Make stupid wars. Collect stupid prizes

That the Trump Klown Kabinet could fuck up a military wet dream?

Color me shocked by that. Shocked!

One of the most interesting takes on this is Garrett Graff's piece here:  

It sums up the multivariate fuckups, idiocies, and "scandals" (if such a thing can be applied to these shameless nitwits - you have to have the ability to feel shame to be "scandalized", and these garden tools have none) involved in the now-apparently-called "Signalgate" nonsense.

I don't really give a shit. These people have done and will do worse. This is just another Tuesday in Yemen and the worthless Trump 2: Electric Boogaloo Administration. Oh, wait, more dead people? Yawn.

No.

It's what it exposes about the pure, crystalline stupidity that has been the U.S. "policy" in the Middle East, Trumpian and otherwise.

Seriously...what the fuck did these nimrods think a dozen bombs, smart or otherwise, would do in Yemen?

The place has been a clusterfuck since, well...in the modern era? The Sixties, when the place split into two north-south halves and proceeded to indulge in various bloody debates over who should be the boss of whom.

Throw in the usual - corruption, poverty, famine - and you've got the classic Middle Eastern recipe for misery.

So how does hucking a dozen or so kinetic weapons into random apartment buildings "help" with that?

Hint: it doesn't.

This was, apart from the awesome level of bureaucratic incompetence - people on their iPhones in the Kremlin cafeteria, random journos in on the chat, schoolboy emojis - the ultimate in worthlessly performative "war". This was the equivalent of the story in Tony Herbert's Vietnam memoir where he runs down the list of target effects and comes across one labeled "emplacements destroyed" and wonders how you "destroy" a hole by blowing it into a bigger hole.

For a couple of cool million in ordnance, fuel, equipment wear, and personnel costs this nonsense only made the Yemeni rubble bounce. 

I'm sure Elon Musk will get on this "waste" just as soon as he gets done kicking all us "fraudsters" off Social Security.

WASF.

Find Out?

Two things about Tubby finally running into the long arm of the law:

1) the Stormy payoff might possibly be the LEAST illegal thing he’s ever done, because…

2) Everyone who is familiar with the joker from his real estate days in NYC knows he’s crooked as a dog’s leg and mobbed-up. He’s just a sleazy little development hustler and always has been.

That means nothing to the GQP/his cult. They didn’t care before and they don’t care now. He’s their crook, and his cons are their cons.

No, the real question I’d ask is “will this change the REST of the country, particularly the mainstream media?”. So far they’ve treated Tubby like any other Republican, meaning when he lies they report the lie rather than simply noting “he lied again” and when he crimes they report it as just a thing rather than "he crimed again".

IF – and that’s s big if and not a given – this gives the press the chance to actually report that this crooked shitbird is a) a crooked shitbird who is b) likely to be elected president again? 

Maybe suddenly the idiot “center” will wake up and turn out against him.

I’m not betting that way.

But at least this is an opportunity.

Wait...

“Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, nicknamed MTG, isn’t afraid to share her opinions, no matter how intense and in-your-face they are. She sits down with Lesley Stahl this Sunday on 60 Minutes."

Okay, we're fucked.

Some things I dread about 2023

 

Hunter Biden.

Let's just start there.

Mind, that's just a placeholder for the tl:dr version, which I now kind of have to explain. So.

There's always a handful of ominous clouds on the new year horizon, every year, things we know are in view but have no way of knowing how they will affect us or even whether they will affect us..

But this one's both a surety and a misery; the GQP's takeover of the federal House of Representatives, which I'll just go ahead and call "Hunter Biden" for short because the coming ridiculous fucking clown show is sure to include massive amounts of the sonofabitch.

(And in case you haven't been following this goat rodeo, the central fact of our next two Congressional years is that the fucking monkeys will be running the House zoo. The steering wheel will be in the clutch of the whackjobs - the Greenes, the Gaetzs, the Gym Jordans...the people who make Louie Gohmert look like a sage.)

As we've discussed here (over and over, because it's the central reality of our current U.S. politics) the modern "conservative" movement has only a handful of actual policies, all of which are loathsome to anyone who can't check all the "rich, "white", "male", "god-botherer", "ammosexual", and "bigoted" boxes.

Popular support for policies like "tax cuts for rich fucks!", "let's make American society socially, politically, and financially more like 1929!", and "let's hand over more political power to big business!" ranges from nonexistent to miniscule to at-least-less-then-two/fifths-of-the-public. 

In a genuinely popularly-elected government flogging those sorts of political goals would get you locked out of the corridors of power for generations if not forever; there's just not enough plutocrats, plutocrat-fluffers, and morons to get you elected.

Since that's all the "conservatives" have, though, they have to spend - and will spend - the vast bulk of their time fapping over ridiculous QANut conspiracy bullshit that is red meat to their lunatic base.

So when Margie Taylor Greene gets her little dickbeaters on the House Judiciary Committee gavel you know damn well she's gonna drag Tony Fauci in front of her to explain why...ummm...well, that's a good question, actually, given that it was Greene's outfit - starting with her Orange Crush - that fucked up the COVID response and managed to kill something like half a million people and all Fauci did was what he could to stop the suicidal morons from killing others along with themselves

Over at wherever Matt Gaetz lands he'll gin up a dozen Hunter Biden "investigations" generating a shit-ton of FAUX "News" content while trying to make Hunter a scandal on Daddy Joe...as if Jared Kusher didn't even fucking exist or if anyone outside the looney wingnut Right gives a shit.

All the while these chucklefucks will deliberately impede every other goddamn thing the federal government is there to do.

Because the bottom line is that these fucking people are 1) dumb as a box of rocks, 2) mean as weasels and 3) convinced that "government is bad" so they're bad a governance.

Which, in a republic where the fucking people are supposed to BE the fucking government, is a nonsensical and dangerous conviction.

Which isn't going to stop these nitwits. 

They'll tie the House, and to the extent they can, the entire federal government and everything that government has a hand in (which means damn near everything, the modern U.S. being an immense industrial nation that cannot continue as an entity without constant and continuous governance in everything ranging from foreign defense to meat-packing inspections...) with their "Hunter Biden"-level foolery.

Which means that the true disaster of our age...

Climate Change

...will roll unchecked.

We've talked about this, too. We're headed straight into the Perfect Storm of the Holocene Thermal Maximum and the Sixth Extinction without the slightest idea what that will mean.

Except not good; we can take that as read.

Will 2023 be The End of All Things?

No, of course not.

But it'll be incrementally worse than 2022 was. More extreme weather. Probably another bad western fire season. Trouble with supply chains. Difficulties in crop yields, and changes in, especially, water budgets that will affect everything from drinking water to fish runs.

It's difficult enough to get even the left side of the political spectrum to pay attention - let alone doing anything genuinely useful - about this stuff. It's complicated (meaning that the vast majority of Americans neither understand it nor appreciate how potentially devastating it will become...) and expensive (meaning taxes, which nobody likes, particularly the rich fucks who have their hand up the typical elected sock-puppet's ass...).

The Right?

Probably 80% still think the whole climate change thing is a Red Chinese hoax.

Yes, they ARE that fucking stupid.

I'm old. I'm not going to live to see how bad this could and probably - at the rate we're going - will get. But my kids will, and I'd just as soon not hand then the mess that it looks like we're going to get.

There's a lot of other shit that we're going to see in 2023 that ranges from "gee, that's kinda fucked up" ro "WTAF!!??"; increasing plutocracy and the New Gilded Age, more COVID (including new strains that we're incubating now because we've effectively given up on trying to run the Smallpox Program and vaccinate the fucker out or existence), and more trouble around the periphery of the former Soviet Union. 

Because...

Wars and Rumors of Wars

...are likely to continue to roil eastern Europe and north Asia as well as all the usual (ahemMiddleEastahem) places.

Ruth Deyermond has a useful Clif's Notes discussion of the problems of Russia and the West, but the tl:dr is Ukraine has made clear if nothing else that the Western (including the U.S.) assumption that the post-Soviet status quo - a chastened Russia unwilling and unlikely to act aggressively outside its post-Soviet borders - is gone so long as the current Putin-led leadership remains in place.

Okay, let me make this clear - I am NOT writing a new Long Telegram for 2023.

Putin Russia is a problem. That doesn't automatically make it OUR problem, or automatically make it a geopolitical-military problem. I'm not arguing for a new Cold War.

I'm agreeing with Deyermond, though, that we need to:

1. Accept that the old energy relationship with Russia cannot be recovered. Communicate this, and the reasons for it, clearly to readers/viewers/voters.

2.  Acknowledge that the need to pay attention to Russia isn’t going to go away and that this requires reorganisation and investment.

Deyermond has a long sub-thread that expounds on how institutional neglect of post-Soviet Russia has gone a long way towards putting us (and Russia!) in a vastly more risky position.

This is a new bud on the troublesome U.S. foreign policy tree, but there's a lot of poison fruit still hanging on the old branches.

Unquestioning support of Israel even now that it has become an openly theocratic apartheid state. 

Ignorance, or, worse, ignorant meddling in internal troubles in subSaharan Africa and the Middle East.

The uncertainty about the PRC's intentions towards it's own "near abroad", especially Taiwan.

Problems in Central America - a lot of this is related to the climate issues mentioned above - and the instability of Mexico in particular brought about by a combination of demographics, economics, the institutional political dysfunction baked into Mexico by its colonial master Spain, and the collision of the Mexican underworld and U.S. drug policies.

Ugh. I won't even want to think about what will happen with all this shit if Trump gets back into the White House in 2024.

But 2023's gonna be bad enough as it is.

Homelessness in Portland

With the defeat of Joanne Hardesty there's no Portland commissioner who will push back against Mayor Wheeler's "might, power, and beatings" plan to sweep the poor people in these squalid camps out of Portland.

So we'll go on with the whack-a-hobo "policy" that's been all the City can come up with to try and figure out what to do with poor people who either can't afford Portland's astronomical rents, or who are struggling with everything from addiction to mental and physical health problems.

And we'll hear the usual bullshit from people like Betsy Johnson about how this is going to "solve" the problem, which is the equivalent of pissing on your head and telling you how lucky you are that the rain is warm.

All the while the City will he shoveling money at the worthless fucking Police Bureau.

Plus there's all the usual bullshit. Payday lenders. Non-alcoholic beer. Bathroom ceiling fans (I'll have a post about that in a bit...) The Fucking Big Bang Theory.

Is there going to be more good than bad?

Christ, I hope so.

But whatever we're going to get, it's too late now. We're gonna get it good and hard.

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..?)

Die Braunen Battalionen

 

One year on, a reminder.

These people, and millions more like them, were not joking and were not playing. They intended to seize power by force. If you got in their way they were perfectly willing to kill you.

They are still there. They still want the same things.

And their "leaders" - the suit-and-tie-or-power-pumps sockpuppets like Greene and Cawthorne and Cotton and, or course, Trump himself - are happy to use the levers of power to please them while ruling the rest of us with as much of an iron hand as they can.

I have absolutely no idea 1) how you deal with these people - they don't want to play nice or compromise or "govern" with us; they want us silent and, if not silent, dead - or 2) how, in fact, you "govern" a democratic republic with them there.

I wish I had more optimism about this. I wish I thought that the wingnut right was just posturing.

I don't think that. I think that in less than a year they will pull all the levers they tried in 2020, and I think they'll succeed, and I think that, just as it worked in Germany in 1933, it will work again. 

And once these new "conservatives" take power they will not let it go.

So those of us who are not of their faction and who are their enemies will be presented with a horrible choice; fight them as they deploy all the power of the State, or let them have their will with us.

And that, frankly, is simply a choice between dying on our feet, or on our knees.

The South Dakota Borderers

Those dusky border ruffians are put on notice! The Mount Rushmore State Mosstroopers - a whole platoon of the hardened veterans! - will fan out and become The Wall! No pasaran!

Seriously. Some Republican fatcat is paying for a whole platoon or so from the South Dakota Guard to TDY down to Texas to stop the Brown Hordes. 

Be assured that now the Republic is safe from La Raza.

Hey, Abbot? Hey, Noem? I seem to recall we tried this once. It didn't go all that well.

"We left the border for Parral
In search of Villa and Lopez, his old pal.
Our horses, they were hungry,
And we ate parched corn.
It was damn hard living
In the state of Chihuahua
Where Pancho Villa was born."

Update, 6/29 pm: Dan Nexon wins the Internets:

 

Lazy Sunday

The sun is out, the rain is - at least for the moment - gone, and I'm feeling lazy and unwilling to devote myself to anything serious, so since I'm aware of all Internet traditions, here's a cat picture:

These two are outstanding as cats, sleeping constantly until there's an opportunity to be a ginormous pain in the ass. The little gray-and-white one is the house Junior Cat (her name is "Nine" because she was practically feral and living in a storage unit with that number) and she's a mistress of the Dark Cat Arts, waking up at 3am to walk all over my pillow, yowl, and myurp for cat food. I've tried to sleep through her night ramble and it hasn't worked, so I get up and feed the beast and just go back to sleep.

When she's not being a pest she's a very sweet kitty, though, so there's that.

She did NOT enjoy our February ice storm, however. She has a catbox but loves to go outdoors like a natural kitty, so all that cold white wet stuff? Nopenopenope.

 Give her credit, she did try it out.

...and quickly concluded that this white shit was NOT cat-friendly.

That's Life, cat; you gotta take what it hands you.

Like this:

Damn, that's one zesty-ass sandwich!

Other randomeness: the CPAC saga of the Golden Trump is a nice reminder of what I've been talking about lately; that my GOP brothas are just fucking Jim Jones Koolade-cult whackadoodle, but the kicker this morning was reading about some joker named Jahn who got up at the US Soccer annual general meeting, of all places, to rant about how US slavery was actually fairly cool and that most of those uppity Negroes aren't shot by coppers but probably each other and he knows this because he's Cherokee and also a high-speed, low-drag Special Forces sooooopersoldier who can kill you in seven languages.

Now...everybody's entitled to their opinion. Even stupid ones (maybe especially stupid ones...).

But.

And I've talked about this before here, so;

Whipping civilians with your DD 214 is a total dick move that I've been seeing a LOT of.

This "I gave my service to you! And that means you need to respect mah athoriteh!" bullshit  stuff from GIs seems to go hand-in-hand with the cult-of-the-badass/soldiers-are-better-than-you-civilian-pukes thing that we’ve developed over the course of these endless wars fought by a tiny self-selected slice of We the People.

So it wasn’t so much WHAT this joker said. Yeah, lots of people share those opinions, and while I might disagree I’m not gonna dopeslap the guy for blarting them out.

But it’s dragging in his military credentials – stripping his sleeve and showing his scars and saying "These wounds I had on Crispin’s day!" – as if somehow killing foreigners for national interests make his opinion more valid that gets my goat. If you don’t get the whole "protest" thing, fine. But having been shot at in Kunar Province doesn’t make your opinion on the subject any more – or less – valid.

So, as my old platoon sergeant used to tell me; soldier, shut up and soldier.

Oh, well.

Off to do the grocery shopping.

At ease, disease

So. Here's the thing.

I've spent some time in the sort of less-paved parts of the world we're talking about today.

And I'll be straight-up with you; the term I used to describe them was, typically, "Third World shitholes".

But.

At that time I was a paratroop sergeant, NOT Chief Executive of the world's largest superpower.

If you can't see the critical distinction there, you're a goddamn moron.

Or Donald Trump.

But I repeat myself.

Chronicle of a Grift Foretold

We are now less than three weeks away from the inauguration of His Fraudulency 2: Electric Trumpaloo, and the Congressional GOP is already doing what it does best - beavering away undermining whatever "good government"/progressive/antiplutocratic rules they can find.

And I'm perfectly confident predicting that we're going to see much, much more of this in the next four years. In fact, I'm absolutely slam-dunk, pure-D, dog-ass certain of it.

Why, you ask?

Because the thing to remember about the GOP as currently constituted is that it's not a "political party" in the "tradition of American political party" sense but a party in the "faction of the caudillo" or one-party state sort of party.

The GOP doesn't want to "govern" in the sense that a party in power in a republic wants to govern; it wants to RULE, in the way that the United Russia Party of Vladi Putin rules. It wants all the cakes and ale and graft and hippie-punching and Koch-sucking it can shoehorn into a swagbag, and it will get it though Hell bar the way.

The GOP also knows perfectly well that stoogeing for plutocracy and pimping for Christian theocrats and ignorant hillbillies isn't going to appeal to a majority of the citizens of the US, and that to continue to rule it will have to circumvent the norms and conventions and institutions that would otherwise expose it as a bought-and-paid-for tool of the Rich and Well-Born on economics and the Christopathic Nutbags and Racist Trash on social issues.

So whilst this might get walked back a trifle don't kid yourself; the reign of His Fraudulency and his Wingnut Congress will be characterized by just this sort of grifting and chicanery.

We are about to see a federal government riddled with open corruption - not the sly, business-as-usual, K-Street sort of corruption we've seen over most of the modern era but the open, hand-out, greasy sleaze corruption of the Gilded Age or of a Trump Casino - the like of which those of us living have never seen. You'd probably have to go all the way back to the pre-Progressive Era to find the sort of daylight-robbery kind of pay-for-play we're looking at coming at us.

It's not just because it's who they are. It's because this sort of grifting is the ONLY way that the GOP can continue the grift. The plutocrats don't give a shit about Second Amendment Rights - in fact, they'd just as soon disarm the dangerous crank-addled hillbillies. The Christopaths could give a shit about the estate tax, and the gunlickers don't care sweet goddamn about the carried-interest deduction. The GOP coalition is eight rabid rats in a sack, and the moment one rat gets the hint that one of the others is getting over on it the ass-biting will go nuclear.

My real fear is that these morons know so little of history that they will try and push the nation back into the Gilded Age while in their ignorance have no idea how close we came to some form of autocracy in the 1929-1932 period and how dangerous it will be to try and go there today.

The Ryans and McConnells and Trumps are too ignorant to know what a turbulent place the US was in the original Gilded Age, and too stupid to figure out that while the Homestead Strike and the Haymarket Riot were one-sided wins for the government back in the day the profusion of cheap semiautomatic and automatic weapons and simple, easy-to-construct mines ("IEDs") have made suppressing rebellions a mug's game for Western troops.

They may very well get their wish and then discover why the original John D. Rockefellers and Carnegies and their robber-baron ilk didn't push back that hard against the Welfare State back in the day.

They had seen the bodies hanging from the lampposts in St. Petersburg and Rome and knew better than to think that they were safe.

I have no doubt that the upcoming Trump Administration will make Dubya and his band of cronies look like MENSA for competence and the Salvation Army for probity, or that they will do their level best to push the GOP Back-to-the-Gilded-Age agenda as far towards reality as they can, and that both sickens and enrages me.

But what I fear the most is that this administration will tear down a LOT of the institutional and social barriers that have protected us here in El Norte from the sort of caudilloist corruption and nepotism that has been endemic in much of the rest of our hemisphere.

His Fraudulency 2 himself is a walking violation of the Emoluments Clause, and rather than gibbering in fear that he will invoke a constitutional crisis the rest of the wingnut monkeyhouse has been doing a Gingrich; trying to insist that breaking the norms and rules is really the New Norms and Rules and that doing to the federal government what Newt does to Callista on Friday night after a bottle of lambrusco and 100mg of Viagra is Just How It Works.

We Are So, So, So, SO Fucked.

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.

Friday Jukebox: Transgender Toilet Trauma Edition

Soundtrack for today's post:



(from Suzanne Vega's brilliant "99.9F" album...)

So I'm a little baffled. I haven't paid enough attention to the usual wingnut suspects to "get" their argument for spending time and money worrying about the junk of who's using the public bogs. Part of this is the whole nutroll of how it seems like "conservative" politics seems to have been boiled down, like last week's roast chicken carcass, to a hot, steaming mess of Lurvin' Jesus, Lickin' Guns, and Hatin' Faggots.

So I'm not sure whether these jokers have the screaming fantods about a guy in a dress using the ladies' room, or a gal in Carhartts sitting down in the guy's stall because it's a potty thing or just simple, straight-up hatin' on people who aren't conventionally gendered.

Thing is...who worries about this?

When I hit the head at, say, Civic Stadium during a Timbers match I'm a LOT more concerned that the drunk guy next to me at the trough is gonna miss the target and wet my shoes down...or that the guy in front of me in the stall line had spicy Chicken Vindaloo for lunch.

What the possibly-not-born-a-dude in the next stall is sitting on? NOT on my radar.

And, seriously, WTF? How is that a "problem"?

Seriously.

I kinda get it if this is really just about politics and rilin' up The Base. Show a red-blooded Republican a picture of a homo and watch him or her get spun up like the little girl in The Exorcist when the priest shows up. They can't help it, so I can kinda see how a GOP "strategist" might think that hammering on the predatory homos in the public pissers might work as a "get-out-the-vote" kind of thing.

But...still. It seems to me like the whole "scary-crossdressing-homos-are-lurking-in-your-potty" meme as a fearmongering tactic is some pretty weak and oddball stuff to try and get votes on. Like I said; who seriously worries about that shit? You'd have to spend a lot of time on alt/transgender/toiletrape to even believe that was a thing.

That, or be stupider than a fucking bag of hammers.

Because as an electoral lie/tactic? Seems to rely on waaayyyyy too much on your targets being hooked on transgender toilet rape porn AND dumber than a fucking bag of hammers.

But..."conservatives"...hmmm.

Maybe not.

The Care of Devils

It goes almost without saying that a huge part of me is equally revolted and angered at the ridiculous carny show that has become the Republican Party and its loathsome Presidential candidate field. Krugman is perfectly correct; the obviously lunatic, con-man, and carny currently running ahead of the rest of the klowns is only less acceptable as the potential Chief Executive of the most powerful polity in the Western world because of the obvious unmoored insanity of his personality, not his "political positions" (such as they are) which are, in many cases, mildly less loathsome than those of his supposedly more conventional competitors.

But, much as I hate to admit this, the current widespread enthusiasm for the vulgar talking yam - among both the public and among the press - is horribly fascinating as a glimpse into mind (also such as it is...) the American public.

The degree to which the Presidency of Barak Obama has completely unhinged a certain proportion of the public has always amazed me. Here's a guy who is pretty much a 1950's Eisenhower Republican or, at least, has governed as such...and, yet, I have heard from friends whose relatives, or acquaintances, or casual correspondents hate Obama, hatehatehate him with a passionate intensity.

It's not like I don't understand "passionate hatred" for politicians; I've loathed a few myself.

But Obama? Obama?

I can't imagine a more perfectly innocuous corporate suit, whether it's his personal style or his governing. He's...well, he's kind of a suit.

And yet, I read people saying they HATE Obama so much (or Clinton, another perfect corporate suit) that even though they admit, or even insist, that Trump is, indeed, a dangerously mendacious fool that they will vote for him when he receives the GOP nomination. I find this literally incomprehensible; it's like saying "Well, the food at that Korean joint was pretty awful, so instead let's just stay home tonight and eat a big ol' bag of camel shit."

Obviously most of these sorts of people don't admit that Trump is an unhinged looney. They say he's a "truth-teller" or not hidebound by "political correctness", as if lying was some sort of version of saying unsayable truth.

But he clearly is, and their kidding themselves is patently ridiculous.

And herein lies the most incredible aspect of this election.

If you had tried; if you had carefully, deliberately, painstakingly crafted the most perfectly disastrous sort of human being to be placed in a position of immense power I cannot imagine crafting someone more catastrophic than Donald Trump. He's like one of those the wartime caricatures of Hitler, or Tojo, or Mussolini; an embodiment of everything utterly incompetent put in charge of a Great Power.

It doesn't matter WHO his opponent is, outside of zombie Iosef Stalin or Satan or another equally gross cartoon villain. There's just no reason any sane person would vote for Donald Trump for President if the alternative wasn't a bloody-handed mass murderer.

So this November will of interest to me only in what it will reveal about my "fellow citizens".

The percentage of the general public who will vote for this scumbag is directly proportionate to the percentage who are utterly unfit to be citizens of a self-governing republic. They are sheep who would vote to make the wolf their king because they are afraid and he is "strong". They are the slaves who would vote to make the slavedriver their king because they want to hate the Others and he is "honest" enough to say so out loud.

And I very much fear, that in the words of Mr. Paine, that I am infidel enough "...as to suppose that He has relinquished the government of the world, and given us up to the care of devils..."

Dear wingnut...(an open letter to "conservatives" on the Malheur Morons)

I've been reading your responses to the outpouring of anger and vitriol that has greeted the news that a bunch of self-identified pals of yours had "occupied" the vacant headquarters building at Malheur NWR out in the lesser paved portions of my home state.

You were angry yourselves, and scornful, that the "libtards' heads were exploding" over this. You seemed incredulous that these scruffy seditionists had aroused such ire on the Left, apparently as much because it is the Left as the subject of that furor. After all, we're supposed to be all "tolerant" and "squishy" about taking stands, except when we nag you about your hatred for things like homos marrying and Muslims...well, being alive...as "intolerant" and "rigid". You don't get it. Why are we so fucking pissed off about a handful of patriots exercising the Constitutional Second Amendment right to protest gummint tyranny?

So let me try and explain why this particular incident got up our collective wick so quickly and so badly.

First, a lot of it is the cumulative hammering you've been doing since...well, it feels like forever but at least the fifteen years since 9/11. We got used to - not okay with, but used to - being called "traitors" and "cowards" and "pussies" because we questioned your excitement about bombing and/or shooting the shit out of the public enemy de jour. We grew to expect that you would call anything we supported, whether it was abortion or freedom from theocracy or using cunning (or economics, or diplomacy, or pretty much anything) instead of bullets, "foolish", "impractical", "cowardly", and "anti-American".

We got used to hearing you describe our belief that taxes are the price of civilization as "stealing" and our conviction that regulation of the commons helped prevent the sort of greed and selfishness that got these Hammond people in trouble as "tyranny".

We didn't like it. Oh, hells, no. But we pretty much gave up trying to unscrew your heads on that subject, figuring that this was just your default setting.

We also got used to the big media outlets giving your whackadoodle ideas equal time just like they were actual human thoughts. So when we tried to discuss things like heading off climate change or not going all Operation Wetback or treating women as women and not as life-support systems for wombs and you started shrieking "Liar!" and "Babykiller!" we just sighed. Forget it, Jake, it's Wingnuttown, we would mutter. It's not worth the aggravation.

We especially gave up trying to warn you, and the newspeople, about the fire you were fucking with your fondness for wild talk about "Second Amendment solutions" to "government is the problem". See, we kept saying, We the People ARE "the government"; that's the idea, anyway.

Right? Kinda baked into the pie back in 1789?

That the problem with "Second Amendment solutions" pretty much led to the sort of "solutions" proposed by the western Pennsylvania whisky distillers and Dan Shays and Jeff Davis. And that those "solutions" were the kind of solutions that led to "solutions" like burning down your kitchen to get the roaches out of the oatmeal bin; ugly and violent and not really "solutions" at all.

Because every time we'd bring that up you'd start shrieking about "gungrabbers!" and "tyranny!".

Sigh.

So. Here we are.

A bunch of your pals - or, at least, people who claim to be your pals - have taken their bullet launchers and their energy drinks (but not enough jerky or cheeze doodles, apparently...) and done, in effect, what Shays and Davis and the whisky rebels did; taken a patch of ground that the U.S. government claims and broken rules the U.S. government has made and are defying the U.S. government to come and make them behave.

And are you guys ashamed about this, this armed sedition? Are you angry that these stupid jamokes are saying the quiet parts of Tentherism and "Second Amendment solutions" out loud? Are you out there with a bullhorn telling these screwheads to knock it the fuck off?

Hells, no. Once again, we're left to remind you that part of "a republic, if you can keep it..." is not losing the fucking Whisky Rebellion.

And, once again, the news media is fucked up like a football bat about this and giving your screwhead pals all sorts of free airtime to blarb their nonsensical screeds and, once again, you're giving, and going to give, us nothing but shit about it.

And we're really, really, really fucking sick and tired of it.

But since we've long figured out that arguing with you about this stuff is like trying to teach German irregular verbs to a cat we're reduced to screaming at these HeeHawsbullah morons and at our federal government to quite treating them like they have a point other than on their fucking heads so's we don't lose the fucking Whisky Rebellion.

Will that work? Doubtful. It hasn't so far. Christ, you're on the verge of electing Donald Fucking Trump your presidential candidate, forcryinoutloud, and the feds have let these goddamn screwhead VanillaISIS teahadis off the hook before. It's not like we're really hoping to get you knuckleheads to try a taste of realism for once.

It's just that sometimes the bullshit gets to the point where a liberal's just gotta fucking vent.

And speaking of mistakes...

...the latest round of stupidity from this season's GOP candidate field comes from surprisingly ignorant Ben Carson, the climate change/evolution-denying physician.

"I would not just stand there and let him shoot me, I would say, 'Hey, guys, everybody attack him. He may shoot me, but he can’t get us all.'"

Okay, fine; you first, asshole. I'm going out the window.

This latest incident of what Jim Wright over at Stonekettle Station likes to call Bang Bang Crazy has brought all the usual idiots out of the woodwork to recommend that the solution to moar gunz is...wait for it...moar gunz! Because...

Good guys with guns! Amirite, hunh? Hunh?!

Sheesh.

Look, I may have been just a simple grunt medic, but I was smart enough to figure out that the way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a fucking battery six with HE-quick in effect. Except you can't fucking do that in a shopping mall or a theatre.

And short of that, you're pretty much just tossing the dice.

Teaching a human being to take effective deadly action is a damn difficult thing. We spend weeks and months training Joe and Molly to do that and the statistics show that we only succeed in about 30-50% of the time. Most people - even most trained soldiers - react to danger by getting their heads down and trying to stay in defilade.

But let's assume that the training works and our hero heads towards the sound of shooting.

What does he or she encounter?

Fucking chaos, that's what. The nutter is the center of it, shooting left and right...but everyone else is amplifying the chaos; screaming, running, dying...it's total mayhem. Into this comes our hero, trained but not experienced - one hopes - in this sort of bloody mess. How's that likely gonna work out?

First of all, one of the hardest parts of learning to be lethal in combat is making sense of it. We humans are used to an orderly world, a world that moves in a linear sort of way at a relatively leisurely pace. Suddenly - and with our own reactions and judgements spazzing as adrenaline turns our brains into an arcing circuit board and our firing arm into a licorice whip - we step into a world gone mad.

Is this guy running screaming at us the shooter in a kamikaze rage or a target trying to escape? Is the dude over by the wall still and silent with terror or does he have his pistol down by his leg waiting to fire again?

Noise, random movement, incoming fire...it takes an assload of training to even begin to sort this stuff out, and without experience the likelihood of sorting it wrong is damned likely; that's why we try and make veterans into our combat NCOs. Because they've had to sort through this gibbering chaos and hopefully - seeing as they're still alive - have gotten it right.

But there's another, even more complicating and difficult factor here.

This isn't a straightforward military red-on-blue. There's at least four factions; the "bad guy" shooter(s), the prospective "good guy" shooter(s) - if more than one made more fraught by having no connection or experience working together, meaning just as likely to mistake each other for the "bad guy" - the people being shot at...and the police.

The coppers have NO idea who the "bad guy" is. To them anyone with a weapon out is just as likely to be the murderer, which has, in previous massacres, nearly led to blue-on-blue gunfire.

So. You have a nutter firing right and left. You have "good guys with guns" firing at the nutter...but also possibly each other, seeing as unless they were on-scene when the shooting started don't know which armed citizen is the nutter. You have the coppers, when they arrive, shooting at the nutter...and possibly at the "good guys", since they have no way of telling that they are good guys when they roll up.

I'm sorry. That's fucking nutzoid land. Makes the Battle of Ia Drang look like a sorority pillow-fight.

The idea that We the People are happy with one of these nutter shootings happening every month or so seems just as nutzoid. If you told me that without my knowing anything about this country I'd laugh in your face.

At the same time I have the utmost confidence in my fellow citizens to do absolutely nothing to change anything. And that's just really, really depressing.

Update 10/12: As you might expect, Jim Wright takes down the Mad Doctor more completely than I ever could.

Verucasaltism

I just gave him a big shoutout and, yes, I'm usually completely down with Charlie Pierce. But I think he's missed his target here when he says that George Effing Will is trying to equate climate-change-denialism with "science".

He puts up this Will quote from his WaPo column and no, I'm not going to link to the insufferable sonofabitch but Pierce does if you want to read his condescending little screed. In it Will says of the current Roman Catholic pontiff:

"He stands against modernity, rationality, science and, ultimately, the spontaneous creativity of open societies in which people and their desires are not problems but precious resources. Americans cannot simultaneously honor him and celebrate their nation's premises."

and what Pierce picks from this chunky nougat of fuck is that Will is claiming that pretending that human beings are not substantially changing our planet's environment is "scientific" and "rational" and that to suggest that they are, or might at least be doing enough to support some serious investment in changing that, is to be against "modernity, rationality...and science".

But I think that Will's point is really worse than that. It's in his conclusion that this concern for things like planetary temperature is an attempt to destroy "...the spontaneous creativity of open societies in which people and their desires are not problems but precious resources." and that "...celebrat(ing the) nation's premises." involves subordinating everything else to "people and their desires."

Now this isn't an elusive or subtle idea. In its simplest form it's just what Veruca Salt wanted from Willy Wonka: everything, the whole world, and right fucking now. It's greed, raw, naked greed. It's selfishness on a Randian scale, the "desire" is simply that everyone and everything else owes me what I want and more and right this very second. Call it the "rollin' coal" theory of social responsibility. Or call it what it really is; the morals of a four-year-old...or Veruca fricking Salt.

And I agree that a hell of a lot of human history has been about people trying to get everything yesterday. But should that really be "our nation's premise"? Should we really be all about trying to be bigger, fatter, richer, stronger, happier than everything and anything regardless of the cost? Is that a "precious resource" or more likely to be a "problem"?

George Effing Will in his capacity as the nation's Republican Intellectual wants to tell you we should be, and it is.

Bullshit.

He's a Bad Egg, and so is his argument. Hell, so is any argument that is nothing but fucking Verucasaltism in a goddamn prom dress.

The Limits of My Post

So apparently some nutter went and shot up several military facilities in Tennessee and ended up killing five troopers; four U.S. Marines and a U.S. Navy logistician.

Everybody was very sad about this, except possibly for the theocratic lunatics in the Middle East that have been on the receiving end of the ordnance delivered by (presumably) USAF aircraft. The degree to which the shooter identified with and wanted to be one of those lunatics is still uncertain but likely to be considerable. That was his problem. The fact that a Muslim theocratic looney wanna-be wanted to shoot up U.S. Navy and recruiting facilities has a lot to do with the number of Muslims that the U.S. has shot up since 2001. That's our problem; when you insist on jamming your head in the beehive it is extremely likely you'll get stung by the bees.

But that wasn't what got me thinking.

It was, instead, the instinctive reaction of the wingnut politicians including Bush, Walker, and (of course) Trump to the "best solution" to the fact that Muslim nuts want to kill U.S. troopers, and it had nothing to do with spending less time killing Muslims and thereby provoking Muslim nuts.

The Donald pretty much spoke for all of these gasbags when he said: "This sick guy had guns and shot them down. These are decorated people. These are people who could have handled guns very easily. They would have had a good chance if they had a gun."

Which, as much as anything this moron has ever said, tells me everything I need to know about the room-temperature-level of his IQ.

But it also made me think about this story, which I think tells you everything you need to know about what I think is very likely to happen if every armory, reserve center, and recruiter has an armed Joe pulling guard.

So.

When I got out of the RA - and I should really tell you the story of my first post-active duty assignment, an Army Reserve mobile hospital in Lancaster, PA - I bounced around through a couple of outfits. I finally got my bump to E-6/Staff Sergeant and in the process got shifted over to a Reserve Combat Engineer outfit. This was a "heavy" engineer unit tasked more with construction missions rather than a sapper sort of outfit, and for a former light infantryman the setup was pretty plush. We had an aid station tent with a big old Deuce-and-a-half truck to carry it and all our medical kit around in and a couple of the old M718 quarter-ton field light ambulances for evacuation. We got to drive everywhere, and as one of Ramses' medics is said to have scratched in hieroglyphics on the back of Cleopatra's Needle: "Why fight when you can hide? Why walk when you can ride?"

The best part of our reserve center, though, was that it was located on what had been an old Nike missile site, Battery PH-91, located north of the city of Philadelphia. This Cold War relic had been closed down in the early Sixties but the underground holes ("silo" is too grand a word for how these critters were stored - here's a picture of one today)

were still out back of the center, in the motor pool, three of them if I remember, and they had a creepily-cool sort of "Doctor Strangelove" feel to them.

The other interesting thing about the old 330th Combat Engineer Battalion was the intake area; it spanned a fairly huge chunk of the northern suburbs and the north part of the City of Philadelphia. Some of the troopers came from the nice, white, suburban and even fairly rural (Montgomery County still had some rural areas in the late 1980s...) areas around where the actual reserve center was located on Potshop Road. Some came from the heavily black parts of North Philadelphia and only got out of the concrete jungle one weekend a month and two weeks a year. Everybody seemed to rub along fairly decently and I recall it as a pretty good outfit, both for weekend drill as well as our summer camps.

Ah, yes. Annual training. That's where my story takes us.

I don't remember the year, but it must have been one of the two years I was there (either 1989 or 1990, since I got off active duty in December 1987 and moved to Oregon in August 1990...) and the battalion did our annual training north of Fort Indiantown Gap - "Fig", we called it, the sprawling Depression-era post that was primarily the business of the Pennsylvania Army Guard. The idea was to help the Pennsylvania Fish and Game people do some work on their hunting lands in the are north of Fig. If my memory serves me correctly it was somewhere in the red circle, probably that triangle-shaped area near the center:

It was a fairly unmemorable piece of the rural Pennsylvania Appalachians, and we drove up the mostly-dirt "gravel" road to where the S-4 put our combat trains, ran out the wire, dug our rifle pits and latrines

(which, as I recall, managed to find the only spring on the whole goddamn hillside and overflowed, washing out a couple of pounds of used GI chow downhill towards the mess tent. "Swimming back to where they were spawned..." was one joker's comment as we frantically tried to fill the damn things in.)

and our aid station tent and settled in for a couple of weeks playing Army.

OK. So now a couple of things happened. First, "spring gobbler season" opened. This is apparently a thing, and in it the local yokels don their camoflage and shoulder their shotguns to go out and stalk the elusive wild turkey. Our portion of the game lands had not been set off-limits to the turkey hunters, and we did not know that. There was an Army Reserve unit in that portion of the game lands, and the turkey hunters didn't know that, either.

Second, our S-2, who was either a smartass or a complete fucking idiot, told our guys that the OPFOR, the notional enemies, were dressed in odd-looking camoflage and might try and walk up to our positions pretending to be local people. This became part of the special instructions for our gate guards, and had been the morning one of these local Nimrods came strolling up the road to where our two Rambos were lounging around the roll of concertina wire that blocked the road through our trains area.

"Halt!" says one of the GIs. I should note that just by pure coincidence the two guards on the gate that morning were deep-city Philadelphians, born and raised within sight-line of Billy Penn's hat (that is, the statue on top of the City Hall building at the center of downtown Philly...) and knew about the central Pennsylvania countryside what a cow knows about the Council of Trent.

The would-be turkey-slayer looked at him curiously but kept coming forward. "HALT!" repeats the troop. Now the guy halts and looks around him like he's suddenly encountered a two-headed Martian baby.

"Where you think you're going?" says the soldier. "Up the hill." replies the hunter.

"Not that way." the GI informs him "You gots to go around the wire. This a secure area."

"Bullshit." fumes the hunter. "I need to get up the road. This is state land. You can't close off this road."

"Hell I can't" replies the troop, getting a little aggravated himself. "You gots to go around."

"I can't and I won't. I'm going through there." says the hunter, and starts to come at my guy. The GI, who has had his rifle slung up to this point, now pulls it off his shoulder and levels it at the dude. His partner backs him up and the hunter stops with his hands coming up, palms out, to show that he's not dangerous.

"You lie down and put your weapon on the ground!" barks the GI, now convinced that this is one of those "enemy" infiltrators. The hunter, not wanting either to lie on the wet dirt of the road or to put his shotgun down in it, just backs off shaking his head.

Now the GI is really suspicious. He comes on, rifle leveled, and then raises it to his shoulder. "Git the FUCK DOWN!" he roars, and the hunter scrambles to put his belly in the dirt, ignorant of the fact that in this confrontation he is the only one with live rounds.

The GI draws down on him as his pal circles around to snag the shotgun before retreating to the landline to call the sergeant of the guard.

"Now...what you want up that hill..?" interrogates the gate guard. The hunter looks up at him with that "how ignorant are you?" face and says "I'm going after turkey." and is stunned when this produces a snarl of derisive laughter and the blank-adapter on the rifle pushed down towards his head.

"Now I know you lyin'!" the guard sneers. "There no turkeys up that hill. You gets your turkey at the Super Fresh."

Anyway, fortunately the unit chaplain arrived at about that time along with the commander of the relief. The hunter was plenty hot, and the GI on the gate was, too, both thinking that somebody had run some serious buuuulllllshit on them (and someone had, but it was the S-2 who was safely distant in the battalion tactical operations center and wouldn't hear about this until it was just a good story...) and it took everyone's best efforts to calm them down and send them their separate ways without a fight.

As it happened, the whole thing ended up in the local paper because, well...because. It was a sort of funny story, and it all ended happily except for the turkey, perhaps.

But let's update that story. Give my GI a rifle with real live rounds in it. Put him out front of his armory or reserve center or, worse, in a busy shopping mall with a "career center", one of these inter-service recruting shop things, in the middle of the busy crowds of pedicure-seekers and payday-lender-marks. Make the turkey hunter someone who has had a couple of Bud Lite Limes for lunch and has got the wrong address and is a little more belligerent and a little less intelligent.

Gee. I wonder how THAT could go wrong..?

The point is, if we insist on treating these gun-nutter shootings like war, then war is what we are likely to get. And any intelligent soldier knows that in war usually one of the most deadly weapons is the one closest to you. That's why we train so hard, that's why we have so many rules about weapons handling and weapons safety. That's why we make such a big deal about knowing exactly who and what are where when we have a round in the chamber.

Putting Joe or Molly on door guard armed with live bullets is a hell of a lot more likely to get some other GI, or some random pedestrian, killed than putting one in the center-of-mass of Rag bin Head the IS Wannabe, and pretty much every GI whose ever carried a full-metal-jacketed round knows that perfectly well.

But it suits our current crop of "conservatives" to pretend otherwise, and that's a huge part of our fucking problem.

Radio Check

Still here, though still without much to say. Same issues; the things that matter to me just aren't that interesting to anyone else; home, work, family, and as for the soccer I work out over at my daytime gig at Slide Rule Pass. I did enjoy the hell out of the Women's World Cup, but I know better than to try and write that one up; a lot of work and you'd get better value for your money over at The Equalizer or All White Kit...

As far as blogging goes, I'm farkling about gearing up to writing up the Battle of the Philippine Sea as a sort of send-off to my "Imperial Japan, WTF?" series. Yeah, Leyte gets all the press, but it was the Turkey Shoot that was the USN at the top of its game, that meant Game Over for the Kito Budai. I'll try and get that in later this month.

Part of the blogging roadblock is just Real Life; I've found that I don't have the burning desire to write so badly as to put off everything else I've got going on. Tonight the kiddos are upstairs playing Goat Simulator (don't ask. Seriously, there are some things that, once seen, can never be unseen...) and The Bride is reading the new Shadow Campaigns novel I bagged for her at the county library so I found some time to come downstairs - my computer is back in its old place at the basement worktable - and write.

But the other big part is just the notion of trying to talk about politics or military affairs has just really lost its grip on me. I don't know enough about the politics of places beyond the strandlines to speak sensibly and the politics of my country are, at the moment, loathsome. To me the perfect poster child for American politics is The Donald.

And even here I can't really better the Rude One in his summation of the shitshow that is Trump:

"He's like most of the other candidates rolled into one: a blithering, idiotic, climate change-denying loudmouth xenophobe who wants endless war, Christian "values" (whatever the fuck those are anymore), an economic and health care system that benefits the rich, and a big fuckin' fence with alligators or some such shit to keep out the Mexican rapists. He doesn't need to pander to the baser instincts of the primary voters. He is the living embodiment of the baser instincts of GOP primary voters. That's why he's wiping the floor with virtually every other candidate."

But I can't even find any entertainment in the idiocracy that has become the Republican Party.

Because the way our political system works we get two parties. You can try and come up with another system that produces another outcome, but the bottom line is that the U.S. first-past-the-post election setup produces two big parties instead of the lots of little ones you get in a parliamentary system.

So, given two parties it'd be nice to think that we'd have two, you know, actual parties. Organizations with smart people and thought-out policies that wanted to run a sane and healthy country.

Instead we have a bunch of fairly conservative corporatists who prefer a sort of elite, oligarchic control over the dusky masses...and a Monster Fucking Raving Loony Party of which Trump is not the ravingest fucking looney by a looooong chalk.

It's a fucking fuckstory, and what more can I say other than that..?

I've included a whole bunch of family pictures to give you an idea of what we've been doing that has kept me away from the keyboard; you get the whole spectacle of work and play, house, and kids, and pets. I've also been volunteering to help sell merch for our women's soccer team supporters group the Rose City Riveters, and help out with our friends' project to clean and paint and sell their house; here we are after a long, hot day of exterior painting:

Or pitching in at the local watering hole for soccer, Bazi Bierbrasserie. With my temporary Oregon Liquor Control Commission volunteer server credentials in hand here I am, ready to start pouring for the Women's National Team supporters...

Busy, busy, busy, that's me.

Just not here. I'm sorry.

But if you stick around I can promise you Marianas and Turkeys. This is no shit.

I will tell you one more story before I have to go.

So I go to the Thorns match on the Friday before the Fourth of July. Good match, Portland win, if you give a shit you can read all about it here. Anyway, I get in late as in late-late, nearly midnight. It's hot, damn hot as it was for nearly the entire month of June. But not hot enough to explain the expended kitchen fire extinquisher sitting on the dark front steps. Interesting, I think, and go inside.

Everyone is sleeping in the Little House. The only creatures stirring are the two expended Roman candle launchers sitting silently in the kitchen trash. Interesting, I think, before heading into the shower and the bed.

So it's not until the next morning that I find this:

My Bride explains that my son and his pal were playing in the street with the pair of fireworks they were allowed the night before the tradition of Expending All Rounds (of illegal fireworks smuggled in from Vancouver) in the paved "playground" of Astor School at the east end of Amherst Street. She wasn't sure how the fireball landed in the city strip, but she thought that one of the boys might have aimed it down and it skipped off the pavement into the grass.

Which, explosive as flash-paper after weeks of drought and days in the nineties, ignited.

This little inferno took a shovel and the extinguisher and the neighbor's hose - the lighted section was in front of the house two doors down from ours - to kill. I think my Inamorata realized that the fault was not so much in her stars or in her son but in herself for not insisting that the boyish pranks be shifted to the inflammable asphalt of the elementary school.

Missy was properly disgusted.

"I had nothing to do with this." she sniffed. "It was those boys!"

I smiled and agreed and felt thankful that all that had burned was some dead grass. And climbed into the Honda and drove away.