Debtors Prison

It's hard to express how infuriating the whole "debt ceiling" nonsense is.

Partially because it's even a thing, like there's an option to just decide to not pay your bills (which is what this is - it's not about spending, it's about paying off what's been allocated and spent) for you or me or Sears Roebuck. The whole idea is idiotic and should have been taken out behind the shed and shot decades ago.

But mostly because it's just another (stop me if you've heard this before...) way for fucking wingnuts to fuck around without finding out.

The stuff they're demanding or they'll shoot the hostage - things like cutting poor people off welfare and cutting vet's benefits - are massively unpopular. If they tried that shit in Congress the usual way they'd get crucified - even in the popular press where idiotic trashfires like the NYT and CNN will usually just vomit up Republican talking points - before they got out the committee room door.

So they're pulling this shit.

As I keep saying; they're cultist loons. They don't care. If they can't have it their way, they'll burn it down.

You'll note what's NOT on the table, right?

Reversing decades of plutocrat-fluffing "tax cuts"?

Yeah.

Because damn near everybody in US politics - outside the Bernie and AOC "looney left" - loves handing cash to billionaires the way Empty-G loves some CrossFit stud groping for trout in her peculiar river.

(Look that one up..!)

But the same idiotic press is pimping this as "negotiations" and bothsidsing the hell out of it. The Biden Administration looks like they're too scared to tell the wingnut terrorists to fuck off and die in a hole. They'll cave, the idiot public will blame them and elect MORE wingnuts...so we're going to end up right where the wingnuts want us. Poorer. Smaller. Weaker. Stupider. Closer to the plutocratic Christopathy they crave.

All because We the People have been sitting on our hands while these people beaver away rolling back everything our parents and grandparents fought for since the First Gilded Age.

WASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSF. 

Update 6/1/23: So the Wolves of Wall Street got nervous that their Congressional sock-puppets were going to do something stupid and called them off. As Charlie Pierce noted,

"As soon as Wall Street and the financial elite started getting publicly nervous about the possibility of a default, both Kevin McCarthy and, to a lesser extent, Joe Biden, were painted into a corner. All bluffs were not just called, but they were effectively dispatched into an alternate reality, a kind of political phantom zone. The money power was the only thing in this particular reality that was, well, real."

So we're not going to have to find out how to catch and eat starlings before midsummer, so I suppose that's fine.

That said, there's little respite in knowing that the lives and fortunes and sacred honor of countless millions of citizens of this country mean nothing to the vandals.

But their plutocratic masters whims?

To finish with Pierce again:

"In other words, politics as usual, a basic Washington transaction conducted in the most basic of Washington ways, a Swamp Thing from start to finish. And all in service to the money power, to the corporate elite, woke and otherwise."

Cold comfort if comfort it is.

 

 

The Politics of Stupid

So here's what's been bugging me.

This past November the voters of Oregon went marginally in favor - 50.6 to 49.4 - of a ballot measure, 114, that imposed some restrictions on firearms.

Those included:

• requiring permits issued by local law enforcement to buy a firearm;
• requiring photo ID, fingerprints, safety training, criminal background check, and fee payment to apply for a permit; and
• prohibiting manufacturing, importing, purchasing, selling, possessing, using, or transferring ammunition magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds and make violations a class A misdemeanor.

 And y'know what?

That's just fine as far as I'm concerned. 

It doesn't infringe the "right to keep and bear arms". It infringes the non-right to keep and bear certain types of magazines, to keep and bear arms without being evaluated for things like criminal records or knowing how to use the fucking things, and being on record so that IF your bang-stick gets used for bad purposes it can be chased back to you.

If I'd have been the ballot measure writer I'd have added some of Jim Wright's "bang bang sanity" proscriptions like making "accidental" shootings crimes that would lose you your "right" to fuck up other people with the weapon you obviously don't know how to use and have no business having and requiring people to store the things like we did in the Army, locked up right.

So vox populi vox Dei, right? Gonna get right on that, sheriff. Right?

No.

Because if you're a wingnut ammosexual then the public spirit only bloweth where wingnut fap-memes listeth, and so, of course, a judge in West Buttfuckistan (or Harney County, which is effectively the same thing...) heard a suit brought by a bunch of these clucks and, of course, has been hammering down Measure 114 because...reasons.

Well.

I don't really need to go over - again - why fewer people with smaller, slower, less capable firearms is good.

It's the same reasons that a NASCAR-grade Camero isn't street legal. What soldiers need in war is the exact opposite of what Sparky needs behind the counter of the 7-Eleven.

But because the Right has spent more than sixty years grooming these chucklefucks to scree like wounded eagles anytime some sensible reduction in the mad carnival of firearms is proposed here in the Land of the Free trying to make that obvious fact a reality is damn near impossible.

Different day, same nitwit wingnut shit, though, right?

Here's the problem with just shrugging about that.

These dopes are making life harder for all of us, and not just about firearms.

Some of the things they want - more racism, more prejudice, more ignorance, more misogyny - are 1) irritating and vile as well as 2) predictable, but are baked into them and can only be ignored when trivial and mocked and slammed down when violent. 

Any sensible government - any sensible organization - can and will do that. Even corporations, sociopathic sonsofbitches that they are, realize that gays and immigrants and dusky people buy toasters, so being associated with redneck shitbirds is bad for business.

No. It's the other political obsessions that they're being talked into now that are so fucked up.

These ammosexual rule-free Days of Jubilee are one of them.

If you think we're bad here in Oregon look at Florida, where their Wingnut Jesus wants to enact "constitutional carry", meaning that any and everyone can walk around strapped. No rules, no license, no training, no nothing.

Imagine how your average rural Florida deputy sheriff - Nobel Prize winning philosopher and gentle soul that he will be - is going to act now that EVERYone he meets is packing heat?

You think we're way ahead of the mean on copper shooting of randos now?

Oh, and try pulling that shit if your skin color is marginally darker than a sheet of notebook paper.

Fuuuuuucccccckkkkkk.

But even beyond how fucked up that is, is the wingnut neediness to repeal the 20th Century.

When I was learning my trade, an older engineer told me that things like building codes and design requirements were enacted "one death at a time".

Because we would do our best to head off fucked up things like deadly building fires or earthquake collapses based on our best guess on how bad those fires or earthquakes could get.

Then a worse fire or earthquake would come along, kill a bunch of people, we'd learn from that and revise our codes and designs to head off those worse fires and earthquakes.

If you look at public health and safety rules - things like OHSA regs, vaccination requirements, medical practice - between 1900 and 2000 you see a fairly broad, if uneven, progression from "we don't understand and couldn't do anything even if we did" to "oh, okay, here's what's happening and here's how we can prevent or mitigate that."

No everyone was on board with that - look back at the "polio monkey serum" shit that the Birtchers ran with back in the 1940s and 50s - but the public in general agreed; safer is better in the general sense.

So it was less fun to drive with seatbelts and sober. But it was safer for everyone.

It wasn't much fun to get measles shots. But it was safer than getting measles, safer for everyone.

It was more irking to have guards on saws, and rules for ladders. Some things - like the tipping toddler on 5-gallon buckets, seemed even silly and excessive.

Taking the handle off the pump sucked. But shitting yourself to death from cholera sucked worse.

The general public consensus was that this stuff was a minor issue compared to, say, dying horribly of smallpox and cholera or being paralyzed by polio.

Now that consensus is in ruins, and it's for a simple, horrible, stupid reason;

Because the political right's policy goals are subjectively shit - plutocracy, oligarchy, theocracy - they need red cultural meat to feed their C.H.U.D. hordes, something like 40% of the U.S. public, and they've chosen things like democracy, equity, and, yes, public health to feed this ignorant beast.

As the linked article points out, it's killing those CHUDs.

And, as the article also points out, the CHUDs don't care. 

If those cultural "wins" kill those they hate and "own the libs"?

They'll die happy.

How the fuck do you fight that?

That's whackadoodle cult thinking.

That's hashishin thinking, the kind of thinking that made blissed-out drug-addled assassins that you had to kill to stop.

And, as I've also said here before, if that is the case...

...and I believe it is...

...the implication is that our choices are grim; give up all the social and political and economic and even medical gains of the 20th Century,

or,

Kill them.

I know which I think is the worse option.

But I also know that I'm rolling a massive rock uphill to even begin to clue the vast bulk of my supposedly-fellow citizens in that that's even a possibility, much less a necessity.

And so here we are.

They will kill us before they let us take the fucking handle off the fucking pump.

And that, my friend, is a Peak Fucking Stupid way to die.

In passing

I've been working all week (You: but...but you're retired, right? WTF? Me: Ummm. Hang on, I'll get there...) and I've been getting up at 4am to get there, so I'm gonna do the old retired guy thing and take a fucking nap.

But first, I wanted to drop in here and throw out some passing thoughts.

So...retired.

Yeah, well. I didn't want to just drop into the rocking chair and find myself dead of some sort of aneurysm six months from now like every other retired dude. I asked around among some friends still in the biz to give me a call if they needed a hand with anything. One did, so I'm dirt-nannying a job up outside the tiny no-longer-a-real-town of Goble up in Columbia County.

It's irritating, like all this dirt-nanny work, but, hey...it helps pay the bills, and it's only for a month or two.

But that wasn't what reminded me of "working". 

It was an e-mail from my last chief engineer, from where I just retired out of.

He said he wanted to talk; specifically about my last annual "bonus" from the outfit we work(ed) for.

I assume if you've worked for any sort of big business you know what I'm talking about. At the end of the calendar year corporate masters hand out an envelope with some extra jack in it.

Or not; if business has been bad there may be nothing. My first workplace, David Newton Associates, tended to have fat years and lean years and the year-end kick tended to vary depending on how fat or how lean. 

One of the lean years our "bonus" was a fucking frozen turkey.

But this last outfit has a peculiar addition to that tradition; your immediate boss is supposed to "tell you about" your bonus - hence the e-mail from the former CE needing to have a FTF with me about this bonus.

What it reminded me was how I hated that little talk with the heat of a million suns.

What it always did was remind me how much my corporate masters seemed to think what a huge fucking favor they were doing me by handing me this cash bolus which my work earned for them in the first place.

It was a sort of 21st Century largesse, the coins tossed into the crowd of grubby proles by the noble on horseback, and the little talk that came with it irked me more every year I heard it.

Didn't matter if the speaker was someone I liked or, as this guy, was someone I wasn't particularly fond of.

It got to the point where I had to bite my tongue to respond with something biting. One thing I did early on was stop thanking the person. 

Why? Why thank them? How in any way was this a gift? I worked, and worked well, for it. I earned it, it wasn't largesse, it was a measure of my value.

But the corporate requirement to present it as a gift, to "talk" about it as such, made the company's rep come off like they were handing it down as a favor that they should be thanked for, and this time - he finally caught me on the phone - was no different.

I didn't thank him; I agreed it was a nice kick, we talked a bit about work, and he buggered off. 

That was my last one of those little talks - I'm no longer a salaried employee, and I'm no longer eligible for the thing.

Good. We may be in the Second Gilded Age. But I don't need an annual reminder that the coal barons still want to shove us back into company towns, thanks.

The other thing that I wanted to mention was the continued Twitter tsuris.

Jim Wright at Stonekettle has a long post about his thoughts - which, as usual, are fairly well-reasoned and to the point - about this flaming trainwreck, but my own perspective on the issue is a peculiar one.

I read a lot of politics and a lot of political blogs, so I hear a lot about the nonsense. And I can see how it is entirely within the bounds of possibility that a high-function autistic, obscenely rich white boy marinated in the toxic shitbrew of apartheid South Africa could, indeed, be an unhinged shitposting MAGA nutball who is turning a social media platform into a fairly accurate resemblance to his own freakish internal headspace.

But the thing is...I don't get my news off the platform. 

I don't use it to communicate with others. 

I pretty much just read; read the content generated by people who write about soccer, or art, or history. I do read some lefty political accounts, like Roy Edroso, but I don't engage with anyone there other than that.

Some, or all, of the people I follow may be taking incoming MAGAt fire...but I'm not in the beaten zone, so I have no idea what the hell that looks like or is.

So...what's kind of weird is that while I know about this shit, I don't really...know it. 

It's like I'm sitting quietly while a knockdown brawl is going on in the next apartment. I hear the thumping and screaming through the walls, raise a brow, cock my head, mutter "Hmmm...", and carry on.

So while Twitter may be just another part of this country overrun with wannabee Blackshirts, looney anti-vaxx 14th Century cosplayers, and Donald Fucking Trump...I'm luckily enough to be in another part of the country.

And I'm fine with that.

Okay. Got to go finish up the paperwork from today's nannying.

But I'll be back in a bit. I've got some more stuff on my mind.

See ya then.

Put a bird on it

 

The whole "Elon Musk takes over Twitter and immediately pilots the bird in controlled flight into terrain" thing is remotely fascinating. 

To me, anyway.

I really don't have much of a fighting-dog on that particular flight. I don't use the app personally (I'm here, still blogging away like the refugee from the Nineties I am, or on Facebook - largely only because I still have long-distance friends that the Metaverse lets me stay in touch with...) so whether it lives or dies in a spectacular collapse is kind of a matter of indifference to me.

So the interest here at the Fire Direction Center is purely academic and out of curiosity.

But I am fascinated, in a sort of bemused way, watching a whole bunch of things very "21st Century America" slam into each other in this Twitter crash.

1. The whole tech-"genius"-worship thing.

I've never "got" the Musk-fanboi. The guy owns a company that builds...ohmigoadSpaceRockets!

Yeah, well, so did that old Nazi Werner von Braun.

But somehow this seems to have created a club that looks at this joker as some sort of culmination of The Buddha, Johnny "The Wadd" Holmes, and Croesus. Mostly because of the space rocket thing.

(There seems to be a subset of fans of his cars, but the rockets seem like the big draw).

But...c'mon. 

Einstein's Wall means that manned space flight is a nonsensical macguffin best left to science fiction, and since the end of the big NASA programs the inevitable consequence of letting plutocrats take over - space tourism - turns the whole Right Stuff legacy into WTF? Stuff. 

The fact that the USG has let this fuckstick take over the launch of communications satellites is infuriating, mind you. It's the astronautic equivalent of what we've let Republicans and greedy privatizing bastard (but I repeat myself) do to the Post Office; turn what should be a public good - communicating with each other - into a cashbox held by a greedy bastard.

Turns out that you don't really have to be that much of a "genius" to own a rocket company. You can be a greedy bastard and clueless outside your lane so long as you start by being a rich greedy bastard. Turns out that the best way to make millions is to start with millions. Who knew!?

2. Tech.

We're Americans. We're enthralled by shit that goes fast, makes noise, or beeps when you push its buttons. Twitter is just another tech gimmick, albeit a fairly useful one for talking to other people.

The notion that it's something "important" seems a fairly accurate metric of the sort of thing that the American public finds "important", and runs concurrent in my estimation with the amount of time that the recently-concluded election spent talking about "transgender".

There are such things as transgender people.

They're a tiny subset of the set "people", and they - like all people - just want to live their lives. Some happily and productively and sensibly, some madly and dramatically, some...well, just like everyone else.

In a sensible world, we, the "rest" of us, would mind our own fucking business and let them mind theirs.

Instead, because of a bunch of nitwit wingnuts, we've wasted an immense about of time, money, and intellectual throw-weight fretting about them.

It's the same with tech.

Twitter is a postcard. Facebook is a letter. TikTok is...sort of a postcard with moving cat pictures.

The platform is just another way of talking to one another. The "how" may be gee-whizzical. But the "what" is the same old-same-old that Sumerians did with clay tablets.

Which is to say, if not Twitter? Something else will be there to talk through.

Clay tablets, maybe. Whatever.

If we were willing to think of it that way, we'd realize that what's important is what we say and show and do, rather than the how.

And that brings me to...

3. "Free speech"

Supposedly the whole nonsense began because a) Musk was baked, and b) pissed off because one of his favorite right-wing assholes had been STFU by The Bird, so he c) did some dumb things that forced him into paying way more for this thing than he should have, so here we are.

Supposedly this all started because Musk (who may have been baked, remember...) wanted to "Free the Bird".

And yes, all the wingnuts have been raving for a long time about "freedom" and "their freedoms".

Those "freedoms", so far as I can tell, are largely the "freedom" to fuck around and not get kicked in the ass for it. To do rude, stupid, destructive-to-the-commons stuff and then not have to hear the non-rude, non-stupid, and/or non-destructive bystanders tell them they're being rude and stupid.

(kinda looks back at the whole "transgender" thing here...)

The "open-carry" fucknuts? The "rolling coal" d-bags? The sorts of people who want to pry into your bedroom, or your uterus? The white-is-right open racists, the "wimmens-is-stupid" misogynists?

Yeah, all those assholes.

They're cranky because they were told to sit down, shut up, and stop being rude stupid assholes.

Y'see, I grew up in the Sixties, when ALL that rude, stupid stuff was just "how Americans are". 

I remember hearing and using the expression "Jew him down" for bargaining; it wasn't "racism", it was "how Americans talked". 

I remember hearing my Chinese friend described as a "slope" and not immediately pounding the speaker senseless because that was "how Americans talked".

I remember seeing how badly the black kids in my school were treated, how girls "did this not that", how there were one set of rules for rich and powerful and another for everyone else, and that ws just "how America is".

Then, slowly, painfully, sometimes violently, incompletely, some "Americans" started pushing back against that rude, stupid shit.

It started to become unacceptable to call people playground names, because, well, that IS rude and stupid. 

It became less-acceptable (if not completely UN-acceptable) to treat people like shit because of their skin color, or their gender, or because of who they liked or loved.

And the rude and stupid people haaaaated that. So they fought back.

They found a natural ally in "conservative" groups - since most of the "conservative" groups believed, like them, that "bitches" and "faggots" were icky and that the Good Old Days when you could just call them "bitches" and "faggots" and beat them up were Good - and turned their rude stupidity into "free speech" so they could push back the pressure on them to be less-rude-and-less-stupid by slamming it as "woke" and "politically correct".

So all these rude, stupid wingnuts have been foaming at the mouth in anticipation of Musk turning his new Twitter toy into a place where everyone can be rude and stupid to the people that wingnuts hate.

And that seems to be happening.

And if that's not "America 2022" I don't know what is.

A rich, greedy rude (and, it now seems, pretty stupid) "genius" makes a dumb move while baked because his rude and stupid fanbois are fapping to him making the dumb move, and in the process takes something that other non-rude, non-stupid people find useful to communicate and makes it ruder, stupider, and worse.

The fucking Post Office?

Medical care?

Politics?

It seems like there's nothing that 21st Century America can't find a way to let - or encourage - rich, greedy, stupid douchenozzles to make ruder, stupider, and worse.

So.

I'm hopeful that the good (not-rude, not-stupid) people I visit on Twitter (hi, Arielle Dror! Hi, Mark Hertling! Hi, Scamperbeasts!) don't go away if (when?) the Bird hits the window.

Perhaps that's the most irritating part about all this, and what makes me less "fascinated" and more "irked with the antics of greedy rich bastard"; that all these good people (and cats...) are going to take it in the shorts because some baked knucklehead has a bunch of rude stupid asshole fanbois.

But people, eh?

As one of my old platoon sergeants summed it up:

"Some fuckin' people could fuck up a wet dream."

Probably as pithy an epigram for the damned human race as was ever coined, and so, since I can't add anything, here's another cat picture.

I gotta go gas up the Prius. But I'll be back later with more less-rude less-stupidity.

Our little domestic fascist problem, condensed.

Here’s the thing.

The U.S. right has largely been captured by ideological nutbars. 

QANuts, anti-vaxxers, gunhumpers, OathKeeperProudBoyThreepers. 

Trump-fellators. 

Lunatics whose purpose is to undo the 20th Century.

The problems with that are that 1) the "mainstream" news - that is, every information source outside the outright wingnut infostream - won’t even hint at that, and 2) even if they did…

...what can sane people do about that?

Ever tried to “debate” one of these conspiracy theorist loons or just a garden-variety nutter? 

It’s impossible. 

They’re not going to concede the argument, and if you “beat” them (through balloting or such) they’ll just lose their shit and start biting you. 

They're nuts. That's the point.

Problem?

You can’t fucking run a republic like that. 

Period.

What DO we do?

I don’t know. 

Or, rather, I do…

 
...but then it presents the issue of "...what do you do with the corpses?".

The State of THE Union, 2022

Like any good American, I started this with a long post al about memememememeMEEEEE! because that's who we are. Americans, the People of the Ego. It's ALL about us, speshul snowflakes that we are.

Which, I should add, goes a hell of a long way to explaining WHERE we are and how we got there.

But that's part and parcel of this post, about the city and state and country I (and many of you...) are living in. 

Let's start local; Portland.

I wish I had a nickel for every "OMFG! Portland is OVER!!!" I've read in everything from the local digital fishwrap (since I can't recall the last time I saw an actual dead-tree Oregonian) to national opinion columns. This assessment seems to rest largely on two pillars:
1) The 2020 protests, and
2) the "homeless crisis".

Those, in turn, seem to come from, in order:

1) The reporting on the protests that made it sound like all of the city was in flames because a six- or eight-block area around the courtshouse/Central Precinct cop-shop were Ground Zero for the combat between Portland Police Bureau (and, later, a trashbag assortment of federal cops and cop-like entities...) and people who don't much like Portland Police Bureau. And

2) The frequent, highly visible, presence of homeless people in almost every public space from parks to streets to open waste ground.

Let's take them apart.

The first is pretty simple; Portland is always been a pretty shitty town to not be a straight white guy. And Portland cops - who have always been, like most Portlanders, white - tend be shitty; shitty cops, for one, and shitty people in general.

I mean, you kind of have to be sort of an asshole to be or want to be a cop to begin with. Your job, how you earn your living, is mostly going to involve pushing people around, as well as constantly dealing with shitty, awful people, or people who are having a bad day, or troubled people, or insane people, or just people who are looking for trouble.

Throw in that your job also involves making sure that the Good People - that is, the nice, well-bred, wealthy people who largely pay your wages - aren't bothered by Those People. And that our country's history and many of our institutions ensure that Those People are somewhat darker-colored than the Good People.

Means that you stand s pretty good chance of coming off like a racist bastard even if you aren't personally...

(hint; that's what "Critical Race Theory" pretty much predicts - that we've set things up, even here in "liberal" Portland - so that the effect of the Law In It's Impartial Majesty has the effect of making huge swathes of the U.S. being effectively pretty goddamn racist...)

...which, so far as we can tell, a hell of a lot of Portland coppers are when they're being honest with themselves. And as the link shows; the PPB knows they're hiring these freikorps wannabees and don't care. They just send them out to fuck with the people that you'd expect an American Nazi to fuck with.

So you had a perfect shitstorm; Portlanders - sick and tired of being pushed around by blue bastards and angry because the resurgent Republican "fuck you, I'm a racist Nazi bastard, what you gonna do about that?" crew of Proud Boys, Threepers, and Oathers had been goose-stepping through downtown with the ostentatiously visible love and tongue-bathing of said blue bastards - finally snapped.

And the result was - if you knew Portland coppers - depressingly predictable; the coppers ran wild bashing, macing, and arresting everyone. 

And what happened after that?

Nothing.

Nothing was done to make the Portland cops less shitty, so they're still the same bunch of gormless freikorps-fondling fucksticks they've always been, and nothing was done to make things better for the people they constantly fuck with, Portlandrs of color, the mentally troubled, and the homeless.

But - here's the thing that makes the whole "Portland, it's SO over" bullshit bullshit - it was just downtown, and just a tiny part of downtown, at that.

It didn't make Portland better.

But it didn't make Portland any worse, either. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of Portland and Portlanders had no contact with and were not impacted by the protests or the cop response.

The "reporting" was copaganda crap, and if you believed the reporting you were being played for a fool.

And the "Portland is Over" line is a constant stream of wingnut projectile vomit spewed (mostly) by the "People for Portland" gang responsible for the ads like the one at the top of this section. These jokers want to put the "rich, the well-born, and the able" higher on top and are using this ooga-booga scare noise to try and do it.

They're hard at work state-wide, too, but we'll get to that in a bit.

Now.

Homelessness.

This one is a subject that's hard for me to be objective about, because my part of Portland, North, seems to be overrun with people living in tents amid mountains of trash and shit, or in trashed-out campers parked in our little residential streets.

Plus we had our very own homeless crazy lady parked in our little street, screaming and muttering, taking her clothing off...

(the morning I found her at the bottom of our steps, smoking - and how the fuck do you afford smokes at fifteen bucks a pack or whatever they cost now if you're a jobless homeless crazy lady? - and muttering between bouts of begging remains a pretty memorable one. I asked her to go smoke somewhere else, please, and was met with a screech of nuttiness that culminated in her proclamation that Jesus (her nuttiness had a strong religious taint) wanted me to see her tits and her yanking up her grubby clothing so I could. Let's just say that I'd have appreciated Jesus' ideas more had said tits been both cleaner and more attractive...)

...who had my daughter, in particular, massively creeped out for weeks.

Like a hell of a lot of Portlanders, I'm heartily sick of being run out of our own public spaces by reeking piles of trash and whacked-out campers. Tired of having anything moveable stolen, of having parked cars broken into, of being unable to visit parks and trails without stepping around discarded tweaker trash and soiled underwear.

I just want the problems to go away.

But - and this is what makes this whole thing a lot less simple than "exterminate the brutes" - I also realize the "problems" are other human beings trying to make human lives for themselves.

This isn't some sort of mindless orkish horde invading our city. 

The people making this happen are just people. Some are troubled - with addition, with mental or emotional problems - but a hell of a lot, probably most are just poor and down on their luck in - and this is the most important part - a town that has done nothing and worse than nothing to provide actual places for poor, down on their luck people to live.

It's not fucking rocket science.

Portland, like a lot of the rest of this country, has too few places for poor people to live.

Seriously.

That's it.

It's hard to be poor and find a place to live because your supposed fellow-Americans have either made it hard to find places for poor people to live, or don't care.

Sure, a handful of the people living in the tent camps along the Cut would need more even if you got them into a little house or an apartment. Counseling. Medical care. Social interventions of various sorts.

But a hell of a lot would simply need a home and a decent job and a way to get there and back.

We the Good People aren't doing anything to help with the home. 

We're not doing anything to help with the job. 

And we're sure as hell not doing anything about the "getting there and back" think with our bad-and-getting-worse transit.

What's frustrating as hell to me is that it's pretty simple.

You change the zoning laws and subsidize (or force) building houses and apartments poor people can afford.

You subsidize - or just create - work that poor people can do that pays them enough to afford that housing.

You create enough bus and trolley and train routes to get people to their jobs and back home (since if you're poor all you can afford is a beater piece-of-shit car and those are less reliable and worse for everyone than a bus ride).

You pay for people to help where it's needed; physical and mental health care workers, counselors, addition care people.

And you tax the rich fucks and their businesses to pay for it all.

Will that "solve" homelessness and the attendant problems?

No.

Will it improve the situation, probably immensely?

Yes.

Will it happen?

No. The Portland City government has already given up trying anything but force, might, beatings. The "homeless sweeps" are the "answer", so the City has directed the coppers (see above...) and the city cleanup crews to chase the poor bastards from one place to another.

Like so much else in the U.S. circa 2022, there's an obvious social, political, and economic solution to an obvious social, political, or economic problem.

But because the solution would require Americans to abandon their prejudices and make hard choices and financial sacrifices, they won't even be seriously discussed, let along tried. 

Take all this larger, and you've got the same problems.

Oregon has a bunch of red-state wingnuts roaming the less paved parts of the state.

Do they have answers to these problems outside of blabbering about illegal aliens and woke capitalism?

Don't make me laugh.

Instead they want to join their fellow wingnazis in Idaho. That pretty much tells you about the condition of Oregon's goober politics.

The country at large?

The United States has a massive, indigestible minority - something between a quarter and two-fifths of the country - that want caudillo-style dictatorship if the alternative is not getting all the guns, Jesus, tax cuts, and ability to call people they don't like rude names they want.

They're not going to change. Nothing that we've seen proving the unparalleled shittiness of Republican "policy" (such as it is other than "whatever Donald Trump wants me to suck...") or the hammering that Republican governance will give anyone not in a two-yacht family will persuade them to back anyone other than the reddest of red-meat Bircher Trumpkins.

The institutions and political structures that empower these hayshaking fucksticks mean that they can rule the rest of us unless the other three-fifths of the country 1) gets off their collective dead ass and 2) votes against every one of these C.H.U.D.s...and this is a country where barely two-thirds of the eligible population bothers to even show up in the most important elections.

They have a gajillion reasons, from ignorance to indifference to actual "reasons" (my personal favorite being libertarians, who seem to think that the opposite of "government regulation" is "freedom" and not "rule of the most rapacious and powerful wealthy individuals and groups") but the overall effect is, again, to put these well-funded, rabidly active, right-wing nuts in power.

I have no idea what the hell you do about this.

It's not like the danger is hard to see. It's right fucking there, the iceberg not on a cold dark night but in broad daylight, visible for miles ahead. And yet the fucking U.S.S. Titanic seems determined to ram the goddamn thing, maybe just to see if letting these gomers put a massive hole in the Republic's hull will fucking sink it.

Maybe just for shits and giggles.

Either way?

Pretty soon we're going to have to decide, those of us non-wingnut, whether to bend the knee to these fuckers, or fight.

The only question is how willing I am to die on my feet.

Because when your country becomes Bosnia, you have no other choices.

Cite your sources

I get that this sort of thing has become so utterly bog-standard from the GQP/wingnut Right that the rest of us have gotten to the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ phase and just kind of elide wingnuts and wingnut pols saying it;

Okay, so.

I've made it pretty clear where I stand on the whole business of theocracy. It's a bad idea, and - believe it or not - not just for those on the theocratic-outside. 

It's bad for religion and especially bad for whichever sect gets the whip hand. The whole sorry history of the European Wars of Religion make that clear. Becoming the state religion of Rome (and its successor states) was bad for the Roman Church.

But here's the part that I think we don't talk enough about.

One of the most troublesome aspects of theocracy (or any political system that depends on an unquestioned, received creed - Nazi-style fascism and Soviet-style and Mao-style Communism were others) is that they rely on the fundamental truth of the received narrative.

In other words, for Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism to "work" enough of the fundamental tenets of the creed, from Kapital through the diktats of Stalin, have to be "true". They have to reflect some fundamental political (and economic and social) reality that can be applied to the messy business of daily life.

If the fundamentals don' t work - if they're not really grounded in reality or something close to reality - then the chances of that theocracy of working IRL become significantly more difficult.

We saw that with Marxism.

The fuzzy guy had some interesting ideas. But it turned out that they were really difficult to turn into practice that didn't involve a whole lot of human misery.

Turns out that a LOT of Marxism was a sort of 19th Century political version of Scientology, and it turned out that running a civil society on them was really difficult to turn into anything that wasn't pretty punitive.

So.

What this led me back to was something I got to thinking about when I went and re-read my old battles piece on First Panipat.

When I wrote the original I hadn't gotten to the point of checking the original source materials. I did the usual "I did the research" thing on the Internet where I peeked at the first dozen Google hits and wrote based on what came up.

But the deeper I dug into the sources - especially for the events that occurred prior to widespread literacy and the printing press - the more I discovered that one of the biggest problems with the "accepted narrative" of these ancient events is that it is often 1) culled from a tiny handful of accounts that are often 2) lost in the original form and exist only as multiple-generations-removed from the original, and 3) afflicted with one or more "unreliable narrator" issues (where there are more than one contemporary source the sources contradict each other, sources state as facts things that we know from physical evidence are untrue, are written by authors that are unfamiliar with the physical realities of ancient or medieval warfare, i.e. monks writing military history...).

So, as it turns out, a lot of what we "know" about these past events - actual events we know really happened - turns out to be either untrue, or partially true, or (more often) simply impossible to accurately pin down.

And these are simple events! We're not talking about using them to set up a political system!

Which got me thinking about theocracy, and specifically Christian theocracy; what do we actually know about the actual events, people, places, and things that have been codified over centuries into the "Judeo-Christian ethic" that a lot of theocratic or theo-friendly politicians, pundits, and other authorities like to cite as the best form of human government.

Here's a little chart that displays the historians who wrote about the world of the Mediterranean littoral (including, obviously, what was then the Roman province of Judea) during the period that we interpret from the books of the New Testament that discuss it was the time of Jesus Christ:

As discussed above; this is perforce only a partial list of the people who may have written histories of this time. This is just those whose accounts remain to us!

As noted in the picture, though; none of these authors mention any of the things that are stated in the Gospels (and Acts) that you'd expect to have come to the attention of a diligent historian.

Many cultures around the 1st Century BCE/CE tended to place great import on astrological signs and symbols. Something like the "Christmas Star"? SOMEbody should have said something. Nope.

The "Massacre of the Innocents"; Herod I's supposed ratissage of newborn Messiahs? You'd think someone - particularly Josephus, who was pretty tuned into events in Judea - would have mentioned that. Nope.

The events surrounding the crucifixion - the darkening sky, the earthquake - should have caught the notice of someone writing from somewhere close enough (like Alexandria or Damascus) to have heard, felt, or seen them.

Nope.

I don't know if the whole basis of Christianity is as sketchy as Joseph Smith and his golden plates.

But if I was researching some event in ancient warfare?

I'd be utterly hesitant to place any confidence in that event - what happened, how it happened, even if it actually happened at all - if all the contemporary sources save one ignored it as if it had never existed.

If you want to govern me based on your love of Christian scripture...okay. That's your call.

But to insist that I accept that's any more of an inescapable "truth" than governance based on the events of the Twilight novels or the philosophy expressed in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic?

Sorry. That's not just a bad idea. It's a bad idea based on complete and utter bullshit.

And the fact that We the People don't laugh it out of the public square is...not a good sign.

Die Straße frei den braunen Bataillonen

 So I came across this the other day and it was so odd that I've been fiddling with it ever since.

The grinning MAGAt there is one Ashli Babbitt, the only one of the treasonous mob shot dead on January 6, 2021 in the failed attempt to putsch Tubby off his golden throne and back into the chair behind the Resolute desk.

At the time if just seemed like just another freakish event in perhaps one of the most freakish days in the political history of the United States.

Since then, however, the wingnut Right - meaning the entire GQP - led by Tubby himself has beavered away to make the woman some sort ot True Christian Martyr cut down in the flower of her youth by communism, immigrants, Antifa, George Soros, or some combination of all the above.

In case you're not a student of Nazi iconography, the title of the post is from Die Fahne hoch, also known as the Horst-Wessel-Leid, the official theme song of the original NSDAP, supposedly written by the original Ashli Babbitt, a fightin' Sturmabteilung street brawler who was given a fatal injection of external lead by his Red Front street brawler enemies. So we've kinda been here, seen that. It's now dangerous and scary because it's Nazis; it's dangerous and scary because it's worked in the past.

Anyway, that's not really the point of this post.

It's that part of the emerging Babbitt the Martyr legend is that she was a veteran of the US Air Force.

Tubby himself has been banging that drum. Dead Ashli was "An innocent, wonderful, incredible woman, a military woman...” according to the President quondam ex futuris. 

Given the tidal level of tongue-bathing the U.S. public gives veterans of any stripe that's not a bad propaganda ploy. Brand your people as Real American Heroes and suddenly any and everything they do is American and Heroic, right?

So I've been kind of following the whole Dead Ashli Saga with a curious and jaundiced eye for a while now but only just this past week came across these two little related items.

1) Babbit had a total of 12 years time-in-service; four active USAF (2004-2008), two AF Reserve (2008-2010), and six in the ANG (2010-2016), all as a "security" specialist, meaning one of the air cops that pull gate guard and provide perimeter security for USAF installations among other things.

2) Babbitt got out as a Senior Airman (E-4), the equivalent of an Army Specialist.

That is intensely weird to me.

I know that it takes longer - it used to take much longer - to make rank in the USAF than the Army. In the 1980s, when I came in the Army if you weren't at least E-4(P) - meaning on the promotable list for buck sergeant -  by the end of your first term you were a total spud. After a dozen years in? A decently competent troop should have been at least an E-5 and probably an E-6 - Sergeant or Staff Sergeant in the Army, Staff Sergeant or Technical Sergeant in the USAF.

To still be an E-4 after a dozen years in?

That seems pretty shocking. You'd have to have been either passed over repeatedly - meaning that your unit commander would have to find some pretty big reasons for not just 86ing your ass the next time your re-up date came around - or you had to have been promoted and then busted...also not a good reason to keep you hanging around the dayroom.

The endless Wars on Terror have forced the services to body-snatch pretty hard, though, so it's possible that Warm Body Ashli was better than a hole in the MTO&E, so there's that.

Still.

I find it intriguing in a not-good-way that the Wingnut Wessel of 1/6 turns out to have been - as a "military women" - kind of a pretty poor sort of "military woman". 

But, then again...why not? She clearly missed the part in the words she swore every time she re-upped where she was supposed to "...support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic..." and became, instead, one of those enemies herself and got killed as such.

But the big picture seems to me that, like Tubby himself, wingnut world seems to find some of the sketchiest human beings on the planet to make into heroes. It's taking a street brawling thug and turing him into one heroic martyr, or taking a sad act air force cop and making her into another.

I wonder whether that says more about the heroes, or the sorts of people who make up Wingnut World..?

Losing the Whisky Rebellion

One of the more irritating ammosexual traits is their man-crush on fucking Tenthers and "sovereign citizens" and the other assorted douchenozzles that populate the far-right wing of the anti-government crowd.

The last time we saw this was when welfare rancher Cliven Bundy got all rampant about not paying his fucking debts and a crowd of Second Amendment jihadis showed up at his moochateria to face down the Feds.

The really fucking irking part about that was that it worked. Bundy's young welfare-buck ass stayed out of the sneezer and the Federal claws stayed out of his wallet and the guntards walked away with a swagger and the win.

And now they're at it again, out in the lesser-paved part of my own state.

Largely because, in my biased opinion, the Feds punked out at the Bundy crib. Here's one of the fucking rebels in arms talking about how their jihad would have succeeded had the Feds tried to enforce the law:

"We had counter-sniper positions on their sniper positions. We had at least one guy—sometimes two guys—per BLM agent in there," Payne told a Montana weekly, the Independent. "If they made one wrong move, every single BLM agent in that camp would've died."

Nice. You do that in a black ski mask, Abdul, and Donald Trump is gonna carpet bomb your and your whole family's asses. But do it with a "Don't Tread On Me" flag and you're a GOP Congressman.

What a goddamn mess.

Anyway, the point is that, while irritating, this is nothing new. It's happened before, back in the early days of the Republic. And the then-leader of the Federal government knew precisely how to deal with this sort of fucking idiot:

"Washington organized a militia force of 12,950 men and led them towards Western Pennsylvania, warning locals "not to abet, aid, or comfort the Insurgents aforesaid, as they will answer the contrary at their peril."

Now THAT's the way you deal with fucking Bundys.

That's how the Feds should have dealt with the last one. And how they should deal with these newest Oregon ones, too.

So far no Federal agencies have done anything about the Oregon rebels, and I have no idea whether, or how, they plan to deal with them. But I can at the very least give them one little bit of helpful advice.

The First Rule of Keeping a Republic: Don't Lose the Fucking Whisky Rebellion.

The Second Rule?

If You Want To Be A Good Citizen, Don't Start The Fucking Whisky Rebellion.

Honestly. These fucking people...

Damned dirty apes

So I've been using this morning - since my work here in Medford is shut down by the Northwest Rainpocalypse (film at 11...) - to ponder what exactly it is that has me so grimly uneasy about this year in U.S. politics.

And, no, I don't think I have anything to add to the bleak assessment I have already so often written down here; this isn't really an essay about "U.S. politics".

Rather, it's a distillation of what I finally realized so worries me about U.S. politics, and it links back to a post over at the Penguin's place about Obama Derangement Syndrome. In it the Tuxedoed One notes that:

"I can’t think of any time in this nation’s history where the rhetoric surrounding the President is so divorced from reality...this hatred towards Obama is divorced from anything the man has actually done...It’s as if a significant portion of the white population of the United States has gone completely insane. And I don’t know if the nation is going to be able to survive that."

THAT's my concern.

When I look around at the looney-tunes Mirror Universe that the GOP has constructed, as typified by this Obama-derangement and the hysterical pants-pissing terror and range evoked by Obama's mildly rational speech the other day, what I see is the cumulative effect of thirty-five years of selective breeding and nurturing of a sort of subspecies of higher primate; let's call it homo wingnuttiens.

It sort of looks like homo sapiens with 100% less sapience.

It looks, in fact, a lot like the intelligent apes of the old Charleton Heston flick or, rather, the artifact in the plot of the film's source material, a novel titled La Planète des Singes. Same basic story; astronaut finds ape civilization and uncovers the history that humans effectively created their own downfall and the rise of their anthropoid masters. The moral of the story is that human intelligence is not a fixed quality and could atrophy if taken for granted.

Or if deliberately destroyed.

By, for instance, creating a race of demi-humans who have been carefully taught to believe only what they are told by certain sources, to automatically refuse to accept anything that doesn't fit what those sources tell them, that base their actions on automatic acceptance of certain ideas (war, strength/force, "Western culture", patriarchy/authoritarianism, "market economy"/rapacity, Christian theocracy/primacy, xenophobia) and rejection of others associated with what they see as despised and illegitimate enemies.

This isn't exactly new. I pretty much had the wingnuts figured out back in the Clinton years – the default position of the GOP has simply become complete rejection of the legitimacy of ANYthing Democratic, or, more precisely, anything not endorsed by their own echo chamber.

And this wasn't exactly an accident. The GOP mad scientists have created these creatures for their own power. But I think, like the researchers in La Planète they are being willfully blind to their own madness.

Several studies of the wingnut-third has established fairly thoroughly that the cumulative effect of the right-wing echo chamber, eliminationist rhetoric, and apocalyptic propaganda has developed a “country within a country” populated by people who see the world through wingnut beer goggles.

So, for them, the actual corporatist Eisenhower-Republican Obama isn’t an actual thing. It’s the secret-Muslim communist traitor welfare daddy Obama that exists.

The complexity of the modern Middle East isn't an actual thing; it's the seething cauldron populated by nothing but beheading Muslims who live to kill white men and rape white women that exists.

Or something.

And so on down the line. "Markets" aren't something established and run by societies and governments, they are magical fucking invisible-hand unicorns dancing on rainbows. Oligarchies aren't bad for the non-oligarchs, they're just how life is and if you aren't rich it's because you're a lazy loser. Taxes are theft. Peace is surrender. War is victory.

And my problem with all that is that I’m not sure that you can run a functioning representative democracy when about a quarter to a third of your “citizens” are effectively living in a fantasy world of their own devising.

The potential for a critical mass of these nutjobs blowing the doors off of the polity seems WAY too high not to happen at some point.

So while I'm not going to predict a Trump presidency or some sort of immediate disaster in the immediate future, my consistent low-grade concern is that my country is a long way to developing a strain of this homo wingnuttiens into a force that has the potential, if and when the plague that kills all the dogs and cats, to break down the country of my birth in such a way that it will be nearly impossible to rebuild.

I'm not really sure how much I fear this, or how realistic my fear of this is. But I can feel it like the hum of distant high-voltage wires that begins to crackle in the rain whenever I read of the latest trumpism and the wingnut baying that it produces.

I feel distantly angry and at the same time bereft, as if I have already lost something that has not been taken from me yet.

In a strange way, I feel like I am already mourning the loss of my country.