each other instead of doing anything helpful. But that's beside the point.

No. We've been making stuff. Bronze axeheads. Iron plowshares. Steam engines. Cotton gins. Battleships. Nuclear power plants.

All this making means burning dead things. Wood. Coal. Petroleum. All that burning shoves gases and particulates into the air.

And we know what that does. We've seen it on Venus, where the gas blanket is so thick that it traps solar heating like a big ol' duvet.

So it's not some sort of wild speculation or conspiracy theory to draw the line from A to B to C; more industry = more gases = more insulation = more heat.

And it doesn't take a genius to figure out how this extra heat could be a bad thing. Hell, even my old boss the Green Machine is worried. In the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review the authors said:

"Climate change poses another significant challenge for the United States and the world at large. As greenhouse gas emissions increase, sea levels are rising, average global temperatures are increasing, and severe weather patterns are accelerating. These changes, coupled with other global dynamics, including growing, urbanizing, more affluent populations, and substantial economic growth in India, China, Brazil, and other nations, will devastate homes, land, and infrastructure. Climate change may exacerbate water scarcity and lead to sharp increases in food costs. The pressures caused by climate change will influence resource competition while placing additional burdens on economies, societies, and governance institutions around the world.

These effects are threat multipliers that will aggravate stressors abroad such as poverty, environmental degradation, political instability, and social tensions – conditions that can enable terrorist activity and other forms of violence."

Note the verb. "Poses". Not "might pose" or "could pose" or "fuck NOAA, this climate change stuff is a bunch of libtard hooey..." "Poses"; pose pōz/verb
3rd person present: poses

1. present or constitute (a problem, danger, or difficulty).
"the sheer number of visitors is posing a threat to the area"
synonyms: constitute, present, create, cause, produce, be
"pollution poses a threat to health".

So. I go to my Facebook page and I find a post from a friend of mine. Great gal, Olympic athlete, mom, artist...and a pretty smart person. And she's got a link from "PragerU" talking about how climate change isn't a real - not a REALLY real - problem and, besides, "doing something" would be SOOOO expensive. "Will the enormous cost justify the gain?" is their tagline.

That's pretty much where I facepalmed. PragerFuckingU. Gah. Have you ever encountered those idiots?

SweetFuckingBabyJesusonaStick you've never seen drool-puddle-stupid until you've seen one of the videos these drooling stupids produce. They're supposed to present topics from a "conservative" point of view, "conservative" meaning, apparently, "the condition the human brain assumes when all the little brain cells have been herded onto cattle trucks and transported to extermination camps where they are dosed with ZyklonB in the brain showers..." but all they manage to do is make "conservatives" look "fucking stupid" by reducing complex topics to a word salad of conservative talking points, bad arguments, and outright lies.

Here's an article from something called The Blaze which is, so far as I can tell, some sort of wingnut website that luurves them some PragerU (Prager, BTW, is one Dennis Prager, a wingnut radio shouter before branching out into dubious "educational" schemes).

The article tries to make this "PragerU" sound full of awesomesauce but, instead, ends up making the wingut radio-shouter moron sound like...well, a wingnut radio-shouter moron. Here's the article citing the wingnut radio-shouter moron on foreign affairs;

“The people who try to make the Middle Eastern conflict complex have an agenda,” he said, giving just one example (see the condensed Middle Eastern lesson, below)."

Complex? Pshaw! Saddle up, l'il buckaroo, and let's ride through hundreds of years of migration, religious coexistence and conflict, resource allocation, consuption, and disputation, Mongol invasions, Ottoman rule, European colonial highjinks, and four Israeli-Arab wars - in just five minutes!

Yes. Somebody has an agenda here...but more'n likely it's the wingnut radio-shouter moron who thinks that you can "teach" the Middle East in five minutes.

That's "PragerU" and that's what my smart, dynamic, engaged friend thinks is a valid "take" on climate change. I've tried to expose Prager to her, I've tried to show her the science...and she won't go there. "I'm not convinced." she says. "What about "Climategate"? What about this? What about that?", throwing every wingnut talking point smokescreen out at me. She just. Won't. Budge.

And that's reeeeally depressing. Because she's a relatively "high-information" Republican sort of voter. She reflexively hates Clinton but is smart enough to recognize the passengers in the Republican clown car as three rings full of liars, fools, charlatans, and whackaloons. She's very religious but not self-righteous about it. She's usually pretty good people...but she's buying this and - I can't imagine any other reason other than - its because the wingnuts and Christopaths are yammering about it.

So this strikes me as pure tribalism. And if the Clown Clan can pull my friend into their Clubhouse of Bottomless Derp...what the hell can the rest of us do? There's enough of these people to jam things up enough, long enough, until we're all dog-paddling around Manhattan.

And then what..?

Dead to rights

I'm sorry, but this little morality play doesn't seem (to me) to say anything nearly as much about "gun control" or "Second Amendment rights" as much as it does "You're never as fucking smart as you fucking think you are so you need to plan for that".

Because there's really only two ways I can see this playing out:

1. Li'l Jocko reaches into Mommy's "specially designed" pistol-carry purse, extracts her hogleg, jacks back the slide, releases it, takes up a solid, two-handed firing position and puts a round into Mommy's brain housing group (all without Mommy either seeing him do all this or hearing the sound of the automatic pistol action being worked - an unmistakeable noise for someone who was supposed to be all Miss Idaho NRA as the mommy-target is said to have been) or

2. Now-deceased rocket scientist was wandering around Wally Mart with a freaking round under the hammer in violation of every common-sense rule on firearms safety ever thought up and Rule Number Zero for any sort of firearm, thus allowing her sprog to simply slip the bullet-launcher out of her clutch and put one in her ten-ring, easy-peasy.

Believe #1 if you dare, but I gotta go with #2. Which pretty much goes to show you that you can be a valedictorian, scientist, wife, mother, and firearms aficianado, and if you fuck up Rule Number Zero for a tenth of a nanosecond chances are you'll wind up dead as mutton.

Which, in turn, reminds me again that waaaayyyyy too many people can get their little paddy-paws on firearms who shouldn't go out in public with anything more lethal than a fucking licorice whip.

That's my real problem with "Second Amendment Solutions"; because the First Amendment of Not Getting Fucking Shot is that you never forget that the most dangerous weapon is the one closest to you, i.e., the one in your own hands. You ignore that, or forget that, or pretend that it's not true and you become more dangerous to yourself and everyone around you than the maddest lunatic jihadi suicide commando who ever graduated magnum cum madrassi.

Today In the History of Bad Ideas...

...here's one I never thought about.

I mean, the headline kinda writes itself, doesn't it?

"Two killed, three injured in nude hot tub waterfall plunge"

And, of course, the now-traditional phrase whenever this sort of fucking Darwin-award idiocy is reported:

"Investigators suspect alcohol was involved."

Sheeyeah.

Spy vs. Spy: Bay State Fathead Edition

Well.

Good to know that only the most cunning and hardest-core of the fiendishly cunning hardcore Mooslim evildoers lurking behind the arras of Islamofascism can evade our highly trained Homeland Security colossus and harm us;

"After being read Miranda rights, the Boston bombing suspect in custody, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, has stopped talking to authorities, officials tell the Associated Press. "The surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings acknowledged to the FBI his role in the attacks but did so before he was advised of his constitutional right to keep quiet and seek a lawyer, U.S. officials said Wednesday,"

This guy has been in the U.S. since he was nine and has never, EVER watched a TV police show. Or cop movie.

Ever.

Had NO clue that crime suspects lawyer up and dummy up.

Until they told him.

Remind me - how the hell did this fucking idiot figure out which side of the pressure cooker to put the boomy-stuff in?

And this is the latest Fiendishly Cunning Mooslim Evildoer? Man, they gotta be vacuuming the bottom of the gene pool over there in Scary Islamofascistic Caliphate-wannabe Terrist Land^TM.

(h/t to Doghouse Riley for the update.)

Utinam journalis et Norks et North Carolina et fuckin' omnes sed(autem) unam cervicem...

I don't know why, but today's immense mountain of stupid is immensely depressing.



I'm not sure which particular item pushed me over the line.

Was it the State of North Carolina declaring the right to establish a state religion? (And to think that we could have just let the dumb fuckers secede, but noooooo...)



Was it a man who is paid as a profession educator suggesting that as long as the rapee is unconscious the rapist should feel free to "reap the benefits"?



Was it the statistical data that indicates that somewhere between one fifth and one third of my "fellow Americans" fall somewhere intellectually between "utterly fucking batshit crazy" and "dumber than a stump mating with a bag of hammers"?



Was it the usual idiot news media panicking over the usual idiot North Korean bluster without realizing that they always do this, and our media always falls for it? Honestly, it's like the fucking morons are playing tug-of-war with a dog and wondering why the dog won't stop first.



Or was it the people - presumably the same 28% who still think that there's a secret UN conspiracy to take away our precious golfs - who were so utterly gormless as to confuse a 25 pound, 18-inch long housecat for a 120 pound, five-foot long cougar?



I honestly don't know for sure.

But whatever it was, like the Emperor Caligula, it makes me wish that all these fucking idiots had one neck so with a single stroke I could rid the world of them.

It's bad enough that I've finally had to call the Dove Lewis guy to come out to give the Little Cat her quietus (it was either that or declare the Fire Direction Center a solid waste treatment facility). But when I think that that harmless little moggie will be gone before the sun rises Saturday and yet all these goddamn blockheaded, ignorant, selfish, greedy, shortsighted, mewling, puking, festering soulless moronic waste products of humanity will be here to see it I just get pissed off.

Oregon Assholes Award II: Sellwood Dumbfuck Guntards

Because nothing says FREEDOM!!! like wandering around a residential neighborhood in a major city sportin' your AR-15 wood.

These guys qualify as certifiable Oregon Assholes for a number of reasons:

1. They picked Sellwood, a very quiet little Portland neighborhood, to walk around slinging their metal cocks. Neither one of these assholes is from Sellwood - in fact, Guntard Warren is all the way from Medford, waaaayyyy south in the more rednecky-part of Oregon. The other one is from Clackamas County, well known for having livestock smarter than many of the registered voters. Assholes.

2. Here's the public statement of one of the assholes:

"I am a full flesh libertarian and a gun right extremest. We the people should control our government and bring us back to when we had and own our Life, Liberty, and Property. I hate socialist, dictators, and corrupt Government. We are losing are rights every day while not knowing it and then it become to late."

You will please note that neither one of these assholes was protesting the immense number of people incarcerated for long periods for minor drug crimes. Neither one is protesting the immunized spying on Americans facilitated by the PATRIOT Act, or the warrentless searches, or the imprisonment without trial, or the torture. Losing rights? Losing rights, douchebag? You've lost more goddamn rights than a Jewish activist in Omsk and the only ones that have gotten your panties in a twist are the ones that have you prancing around with faux-military firearms like some sort of NRA-lobbyist's wet dream? Assholes.

3. The assholes cost me tax dollars. These assholes generated ten calls to the 9-1-1 center and at least one Portland Police Bureau stop. They also caused a lockdown at one of the daycares in Sellwood. At the very least the City ought to bill these assholes for the time lost checking out their little stroll and the daycare should hit them up for the classroom time lost to the entirely-reasonable fear that these idiots might pull another Newtown.

4. The assholes cost local businesses money; several locked up on the, again, not unreasonable suspicion that the jackholes might take it into their heads to rob them.

There's a good reason that one of the first rules of urban civil society is that we disarm. Our history of armed assholedom is way too long to kid ourselves about the good that some noble individual might do with a bullet-launcher. The sheer weight of assholery will bury him or her in a heartbeat.

An asshole with an attitude armed with feet and fists can be a problem. An asshole armed with a knife may be lethal.

And asshole with a firearm WILL be lethal at a much lower degree of difficulty than that required to kill you with an elbow, a cleaver, or an axe.

Frankly, I don't walk around with a firearm because I don't trust myself not to reach for it when some asshole gets up in my face. And I'm a smart guy who hates fighting and has outgrown the groinical-reflex phase of manhood; you bet your ass I don't trust YOU - who the hell knows what kind of person, or whacko, or nutter, you are.

And you want to walk around with rifles, assholes? My Army brothers are were doing just that at the very time you fuckers were; walking around with rifles in their hands. But they aren't walking around peaceful Sellwood. They were walking around some of the shittiest places on Earth, walking around them for no reason that will ever bring them joy, or peace, or wisdom, or riches. They were not being asked whether they want to walk those places. And some number of them will never come home alive or sound.

And yet, there you were, as greasy and stupid as a pork rind and as useless as an encyclopedia in a monkey-house, you arrogant pricks, shoving your blued-steel cocks in everyone's face in quiet Sellwood like the pathetic wannabe-soldier porn-fluffers you are.

Want to walk around with rifles, douchebags? I'll bet there's a street in Kabul where you'd find lots of people who'd love to see your sorry, lame, "gun rights extremist" ass walking down the street with rifles. And here's somebody to tell you what would happen to your sorry sad act;

Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, pride of Bow Bazaar,
Owner of a native press, "Barrishter-at-Lar,"
Waited on the Government with a claim to wear
Sabres by the bucketful, rifles by the pair.

Then the Indian Government winked a wicked wink,
Said to Chunder Mookerjee: "Stick to pen and ink.
They are safer implements, but, if you insist,
We will let you carry arms wheresoe'er you list."

Hurree Chunder Mookerjee sought the gunsmith and
Bought the tubes of Lancaster, Ballard, Dean, and Bland,
Bought a shiny bowie-knife, bought a town-made sword,
Jingled like a carriage-horse when he went abroad.

But the Indian Government, always keen to please,
Also gave permission to horrid men like these --
Yar Mahommed Yusufzai, down to kill or steal,
Chimbu Singh from Bikaneer, Tantia the Bhil;

Killar Khan the Marri chief, Jowar Singh the Sikh,
Nubbee Baksh Punjabi Jat, Abdul Huq Rafiq --
He was a Wahabi; last, little Boh Hla-oo
Took advantage of the Act -- took a Snider too.

They were unenlightened men, Ballard knew them not.
They procured their swords and guns chiefly on the spot;
And the lore of centuries, plus a hundred fights,
Made them slow to disregard one another's rights.

With a unanimity dear to patriot hearts
All those hairy gentlemen out of foreign parts
Said: "The good old days are back -- let us go to war!"
Swaggered down the Grand Trunk Road into Bow Bazaar,

Nubbee Baksh Punjabi Jat found a hide-bound flail;
Chimbu Singh from Bikaneer oiled his Tonk jezail;
Yar Mahommed Yusufzai spat and grinned with glee
As he ground the butcher-knife of the Khyberee.

Jowar Singh the Sikh procured sabre, quoit, and mace,
Abdul Huq, Wahabi, jerked his dagger from its place,
While amid the jungle-grass danced and grinned and jabbered
Little Boh Hla-oo and cleared his dah-blade from the scabbard.

What became of Mookerjee? Soothly, who can say?
Yar Mahommed only grins in a nasty way,
Jowar Singh is reticent, Chimbu Singh is mute.
But the belts of all of them simply bulge with loot.

What became of Ballard's guns? Afghans black and grubby
Sell them for their silver weight to the men of Pubbi;
And the shiny bowie-knife and the town-made sword are
Hanging in a Marri camp just across the Border.

What became of Mookerjee? Ask Mahommed Yar
Prodding Siva's sacred bull down the Bow Bazaar.
Speak to placid Nubbee Baksh -- question land and sea --
Ask the Indian Congressmen -- only don't ask me!

Assholes.

狼獾皮!

(N.B. - I apologize in advance for my bad Mandarin, but I had to guess at the Chinese word for "wolverine"...)

When I read that the MGM producers of the new Red Dawn remake had decided to bail on China as the replacement for the original concept of Soviet, Cuban, and (don't giggle, now...) Nicaraguan invaders in the wilds of West Buttfuck, Idaho I didn't so much as blink.

You can see why; the old Commies just ain't what they were, sure, and China...well, China is the Holy Grail of marketing. You can't make bank on selling Western movies to Chinese audiences when they are the baddies.

I tried to see them using some sort of Arab terrists but couldn't get past the whole "Successfully crossing an entire ocean full of U.S. carrier battle groups with civilian freighters loaded with a gajillion Al Qaeda tanks n' shit" concept.

I gotta admit, though; NORKs?

I didn't see that one coming.

But what I could, and did, see coming was this shit:

What makes this even more ridiculous is that in 1984 there really was a big, scary enemy out there that might have done a "red dawn" (OK, without the Nicaraguans, who would have maxed out the Texaco card halfway through Sinaloa). There really was a possibility that U.S. civilians might have had to choose between red and dead.

But...North Korea?

It's enough to make a fucking cat laugh.

Add to that the bone-stupid racism of the 2012 version AND a critical mass of the dummies who want to see it?

Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ.

We don't have enough race problems with the mouth-breathing goobers and Republicans (but I repeat myself...) in the U.S. we need this?

All this and a remake of Sabrina, too?

Maybe the Bible-beaters are right; maybe we are living in the End of Times.

Sheesh.

Jesus Loves Me

this I know...

...'cause the Constitution tells me so!

What fresh hell is this?

Honestly, the Founders really did this nation a disservice by not rounding up the damn snake-handlers and bible-belters and Christiopaths (along with the Tories) and shipping their lame, nonreasoning, paste-eating asses to Acadia.

Idiots. Faaagh.

Lesson Unlearned

So I had an incredible evening at the Portland v. LA match last Wednesday. You can read about it here, but, trust me, the words alone don't do it justice. I think we all showed up expecting just to do our parts as good supporters and were surprised (and delighted) by the win.But before the match I was involved in an odd incident and I thought I'd mention it just...well, just to see what you thought.

First let me explain how the seating works at Civic Stadium (a.k.a. "Jeld-Wen Field"). The North End - what we call "The Shed" - is where the Timbers Army stands. In the old soccer tradition this would be "the terraces", home of the hoi-polloi, the rabble, the working class yobbos, where the penny-ticket supporters would be herded to stand all match long. Portland has made good changes to this tradition, so the Army is made up of both men and women, young and old, and in my obviously biased opinion marries the best of the old British terrace traditions to the best of American sports fandom AND the best of Portland's happy anarchic spirit. We call ourselves the "People's Republic of Portland " for good reasons, and some of the best are on display in the Shed End on a matchday.The Army has always had open seating - since we don't use the seats - and sections 101 through 108 are "general admission"; first come, first stand.

I sit in the next section over. Well, actually, we don't sit - we stand in front of our reserved seats. I like to call us the "Timbers Army Reserves"; we're too staid for festival seating but too raucous to sit down.

Occasionally we get people with general admission tickets who sneak down before the match. We usually warn them that our section is "reserved", and that if the ticket holders show up they will get chased off, and they usually grin and admit to taking their chances. A couple of youngish guys showed up for the Toronto match and were nearly immediately evicted when the people who had the seats showed up, but they just stepped down to the front of the adjacent aisle and stood in front of the capo stand all match. Nobody had any problem with that.

But this week I ran into something a bit different. We arrived to find a woman and her daughter standing in front of our seats. I informed her that they WERE our seats, and she replied that we were wrong and that our section was general admission.

Now I'm a fairly peaceable guy; not VERY peaceable, but enough to keep me out of casual brawls. But this woman was visibly not interested in discussion. She was a bulbous, tattooed sort of Southeast Portland gal. The uncharitable description would be "trashy" and I'm inclined to be uncharitable, since when I informed her that she was wrong and that she was in a reserved section she loudly informed me that I was full of shit and that she was damn well not moving.

I suggested that she look at the number of the seat she was standing in front of and the number on my ticket, at which point she said she didn't care what was on my damn ticket, ripped it out of my hand, and repeated that she wasn't moving.

At that point I stopped being peaceable.

Now while she was an obnoxious fat slag she was also a woman who had not offered physical violence, so I held back on my initial impulse to step in and pop her one. Instead I stepped up and put myself right up against her, well inside her personal space, chest-to-chest, and suggested pretty sternly that she move her fat slag ass to another place.She started protesting loudly that I was threatening her and that she had a twelve-year-old daughter with her. I repeated that I didn't care if she had a chimpanzee monkey with her and that she and her daughter needed to go find their seats. She moved, cursing and loud, and I sat down and went about my business.

And then came the odd part. About ten minutes later along comes one of the staff who informs me that the woman has reported me to the ushers as threatening her, that the woman was misinformed by the stadium staff about the seating so she was not "at fault", that her daughter was crying because of what happend, and that I needed to go to the ushers if I was confronted by another similar "misunderstanding" in the future rather than confronting the offender.

My first reaction was just surprise; that the woman, who must have found out from the ushers that she was wrong about the seating, would have been indignant rather than ashamed and have tried to set the ushers on me rather than slink away quietly. But on reflection I recognized that shame is a rare quality in 2011.

But my second reaction was irritation with the officialdom. The ushers had not bothered to find out what had happened, and, having done their job poorly to begin with, were upset with me because I corrected their error in a way that caused a rude and stupid woman's child some distress. I informed the usher that I was perfectly capable of corrective training for both present and future Gresham hootchies and that, while I had not so much as raised a hand to the woman, that she had obviously been looking for trouble, picked the wrong person, and found it. And that I had no intention of deputizing other people to stand up for me; I was perfectly capable of that myself, being over the age of consent and all that.

The usher repeated her warning, I repeated my position, and we parted in mutual dissatisfaction.

My final opinion on the whole ridiculous business is that the worst part of it is that the woman whose aggressive ignorance was the cause of the entire mess is still out there, still convinced that she was hard done by and browbeaten by the mean nasty man, still ready to jump up in the next unsuspecting chump's face with the same rough insistence of her own rights - whether she's right or not.

She learned nothing from the entire mess, other than perhaps to feel more grieved, more put-upon than before; nothing about the evening, other than perhaps my ferocity, gave her a moment's pause.Reasoning did not touch her, reflection or self-doubt was not in her, civility was useless against her...nothing moved her but raw, naked force. And even when she was exposed as a misinformed fool her reaction was not shame or remorse but self-righteous anger.

What the hell can you do with someone like that?