tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-99086042024-03-07T10:25:25.828-08:00Hammer Of The Blogs"Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."<br>
-- George Orwell, <i>Politics and the English Language</i>Heywood J.http://www.blogger.com/profile/05627748699423939682noreply@blogger.comBlogger3628125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9908604.post-52770734380309873302021-01-12T22:27:00.002-08:002021-01-12T22:32:34.735-08:00American Carnage<p><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: small;"><span>And crows will eat your eyes. -- Motörhead, <i>Traitor </i></span></span><br /></p><p>I promise that I don't intend to make a habit of breaking radio silence, especially just a couple weeks after making a show of pulling the plug, but the events at the Capitol building on January 6th bear some consideration and discussion that I am missing in most of the mediocracy pow-wows so far. Watching the events unfold live, I realized I hadn't had such visceral feelings of genuine revulsion and anger since watching the second plane hit the World Trade Center.</p><p>Others have already brought up the 9/11 comparisons. But the thing is, if we are careless in pursuing true accountability and making it sting, the event may actually turn out to be closer to Fort Sumter. I know I've scoffed at the possibility of a true "civil war" dynamic in the past, and I still strongly believe that the lack of foresight, coordination, strategy, or even any aligned goal prevents these people from doing much in the way of setting up an actual competing governmental system.</p><p>But that doesn't mean they can't do a lot of damage and kill a lot of people giving it a try.<br /></p><p>There appears to be genuine anger on the Democratic side, and a desire for real accountability and even retribution, and that's a great start. This is not something that can just be "let go" for the sake of comity. Many media observers were quick to frame the rioters as "domestic terrorists," and that too is good and necessary. Anyone shying away from those terms and that framing is in on the con, period.</p><p>There is nothing to be discussed or broached or reconciled with these rioters. At all. They are traitors and insurrectionists. Fuck them and their "Camp Auschwitz" and "6MWE (6 Million [Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust] Wasn't Enough)" tee-shirts. Fuck their treasonous flags, devoted to one individual rather than a show of loyalty to their country.</p><p>I am not joking in the slightest, nor trying to be polemic, when I say that as many of them as possible should be summarily tried in open hearings, and immediately after sentencing, lined up against a wall and shot. In an earlier time, they would have been gibbeted and immured, as a warning to others. Some of them are military. They should be court-martialed and sentenced to death. The death sentence can be commuted to life without parole at the Florence Supermax, or it can be carried out. I really don't give a shit which. They can dump these assholes into a filled swimming pool and toss a fucking toaster in for all I care.<br /></p><p>At least some of those poor bastards back in the day, the folks who ended up in the gibbet, had legitimate grievances. These dopes have nothing but the nonsense they've been spoonfed by the lifelong liar Trump and his booze-soaked sidekick Ghouliani, who is probably lining up yet another thirsty pig to receive his slobbering, grotesque sexual overtures.<br /></p><p>It has already been noted by multiple observers that it was just a damned lucky break that of the hundreds of legislators and staffers that were forced to quickly evacuate and hide and barricade themselves for hours, none of them were found and dragged and beaten or executed by the braying mob of traitorous slapdicks. Again, it wasn't for lack of trying.<br /></p><p>There was a forty-foot gallows erected outside the building. How do you like them apples? Amazing what you can get away with when you're the right shade.</p><p>Another thing we need to understand fully is that all of this is exactly what he promised before the election -- and before the <u><b><i>2016</i></b></u> election. <i>If I lose, it's because the election is rigged.</i> Remember that, both times? <i>Heads I win, tails you lose.</i> There are always suckers -- people still purchase music and clothing from Kanye West. There will always be enough impressionable morons to make something happen, through deception and repetition. It's even easier when you have an entire teevee network at your disposal.<br /></p><p>As the usual weasels start retconning excuses and strategems for "unity" (with <u><b><i>what</i></b></u>, precisely? Be specific, show your work, and your plan to get there from here.) and the like, we all need to consider the sort of craven individuals who make such proposals.</p><p>Imagine the sort of person who was in very real danger, whose colleagues and employees were in very real physical danger as well, and yet a couple days later, are bleating mealy noises about how we mustn't do anything at all to enrage these terrorists any further.</p><p>They were openly shouting for Mike Pence to be hung at their makeshift gallows. They were looking for Pelosi, for Schumer, for whoever they could tase and zip-tie into submission, for their fantasy show-trials. <i>Oh no, we better not do anything to <u><b>enrage</b></u> them!</i> Jesus H. Christ.</p><p>If you do not know your enemy by now, and truly understand them as such, you never will. I don't know what to tell such people, since they are clearly unyoked from any sort of moral compass, but <i>are</i> welded to a compelling motive of personal profit and ambition. Anyone insisting on a mitigation of accountability is a clear enemy of this country and <i>all</i> of its citizens, and needs to be treated accordingly. Let's not overthink this. They told us who they are, over and over again. At some point, it might be time to take them at their word.</p><p>The most important thing to consider about their weird collective psychosis is how they see themselves -- and each other, for that matter. Now, there is <i>some</i> money peppered through these crowds at certain nodes. All that faggy cult swag costs money, as does the tacticool gear, the trips all over the country to the rallies and the be-ins, like deadheads that took the brown acid and chased it with a bucket of Wild Turkey that had been left in the sun for a month.</p><p>But you can tell that the median morlock in these crowds is a goddamned loser -- not because their education abruptly halted somewhere around their seventeenth birthday, but because they felt at that point that they had learned and known <i>enough</i>, enough for the rest of their lives. And everything they've done in their lives since those critical decision points, every job and every relationship they've stumbled into and shouted themselves out of, reflects that outlook on life.</p><p><a href="https://defector.com/after-the-sacred-landslide/" target="_blank">The word "loser" should be taken literally here</a>, but like all such folks, they need to envision themselves as victims of circumstance, of the machinations of some malevolent force or baroque conspiracy. It can't just be that you're a willfully ignorant bum with anger management issues. It's always someone else's fault.<br /></p><p>And now they're in their forties or fifties, these median dopes, their best years long behind them, and there warn't too many of those in the first place. They don't know much, but they know <i>that</i> much. The only thing they have to look forward to, the thing that informs what passes for their political sentiments, is the hope of pulling as many of their fella 'murkins down to the same level.</p><p>Remember the ancient joke about the campers awakened by the approaching bear, how you don't have to be faster than the bear, just faster than the other campers? Well, imagine the sort of person that just wants to be the <i>bear</i>.</p><p>But because these people still see themselves as <i>good</i> people, as <i>decent</i> people, they did what all delusional people do and crafted a story that casts themselves as heroes rather than villains. The crucible of social media, and the common bond of the Q mythos, enabled them to quickly forge a more solid and sweeping narrative for themselves, noble hobbitses headed for Mount Doom to thwart the satanic pedophile cabal headed by Hitlery Clinton.</p><p>Did I get all that right? Does it matter? The main thing is that it gives them the excuses and the rhetorical cover they need in order to strive for something they know is monstrous. It doesn't matter that the strike dates of the Q mythos keep shifting, like doomsday predictions from crackpot preachers. It doesn't matter that Trump can't show a single tangible accomplishment that would benefit any of them. It doesn't even matter that Trump turned on Pence -- and even on <i>them</i> -- by essentially conceding the day after the riot, by acknowledging that there would indeed be a transfer of power on January 20th.</p><p>Some of them will squawk about betrayal and such, but their hearts aren't in it. After all, they have nowhere else to go. I don't mean the garden-variety asshole coworker or uncle we all have in our lives; I mean specifically the individuals at the rallies, at the Capitol riot. I mean the sort of person who seriously thought that if they bum-rushed the Capitol cops, smeared shit on the walls and vandalized the place good and proper, maybe dragged a couple of heretics out to the makeshift gallows and strung 'em up, that the other 330 million of us would just roll over and go, <i>Oh, okay guys, we see your point now. I guess we can go ahead and flip the script for Fat Orange Elvis' second term. No fucking problem.</i></p><p>No, the people who invaded the halls of American governance last Wednesday afternoon have nowhere else to go, politically, morally, spiritually. These are people who have alienated every sensible person who was in their lives, who have moved on without them. These are people who have been rolling around in an impermeable hamster ball of epistemic closure.</p><p>Ted Kaczynski holed himself up in a hundred-square-foot cabin in the remote wilderness, with nothing but his jotted musings and his increasingly fevered aspirations. Imagine if the Unabomber had been able to stew and commiserate for years with like-minded souls in members-only Fakebook groups, steadily bringing each others' sentiments and outlook to a rolling boil.<br /></p><p><span></span></p><div class="ujudUb"><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-small;"><span><span>Cold, alone, and alive</span><br /><span>You're afraid but that's not what I asked. Wanna go for a ride?</span><br /><span>Sharpen your teeth, my darlings, s</span><span>harpen your minds</span><br /><span>Take a finger -- if the hand feeds you shit, take one scalp at a time. -- Them Crooked Vultures, <i>Spinning In Daffodils</i></span></span></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span><br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>We have a crisis in our angry-yokel population, to be sure (best one I've seen so far is <b><i>Coup Klux Klan</i></b>), but it seems to me that the real -- and sorely under-reported -- crisis is in <i>law enforcement</i>, a term becoming an oxymoron on the level of <i>jumbo shrimp</i> or <i>Holy Roman Empire</i>.</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span><br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>We saw it all last summer, the beatdowns of unarmed college kids and elderly trespassers, in city after city after city. Violence occurred, and buildings were set ablaze, but in countless videos, it was rarely the Molotov cocktail chuckers who were getting the batons, but mostly the passive, unarmed resistors.</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span> </span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>We've all just come to accept it, since the only people who can do anything about it refuse to. But the actions and behavior of the Capitol Police on January 6th indicate a non-zero percentage of officers and leadership who are coup sympathizers at best, and sabotaging moles at worst. They let these hooting yokels right in to do as they pleased, and escorted them out and down the steps when they were done. They risked the lives of their own fellow officers, and got one of their own killed. Arrests were comically few and mostly late in the day, after media figures had already been openly questioning their, ah, dedication to their job.</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span><br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>One thing for sure is that they were fucking terrible at their job that day, the Capitol Police. How the hell is it that the terrorists plan openly online for weeks in advance, with the date, time, and location, and there's no preparation whatsoever, no barricades, no reinforcements, no orders to use force early and often? They had <i>bike racks</i> that the terrorists swiped and used as ladders to climb the walls.<br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span><br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>Not to mention the fact that this entire time -- during the Capitol invasion and even last weekend in Frankfort, Kentucky -- there have been cells of armed white supremacists menacing state capitals across the country. Kansas, Oregon, Washington, Michigan. They're planning more leading up to the 20th. No one is doing a goddamned thing about any of it. Wonder why that is.</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span><br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>This is not just a constitutional crisis. This is a very real crisis in "law enforcement" and what that entails, quite literally. You have an entire class of people who are held completely unaccountable, who are legally immunized from everything they do, no matter how awful. In the cities, they are militarized, and far more powerful than the legally elected city councils and mayors and such. They decide which laws to enforce, and how rigorously, and upon whom.</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span> </span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>Their choices in those regards should be clear to all right now. It's certainly clear to the terrorists. They knew they wouldn't be touched, and they were right. Hell, they were given directions to Schumer's office. They put their feet up on Pelosi's desk. They took selfies with these paragons of law and order.</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span><br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>There is no justice if laws are not enforced equally. This is so obvious that it shouldn't need to be said. Yet here we are. It's good that people are finally saying it out loud. But as much effort as it's going to take to send the treasonous cockroaches scuttling back to their swamp caves, it's going to take ten times that effort -- a hundred times -- to weed out all the sympathizers and the thugs and the fascists that infest every level of this nation's law enforcement services.</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span> </span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>I honestly don't think it's doable, and it's a real problem. We'll see on January 20th, for starters; now that one of their own came up as a casualty of their malicious incompetence, the CP have to at least make a half-hearted show of force for whatever inaugural recognition is taking place that day. Maybe we should all send them reminders to put on their fucking calendars.</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span> </span></div><div class="ujudUb"><b><i><span>Some of the assholes are coming back for seconds, and some new assholes are planning on showing up as well. They've printed up tee-shirts and everything, with the date and location. Maybe you should prepare, you know, just in case. Like a security type of thing.<br /></span></i></b></div><div class="ujudUb"><span><br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>And then people will go back to what they were doing, assuming that the foot-dragging agencies and entities entrusted with making these fuckers pay dearly will actually do their jobs. I have a feeling we'll be disappointed in that regard, which will only embolden them for the next round, for the eventual Tim McVeigh type who isn't a booger-eating cartoon character, but a trained, focused, committed killer.</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span> </span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>There's been a lot of close calls with this sort of thing lately. Think about how close the governor of Michigan came to being kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by a cell of these "militia" dinks a few months back. You only get so many rolls of the dice before they come up snake eyes. <br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span> </span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>I hope I'm wrong. As of now, it looks like impeachment will happen, as will an effort to expel the treasonous congress-critters who fomented and supported this bullshit. Let them all swing for it.</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;"></span></div><blockquote><div class="ujudUb"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: courier;">Now, the right of revolution is an inherent one. When people are
oppressed by their government, it is a natural right they enjoy to
relieve themselves of the oppression, if they are strong enough, either
by withdrawal from it, or by overthrowing it and substituting a
government more acceptable. But any people or part of a people who
resort to this remedy, stake their lives, their property, and every
claim for protection given by citizenship--on the issue. Victory, or the
conditions imposed by the conqueror--must be the result.</span></span> </div></blockquote><blockquote><div class="ujudUb"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: courier;">-- President Ulysses S. Grant</span><br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span></span></div></blockquote><div class="ujudUb"><span><br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>Let's be clear -- the people who showed up to storm the seat of American governance (such as it is) are not good people, nor are they patriots. They don't give a fuck about this country, only their nihilistic death cult. They must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, or they're just going to do it again and again until they succeed. The people defending them and attempting to find points of "reconciliation" are even worse -- they know better and actually have power to do the right thing, but choose not to.</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span> </span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>They don't want unity or justice, they want <i>appeasement</i>. They want reassurances that once again, for the umpteenth time, angry crackers have the "right" to expect leniency and complaisance. I don't know who they think they're fooling with this bullshit, but it ain't happening anymore. They bought the ticket, they can take the ride.</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span><br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>It's not all grim -- for starters, Sheldon Adelson is dead, as are Josh Hawley's presidential ambitions. Ted Cruz is finding himself more and more on an island. The Powers That Really Be have at long last decided that Fuckface Von Clownstick's antics really are bad for business, and so they are pulling the plug on the whole black op. Assholes are getting deplatformed, and it is glorious to watch them vent and preen in futility.</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span><br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>(Anyone starting in with that "freeze peach" bullshit can go right on ahead and fuck themselves with a pineapple. Not only are you not "free" to organize terrorist attacks and incite violence, you're <i>definitely</i> not free to use someone else's private business to do that shit. I mean seriously, have any of these morons ever even skimmed a EULA? The same question keeps coming up with Trump and all of his dupes -- are these people really that fucking stupid, or is it that they think everyone else is dumb enough to believe their bullshit?)<br /></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4a0nV1PHkJY7uxEZXjNJ9eGDYi8C6xWOHDyR25IaIEKOy6huTnFditRFxnmJ7BDD-yPsz_uXZfkXTE3l_DW7JyR-3U2atmxtYyIuBKxW2azg7baXehyMY4xn99CaDt0pRB2KVpA/s1920/1920px-Cole_Thomas_The_Course_of_Empire_Destruction_1836.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1191" data-original-width="1920" height="248" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4a0nV1PHkJY7uxEZXjNJ9eGDYi8C6xWOHDyR25IaIEKOy6huTnFditRFxnmJ7BDD-yPsz_uXZfkXTE3l_DW7JyR-3U2atmxtYyIuBKxW2azg7baXehyMY4xn99CaDt0pRB2KVpA/w400-h248/1920px-Cole_Thomas_The_Course_of_Empire_Destruction_1836.jpg" width="400" /></a></div></div><div class="ujudUb"><span> </span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>And in fact, so many of these dopes seem determined to prove that they're even stupider than they seem, which is always entertaining. The best part was when some of them -- led, to be fair, by their elite mouthpieces in the media and rump House insurgency caucus -- tried to blame the dreaded antifa. This would be the part in every cult where the cultists prove their loyalty by faithfully regurgitating something that they know not to be true, while insisting that it must be true because the leader said so.</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span> </span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>Both the cultists and the leader understand this dynamic between them -- the leader knows that the flock know this thing to be false, yet prove themselves to him with this test. If he wanted a night with each of their wives and daughters instead, they'd gladly grant him that. That's not an exaggeration -- <u><b><i>it's a death cult</i></b></u>. They have shown over and over again that they are willing to die for him, willing to commit acts of violence and kill for him. It's not hyperbole. As dumb as they are, they are dangerous people and need to be treated as such. This goes for the <a href="https://www.inquirer.com/columnists/attytood/capitol-breach-trump-insurrection-impeachment-white-privilege-20210112.html" target="_blank">petit bourgeoisie assholes</a> who showed up, every bit as much as for the cartoon characters we mostly saw.<br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span><br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>But the idea that any antifa-BLM type of counter-protester was anywhere near there, much less staging a false-flag incident in the midst of the real mob, is of course ludicrous. Here's a few things that should be said in response every time someone tries to pull that line:</span></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><span>Gee, it's too bad none of the Real 'murkin Patriots there was able to stop them.</span></li><li><span>If they were antifa, the cops would have actually beaten and arrested them.</span></li><li><span>Even if they <i>were</i> antifa, prosecute and imprison them just the same.</span></li><li><span>I don't believe that you really believe that. We know you know better.<br /></span></li></ul><div class="ujudUb"><span>That settles that. The other darkly humorous aspect was in a couple of the terrorist deaths. One asshole tased himself in the balls and had a heart attack, while trying to steal a portrait of Tip O'Neill. One gal got trampled while carrying her "Don't Tread On Me" flag.</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span><br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>You can't say the writers aren't pulling out all the stops this season.</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span><br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>I also enjoy reading the perfunctory, anonymized accounts of how dismayed and disheartened the various minions and dogsbodies have become. Their professional and personal ambitions thwarted, because it turns out that white-shoe law firms not only are notoriously gun-shy about hiring nazis, they <i>also</i> aren't terribly interested in hiring the assistant to the regional nazi. Who would have thought?</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span><br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>I'd say their choices are clear: they can assess their role in this ongoing catastrophe, and how much time and effort they put into it, and come up with an honest multiplier, and put that amount of time and effort into some charitable pursuit -- helping the unhoused; rescuing animals; distributing vaccines; penning public apologia for being fucking scumbags and promising to do better with their given time in this mortal plane.</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span> </span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>So, for example, the kid who brings Dear Leader his Diet Coke every hour can just do a 1:1 or 1.5:1 amount of time in such a pursuit. Kayleigh MagaNinny, on the other hand, needs at least a decade or so at a truly charitable pursuit that doesn't line her pockets, a place where she can truly contemplate what an awful facsimile of a human she let herself become. (Recalling, of course, that like so many of these interchangeable minions, she was vocally anti-Clownstick before she started cashing his checks.)<br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span> </span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>Or they can all go back to their respective homes, eat one final cheeseburger and jerk off one last time, and blow their fucking brains out. I really don't care which they choose, so long as we are spared any additional public navel-gazing from these dismal parasites, who take and destroy and lie and perpetuate their seedy little hustles, and then expect us to feel sorry for them when it predictably blows up in their faces.</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span> </span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>Even allowing for the incredibly unlikely conditions I propose above, even where there might happen to be some form of genuine contrition and regret, none of them should be allowed anywhere near the levers of real governmental power again. They've already shown what they're capable of. There are plenty of people who can do government service right. There's no reason to try to rehabilitate traitors and failsons and shitheads. Again, if any of them had any real sense of shame, they'd have already done the right thing. Their problem is that they've been seen for what they are. Head on back home to Goatfuck, Missourah, and prepare to spend the rest of your sad life running dad's Kia dealership.<br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span><br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>To listen to the plaints of these turds is to listen to their boss, the impotent threats implied in a cascade of wheedling and cajoling. It's like it never occurred to any of these assholes that it's possible to make money and be happy without being a complete piece of shit, without surrendering your soul.</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span><br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>I try to conjure an image of the sort of person whose biggest ambition is to push ass for Rupert Murdoch's red-baiting agitprop network, or to defend resource extractors and poisoners, to cash those fat checks and spend it on slightly better bottles of single-malt, a slightly bigger McMansion in a slightly better neighborhood, a slightly newer XUV to drive to the Whole Foods. People who think that that's all there is to life, all that's worth having and doing. People who will align and attach themselves to the lowest types in order to fulfill those empty dreams.</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span><br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>They're as bad as the rest of them, really. They hide behind their uptown degrees and their family connections, but they're willing to con violent rubes into doing the wetwork, they're willing to affix their lips to the rump of the despot, regardless of the souls he chooses to squish in his ascent to fleeting greatness and vainglorious conquest. The people who <i>do</i> evil, who commit the acts to further the agenda, cannot do what they do without the ceaseless behind-the-scenes toiling of these little Eichmanns.</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span><br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>They'll never do the right thing on their own, and you hate to use the word "purge," but the house is in dire need of a cleaning, to say the least. And make no mistake, had a few states turned the other way, or just made it close enough to steal, they would have completed the purge they've been doing in plain sight the whole time. The Foreign Service is gutted. There has been zero transition planning or coordination since the election. Even without a coup, the Biden Administration starts off in a deep hole, and <b><i>that is by design and intent</i></b>. Everything you see going on right now is because someone wants it that way.<br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span><br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>And that's not just Trump, that's the little worker ants who were all too willing and happy to do his bidding. And now they're caught and identified and blackballed. They're worried about their future job prospects Well, <u><b><i>fuck them</i></b></u>. They deserve to never hold decent employment again. Let them toil away in Jeff Bezos' warehouses for nickels on the dollar. Make sure to send <a href="https://twitter.com/KateAronoff/status/1347928696959741952" target="_blank">all the corporations who bankrolled the putsch</a> a nice "fuck you" card while you're at it.<br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span><br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>This is about retribution, but more than that, it's a deeply practical matter. Everyone involved in this beer-belly putsch -- and it ain't over yet, you just watch -- needs to be made to pay dearly, or it'll just keep happening until they get it right.</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span><br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>The bullshit stops with just two words -- <u><b><i>enforce laws</i></b></u>. Enforce them equally -- rich, poor, black, white, cops, civilians, famous, anonymous, the powerful and the powerless, from hedge-funders to hedge-trimmers. Maybe the question everyone should be asking is why it seems to be so damned difficult to live up to those two simple words.</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span><br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>Let's end with a poem of sorts, shall we?</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span><br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span><b><i>The Art of the Fall of Rome</i></b>, by D.J. Trump (<a href="https://poets.org/poem/fall-rome" target="_blank">with profound apologies to W.H. Auden</a>):</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span><br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>Knuckleheads ascend the stairs</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>Approach en masse the blessed doors;</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>With incoherent yowls and roars</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>Affix the mall cops with mighty glares.</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span><br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>Messaging in fecal scrawls</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>The atmosphere grows ever tense,</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>As chants of "Hang that fucker Pence"</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>Echo through historic halls.</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span><br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>Cerebrotonic Q-balls may</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>Wrack their wretched lizard brains,</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>To seek the secret money trains</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>Where jooz transport their pilfered pay.</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span><br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>Homoerotic banners billow</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>As they catch the wafting breeze.</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>The bozos hear the lilting wheeze</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>Of the asshole from My Pillow.</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span><br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>Debt-collectors begin to swarm</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>Around the supercilious jerks</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>Writing I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>On their non-disclosure forms.</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span><br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>Unsurprised it turned out shitty,</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>Tremendous birds with the best legs --<br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>Seriously, people, you've never seen such legs --<br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>Flee from plague-ravaged cities.</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span><br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>Altogether elsewhere, vast</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>Herds of morons move around;</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>Can't get back up, so they can't sit down</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>Awaiting their quadruple bypass.</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span><br /></span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>And in the end, the bitter cry</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>Because they never found the nerve</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>To tell the chumps what they deserve</span></div><div class="ujudUb"><span>To please, at last, fuck off and die.<br /></span></div><p></p>Heywood J.http://www.blogger.com/profile/05627748699423939682noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9908604.post-38558397049168538782020-12-31T23:57:00.056-08:002021-01-02T11:49:00.981-08:00The Great Depression<p></p><blockquote>I'm what time and circumstance have made me. -- Jimmy Darmody, <i>Boardwalk Empire</i></blockquote><i></i> <p></p><p>It's depressing to consider the fact that nearly half the country looked around at the mass death, chaos, and general failure of 2020, and collectively said <i>yeah, I want four more years of <u><b>that</b></u></i>. </p><p>Now, the default temptation on the part of mediots and assorted Dummycrats is to reflexively ponder whether they should have microtargeted the Latinx community in Texas or whatever, some boutique bullshit along that line. The Democrats' fatal establishment teleology is that they sincerely believe that if they just act a leetle bit more like Republicans, they can poach some of their constituents.</p><p>Or, like a normal human being, you could look at the significant numbers of minorities who voted for a racist, and women who voted for a rapist, and understand that a different tack might be useful.<br /></p><p>It's depressing not only to consider the cold hard reality of the situation -- that some people, as the prophet John Cougar Mellencamp sagely advised thirty-some years ago, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PErUiAyVoGc" target="_blank">ain't no damned good</a>, and that unless you have more money or better job prospects for them, it is a waste of time trying to reach them -- but also to realize that there is a billion-dollar perpetual-motion machine dedicated to ignoring that truth.</p><p>Real social justice -- however you want to define that -- is empirically impossible without at least some movement in the direction of real economic justice. You need the one in order to get closer to the ideal of the other. The assumption has been in the other direction, and it hasn't worked. Prove me wrong.</p><p>Understanding that simple premise -- and then understanding that, again, literally billions of dollars every year are washed into a massive system utterly committed to keeping people from understanding it -- is absolutely critical to seeing with clarity what you're up against.</p><p>Biden has promised to "build back better," but without massive infusions of capital from the bottom up -- difficult even if the Democrats win both GA runoff seats and retake the Senate, but an impossibility without that -- the best he'll be able to do is slow the bleeding a bit. He'll get maybe three to six months as a grace period, and then all the Covid casualties and economic fallout will be blamed on him. Hell, the usual suspects won't even wait that long.</p><p>The pandemic could easily have been a real opportunity to rethink some basic premises about how we "do" things like health care and <a href="https://defector.com/a-student-debt-researcher-fucks-me-up-with-americas-broken-promises/" target="_blank">education</a>, yet such notions were scarcely if ever brought up, and certainly not among the mainstream thought leaders, such as they are. Somewhere on whatever plane he currently inhabits, the shade of Upton Sinclair is smiling grimly.</p><p></p><blockquote>If you want to gauge group loyalty, requiring people to believe an absurdity is a far better test than asking them to believe the truth. -- Yuval Noah Harari, <i>21 Lessons for the 21st Century</i> </blockquote><p></p><p>The Republican party has so far cheated a richly-deserved demise by trucking in the usual mixture of lies and vitriol, rightly understanding that their idiot base and insect corporate overlords will never hold them to account for it. The real conundrum lies on the Democratic side of the aisle, where its collective survival as a viable party is entirely contingent on how much it chooses to embrace or reject the (for lack of a better term) "AOC wing" of the party.</p><p>Like any young and eager upstart, AOC does not always read a room the way the more established members of her party would prefer. She takes her service to her working-class constituents seriously, and is relatively unconcerned with the trifling blandishments her (literal) seniors expect in expressing eternal fealty to Wall Street parasites. This tends to interfere with the eleventy-dimensional chess the party establishment are always pretending to play.</p><p>Gravity works, and the empire is falling. Sure, Elon might be able to cobble together a few pairs of levitation boots for himself and his buddies, but that's about it. It's coming down, and a lot of people are going to get squished. AOC and the Gen Z kids understand this; they've been watching it move along steadily their entire lives. The only question is whether enough of the oldsters get (or care) that they still retain just enough power to mitigate some of the damage for a substantial number of people.</p><p>Republicon politicians cannot be "negotiated" with or "convinced" of anything. They are literally at the point where they would much rather screw over their own constituents than give even the appearance of granting the Democrats a "victory" in even the smallest of efforts. The constituents themselves cannot be convinced of anything either, except perhaps in the moment or aftermath of disaster and tragedy -- and in many instances, not even then.</p><p>Just a couple years ago, huge portions of Iowa and Nebraska spent most of the spring underwater from weeks of torrential storms. Billions of dollars of crops destroyed. This summer, Iowa had the twin punches of a massive, weird "land hurricane" and a Covid outbreak. Have their voting patterns changed at all, even a little, given the extreme circumstances?</p><p>So (he intoned gravely, pulling on his systems analyst hat). Let's consider political strategy in terms of allocating scarce resources -- money, time, attention. Your targets, in the broadest of strokes, are the likely voters in each wing of the Corporate Party, which has the ancillary effect of at least nudging the politicians who purport to represent them.</p><p>In other words, if you can convince a sufficient number of likely GOP voters to jump the sinking ship and head for the Dem lifeboat, their representatives <i>do</i> have to take note of that. Whether there is an actual tangible effect on the votes they cast and the causes they support and the rhetoric they deploy is another matter. But the possibility is still a non-zero number.</p><p>(How'd that work out in 2020, anyway?) <br /></p><p>But again, you have a finite amount of funding and time to work with, and an audience that has an infinite variety of outlets to pursue in the noble causes of "news" and "information" and "entertainment." So where is that time and money best spent? What is the "best" (in terms of efficiency and ROI) audience to capture in your conversion funnel?</p><p>There are many politicians in the Democratic Party who appear to genuinely mean well and wish to do good. That's not a back-handed compliment -- you'd be hard-pressed at this point to single out a GOP pol at any level who isn't a mendacious cocksucker who supports an entire executive branch chock-full of the same. They lie, cheat, and steal, right out in the open, and cater to the worst fucking people to support those efforts.</p><p>A person who is happy to kill themselves so long as it fucks you over along the way, is not a person worth trying to "convert," or even "reach out" to. It is a question that needs to be asked in response every time some corporate media drone does their stink-piece -- "unify" with <b><i>what</i></b>? Why does the clear winner need to placate the loser, and not the other way around? How do you convince someone who has made a clear decision to live in their own version of reality?</p><p>We have jobs and lives of our own. Why on earth would anyone in their right mind waste precious time "reaching out" to these people? For that matter, I wouldn't bother wasting time hating or antagonizing them either, but I sure as hell know better than to try to teach a pig to sing.</p><p>But this is the catechism of an appallingly substantial number of "establishment" Democrats, forever protecting their mythical right flank, frequently by going out of their way to shit on the untapped demographic that might actually show up for them, without a bunch of bullshit qualifiers and litmus test about fellating cops sufficiently or bringing up Jesus at every possible opportunity.</p><p>So again, what is the most efficient use of your scarce time and resources -- trying vainly one more blessed time to poach some mythical sliver of truck-owning Latinx in the 35-45 age demo, or bringing the fucking lumber to the thieves and criminals responsible for this controlled and accelerating demolition of the country, and motivating people with clear vision and purpose? AOC at least has been clear on her position. Others seem to at publicly cling to dead notions of comity and collegiality. I don't know if Moscow Mitch has to take a steaming dump on DiFi's podium in the middle of open session for her and the rest of them to get the fucking message, and I no longer have the stomach to keep asking.</p><p>That's ultimately the reason (though there are certainly plenty of other, non-political and non-blogging, issues in the mix) why this will be the final post here at least for the foreseeable future. I've come very close several times over the past few years to pulling the plug anyway, but toward the end of 2019 it made more sense to me to just "see it through," whatever that means.</p><p>We all hoped for that <i>deus ex machina</i> of the blue tsunami, but it really just confirmed the utter venality of an alarmingly large portion of Americans. Maybe the Dems squeak out the Senate in the Georgia runoffs. Maybe Biden can govern boldly and smack the fuckers down at the same time. We'll see, but I think most of us thought after a year like we've all had, we'd see more.</p><p>But this is how it's shaking out, and so there's really not much to comment on, as far as that goes. There are a lot of horrible fucking people in this country, and their low-info laziness does not absolve them in the slightest. But again, there's not much more to say about all that. It's not as if the internets ecosystem will shrivel and die without my surface-of-the-sun takes on the obvious fuckery our elites engage in for profession and sport.</p><p></p><blockquote>It's better to be strangled by a necklace of Mexicans than to be strangled by no one at all. -- Kenny Powers, <i>Eastbound & Down</i></blockquote><p></p><p>Gore Vidal once said in an interview, in a very broad assessment of his body of work, "America, literally, is my subject." Occasionally I will pull up a specific month in a past year, and do a little review. To say "sixteen years" is one thing, but to put it in perspective is another -- that's nearly half my adult life so far. That's three places of employment ago, and even within my current place, I've had three major position changes. I had a high-school diploma and a bad attitude when I started this thing, and now I have a master's degree -- and a far worse attitude.</p><p>And throughout, America has been, broadly speaking, my subject. But as eye-rolling buffoonery and pelf-hungry war-mongering turned to empty promises and spineless bromides, and thence to full-throated fascism, my attention turned from the assholes and dirtbags enacting those policies and doing those things, to the assholes and dirtbags who kept sending them back to do the same old shit.</p><p>Maybe it took a decade-and-a-half of thorough research and reading and teasing it all out in writing, to process what I had intuited long before I ever got online or even touched a computer -- the system is rigged, and most people are either fine with it, or at least can't bring themselves to oppose it in any meaningful way. Steinbeck sagely observed almost a century ago that poor Americans, more than their counterparts elsewhere, see themselves as temporarily-displaced millionaires. The ship will eventually come in, the golden ticket will show up when you need it most desperately.</p><p>Generations of Americans were conditioned by people like Horatio Alger and Horace Greeley to buy into the bootstrap theology of divine opportunism, and that idle religion still holds dear for many. Others have positioned a serially-failed fake tycoon blowhard as the Dully Llama of that religion.</p><p>The more I found myself transferring my attention to <i>them</i>, to the bastards who keep putting the bastards in, the more it became clear, that thing all of us know, but don't want to admit or internalize: they're not being fooled or tricked. I think self-styled liberals and some professional Democrats are beginning to realize the awful truth, but they're still willing to sub out the wetwork to career assholes like Rick Wilson (who at least owns it and is very good and very entertaining at what he does). But without acting on that knowledge, it won't matter.</p><p>So it's an exercise in futility to talk about "changing" or "saving" things, when no one can agree on what things are to be changed or saved, or for whom, or if they're even worth saving anymore.</p><p>So we're each an army of one, I guess, millions of little individual nano-nations, free-floating on a skim in a petri dish, occasionally colliding with one another, occasionally banding in loose agglomerations, waving our internet flagella and pretending to be higher organisms.</p><p>I'd like to leave it on a more optimistic note, if there is one to be found. For myself, it's all good -- I'm taking classes and working on projects to improve my skill set, working on creative ideas. There may be a new brand to build in the future, or it may just be a side hustle to push toward my mountain of usurious student-loan debt.</p><p>Hell, I might even find after three or six months that I miss getting in here with the virtual kvetching. But it's mostly a matter of my bucket runneth over, between professional obligations and aspirations, and creative endeavors that need to be pushed over the hump into reality, and I have to prioritize.<br /></p><p>But I also tend to be more solution-oriented than process-oriented by nature, and so it grinds my gears to see that too few in the entire decision-making chain are interested at all in "solutions." The money and the power lie in perpetuating the <i>problems</i>, and so there is no urgency to <i>solve</i> anything. And as a writer, there are only so many angles to approach that from. The next frontier for that would be to fictionalize the scenario and the dynamics, but frankly, it would take some time for me to be able to tackle something of that scope and scale with an acceptable level of competence.</p><p>In the meantime, the basic Stoic principle of focusing on what you can control, and leaving what you can't, seems to be the best ideal to strive for. I can't change the minds of my Fakebook-addled friends and relatives, but I can sure as hell nuke my page. I don't have to engage them in any conversation beyond "How's your family?" when I see them in person.</p><p>I don't argue with them, I don't rebut them, I don't present them with a sheaf of empirical data refuting their nonsense. Instead I let them know with subtle but very real cues, facial and body language and so on, that I am completely disinterested in their opinion, absolutely unencumbered by what they think about anything in the realm of current events or politics. It's not a matter of being offended, but that I simply don't care anymore. They have chosen to identify themselves as ridiculous people who are enthused about ridiculous things, and I see them as such, and I have chosen to walk away from all that. I refuse to give them any more oxygen. That much I can control.<br /></p><p>It's amazing how quickly they get the picture, and don't even bother with the bullshit anymore. That, to me, shows a path forward. The old saw says that if we don't hang together, we hang separately, but it's times like these that force us to think closely about the immortal question: <i>Who's <u><b>we</b></u>, kemosabe?</i></p><p>I don't have too many non-empirical beliefs, but one that I hold dear to (and <a href="https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/coping/feelings/stress-fact-sheet" target="_blank">there actually are some studies</a> in this regard) is that stress causes cancer. I'm not going to get into the weeds about correlation versus causation and all that, just the basic notion that when we make ourselves miserable with endless bouts of stress and worry, it eventually eats us alive. Look at the parlous slobs toting their dopey li'l swag-flags to their tiresome little be-ins at the Wal-Mart parkin' lot, all het up about the antifa and the BLM and knee-grow commie hommasekshuls a-comin' ta turn yer kid queer.</p><p>I'm going to tell you right now, with a very high confidence level -- very few of these braying slapdicks will see their seventieth birthday, and I'm padding it a bit. It's not just the smoking and drinking and processed food that a stressful lifestyle naturally goads you to, it's being eaten alive from the inside out with an inchoate hatred that eventually metastasizes. It's that there appears to be nothing else in their odd little existences to balance out the poisons they ingest daily.<br /></p><p>And even if they do see the other side of seventy, jesus what an unnecessarily bumpy road they've chosen for themselves. Who needs it? Deciding to exit from the fray of the unresolvable is not a concession to fascism, nor is it a blind eye to their nefarious efforts. It's an understanding with the universe that life and time and sanity are finite resources that we are wise to conserve, that these useless motherfuckers are never worth the time.</p><p>On the other hand, I'd be lying if I said that I haven't immensely enjoyed sharpening my verbal steel on their granite skulls in here. It's been a fine and fun way to hone my writing skills, such as they are. But for now, it's time to learn and create and produce and prepare. For what, we'll see. But it's time to take that step that starts the next journey.<br /></p><p></p><blockquote>Be bold, and mighty forces will come to your aid. -- <a href="https://twitter.com/AnthonyHopkins/status/1344008299490861056" target="_blank">Sir Anthony Hopkins</a></blockquote><p></p><p>It's not all depressing, far from it, even in the midst of worldwide catastrophe and chaos. Hopefully most of us still have a core of folks we can connect with and occasionally commiserate, who remind us that we are here for so much more than to worry about what Nancy Smash or Huckleberry Closetcase are up to any given week. Hopefully we have skills and hobbies and interests that bring us joy, and brains and eyes and hands that can bring those things to fruition.</p><p>All of us -- yes, even the worst turd-sucking MAGAt -- have something great and wonderful to share with the world. (I think the most toxic people are simply the ones who've never even bothered to consider the possibility of their <i>something</i>, much less make an effort to find it.) Many people never realize that, and most of the people who do realize it spend their entire lives trying to find what exactly it is, and nurture it, cultivate it. A precious few are born with it <i>and</i> have the opportunity to run wild with it. (Sometimes that rare genius comes with its own steep price.) Some know they have it, but never get the chance to put it to work.<br /></p><p>But most of us can do something, one small thing to move ourselves forward in finding it and refining it and showing the world. <i>I did this. This is mine. Check it out.</i> It doesn't matter if everyone likes it -- hell, it really doesn't matter if anyone besides you likes it. You did it all the same, and you can do another one, and another.</p><p>And if the effort is honest and true, that really is all that matters.</p><p>Take a minute -- literally sixty seconds -- and check out the link in the last quote above. It's a message from Anthony Hopkins about the 45th anniversary of him becoming sober, but there's so much contained in that brief message. Mostly the message of hope, but also of perseverance.</p><p>I imagine most of us have known someone in our lives who's struggled with serious drug and/or alcohol issues. You want to help them, and you try to help them when the opportunity presents itself, but frequently the severity becomes such that you simply have to walk away from them, because they'll drag you down with them. Sometimes the only way people can sort themselves out is when the people closest to them disassociate themselves for some indefinite period of time. <i>Until you get your shit together, I can't be around you anymore.</i></p><p>That's what America is now. No, I don't mean Trump voters -- I mean the country itself. Collectively we are in the throes of serious substance abuse issues. Yes, the obvious opioids and reality teevee problems have corroded an already frail edifice. But too many of us are also irretrievably high on the toxic fumes of imagined past vainglories, those good old days that never really were, or were only for a select few.</p><p>It's no coincidence, then, that an impossibly vainglorious fool, like a caricature of a degenerate Roman emperor in the last days, should be chosen to oversee such a nation. Trump is, after all, the epitome of the rich asshole who is so coddled and insulated from the consequences of his own actions, that he never experiences any real repercussions. He borrows money from other idiots so he can live like a pimp, welshes on his debts, and finds another mark. Everybody shrugs their shoulders and gives him a pass, and a millionth chance. Why should he change? He's literally never been given a real reason to change anything.<br /></p><p>That's what the country's been doing for at least as long as I've been alive, and the bloodsucking has only accelerated over the past four decades. Why should Wall Street stop milking Main Street dry? What disincentive to that behavior has ever been presented? Who has always borne the real consequences of their bad behavior? Seriously, <i>why the fuck should they change?</i></p><p>But as with Commander Babyfingers, eventually the bill comes due, eventually the debtors find you. The fantasies Trumpkins and Qballs tell each other about blowing up the deep state, the fantasies liberals and Democrats told themselves about how Bob Mueller was going to bring everyone to account, at the end of the day turned out to almost be mirror images. The fact that one was true and the other was fantasy turned out not to matter, no matter how much either side wished otherwise.<br /></p><p>And like with any drug, there's going to be a withdrawal period, and it will be ugly to watch and endure, and there's no way to know how long it will take. The body shakes and contorts and sweats and convulses, the mind sees spiders on the walls and skin. There's not much anyone can do until the poison leaves the system.<br /></p><p>Sometimes withdrawal effects can be fatal, if the physiological addiction has been sufficiently severe and long-running. Sometimes the poison wins. Sometimes there's something you can do to help, sometimes not. One thing is certain -- it's going to get worse before it gets better. (As always, <i>what</i> and <i>for whom</i> are going to be highly subjective. The best way to make sure your proverbial mileage varies is to find ways to insulate yourself from the marching morons.)<br /></p><p>One thing Sir Anthony imparts in his message is not just the idea of hope, but the principle that the fight is always worth waging, whatever form that fight takes for you. It can be something as simple as what I've incessantly preached, voting with your ballots and wallets, rather than taking to the streets like a chump and getting your head performatively caved in by a pig in a costume. It can be creating something that adds light to your world, and to other people's worlds as well. Sometimes you get lucky and those positive things spread, uh, <i>virally</i>. Even if it's just for yourself, though, it's worth doing.<br /></p><p>It's been a hell of a lot of fun, whatever this has been and become over the years. I appreciate everyone who's ever taken the time to stop in and pore through the frequently scatological content in here. All the folks who kept coming back, kept commenting and providing words of encouragement, I appreciate you all even more, much more. The only way anyone gets better at what they do, whether you're a musician or a painter or an accountant or a lowly internets scrivener, is to see what lands and what doesn't, what makes people laugh out loud in spite of themselves, and what makes them scratch their heads. I never worried about whether people <i>agreed</i> with me, so much as they <i>understood</i> the point I was attempting to convey. That's the only metric worth bothering with.</p><p>So thanks again to everyone, and don't be too surprised if you see me turn up somewhere in this vast virtual void. The archives here will be open for the foreseeable future, but I may restrict access sometime down the road.<br /></p><p>Don't let the bastards win. Hang in there. Stay safe and happy.</p><p> </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1Iz5DaX8f7w" width="320" youtube-src-id="1Iz5DaX8f7w"></iframe></div><p></p><br /><p><br /></p>Heywood J.http://www.blogger.com/profile/05627748699423939682noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9908604.post-76027202398633373452020-12-31T15:38:00.001-08:002020-12-31T15:38:31.049-08:00Hilarious<p>This is one of those weird, harmless, funny stories making the rounds this week: <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2020/12/unpacking-the-drama-around-hilaria-baldwins-spanish-accent.html" target="_blank">apparently Alec Baldwin's wife has been engaging</a> in some sort of long-running Andy Kaufman performance-art exercise in pretending to be of Spanish heritage. Even funnier is that some of the self-appointed keepers of the "cultural appropriation" watch have declared themselves put off by this peculiar avocation of Hillary -- ah, I mean <i>Hilaria</i> Baldwin.</p><p>These subcultures are fascinating to me when they reveal themselves to the larger "culture," such as it is. If I understand the situation correctly, Hilaria has ensconced herself in the coveted "momfluencer" niche, getting attention and teevee time and emoluments not only for being married to a talented actor (who is a quarter-century her senior), but for being seen using certain brands on her Instagram feed.</p><p>Imagine being able to get a nice check delivered to your mailbox, simply by taking a selfie of you, for example, using Goya beans in your kitchen. Amazing times we live in.</p><p>It's all about what aspects of this "story" people want to fixate on. What's weirder -- that a thirsty celeb-adjacent milf entered an arena where such characteristics tend to be CV boosters, and leveraged a mythical aspiration as an extra foot in the door; or that there are upper-middle-class women out there for whom such a person is considered to be "influential" in some respect? How dare this person, whom I don't know but from whom I take merchandising cues, present herself as something she is not! Why, I never! (Well, maybe you <i>should</i>.)</p><p>Even funnier is that she has been playing this character for years, and only now some enterprising celebrojourno decided to do about thirty seconds of digging through public records to figure it all out. Well done, yournamalistas. Good thing there's nothing else worth getting to the bottom of these days.</p><p>If nothing else, her and her parents' love for Spanish culture appears to be sincere. Maybe she really wishes she were Spanish, rather than from privileged Boston Brahmin stock. Big deal. Look at the extended tedium of the Kardashian-Jenner tribe, and their exhausting, constant leg-humping to pimp and peddle and schmooze every goddamn product straight up 'murka's collective asshole. Look at Kanye's tiresome attempts to pretend to be a genius, or even pass as a functional human being.</p><p>This is going to sound completely sexist and lookist and chauvinistic, and I don't give a good goddamn -- anyone who can squeeze out five kids in seven years and still look like <i>that</i> can pretend to be whatever the hell she wants, and good luck with it.<br /></p>Heywood J.http://www.blogger.com/profile/05627748699423939682noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9908604.post-7032048615140241612020-12-29T22:30:00.001-08:002020-12-30T10:13:37.717-08:00Thug the Police<p>I get why <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/12/29/who-jason-meade-deputy-who-killed-casey-goodson-columbus-ohio/4070790001/" target="_blank">articles such as this</a> consistently approach the stories from the "race" angle. I do get it, and it's certainly an important element. But an even more important element, which goes completely unmentioned, is that any cop who guns down an unarmed civilian taking groceries into their house is <i>just not very good at their job, at all</i>. In fact, they're really fucking bad at the job.<br /></p><p>And when your job lets you literally get away with murder, that's a problem.</p><p>Clearly this Meade character is your standard Hollyweird issue high-toned-cowboy type. This is a problem, and it transcends race. Hell, I'm a middle-aged white married guy with a degree and a good job, and I look the part. And <b><i>I</i></b> wouldn't want to be pulled over or approached by that asshole.</p><p><a href="https://twitter.com/davenewworld_2/status/1341922489065238528" target="_blank">Or these fuckers.</a> What the hell is this shit? Why are we forced to pay people like this to terrorize citizens, indemnify them from their misdeeds, <i>and</i> foot the bill for the inevitable lawsuits? For what? Is anyone any safer because they made this kid roll his window down, and pepper-sprayed his father for filming the encounter (as is his legal right)?</p><p>Or you can visit <a href="https://twitter.com/greg_doucette" target="_blank">Greg Doucette's Twitter feed</a>, and dig back through the hundreds -- I'm sure it's well over a thousand by now -- of videos from all over the country, of militarized punks beating the shit out of unarmed citizens peacefully exercising their rights. <a href="https://twitter.com/greg_doucette/status/1344088242199662592" target="_blank">He's got a new one up tonight</a>, of a Vacaville cop holding his K-9 partner -- yes, a dog -- down and repeatedly punching the animal in the head.</p><p>It's an understatement to point out that this is precisely the mentality that needs to be identified and weeded out of all local law enforcement agencies <i>now</i>, not that it will happen. They'll give this scumbag some public slap on the wrist, transfer the dog to another cop -- who probably won't treat it that way; I've known several K-9 officers over the years, and they absolutely love and spoil their canine partners as much as possible -- put the human cop on some bullshit desk job for eighteen months until it all blows over, then put him back on the street with some rook that no one else wants to work with.</p><p>Then he cashes out at age fifty with ninety percent of his wages, starts some "security" side-hustle mostly to chase tail, maybe coaches pee-wee soccer for the same reason, and never experiences a moment where he has to think back on things he's done, people he victimized. If the guy's holding down a fuckin' trained Malinois and <i>punching</i> it, there's at least a few humans he's done the same to, and will again. Maybe his wife, maybe someone he pulled over for a seat-belt ticket got lippy with him, but someone. Count on it.</p><p>Anyone who's interested in this topic is probably already aware of the broader counter-arguments: the vast majority of cops are nothing like these bastards, yet that ninety-nine percent of "good" cops are constrained by the culture and the leadership of The Job, blah blah blah. and there's a lot of truth to all that. As with prison guards, when the nature of your job is dealing with assholes all day, it's only a matter of time before you just reflexively assume everyone is an asshole.</p><p>But I know this much -- if George Floyd was white, he'd still be alive. Ditto Breonna Taylor, and Philando Castile, and Eric Garner, and countless others. I know that the Minneapolis PD, and many other urban police departments, take a notorious "training" by the name of "<a href="https://unicornriot.ninja/2018/bulletproof-warrior-training-manual-released/" target="_blank">Bulletproof Warrior</a>," where the <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/02/dave-grossman-training-police-militarization/" target="_blank">instructor basically trains cops</a> to act and think as if they're IDF forces patrolling the Gaza Strip, dealing with suicide bombers and shoulder-launched missiles. That is not an exaggeration.<br /></p><p>And until that stops, we're going to be doing this dance over and over again. And they don't just do it to minorities either -- don't forget about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Daniel_Shaver" target="_blank">Daniel Shaver </a>or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Justine_Damond" target="_blank">Justine Damond</a>. (Damond's killer, a cop of Somali descent, was eventually convicted of third-degree murder and manslaughter, and is currently serving a 12.5-year sentence. Shaver's murderer had the benefit of being tried in Arizona, and so walked away from his crime scot-free.)</p><p>So it is about race, but it's mostly about power, and what sort of people are allowed to exercise it, and what sort of judgment some of these people have, and the lack of accountability when that judgment proves tragically wrong. This used to be a redneck-south commonplace sort of thing, but many of the more noteworthy incidents in recent years have occurred in relatively liberal enclaves, run by Democratic city councils and mayors, in states with Democratic governors and senators.</p><p>"Defund the police" is an unrealistic goal; not only won't it happen, but it <i>shouldn't</i> happen. There are bad people out there, and you do need some sort of enforcement mechanism to protect the public. But there's a ton of stuff that can and should be done along that spectrum -- demilitarize; remove the army toys; better psych batteries to screen candidates; better and longer training periods (in some states it literally takes more hours to become a hairdresser than a cop); ending qualified immunity; insisting on real accountability.</p><p>Returning to the top link as an example, it doesn't really matter to me whether Jason Meade can be proven to be a racist or not. I mean, it's awful if he <i>is</i> a racist, but the deeper problem is that he's demonstrated -- repeatedly, as his record shows -- that he's unqualified for his job. We don't need these self-styled "avenging angel" cowboy-preacher types. This is not a fucking Gary Cooper movie, and the people that can't handle that fact need to find another line of work.</p><p>Nobody forces anybody to be a cop, so if someone's at the point where they feel it's too thankless and dangerous, well, as the free-marketeers always tell us, get out there and create the future you deserve.<br /></p>Heywood J.http://www.blogger.com/profile/05627748699423939682noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9908604.post-52009956521509421522020-12-28T15:17:00.004-08:002020-12-28T15:17:20.371-08:00Mood for Thought<p>Fintan O'Toole has been making a name for himself this year with his scathing, pithy essays on our collapsing empire, and the doddering oaf we chose to run it the past half decade. <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-trump-has-unfinished-business-a-republic-he-wants-to-destroy-still-stands-1.4435655" target="_blank">His newest piece</a> is making the rounds, and you should check it out.</p><p><a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n01/david-runciman/magic-beans-baby" target="_blank">Also, too.</a> The Democrats are not your enemy the way the Republicons are, but they aren't your friends, either. Save yourself.<br /></p>Heywood J.http://www.blogger.com/profile/05627748699423939682noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9908604.post-85574123127707592522020-12-28T09:42:00.002-08:002020-12-28T09:42:49.822-08:00Extremely Plowed and Incredibly Gross<p><a href="https://popculture.com/trending/news/donald-trump-jr-faces-intense-backlash-humiliating-comments-girlfriend-kimberly-guilfoyle-live-video/#7" target="_blank">Now this is the good stuff I'm gonna miss.</a> Just inject it right into my veins!</p><p></p><blockquote>After going through what some called a scripted monologue that also
featured interjections from Guilfoyle, Trump Jr. eventually paid some
attention to what his girlfriend means to him. “And I’m reasonably
thankful for Kimberly,” Trump Jr. began the awkward message. “Maybe not…
not so much. I don’t wanna, you know, I’ve managed to maintain a very
low bar with Kimberly, so I don’t want her to get too big of an ego,
accustomed to kindness.”</blockquote><p></p><p>I wouldn't spare too much sympathy for Li'l Kim there. <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-secret-history-of-kimberly-guilfoyles-departure-from-fox" target="_blank">Truly a nasty cunt</a>, and that's not a word I use lightly. She deserves a companion like El Chupo, coked-up and vainglorious, forever stuck between desperately seeking his daddy's approval and wishing he was a Guccione.</p><p>One thing I'm absolutely certain of, and it brings me joy to no end, is the knowledge that Junior is one of the most miserable fuckers you could ever hope to avoid. All you have to do is listen to him and look at his facial expressions. He's an easy read, because like his old man, he's so painfully needy. He knows he's a pile of shit, that he could disappear tomorrow and no one would miss him, besides maybe his children. He has five, you know, and if even three of them are still on speaking terms with him by the time they reach adulthood, he should consider it a lucky break.<br /></p><p>Don't feel sorry for any of these people. Unlike most people in that state of mind, Junior and Li'l Kim actually have the money and means to get off the pain train and work on themselves for as long as it takes to get right. They could take a year or two and just get away from the scumbags and pimps and chiselers that surround them, and figure out what their lives should really be like.</p><p>They choose not to, again and again, They <i>want</i> this. This is all they have. It takes courage to arrive at the understanding that you really are better off "broke" (relatively speaking) and happy than "wealthy" and miserable. It takes guts to realize that you need to work on yourself, and that the work never really ends -- that in fact there is joy and catharsis in the work itself.</p><p>Every single person in this grotesque "family" is a coward -- morally, ethically, spiritually. They have nothing else in their little lives but the unquenchable thirst -- for approval, for popularity, for the official cover to push around the haters and losers who see them for what they really are.</p><p>None of them has ever made an honest cent or been in a fair fight. That is all you need to understand about any of them. Guilfoyle's a perfect fit for them, because she's impossibly ambitious -- that is, her ambitions clearly exceed any actual talents by a country mile, and she knows it, so she has to make up for those deficits. She'd suck a roomful of random dicks to win a sack race. And she's fine with shacking up with a cokehead who talks about her like she's a stray dog. Her performance at the Republicon Convention a few months ago was not an act, it was her id unleashed, her true self boosted with what she knew her boyfriend and his creepy, ogling father would want to hear from her.</p><p>I would literally bet my next paycheck that Senior has grabbed her tits and/or ass at least once, or made some sort of obvious comment, and that Junior knows it, and will never confront his old man about it. Look at them, listen to them, you know it's true. Probably worse than that even.<br /></p><p>I'm not saying that money can't buy you happiness -- despite what they tell you, it can. At the very least, having money is better than <i>not</i> having money, if you're a halfway well-adjusted human being. But if you're a miserable asshole to begin with, someone who's been able to coast through life never having to earn or justify anything you do or say, more money will just magnify those problems. It papers over them for a while, but sooner or later, it becomes clear that the demons are driving the bus, it's just a somewhat nicer-looking bus. Eventually the gold leaf and cheap filigree peel away and reveal things for what they always were.<br /></p>Heywood J.http://www.blogger.com/profile/05627748699423939682noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9908604.post-21540840061887409982020-12-23T10:40:00.003-08:002020-12-23T12:59:36.235-08:00Beltway Syndrome<p>Story time, kids -- pretty sure I have not told this one before, if I have it was years ago. After sixteen years, the Blogheimers is kicking in with some regularity.</p><p>So back in the mid-'70s, when I moved from smoggy Los Angeles to the epic glories of the Great State of Jefferson, we lived for about two years out in a rural district, probably ten miles removed from what was then a town of about 3,500 to begin with. I was in second grade, rode the bus, which given the distance it had to cover took about thirty to forty minutes to get to the school. Fun times.</p><p>Even at that age, I was a voracious reader, and would walk to the library on the next block over from the school to grab three or four books for most weekends. I liked the Hardy Boys "mysteries" in particular; as cheesy and twee as they might be in retrospect, they probably provided an early synaptic pathway for my adult love of most crime fiction.</p><p>Mind you, I'm not saying that the Hardy Boys are a gateway drug to Dennis Lehane and James Lee Burke, but if you start reading that genre (even peripherally) at seven years of age, you might hard-wire yourself to later, more adult iterations.</p><p>Anyway. So one fine morning we're on the school bus headed into town. Most of the kids got along fairly well, but one kid, a former friend from up the road who was a year older, and had several meaner older brothers (one of whom later did nine years for rape, and was ultimately murdered by his own adult daughter in retribution -- take a wild guess for what) who enjoyed egging him on, decided to give me a hard time. You know, for being a reader. As Homer Simpson so poetically put it, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMaNxBaEQxU" target="_blank"><i>Egghead likes his booky-wook!</i></a></p><p>So first a couple of taunts and head-slaps, then shoving my books onto the floor. Even at the ripe old age of seven, I could sense a couple of important things quite clearly:</p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>This was going to escalate, one way or another.</li><li>I can get out in front of this, or I can curl up and wait it out.</li><li>If I choose option #2, this is going to be a daily occurrence. Plus, since I go to the same school as this asshole, and he's only a year older than me, this might go on for a while.</li></ul><p>As the bus, piloted by a crotchety tart lovingly nicknamed "Myrtle the Turtle," trundled its way past the rural district cemetery, I picked up the top book from the pile on the floor, and swung it directly into the other kid's face. Didn't break anything, fortunately, but there was blood suddenly. I dropped the book and started swinging wildly, the way a kid who's never thrown a punch yet will do, connecting maybe one in five but getting a message through -- <i>don't fuck with me, I <u><b>will</b></u> fight back.</i></p><p>After what seemed like an hour but was only a few seconds -- we were, after all, still moseying past the maybe two-acre cemetery -- I had enough awareness to consider the possibility that fighting on the bus might Get Me In Big Trouble. I stopped for a moment and glanced up the seemingly endless center aisle of the school bus, toward that large rectangular mirror where you could see what or whom the bus driver was looking at. Myrtle looked directly at me, and beneath that grim squint I could see the barest trace of a tight-lipped smile. All bus drivers know who the troublemakers are on their routes.</p><p>So I did not Get In Trouble; as I departed the bus, Myrtle looked over at me and said, "Don't do that anymore," with that same tight-lipped smirk. "Okay," I peeped meekly, just relieved that whatever that Trouble was, it wouldn't find me that day anyway.</p><p>Better yet, those other kids left me alone after that. We didn't magically become all friends, but they at least understood that, for their purposes of cheap amusement, I was more trouble than I was worth. And for the entire next year, until we moved across town, there wasn't any guff from anyone.</p><p>By now, you see my broader point. It's a staple of every cheesy prison movie, from <i>The Shawshank Redemption</i> on down -- you don't have to be a brutal predator, but if you show yourself as a victim, there will always be a line of takers to treat you like one.</p><p>I'd like to think Joe Biden has seen, far more intimately than any of us can imagine, how the empty tropes of collegiality and courtesy and comity work out in reality, when the other side is actively invested in engineering your failure, and makes it clear that they couldn't care less about how it all affects non-elite citizens. I'd like to think he understands that he doesn't have to take suggestions from professional cynics, that <a href="https://twitter.com/dsamuelsohn/status/1341470802173149186" target="_blank">if he wants to purge bad-faith weasels</a> and little Eichmanns out of his offices, that is his prerogative, and it is entirely in his own rational self-interest.</p><p>If Biden hopes to get anything done, he needs to start with wiping the functionary scum, the bureaucratic enzymes that processed the previous maladminstration's endless fecal waste, out of the body. And he doesn't owe anyone any apologies for it; in fact, he -- and the rest of the octogenarians running his party -- need to step up and take credit for as much as they can, shout it from the rooftops.</p><p>The "performative" aspect of politics has been gone into at great length here and elsewhere, increasingly so over the past half-decade. It sucks that it matters, <u><b><i>but it matters</i></b></u>. Just like in that little-kid "fight" on the school bus nearly a half-century(!) ago, it was less important that I "won" the fight, than that I showed all those kids that I was <i>willing</i> to fight, that they weren't just going to roll me.</p><p>Biden doesn't need to ask anyone's fucking permission -- not Moscow Mitch, and certainly not some Beltway scriveners who are directly dependent on their access and their surface-of-the-sun hot-takes, suffused as they are with the hoariest of conventional wisdoms. Only Democrats need to seek the permission of the opposition party. Only Democrats need to seek "unity" with the hopelessly angry, hopelessly incoherent bloc that comprises the base of the opposition party. Only Democrats are expected to "moderate" with purposefully immoderate people. Every fucking time.</p><p>They need to operate as if their backs are against a great big immovable wall, because they are. They need to remember back to 2006, when they took a midterm win and literally managed to save Social Security from privatization. They fought like they understood that it was real life-or-death shit, that the usual gutless incrementalism wouldn't cut it anymore. That was engineered by none other than Nancy Pelosi, which proves she can do it.</p><p>But they have to stop fretting and prattling about how they're going to "explain" their moves to some hostile low-info dipshit out in East Overshoe, Arkansas. Those motherfuckers will never vote for you, even if you came to their doorsteps with duffel bags full of cash. Bokay? They just won't.</p><p>When the Democrats stop worrying about "explaining" and "framing" shit, and putting real energy and effort into <i>motivating</i> people, it's an ironclad guarantee that they'll be surprised at the results. Say what you will about the conspiracy-addled doofuses on the right, but they are motivated, passionate, and they show up. I mean, they're motivated and passionate about all the wrong things, but what would a motivated and passionate counterpart to them on the left look like, people motivated about things that would actually benefit them and their communities and regions, the country and planet as a whole?</p><p>What might that look like? Since we are not permitted to vote for any parties other than the two (or two wings of the same one) duly anointed by the holy dollars of Corporate America and its <a href="https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2wyj7n" target="_blank">mediaopoly</a> octopus, we'll never know.</p><p>But in the end, this will be the one true barometer you can use to determine whether the Biden administration has a chance at "success," however you want to define it, and whether the next decade in the US can start undoing the ravages of the first two decades of this wondrous new millennium, or if we have more 'n' better decline of empire in the years to come.</p><p>It all starts with whether Biden and his team understand that this is their one and only chance to <i>fight</i>, that <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMA-xA-OSck" target="_blank">when the zombie apocalypse comes</a>, capitulation is really not an option -- you can only strive to find slightly safer ground, and take as many of them down as you can in the process. They are not going to negotiate with you on anything.</p><p>So <i>whom</i> and <i>what</i> do they intend to fight <i>for</i>? We're about to find out, and the answer will either raise or doom their party, whether they understand that or not. But they need to decide, or Moscow Mitch and his merry brand of treasonous bandidos will be happy to make that decision for them.<br /></p>Heywood J.http://www.blogger.com/profile/05627748699423939682noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9908604.post-82207354944972454162020-12-21T15:03:00.002-08:002020-12-21T15:03:10.952-08:00Children of a Lesser Clod<p><a href="https://twitter.com/LauraJedeed/status/1341061381076836352" target="_blank">Interesting thread here</a> about a group of, um, <i>freedom fighters</i> storming the Oregon State Legislature in Salem. As they say in the 'hood, read the whole damned thing.</p><p>Coupla minor and fairly obvious observations:</p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>These people are fucking stupid. Like, aggressively so, like Pfizer developed a mega-vaccine to inoculate these bozos against the ravages of coherent thought, and pumped it straight up their asses until it was coming out their ears. It takes real effort to be that much of a dipshit.
<br /></li>
<p>
</p><li>While thread writer Laura Jedeed is indeed correct that these folks are dealing with tough times and economic fallout from the plandemic, that even in "normal" times these are not people who are swimming in top-shelf liquor and prime rib and all, that's not the real problem. Every protest has some sort of goal: as ludicrous as I might find the idea that mobbing the streets of American cities is suddenly going to make our militarized urban police squads think twice about killing black people, it's still a goal. "Defund the police" is never going to happen, but it <i>is</i> a mission statement.<p>These hard-up slapdicks have no goal beyond <i>durrr, let us into your sneaky Chinee meetin', so's we can cough all over ever'body while regurgitating half-remembered Alex Jones bits!</i> Great. And then what? That's the thing about all these wannabe <i>Braveheart</i> doofuses -- they have no idea what they would do if they "won," or even what the act of "winning" would look like.</p><p>Not much offends me, but as someone of some measure of Scots ancestry (but hey, also English, Welsh, Irish, French, German, Polish, Russian, and even a bit of Norwegian, so go figure), I do find it a bit off-putting every time one of these pathetic assholes tries to flex nuts on their William Wallace game. Wallace fought against real oppression and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wallace#Capture_and_execution" target="_blank">suffered one of the most brutal deaths</a> you can imagine; these ridiculous fuckers might accidentally get maced (or "maced") by a nervous cop. Beyond being begged to wear a mask, and maybe not being able to get away with using hundred-round ammo drums on their full-auto village sweeper anymore, The Man ain't exactly knuckling down on them in any appreciable way.<br /></p><p></p></li>
<li>How many of these jerkoffs drove to their little zombie gathering in $50k trucks, waving $100-200 flags? How many of them are going to hit the swag kiosk for more of that shit? Tell me more about their economic anxieties. That song never gets old.<br /></li><p></p></ul><p>I wonder how much longer our boys in blue are going to feel comfortable having two sets of rules for protesters, kicking the shit out of unarmed hippie-types, while letting the angry right-wing losers run amok. You saw it in the <strike>Million</strike> Thousand Magat March in DC a couple weeks ago, where a few cops got hit by stray projectiles, while fascist gangs vandalized black churches. No Antifa to blame it on, so sad, too bad, truth sucks don't it boys?</p><p>All these <i>herrenvolk</i> fascists know that they're protected, that the one thing their ludicrous caudillo promised them was to be in the group that was protected by laws but not bound by them, rather than that other group that is bound by laws and mercilessly persecuted with them. So when they don't get their way, and the armored shock troops not only aren't helping them but are [<i>gasp!</i>] obstructing their righteous entry into the Halls of Representative Democracy, well, that is an unforgivably perfidious action.<br /></p><p>If there's one thing these dirtbags drag around with them like a fucking cross, everywhere and anywhere, it's this overweening sense of <i>betrayal</i>, that they've been cheated out of something they think they earned, that they're sure they were entitled to. Prob'ly some black or meskin had it given to them, by some bleeding-heart Soros-owned libturd who's setting the stage to re-edumacate the good foke.</p><p>Heh. <i>Re</i>-educate? How the fuck do you re-educate someone who isn't remotely educated in the first place? How do you retrain someone who sincerely believes that the one skill they sorta learned thirty years ago is the only thing they should ever have to learn in life? How do you convey any sort of new idea or concept, any advancement or improvement in life and how we all live it, to people who haven't so much as looked at a book since they dropped out of high school? That's not snark, I know motherfuckers like that, literally like that.<br /></p><p>It would be nice if someone <i>were</i> out to educate them, maybe drop some truth on their heads, that all that cheap shit they get at Wal-Mart -- hell, all those fucking lame-ass "flags" they fly, like they think it's something special -- all that sweatshop shit comes with a price. It warn't as cheap as you were led to believe, bunky, and here's the bill for it, right here right now. Fucking morons. Who says karma doesn't turn up once in a while.<br /></p><p>Looks like things are about to get worse, probably in multiple ways. A new Covid-strain, probably engineered by Bill Gates, Xi Jinping, and the restless shade of Hugo Chavez, has hit the UK, so we'll see how all those "warp speed" vaccines do with the Covid-21. We'll see how all those salty goobers do with the $600 checks Uncle Mitch generously cut for them, and who they decide to blame for it.</p><p>Six hunnert bucks prob'ly don't buy too many of them <a href="https://domesticplatypus.com/products/no-step-on-snek-doormat-drawn-version" target="_blank">"no step on snek"</a> flags. Maybe they can go <a href="https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/phoenix/2020/12/18/viral-videos-show-anti-mask-protest-christown-spectrum-mall-in-phoenix/3966484001/" target="_blank">terrorize more retail outlets</a> with their tiresome idiocy. Maybe one of them, or a splinter cell of them, decides to take things up a notch, while we're tagging more than a 9/11-sized body count <i>every fucking day</i> now.</p><p>Two infamous quotes, from two diametrically different people, running through my mind right now:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>"Life's tough. It's tougher when you're stupid." -- John Wayne (possibly apocryphal)</p><p>"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." -- Hunter S. Thompson</p></blockquote><p></p><p>A modern, industrialized nation -- even in the best of times, even when not beaten down by a worldwide plague -- cannot survive being driven by its dumbest and cruelest elements. It just can't. People like that are always going to be part of the scenery, but if we don't find a way to push them back to the margins, and stop being responsive to every dumb thing they do and say and react to, it's going to be a long, ugly road down.<br /></p><p>Probably a good time for each of us to do a quick personal inventory, make sure things are in order and stocked up. I don't mean going full prepper and hoarding 55-gallon drums of rolled oats in your concrete bunker, but just making sure that your home is secure, you have at least a couple weeks worth of food -- dried, canned, preserved and shelf-stable, you go out only when necessary for the next four to six months. Might not hurt to have a gun or two, just in case.</p><p>Next year is shaping up to be even worse than this one, and that will be the case right from the start. Until the agents of law enforcement decide to apply the laws equally to these increasingly violent and restive factions among us, this is how it's going to be -- only more so.<br /></p>Heywood J.http://www.blogger.com/profile/05627748699423939682noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9908604.post-82919121585108029792020-12-17T11:18:00.004-08:002020-12-17T14:44:57.347-08:00Fuck Your Feelings<p>As far as any actual librul or Democratic voter is concerned, <a href="https://www.glamour.com/story/glennon-doyle-and-jen-omalley-dillon-interview" target="_blank">it's just locker-room talk</a>. Hell, Jen O'Malley Dillon should be given a promotion, a raise, and her own nightly show if she wants it.</p><p>Fuck that cheap plastic cuck Marco Rubio and all the rest of the pearl-clutching swine. They can all get on the next express train straight to hell, and rest assured I do <u><b><i>not</i></b></u> mean metaphorically or figuratively.</p><p>It's not even worth bothering with the countless levels of hypocrisy baked into Rubio's empty plaint. Suffice to say we can all recite dozens of examples, we see these people for what they are, and we count on the people we elected to see that as well. <br /></p><p>Better get used to these moments for what they truly are: a test of the Biden administration's nerve. If they even do so much as make Dillon apologize -- to <i>whom</i>? for <b><i>what</i></b>? if the treasonous scum of the GOP are not "fuckers," then the word has truly lost all meaning -- then you know what you're gonna be in for.</p><p>If we all agree that it's going to take difficult, coordinated work by committed, dedicated, intelligent people just to <i>start</i> undoing the fuckery of the last four years, then we also should agree that the basic fundamentals of such an undertaking involve realizing what's to be gained by <i>compromise</i> and <i>comity</i> and <i>cooperation</i> with the treasonous opposition. Maybe Li'l Marco can go have a chat with some of his colleagues who still -- nearly seven weeks after the most heavily scrutinized and verified election count in our lifetimes -- refuse to acknowledge the duly elected winner, even after all the electoral votes have been duly ratified.</p><p>The Biden administration needs to <i>start</i> from a simple premise, before it does anything: <u><b><i>Fuck them.</i></b></u> Fuck them <i>all</i>. They act in bad faith. They are not interested in civility, but in capitulation. Treat them as you would a violent intruder in your home -- grab your trusty twelve-gauge and give them the choice of surrendering, leaving, or dying. They cannot be bargained with, and that has been <i>their</i> choice all along.<br /></p><p>Once the Georgia runoff is done, however it shakes out, Biden needs to call in the DNC chair and tell them to find someone <i>now</i> to take on Rubio in 2022, and shovel $150 million at them if need be. Invest heavily in oppo research; a smug little shit like Rubio is guaranteed to have some poorly-buried soil falling out of his shoes at random moments.</p><p>Understand these people for what they really are, and start acting accordingly. They cannot be worked with. They cannot be compromised with. They can only be beaten into the ground, or succumbed to. If the last half-decade hasn't clarified that, nothing will.</p><p>Make no mistake, this is a clarification for the <i>voters</i> more than anything else. Is Biden going to see his moment for its possibilities and be a bold FDR type, or a cringing, whinging "our hands are always tied" font of lame excuses? We're about to find out.</p><p>But I think one of the unspecified things many of us voted for is someone who wouldn't bother to listen to a worthless piece of shit like Marco Rubio about <i>anything</i>.<br /></p>Heywood J.http://www.blogger.com/profile/05627748699423939682noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9908604.post-78187169438948097982020-12-16T23:11:00.002-08:002020-12-17T08:55:55.242-08:00This Year In Fuck 'em, Final Edition (Probably)<p>I think I have been relatively flexible on the issue of wearing masks in public during a worldwide pandemic, given the circumstances we all must endure. Although on a personal level I tend to think that someone who just can't be troubled to wear a mask for fifteen minutes while they're at the supermarket or whatever is, well, basically a selfish asshole, the fact is the world is full of those, overflowing even.</p><p>And as long as the assholes keep their distance, good luck with all that. I don't have the time or inclination to try to browbeat people or convince stubborn idjits. Life's just too short. So as long as they're over <i>there</i>, I'm minding mine over <i>here</i>.</p><p>(Now, the angry mow-rons who waddle into Wal-Mart or Trader Joe's and scream at the hapless staff about their fuckin' <i>freedumbs</i>, all's I can say about them is that I sincerely hope they get a dose of the freedom-virus with both barrels. But near as I can tell -- and I live in a pretty red area -- north of eighty percent of people are wearing their masks and minding their business. It's going to have to be close enough.)</p><p><a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/12/12/coronavirus-deaths-highest-us-rural-republican-leaning-county/3828902001/" target="_blank">But these jamokes?</a> What, are we supposed to feel sorry for them or something? They made their choices, they get to live with the consequences. Isn't that the very essence of liberty and freedom? I'm not being snarkastic here, it's a genuine question. This is what they wanted, this is what they get.</p><p>I mean, I get the same sense from that story as I do when, say, a rodeo bull rider gets severely injured. They know what they're getting into; they understand that there's a very real risk of serious injury from teasing a twelve-hundred-pound farm animal.</p><p>You could say the same thing about "regular" athletes, but even base-paid NFL and NBA players make more in a year than a lot of the Gove County folks will see in a lifetime. Those fools were willing to risk their lives for <i>free</i>, for some incoherent idea of what "independence" is and should be.</p><p></p><blockquote>Even today, mask-wearing remains controversial in Gove County, and
friendships are being strained as authorities struggle to persuade their
neighbors to follow basic public health guidelines, such as avoiding
large gatherings.</blockquote><p></p><p>It seems that too many of these schmucks sincerely believe that their performative "resistance" is going to make libturds cry or something. Another <i>heh, showed <b>yew</b></i> moment, which is really all they have to look forward to in their weird little lives anymore.</p><p>Yup, you sure showed us all right. Boy, do we feel silly. Which is still better than feeling, you know, <i>dead</i>, or sick enough to wish you were dead. Let's not forget that there are plenty of people who survived the #TrumpPlague who now have heart problems, liver damage, cognitive difficulties, and other serious issues. Not everybody who gets it and survives comes out the other end unscathed.</p><p>It's really the opposite of hurting or offending anyone -- speaking only for myself, I can only say that the Gove County people might be surprised at how little some of us <i>care</i>. If you've been told for months that stoves are hot, and vending machines will crush you, but you insist on touching a burner and pulling a Coke machine on yourself, I just figure it's nature weeding out the stupid. It doesn't fill me with joy, but it doesn't sadden or anger me either. It's like seeing a dead raccoon on the side of the road, except that no one warned the raccoon about how roads and highways work.</p><p>They do owe some sort of apology to the frontline health-care workers who they endanger, though. Frankly, those people are saints -- I would have walked out months ago and said <i>fuck it</i>, especially in a small community where everyone's been told, but has collectively decided to be weird and stubbornly stupid about it. But then, for every person they see who put themselves in the ICU by being an asshole, there's probably two or six or ten that just had the bad fortune to be in proximity to the asshole at the wrong time.<br /></p><p>Then you have <a href="https://www.texasmonthly.com/being-texan/texas-wedding-photographers-have-seen-some/" target="_blank">these fuckers</a>, people who insist on having big weddings with all the guests and parties and trappings, as if nothing else is going on. The sheer sociopathic indifference all of these people show to the wedding photographer they infected tells you everything you need to know about them. </p><p>Whenever you hear some West Wing idealist type trying to pitch the "appeal to their better angels" jabber, refer to folks like that Texas wedding party to remind them that some people simply don't have such a thing. They really don't, and there's not a goddamned thing you can do about it, except keep the hell away from them.</p><p>Look, it's true that we all gotta die of something someday. But you don't have to die of <i>this</i>, and not right <i>now</i>. The idea that some people just don't get that until the plague hits them directly, or someone they care about, is deeply repulsive, and says something about the people who think and act that way.</p><p>And you can't blame all that on Trump, either. Trump was a lying, buffoonish slapdick decades before this shit hit us. Anyone who was relying on Doctor Babyfingers for life-or-death medical advice was probably bound to pull a vending machine on themselves sooner or later anyway.<br /></p>Heywood J.http://www.blogger.com/profile/05627748699423939682noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9908604.post-8007329326834397242020-12-15T10:31:00.000-08:002020-12-15T10:31:30.407-08:00Disbarred<p>Opus Dei anal cyst Bill Barr, whose dad was a teen-diddler and who had Jeffrey Epstein murdered in prison and all the seized Trump-incriminating evidence destroyed, has been fired for refusing to help Agent Orange steal the election.</p><p>I have to admit to being somewhat surprised, but as corrupt as Barr has always been, he <i>is</i> intelligent enough to see that it just wasn't close enough to poach. It's not that he wouldn't do it because it was illegal, it's that he <i>couldn't</i> pull it off with enough credibility, once the SCOTUS kicked the bullshit Texas lawsuit back into the dumpster whence it originated.</p><p>Even completely amoral dirtbags have some core principles, it turns out. Barr's is that he knows better than to self-incriminate any more than he already has. He's just lucky that the Democrats didn't have the stones to string him up for what he's done.<br /></p><p>The biggest failure of leadership and governance regarding Barr's most recent tenure as AG is that <a href="https://twitter.com/BillPascrell/status/1338628999648595970" target="_blank">he wasn't impeached for lying to Congress</a>, which, last I checked, is still nominally a crime. The second biggest failure is that Barr will now take his walking papers and ooze into a seven-figure "consultant" sinecure at some scummy big-bucks white-shoe law firm, <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/12/neal-katyal-supreme-court-nestle-cargill-child-slavery.html" target="_blank">the kind that defends child slavery</a> for fun and profit.<br /></p><p>Something this nation has never quite figured out, and until it does, things will never get better: power needs to be held to account, at least once in a great while. When allowed to operate with total impunity, you keep getting people and acts like these, endlessly escalating. All these fuckers should be in prison, yet they will all be <i>rewarded</i> in various ways. Really, why <i>shouldn't</i> they keep doing what they do?<br /></p>Heywood J.http://www.blogger.com/profile/05627748699423939682noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9908604.post-79008032591885146042020-12-11T10:38:00.004-08:002020-12-11T11:41:41.535-08:00The Blunder Games<p>Here is your dystopian future: <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/7k94kz/giuliani-says-democrats-used-usb-ports-passed-around-like-vials-of-heroin-to-commit-election-fraud" target="_blank">a hopelessly addled, embittered old man</a>, brain permanently marinated in a bottomless vat of Cutty Sark, vaingloriously attempting to failsplain to Teh Kidz how flash drives work. Ghouliani is basically Trump with a drinking problem, and without even the small amount of exercise from a round of golf.</p><p>But that is not the problem, not remotely. The problem is that the comically inept project Ghouliani has undertaken here belies the truly corrosive nature of the effort. While we're having a larf at the audible courtroom farts and the drunk stripper testimony and the karmavirus catching the main players, they're fine-tuning their approach for the next go-round.</p><p>They know this won't work, and they're fine with that. <i>It doesn't have to work</i>, in the sense that "work" means "help Trump steal the election." That particular instance probably will not happen, though I wouldn't take that for granted until the actual moment of Biden's official investiture in January (and maybe not even then).</p><p>But this will definitely enable them to calibrate their efforts next time -- and I don't mean 2024, I mean the 2022 midterms. You just wait -- any Senate or House election that is even close is going to be contested.</p><p>One thing Trump actually has some expertise in is losing other people's money, which is not as simple as it sounds, since you first have to find wealthy people who are stupid enough to give money to a proven grifter. But second to that, Trump has certainly shown some venal aptitude for knowing how to clog the court system with frivolous nonsense and obstructionist pettifoggery. His penchant for vexatious litigation was well-known long before 2016, and as with all of his other ongoing bad behavior, he has never been given any reason to change.</p><p>This is really a moment of truth for Democrats: either they succumb to the comfortable fictions of "unity" and "reconciliation" and "returning to normal," or they choose to enforce the laws and punish bad actors and criminals.</p><p>I wouldn't have much if any confidence in which path they will choose. When presented clear moral choices and opportunities, they typically choose to wring their hands and helplessly invoke <a href="https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=murc%27s%20law" target="_blank">Murc's Law</a>. Time after time, they have proven to be infinitely better at excuses than solutions. Until people are held accountable for their actions, they will continue with their criminal activities. And why shouldn't they?<br /></p><p>(If I were to propose some sort of addendum to Murc's Law -- call it "Heywood's Corollary" if you like -- it might be something along the lines of acknowledging the reality that Democrats face an opposition composed entirely at this point of amoral brutes, gutless hacks, and assorted actors of varying degrees of bad faith, and yet they (Democrats) continue to persist in equally bad-faith public recitations of an imaginary "need" to "return" to an imaginary "normal" state.</p><p>The point of having institutions is to curate a plausible history of how things work and how they transpire. To pretend that conditions were normal or desirable in any way, whether in 2015, 2005, or even 1995 or 1985, is to insist on indulging in a set of lies every bit as pernicious as anything the various Republicon chop shops routinely flop on the table like a twenty-pound sack of shit.</p><p>In accordance with formulating various internets laws and axioms and such like, I'll see if I can phrase all that more concisely in the near future.)<br /></p>Heywood J.http://www.blogger.com/profile/05627748699423939682noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9908604.post-25150726362974892232020-12-03T08:47:00.006-08:002020-12-11T10:52:23.970-08:00Happy Kempers<p>As irony goes, this is pretty much "crystallize it, crush it, chop it, snort it, and stay up for a month" grade shit: Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, who as Secretary or State rigged the 2018 election that put him in the governor's seat, <a href="https://news.yahoo.com/trump-georgia-brian-kemp-gop-hapless-ashamed-election-recount-172238618.html" target="_blank">is now getting death threats from his own party</a><a href="https://news.yahoo.com/trump-georgia-brian-kemp-gop-hapless-ashamed-election-recount-172238618.html" target="_blank"> (as well as open harassment from Dear Leader himself)</a> for -- you guessed it -- <i>not</i> rigging the 2020 election in favor of Kim Don Ill. Call it Stacey Abrams' revenge, call it what you will, this is brilliant, on-brand, if-you-put-it-in-the-script-they'd-laugh-it-out-of-the-room plot management.</p><p>And now Kemp and current SoS Brad Raffensperger and vote-suppression factotum Gabriel Sterling are all taking turns at the mike and whinging, with no self-awareness whatsoever, about how terrible and unfair it is that these toxic mutants they empowered have turned on them. Turns out that dangerous mow-rons are just that, and now they're holding street rallies calling Raffensperger and company traitors, with all the actions and consequences such phrasing implies. Turns out words mean things.</p><p>Remember the old saying that tragedy is when it happens to you, and comedy is when it happens to someone else? Yeah. They thought it was high-<i>larry</i>-us when libturds were crying and scared. Now, not so much.<br /></p><p>Watching these crybabies go on and on about the ugly, scummy shitheads they encouraged for years gives me a chub that would slice through a brick wall. Fuck every one of these people. This is what they asked for; watching them get it with both barrels should bring us all exuberant joy, just in time for Christmas. Seasons beatings, motherfuckers!</p><p>This is not to say that death threats are justified or that anyone deserves to be harmed, let's be clear about that. But these are, after all, high-ranking gubmint officials. They have power to pursue recourse against such individuals. They don't just have to sit there and huddle in a corner and wait for it to become real.</p><p>So prosecute the scumbags, threaten them with jail time, get them fired from their jobs, etc. Make an example of them, and make it hurt. Otherwise, I don't what to tell you. But just like the militia clowns who plotted to kidnap and murder Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, there are concrete legal solutions to this problem.<br /></p><p>There's a few things about this "stealing the election" nonsense that need to be set straight, on the MSM with a bullhorn if necessary: obviously for Trump this is just another cheap, transparent grift; he's raised $170M <i>since the election</i> for this, and he can do pretty much whatever he wants with the money. (He's gonna need it for defense lawyers over the next couple years.) Republicon pols, of course, know better, but since they are emboldened by not getting the down-ticket ass-kicking last month that they knew they deserved, are still content to hedge their bets, knowing there is no percentage in unnecessarily agitating their zombie basetards.</p><p>As for said basetards? There's the real trick, and this is what needs to be broadcast the loudest: <i>they don't actually care about the integrity of the process.</i> They would have been fine with wide-open cheating, so long as it gave them the results they wanted.</p><p>That's why they're entranced by these ridiculous antics spearheaded by Rudy Ghouliani and Jenna Ellis and Sydney Powell, these jokers that aren't even qualified to chase ambulances with a park bench ad, producing "witnesses" that aren't sworn in (because they'd go to jail for perjury) to attest to things that never happened. They don't care that Rudy is a drunk and a clown who has zero evidence for any of his assertions, that he's pulling all of this nonsense out of his ass and getting chewed out by judge after judge for it -- even judges appointed by Dear Leader.</p><p>It's a key feature of this whole dynamic we've watched unfold over the past five years, as we've all tried to make sense of "epistemic bubbles" and all the behavioral psych explanations for what parents of every bratty two-year-old already knows: baby just wants his way, he doesn't care how he gets it.</p><p>And rewarding bad behavior just gets more of the same. It's long past high time that the people that enabled this nonsense in the first place learn that lesson themselves, good and hard. Don't worry, after all is said and done, they will have learned absolutely nothing from any of it.<br /></p>Heywood J.http://www.blogger.com/profile/05627748699423939682noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9908604.post-26892869589579539922020-11-12T22:17:00.007-08:002020-11-12T22:42:52.143-08:00Clarification, Slight Return: You're All Fired<p>Take a deep breath, and fix a nice beverage of your choosing. You've earned it, just by surviving the last week or so with most of your sanity intact. For a few moments that Saturday afternoon it felt like a burden was being lifted, didn't it? You got the first female <i>and</i> minority veep, <b><i>and</i></b> you get rid of Orange Foolius? Such a deal. Like a huge fucking turd finally being sent to its rightful destination, getting rid of Trump.</p><p>I mean, even by the low standards we've set here over the years, it's difficult to convey just what a low bastard Donald Trump really is. Just a straight-up, no-exaggeration piece of shit. As I've mentioned countless times before, I can find small but still identifiable redeeming qualities in just about any political figure, no matter how much of an asshole they are.</p><p>Cheney and Bush, if nothing else, clearly love their families, and however peculiar their personal codes may be, they are visible. Willard Rmoney, as spineless and unprincipled a person as one could hope for in a business cluttered with them, is still clearly a highly intelligent person. He's just chosen to use that intelligence to gut American businesses, send American jobs overseas, pocket the difference, and sell his soul to people even wealthier and less principled than himself.</p><p>Trump, on the other hand, has no redeemable characteristics that one can clearly identify. And the thing is, he never has. The one thing you can say in his "defense" is that he is exactly what he has posed as all these years -- an ignorant blowhard, the drunk at the end of every dive bar, blustering about how he'd "fix" everything "wrong" with this country. He's Archie Bunker with worse hair and other people's money.</p><p>But at least Archie adored Edith and Gloria. Trump adores only himself. It should be clear by now that he would burn this country to the ground, eviscerate its institutions and pit its citizens against each other in a national bloodbath, if it would allow him to retain a toehold of power.</p><p>And so that is what he is attempting to do now. Think of a cheesy horror flick -- the last victim has escaped the house in their car, not knowing that the killer is in the backseat. And now he's about to raise the bloody knife for one last attack.</p><p>The burden is not yet lifted, not until the madness has actually ceased. If I had a nickel for every time over the last five years we all said <i>he can't get away with it</i> while he, uh, got clean away with it, I could retire right now in luxury. He's doing it right now, trying to concoct some Wile E. Coyote scheme to get a couple of state vote counts into the SCOTUS review. It wouldn't take much to knock that EC advantage back.</p><p>Just like a full-grown rat needs a hole about the size of a quarter to squeeze its whole body through, these people just need the smallest gap to exploit. And if they've learned anything, it's that there is no reason whatsoever not to try. If you can think of a single disincentive or consequence that <i>any</i> of these fuckers -- Trump, McConnell, Barr, Kayleigh MagaNinny -- has ever gotten for their behavior, I'm all ears.</p><p>Frankly, they would be stupid <i>not</i> to try what they're doing. The media are already helping them, in their own stupid way. They can't help themselves, these chumps. They would rather engage in ponderous lectures to the <i>winners</i> of the election about how they must reach out to the losers.</p><p>Funny how they didn't inform <i>them</i> of that particular civic duty four years ago. Funny how the lunatic reactionary cultists are never entreatied to stand down and just act like fucking adults for a while. <br /></p><p>I resent being harangued by some overpaid, weasel-faced ankle-biter that it's <i>my</i> job to reach out to <i>them</i>.
You know? Funny how that works -- when "conservatives" win, it's
because "liberals" need to listen to them more; when "conservatives"
lose, "liberals" need to listen to them more. Heads we win, tails you
lose.</p>So fuck them too, those insufferable mediots, even if they identify as "liberal" or "moderate" or "Democratic" -- hell, <i>especially</i> if they identify as those things. The fucking balls on these goddamned people, I swear to Christ.<p>These stupid calls for "unity." Okay. Fine. What, precisely, are we all supposed to "unify" around? If they refuse to accept the idea that Joe Biden legitimately won the election, then <i>what is this common ground of which you speak?</i> Hunh? Hmm? Seriously, where is this mythical halfway point at which liberals -- and <i>only</i> liberals, mind you, conservatives are never asked to do a fucking thing except to keep on keepin' on -- are supposed to meet and shake hands with their honorable opponents?<br /></p><p>I have nothing to say to <a href="https://twitter.com/JuliusGoat/status/1324676457193459712" target="_blank">these people</a> that isn't already in that link.<br /></p><p>I have no idea what to say to <a href="https://twitter.com/anenews/status/1324559175985233921" target="_blank">these people</a>, like, at all. Maybe one of these teevee geniuses can 'splain it all to me one more time, 'cause I'm a little slow on the uptake, and I'm all out of fucking kool-aid.<br /></p><p>I don't know much, but I know one thing for sure -- the "liberal" or "moderate" who tells actual liberals and Democratic voters that they are responsible for initiating all the "healing" that "we" "need", these people are not your fucking friends or allies. At least I know what to expect from the cultists; the only thing I can think about the explainers is that they get an extra buck for every contrarian hot take they manage to extricate from their pulsating sphincters.</p><p>There is no halfway point between full-throated kleptocratic authoritarianism and democracy.</p><p>There is no common ground between ridonkulous conspiracy theories about fake sharpie votes, and a duly counted election outcome.</p><p>There is no unity to be found between open, brazen lawlessness, and upholding the law.</p><p>Assuming this open coup attempt fails, and the Biden administration is permitted by the divine grace of His Travesty's tiny wittle doll hands, they need to hit the ground running, now more than ever, since these current scumbags are going to make them wait out the entire lame-duck period.</p><p>It's not as if there's a fucking pandemic going on or anything. I hope Mike Pence is at piece with whatever warped god he worships. At least Trump has never pretended to worship anything other than himself. All these fake christians are going straight to hell, though, and they know it.</p><p>Whatever else, always keep in mind that over 72 million people voted for four more years of this bullshit. People are welcome to continue deluding themselves that they were all bamboozled by Trump cultism, by the Murdoch white-noise machine, by Russian micro-targeting on Fakebook. I would reiterate my ongoing suggestion that such assumptions are as ludicrous as the worst Trump-fellating Jon McNaughton painting, just poor by-products of magical thinking.</p><p>The world has always been full of assholes. There's just more of them now than ever, and even the dumbest of them are technologically empowered, and protected to a great extent by a nanny state that places warning labels on empty buckets -- not for safety's sake, mind you, but because for every dumb asshole who finds a way to pull a vending machine on himself, there's a goddamned ambulance chaser ready to sniff out the deepest pockets, to make sure his drooling goober client gets paid well for his self-imposed misery.</p><p>So it goes in the political arena. We're all at the mercy of the roughly 47% of the population who happen to be angry assholes. You can't reason with them, you can't convince them. You can't appeal to their better angels, because they have none. Like their idiot wampeter, they are completely unyoked from any sort of moral compass. There are no truths, or self rationalizations.</p><p>Either the Democrats will realize this and confront it with the necessary force and urgency, or they will default to capitulation. Chances are it will be the latter option, primarily because that is what the insect corporate overlords of the donor/owner class expect from all the pols they rent.</p><p>All any of us can do is find ways to divest from the framework as much as possible, to turn away from the constant churn and the bumptious sprawl of the endless news cycle, which oddly produces almost nothing that is new or useful to know. Defunding the horse-race media would be just as useful as defunding the police, frankly, maybe even more so. Imagine if, say, Maggie Haberman were boycotted, and had to go out and ply an honest trade, rather than sucking up to the semi-cool kids on the Trump campus, and stenographing their carefully targeted lies for credulous dupes.</p><p>Imagine if CNN were forced to stop bringing on known liars for "balance." Imagine if Mark Burnett never had another successful show.</p><p>Every individual has a say in all those things. You can let CNN know that you'll avoid them when they have some interchangeable toad spouting lies. No one makes anyone watch <i>The Voice</i>, or any other Burnett property.</p><p>Not that it'll matter in the end. Just like roughly half the people are assholes, most people just don't care enough in general to actually expend even a little bit of energy to stop the bullshit. I'm not interested in what percentage of Trump voters watched, say, <i>The Apprentice</i> when it was a thing. I think it's more interesting to try and figure how many <i>soi-disant</i> liberals watched it, knowing it was cheesy garbage and rolling in it anyway.</p><p>Think about it. Pop-culture artifacts over the last couple decades have increasingly become heuristic signifiers that overlap with and point to political tendencies. A simple example would be to think about what the overlap might be between certain reality-teevee curios and how they typically vote.</p><p>In other words, what percentage of, say, <i>Duck Dynasty</i> watchers were not just Trump voters, but enthusiastically so? What about viewers of the Duggars (remember them?) or <i>Honey Boo-Boo</i>? How about die-hard SEC football fans, versus the percentage of, say, 49ers fans who voted for Biden?</p><p>This may sound like silly culture-vulture posturing, but it is not. It's all just marketing, in the end. Good marketers figure out how to get you to spend money you don't really have on stuff you don't really want. Great marketers spot the patterns and figure out how to tie buyers of one product over to another product.</p><p>Experienced marketers will also tell you that it's as much or more about the <i>experience</i> of buying the product as it is about the quality of the product itself. That's how you use "cultural" signifiers to push those connections on your marks -- ah, I mean <i>customers</i>. And if your customer base is willing to spend years of their lives watching the hillbilly cosplay of a bunch of duck-call makers, they're ripe to buy the idea that Donald Trump, a filthy pimp who literally jokes about fucking his own daughter, is a man of god.</p><p>It's one thing when a wealthy, decadent society with nothing much to do or worry about collectively decides to use pranksterism as an ongoing mode of political expression. It's quite another when a rotted husk of a dying empire, with millions living in the streets, and tens of millions more just a paycheck or two from that point, make that choice.</p><p>I'm glad Biden won, but since it wasn't a bulletproof landslide, and Moscow Mitch still runs the senate, the victory is not what it could and should have been. I'm continuing forward with the same plans I had in case of a loss -- spend the next few years getting some tech certs; sock away as much money as possible; keep working on my house to get it ready to sell; and research the other areas that might be worth spending the rest of my life in.</p><p>I think that's all any of us can do, since you can't beat the marching morons with reason and logic. You just have to find ways to insulate yourself as much as possible from their bad decisions. Show up and vote every time, but prepare for bad outcomes all the same.<br /></p><p>But the bottom line is that, absent an extremely bold and swift set of actions on the part of the Biden administration, many of which will almost certainly be slowed or thwarted by a treasonous Republicon senate, the next decade or two minimum is going to see continued decline, and it will not turn around without some set of massive catastrophes, some ongoing set of natural disasters in a wide range of areas. Nothing else seems to get through to people; the long, slow spread of the #TrumpPlague doesn't elicit the reaction you would expect from a quarter-million dead in nine months. It's going to take a hurricane wiping Miami or Houston from the map, or a mega-wildfire incinerating the entire State of Jefferson.<br /></p><p>In the meantime, it looks like <i>he's fucking gone</i>, and all his cheating and stealing is probably going to fail. (Never say never until he's actually out of there; the thing about Calvinball is that there are no rules.) If nothing else, that's a start, and a small step back toward sanity. The next critical step is to investigate and prosecute everyone for every single criminal act committed, and I'm just not confident the Dems have the stones to push it.</p><p>As always, I hope I'm wrong about all of this.<br /></p>Heywood J.http://www.blogger.com/profile/05627748699423939682noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9908604.post-29233221005513791162020-11-03T17:40:00.003-08:002020-11-03T17:40:37.354-08:00Clarification<p>I think there have been instances in the past where I've indulged in some Kanye West smackdown, and some commenters have thought I'm kidding or riffing.</p><p>Folks, if you believe nothing else I've ever written in here over the past fifteen years or so, believe this: <b><i>I am not kidding.</i></b> In fact, I'm toning it down. It's not just that West is an overrated no-talent hack, that I've literally seen randos on YouTube crank out better music just messing around. It's that he's a tiresome, insufferable piece of shit as a human being.</p><p><a href="https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/1323727338387902465" target="_blank">Here he is voting</a> <i>for the first time</i>, for himself (of course), and nothing else. No down-ballot candidates, nothing. Keep in mind Kanye West is forty-three years old. But he's every bit as narcissistic and solipsistic as his ridonkulous orange daddy.<br /></p><p>Fuck him. He deserves to be rendered destitute. I feel sorry for his offspring, but considering their parents and their start in life, I have no doubt they'll be just as bad long before they even hit puberty. I hope when they reach adulthood and realize who and what their parents really are, they reject everything about them and go and carve their own meaningful niches in life. Which is also my hope for Barron Trump.<br /></p><p>The people who willingly give this asshole their money, whether for his shitty music or his hundred-twenty-dollar tee-shirts or whatever, are every bit as deluded and pathetic as the fucktards driving around with giant Trump flags. They are not working nearly hard enough for their money, or they'd have some goddamned respect for it.<br /></p><p>Clearly the coronavirus needs to be more selective.<br /></p>Heywood J.http://www.blogger.com/profile/05627748699423939682noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9908604.post-36143784233163422932020-11-02T14:24:00.003-08:002020-11-02T14:24:24.583-08:00Animal Farm<p>Remember back in 2008, when a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_Todd_mugging_hoax" target="_blank">worthless piece of shit</a> tried to bamboozle anyone who was dumb enough to listen that a couple of giant knee-grows mugged her, held her down and carved a <i>reverse</i> "B" in her cheek to compel her to vote for Obama? Good times.</p><p>Cut to this magical plague year, and here come the credulous dupes at 'murka's flagship bumwipe, to breathlessly share with us the terrible tale of some asshole farm-subsidy welfare-cheat in Nebraska. Agriculture researcher <a href="https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/1323297129830469638" target="_blank">Dr. Sarah Taber has a great explainer thread</a> on this nonsense.</p><p>Seriously, boycott the fucking <i>Times</i> already. Every dollar you give them is better used to wad up and flush down your toilet, or line your cat box. Even on the off chance that Farmer Ted's story is remotely true (because yeah, Nebraska Antifa decided that the best strategic use of gaining traction in a +20 R state is to destroy a half-million dollar farm machine), that is clearly not the thrust of the headline. This is just the millionth Cletus safari, gussied up slightly for horse-race coverage.</p><p>The only people they're fooling with this shit are their subscribers. Do your duty, America -- flush twice.<br /></p>Heywood J.http://www.blogger.com/profile/05627748699423939682noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9908604.post-23252706735700091892020-11-02T08:26:00.001-08:002020-11-02T10:21:58.866-08:00Anxiety Attack<p><span style="font-family: courier;">I carry a bunch of anger with me. Who I carry it for rotates. -- Daniel Woodrell, <i>Give Us a Kiss</i></span></p><p>People are apparently getting "anxious" in the final hours, and while it's understandable it's also unproductive. This and five bucks will get you a cup of coffee, but here is my humble advice: turn that anxiety into anger, and keep it like a grudge. Win, lose, or draw -- whether Biden wins with a 2:1 majority, a ten-million PV lead, and sixty Senate seats, or if Trump somehow manages to cheat and steal and bluff his way through this like he has everything else in his rotten excuse for a life, <b><i>keep that anger</i></b>.</p><p>Wherever you are, a year from now, five years, ten years, have that anger close by, always there to remind how you felt all year long, how you've felt since 2015. Use it constructively. Maybe you decide to take action at some point -- run for local office, lead a boycott, write off the poisonous people in your life, or just make sure to show up and vote <i>every single time</i>, right on down to dog-catcher.</p><p>Beyond that, there's not much you can control. That's why you're anxious. But regardless of the outcome, just as we are approaching the end of one thing -- either the end of a kleptocratic scumbag, or the end of what was left of our hollowed-out husk of a republic -- we are embarking on the beginning of another major project.</p><p>And whether that new thing is the long, slow process of trying to restore some semblance of governance and justice to a foul machine, or watching things slide inexorably into violent despotism, the thing for us as individuals is the same: insulate yourself as much as you possibly can from the decisions of bitter, stupid people who can't let go of their sad, pinched view of the world.</p><p>There's nothing you can tell them. There is no point in arguing with them, and there is no compromise to be reached with fascists or supporters of fascism. There is only removing ourselves from their equations as much as possible, and moving forward.</p><p>The only things anyone "knows" ahead of time is that it's about to get worse <i>and</i> better. Beyond that, the order and specifics are always in a to-be-determined status. Should the expected take place, and Biden wins by a healthy margin, and the Dems flip the Senate back to sanity (<i>Senaty</i>? Sorry, it was there.), we should all resolve to communicate only with the Democratic politicians, and exhort them to move swiftly and deliberately. Time will be of the essence.</p><p>Other than that? You don't owe your Trump-supporting relatives and acquaintances shit. No gloating, no exulting, no "I told you so" or some lame more-in-sorrow-than-pity reconciliation, nor any pwning of conservaturds.</p><p>Just this: they made their decision freely and of their own volition. They have their own bullshit justifications and rationalizations, but after all that is said and done and shat onto the lawn, they know what they supported. Understand them for who and what they are, and understand that it isn't <i>your</i> job to find some half-baked rapprochement with that. They have to take the step of doing the work on themselves to understand just how low they've sunk. You can't do it for them, just like you can't make someone quit their substance abuse habit or gambling addiction or whatever.</p><p>My gift for prognostication is not what it once was (and it was never much to begin with), so I'm loath to make rash predictions. I would say there is some non-zero chance for <a href="http://hammeroftheblogs.blogspot.com/2020/10/game-plan.html" target="_blank">each of the four outcomes</a> I outlined in the previous post. (In order from #1 to #4, something like: 10%, 10%, 5%, 75%.)</p><p>More broadly speaking, I think it's really down to one of two possible outcomes: the statistically likely one is the Biden landslide, but the possibility of it being close enough for Trump to cheat and steal cannot be dismissed. I think we've seen entirely enough <i>he can't do that</i> scenarios where he does that and gets away with it, to just ignore that likelihood. A cornered animal with zero scruples will use everything they have to avoid their fate, and he does have some considerable tools to delay and deny and poison the well <i>just enough</i>. And he knows no one in either party will stop him from trying.</p><p>But let's not engage in last-minute doom-scrolling. Let's err on the side of cautious optimism and say that the landslide holds, that it gets called early and the spread only increases from there. That still means two months of Trump's wrecking crew stealing everything that isn't nailed down, pardoning every scumbag criminal enabler, leaving as big a mess as possible, etc. That still means the Democrats will have to be actively nudged by their constituents away from any sort of rapprochement whatsoever with the traitorous fascists across the aisle.<br /></p><p>Again, use that anger and keep it by your side, like a faithful pet that you can nurture forever. Use it to remind yourself that who they are right now is who they were all along, and who they will always be until they resolve to change. Character is fate, as Heraclitus knew 2,500 years ago, and so people either recognize their issues and choose to deal with them, or not. The rest of us always have at least some ability to walk away from them.<br /></p>Heywood J.http://www.blogger.com/profile/05627748699423939682noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9908604.post-1326228691724354612020-10-31T23:57:00.047-07:002020-11-01T01:54:23.751-07:00Game Plan<p><small>People look to me and say, "Is the end near? Is this the final day? What's the future of mankind?"<br />
How would I know? I got left behind.<br />
Everyone goes through changes, looking to find the truth.<br />
Don't look to me for answers. Don't ask me -- I don't know. -- Ozzy Osbourne, <i>I Don't Know</i></small></p><p>As we start to wind down this wondrous Year Of Winning, waiting with bated breath to see if the national fever has a temporary break, it's a good time for all of us to take stock in what <b><i>is</i></b>, rather than what <b><i>should be</i></b>, and what we want for ourselves and our loved ones in the months and years to come, regardless of next week's (next <i>month</i>'s perhaps) outcome.</p><p>Start with what you know, what you can control. We can't control -- or even affect -- the ongoing dumbassification of America, as Chuck D memorably put it long ago. All we control is what we do. Do we still support a shitty corporate media, while complaining about it? Then we're each doing our small part to perpetuate the problem, right?</p><p>Look, I enjoy the writing of Paul Krugman and Jamelle Bouie and such like, and they've done some remarkable in-depth pieces lately. But if my <i>New York Times</i> subscription dollar also goes for the upkeep and maintenance of useless hacks like Maggie Haberman and Elaina Plott, and hopeless, sloppy thinkers such as MoDo and Bobo and Bretbug, then it might be time to spend my news dollar more wisely. You'd be surprised what conclusions the Punch Sulzbergers of the world will reach when the invisible hand of the free market gets jammed up their asses for a surprise exam.</p><p>And if they reach the wrong conclusions and keep the hacks and cut the good ones loose, then you drew the right conclusion about the <i>Times</i> in the first place. The good ones will find a way, just as they did when Deadspin got ripped apart, root and branch, and David Roth and Drew Magary and the rest of them went and founded <a href="https://defector.com/" target="_blank"><i>Defector</i></a>. Now <i>that</i>, I can tell you first-hand, is money well spent. <br /></p><p>I mean, you saw the Plott thing, right? The usual hackjob Cletus safari, this time about white college-educated Trump voters in Georgia. Turns out one of these plain folks on the street was the president of a Young Republicans chapter (cell, pod, whatever -- the guy's in his fuckin' 30s, which tells you he's really there to wow some coed chooch with how he rolls with Dear Leader's inner circle or some shit), and another was a paid Republicon consultant.</p><p><a href="https://twitter.com/patrickhealynyt/status/1319736339034669060" target="_blank">The 'splainin' and backpedaling was as hilarious</a> as you might assume, but here's the thing -- this is something that a professional journamalist would have been fired for in the past, and the <i>Times</i> has done this shit multiple times before on previous Cletus safaris. They frequently talk with county GOP chairs in Indiana and Kansas without identifying them as such. These articles aren't just tedious and unseemly, the lack of sourcing on them frequently puts them in the "journalistic malpractice" category.</p><p>I should be clearer -- what Plott did was not any sort of error or mistake or oversight, though it's being retroactively characterized that way. She wrote for the <i>Atlantic</i> before going to the <i>Times</i>. She knows what she's doing, and if she doesn't then maybe she needs a couple years stringing for some podunk rag so she figures out one of the cardinal tenets of decent journalism. This should be unacceptable, yet it has become routine. Plott is a self-professed Ann Coulter fan-girl. She knows exactly what she did, and why she did it.</p><p>But the fix is in, and it's mostly because these trust-fund babies need their fucking horse-race, the hell with the consequences for actual human beings.<br /></p><p>Broadly speaking, there are four possible outcomes for next week:</p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li><b>Trump wins, GOP retains Senate.</b> Game over. Either get your papers in order and start looking abroad, or learn to deal with the reality of it. The people who have been warning of "creeping authoritarianism" are, it will turn out, underselling it by a country mile. It will be Trump Unchained; it will spell the end of what's left of this rotted, doddering empire. <a href="https://twitter.com/JuliusGoat/status/1321413874650877953" target="_blank">A.R. Moxon has a fantastic thread</a> enumerating the likely results. For the rest of my lifetime and probably yours, it will be a continued decline in every aspect -- economic, cultural, diplomatic, and more.<br /></li><li><b>Biden wins, GOP retains Senate.</b> The slide into collapse will be slower, but no less sure. The remaining Goopers may half-heartedly pretend to reject Spray-Tan Satan and all his nefarious works, but only a complete moron could fail to see that Trump has been the culmination of the party, that everything that has taken place has not been in spite of him, but because he and they are perfectly aligned. They'll do everything they can to hamstring Biden and grease the skids for Josh Hawley, who is slightly more intelligent than Trump, but whose religious fanaticism is much more sincere.</li><li><b>Trump wins, Dems flip Senate.</b> This scenario is highly unlikely, but then look what we thought was impossible just four years ago. This would actually be better than the second outcome, as a Democratic Senate could effectively tie Trump's tiny, tiny hands in many areas. Whether they actually <i>would</i>, though, is as always a matter of fanciful speculation. Most of these assholes couldn't find their balls in a dark room with both hands and a flashlight. But the possibility would at least be there.</li><li><b>Biden wins, Dems flip Senate.</b> Obviously the best possible outcome, and one with a pretty fair chance of actually occurring. Since we've just come to passively accept that Trump will cheat or steal a close election, this scenario has to be assumed to be at least something of a blowout -- roughly a 2:1 EC spread, and probably about a 53-47 D-R spread (including Sanders and King on the D side). This gives the Dems a clear mandate to start unfucking everything Trump and his scumbag administration has done. Again, whether they will actually take yes for an answer and act quickly and decisively is another story. It's not an exaggeration to say that the next couple decades (at the very least) in this country will be directly determined by the choices they make in this scenario.</li></ol><p>For what it's worth, despite my usual cranky pessimism, I am still cautiously optimistic that the last outcome will be the one that happens. Seventy million people have already voted, obviously an unprecedented number. We've all seen the videos of lines in state after state -- not just in corrupt shitholes like Georgia and Texas, but even in "safe" states like New York. This nation's voting system, state by state, is a fucking disgrace and an embarrassment, criminally so, and it should be one of the top three priorities for a Biden administration to address.</p><p>But it's probably safe to assume that most people do not wait for hours in line to vote for the politicians who made them wait for hours in line to vote. You know?<br /></p><p>(California, I am pleased to report, seems to have a voting system that actually functions pretty well. I voted three weeks ago, and have already checked and verified that my vote was received and tallied. As I always point out, one in eight Americans live here, so as much as outliers like to complain -- and like any other state, California certainly has its problems -- this is something that is working at a very large scale. Maybe it's not the smartest idea in the world to have essentially fifty different voting systems. Maybe it's time to standardize as much of this as possible, and not leave substantial swaths of the country at the mercy of backdoored Serbian software with no paper trails.)</p><p></p><small>Prison for praise is not worth thinking<br />Sin is still in and our ballots are shrinking<br />So unleash the dogs - the only solution<br />Forgive and forget, fuck no<br />I'm talking about a revolution -- Corrosion of Conformity, <i>Vote With a Bullet</i></small><p></p><p>Enough people seem to be ready to change the channel on this reality shitshow, and that's at least something. But we all have to do this with the realization that, even in a 538-0 EC massacre, an 80-20 popular vote split, even if that were to occur, the work still needs to be done, and it's just beginning.</p><p>And I wouldn't discount the very real probability -- fairly low but not insubstantial -- that the Supreme Court will steal it for him, right out in the open. Brett "Rapebro McGambledrunk" Kavanaugh's specious, nakedly partisan ruling essentially boils down to states can count ballots as long as they're Republicon ballots, and again, they're not even trying to hide this. Kavanaugh, Roberts, and Barrett (Ofjesse) all cut their teeth helping Fredo Arbusto steal the 2000 election from one Albert Arnold Gore, Junior.<br /></p><p>(Knowing what you now know, you think maybe Gore should have carried his home state, or picked a decent running mate, or maybe fought harder for Florida? It really isn't 100% Thanksralph's fault here, not by a long shot. There's a lot of blame to go around.) <br /></p><p>Political common taters across the spectrum are fond of pointing the finger at this or that party or elected representative as some sort of strategic or logistical fulcrum by which legislative impunity or perfidy gets leveraged. But every elected representative, no matter how great or awful, is an accurate reflection of the people who voted for them -- and of the people who couldn't be bothered to show up to vote <i>against</i> them.</p><p>This is the foundational problem with democracy, it turns out -- in a nation teeming with <i>Idiocracy</i> rejects, the fact of the matter is that no matter how smart or engaged <i>you</i> might be, the system is always at the mercy of the dumbest, most inconsiderate dipshit in the class.</p><p>Just like real life -- the last time you drove somewhere, it wasn't the 95% of drivers who watched where they were going and paid attention who you noticed, it was that asshole that merged right on your front bumper and hit the brakes. It's that jerkoff that takes two or three parking spots because he's just that fuckin' special. It's the tool in Costco that leaves their flat-cart across the middle of the aisle while they waddle away for "just a second" to find that five-gallon bucket of mayonnaise.</p><p>So it is with the process of collectively determining who might be the best-suited to manage the nation's well-being, to maintain its increasingly tenuous standing in an interdependent world that has already begun shifting its focus to the burgeoning <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Monsoon-Indian-Ocean-Future-American/dp/0812979206" target="_blank">Indian Ocean</a> nations. It's the "undecided" voters, these fickle doofuses trudging along in "swing" states, who can't muster much in the way of empirical facts, but do understand all too well the disproportionate power they wield just because they live in Ohio or Florida.</p><p>(I don't know if we'll ever be rid of the damned Electoral College, but it would be the biggest favor we ever did ourselves, regardless of political affiliation. The look on my few remaining Republicon friends' faces when I remind them that, since they're in California, their votes don't really count, is priceless.</p><p>But the fact of the matter is, the only people who still support keeping the EC are the same people who support all the various, nefarious forms of voter suppression across the country. It all boils down to the same thing: <u><i><b>they're afraid of a fair fight.</b></i></u> That's all there is to any of this. The fact of the matter is that there are some people who believe that rather than one citizen equals one vote, that one dollar or one acre equals a vote. Wonder who they keep getting that notion from.)</p><p>From time to time throughout this wondrous year, I have mentioned that I will be shutting down the blog at the end of the year. This was a decision I had made in the Before Times, before the #TrumpPlague took over everyone's lives, whether or not it actually infected them. I would modify that ever so slightly and say that there is a slim chance -- like five to ten percent -- that in the instance of Outcome #4 listed above (Biden wins; Dems flip Senate) I might instead take a brief hiatus and then return in some limited format, a couple posts a month or something.<br /></p><p>For a while I thought about starting a Substack and at least collecting beer money for my cranky perambulations, but the fact is that it's increasingly difficult to keep writing about the same things over and over again. Turns out the daily spew from a hideous rage-goblin gets old after a while. And win or lose, the fucker ain't going away until the bitter end.<br /></p><p>Trump has indeed sucked most of the oxygen out of the room and made it all about him, as he does, but there's more to it than that. Frankly, it's beyond demoralizing to be reminded on a daily basis that at somewhere between a third and half of your fellow citizens are <i>fine</i> with all this winning, that they want <i>more</i> of it, <i>now</i>. It's almost as demoralizing to consider that the putative opposition party has to be cajoled and wheedled into doing the bare minimum -- and frequently not even that -- to protect basic constitutional norms, to at least try to uphold the remaining integrity of the document they swore to protect and defend.</p><p>Even in the best case scenario, the winning party will have to be reminded <i>constantly</i> that there is no "returning" to a pre-Trump "normal," that those days are gone for good, and they can't get there from here. And while I get that all of us have been exhausted by this ridiculous toddler and his scummy family and henchmen, I frankly don't trust anyone beyond the usual "political junkie" (a pejorative I've always despised, connoting as it does an unreasonable fixation on, you know, what the people who make decisions that affect everyone's lives are <i>doing</i> and <i>saying</i>) class to remain engaged.</p><p>This thing will not work -- will grind to a fucking halt, I promise you -- if enough people are not willing to stick with it, to show up and vote <i>every</i> time, to make sure they're registered, to pay attention to who's doing what. As long as we have a critical mass of people who can only (maybe) be motivated by well-meaning pods of strangers, canvassing neighborhoods like Jehovah's Witness to plead with their fellow citizens to do their bare basic minimum civic duty, we're going to keep coming back to this.</p><p>Except the next Trump won't be a slobby, ludicrous buffoon. We all know that, but it's as if we're all waiting for someone else to do something about it. And it's true that as individuals, we have been rendered powerless in most respects.</p><p>But one thing you do have control over is the realization that the American political media -- with a few notable exceptions, but by and large -- is nothing more than a giant PR machine for the psychotic billionaires who really run this joint. Frank Zappa once said that "politics is the entertainment arm of industry," and boy was he ever right about that. There is not a lot of daylight between the coverage of most of those shows, and that of the Kardashians.</p><p>(Again, you can only generalize so far, but it tells you a lot about a certain number and type of person that anyone at all is still paying attention to those useless dunces. They can't just go rent their fucking island for their birthday and leave the rest of us alone, they have to rub everyone's nose in it. For the love of all that is profane and unholy, change the goddamned channel on these people, none of whom have ever done a single thing to merit the slightest bit of attention.)<br /></p><p>So boycott the political media, boycott their sponsors, tell them what you're doing and why. If enough people do that, they will have to listen. CNN would be a great place to start -- CEO Jeff Zucker is one of the two people most responsible for Trump (Mark Burnett being the other so, uh, you might want to boycott <i>The Voice</i> while you're at it). The current dingbat posing as press suckaterry for this human centipede of an administration got her start as the token yammering conservatard on their stupid panel shows.</p><p>I think most normal people would prefer to just cast their vote and then get back to their lives. That is not feasible for at least the next few election cycles, if ever. Unless you stock the entire Democratic party with AOC clones, people who are passionate and smart and actually give a shit, and who you don't have to watch 24-7, this is how it is for now. We will have to keep Biden and Harris to their word; we will have to make our senators step up their game and get shit done, to put country not only party, but over whatever remnants of "collegiality" they want to cling to.</p><p>There are no good Republicons. They must be crushed. That's all there is to it.</p><p>The choice here is flawed but obvious -- fascism or not-fascism. White supremacy and theocratic authoritarianism with a corporate veneer, or not. I can give you a dozen things that annoy me about Joe Biden, but as P.J. O'Rourke memorably said about Hillary Clinton, Biden is "wrong within normal parameters."</p><p>If there's a more perfect metaphor for everything Trump has done in his life -- not just as chief executive, but all along -- it was last night. He held another super-spreader rally in Omaha -- where exactly one electoral vote is at stake -- and thousands of attendees, many of them elderly and enfeebled, <a href="https://twitter.com/omaha_scanner/status/1321258498122985476" target="_blank">were stranded for hours</a> in the 31-degree night. At least seven of these idiot codgers were taken to the hospital for hypothermia.<br /></p><p>To which I say, <u><i><b>Good</b></i></u>. Serves them right. I wish them all the very worst things in life, for however much remains for them. If they still want to vote for the <a href="https://driftglass.blogspot.com/2020/10/biden-fridge-vs-trump-fridge.html" target="_blank">geezer freezer</a> after that, they deserve every single bit of the predictable consequences.</p><p>It's important to see things and people as they really are, and to act accordingly. Not <i>react</i> -- you don't need to run out and tell all your relatives and co-workers to go fuck themselves. That accomplishes nothing. It means to understand them, perhaps better than they are willing to consider the situation and understand themselves on honest terms, and take it from there. Maybe they can be reasoned with, maybe not. If not, just walk away, don't engage. Not worth your time to try to reason with people who have chosen to live in their own reality.</p><p>And in that instance, it's also an important fact to keep in mind -- Trump is an authoritarian fascist in nature and character, and will always behave as such. He cannot do otherwise. His party has chosen to ride along as far as the road takes them. The people who show up to the rallies have chosen the same path. They are all complicit in what has happened, and what is yet to happen. This is important to keep in mind.</p><p>Consider the following sketch: two young men, Jeff and Larry, pull up to a convenience store. Jeff is driving, Larry is going to enter the store and rob it.</p><p></p><blockquote><p>EXT. SHOT -- STORE PARKING LOT: <i>Car pulls abruptly into parking space near entrance. LARRY hops out and heads through the door.</i></p><p>INT. -- CONVENIENCE STORE: <i>LARRY looks around the store, sees no other customers, approaches counter and pulls a gun on CLERK.</i></p><p>LARRY: Give me everything in the register and the safe.</p><p>CLERK [<i>opening register</i>]: I can't open the safe.</p><p>LARRY [<i>takes register cash, clearly dismayed at the measly amount</i>]: This all you got?</p><p>CLERK [<i>bemused</i>]: No one pays with cash anymore. You know what year it is, right?</p><p>LARRY [<i>glares, pissed</i>]: Smart-ass motherfucker! [shoots CLERK twice, heads out door and back to car]</p><p>JEFF: You have a gun? That wasn't part of the plan.<br /></p><p>LARRY: What'd you think I was gonna rob him with, a spoon? Get the fuck out of here!</p></blockquote><p></p><p>Now, at that point, Jeff has a choice to make. He can get out and run, and when the authorities eventually catch up to him he can hopefully convince them that he really didn't know Larry had a gun, or that he would shoot the clerk. Or he can put the car into gear and start driving away, which would immediately make him an accomplice, just as surely as if he'd killed that clerk himself. As far as the law is concerned, Jeff is a mur-diddly-urderer, pure and simple.</p><p>So it is with anyone still willing to support Trump, and especially the people attending the rallies, paid or not. There's still time to get out and run, but they choose not to. This is entirely of their own volition, and pretending that some Russian micro-targeted ad campaign bamboozled them somehow is just about the dumbest thing to believe in. They know what they're doing, what they're supporting, and why they're there. He's spreading hate, lies, fear, violence, and disease, and they want all of that, as if it's the purest heroin, injected straight into the collapsed veins of their arms. They can't get enough of it. If someone created Trump suppositories, these rubes would kill each other with their bare hands just for the right to stick one up their gaping assholes.</p><p>[<b>Note to self:</b> <i>Possible marketing idea -- Trump suppositories. Soaked in oxy or fentanyl maybe? Cheap vodka? Red white and blue, or would color really matter once they've been used? The whole family, or just the big guy?</i>]</p><p><br /></p>
<small>How many times can you hear it? It goes on all day long.<br /> Everyone knows everything, and no one's ever wrong -- until later.... -- Rush, <i>Show Don't Tell</i></small>
<p>It's important to see them for who they are, and to act accordingly -- not to <i>confront</i> them directly, since we've already established that as a complete waste of time, but to find ways to counteract them, to offset the things they do and say.<br /></p><p>But there's a difference between paying sufficient attention and showing up as needed, and immersing ourselves in the arcane strategies of the weasel-faced consultants who appear like young Jimmy the Greek types, to offer their pigskin prognostications. Those people are only talking to each other, and to potential clients. They are not talking to you. Ignore them.</p><p>I made a decision to see this through partly out of some perverse sense of "duty," to make it to the end of this dismal movie, to watch how the fifty-car pile-up turns out, etc. That is definitely a huge factor in this. I've watched every scene of this stinker so far, I might as well see the end.</p><p>But there's also the realization that there really is no end, not a clean, defined one anyway. Either Trump wins and we're done, as far as an America that suits the majority of its inhabitants, or the Democrats win and we get to watch their feckless dithering for a couple years. Lather, rinse, repeat.<br /></p><p>The only end that really matters is how each of us can begin turning away from this ongoing wreck, this sham of a government, and get back to fulfilling what used to be important to us individually. Surely we must be motivated by something more than tuning in for this week's scaremongering. I think a lot of us have lost some of that along the way. There are times when I think I have lost that, and other times when I look back and find a random past post to review and think, <i>okay, that was pretty damned good. I caught something there.</i></p><p>There will be a few posts to wrap up the end of the election cycle, the year, etc. Stay tuned, stay frosty. Keep your fingers crossed for the big day. I'm always glad to be wrong about this sort of thing -- maybe it'll all work out. See you next Tuesday.<br /></p>Heywood J.http://www.blogger.com/profile/05627748699423939682noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9908604.post-5375915541462592762020-10-20T14:23:00.001-07:002020-10-20T14:23:10.369-07:00Rush to Judgment<p>Not going to waste much time or effort on this, because he really isn't worth it, but it is a fine larf to see <a href="https://twitter.com/secupp/status/1318387687745855488" target="_blank">some of the usual dopes</a> entreating us to "be best" or whatever, with Rush Limbaugh's supposedly terminal diagnosis. (I thought he was stage four -- which, in my understanding, generally means "there's nothing more we can do" -- back at the beginning of the year.)</p><p>I could say something shitty, like hoping that every breath he continues to draw is more agonizing than the previous one, something like that. But the fact is that you have to <i>care</i> about something or someone in order to <i>hate</i> it (them) sufficiently. And I just don't care, at all.</p><p>I assume that most people, once they hit a certain age, begin having those little existential conversations with themselves. <i>What kind of mark will I make? How will people remember me? What part of me will live on, and for how long?</i></p><p>Obviously, for 99.9999% of us (not an empirically proven number), the answers are, in order: Little to none; fondly (at best) for a while, then less and less; very little, and not for very long. Even for people with large families and/or large groups of friends, they all move on at some point.</p><p>Limbaugh has made hundreds of millions of dollars over the past several decades by poisoning the well of what passes for American political discourse. People reflexively point to him calling then thirteen-year-old Chelsea Clinton "the White House dog" early in his career, but the fact is that that's one of his more harmless bits.</p><p>He's always been a cheerful prevaricator, a passer of rumors and innuendo, the orchestrator of an endless campaign of calumny and fear. Basically his show and his schtick have been an ongoing false-flag operation, distracting his rube audience with fake misdeeds from the Democratic villains of his passion play, while his Republicon saints robbed the country blind and stupid.</p><p>Here's what he had to say about <a href="https://news.iheart.com/featured/rush-limbaugh/content/2018-07-10-rush-limbaugh-blog-left-pins-hopes-on-ruth-buzzi-ginsburg-workout/" target="_blank">Ruth Bader Ginsburg</a> a couple years ago -- or has he memorably dubs her, Ruth "Buzzi" Ginsburg. [<i>Ed: Hi-yooooo!</i>] You can see where Genius Q. Dealmaker swiped his splendiferous gift for nicknamification. Truly, this is inspired stuff. And he couldn't even wait for the body to get cold before he was <a href="https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ny-rush-limbaugh-supreme-court-nominee-senate-judiciary-committee-hear-20200922-d55mdsgs25ggxebo3n4hw3orpu-story.html" target="_blank">clamoring for a (fascist) replacement</a> to be installed in the seat.</p><p>It goes without saying that the people who will have anything positive to say about Limbaugh are the same sort of arm-dragging troglodytes who will miss Trump when that final Double Whopper finally takes him to hell. Limbaugh's impact is arguably larger than Trump's, and in fact, it's clear that the life's work of the former was to set the stage for the latter, to keep people dumb and angry and eager for the next day's outrage pill, like the Skinner-box rodents they really are.</p><p>Like I say, I don't really give two shits whether Limbaugh keels over tomorrow or ten years from now, because his legacy and operational principles will be the same either way:</p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>The <i>herrenvolk</i> are entitled to their own set of rules and customs, which (as <a href="https://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/12/frank-wilhoit-the-travesty-of-liberalism.html" target="_blank">Frank Wilhoit</a> so memorably put it) protect but don't bind them, while simultaneously binding but not protecting everyone else.</li><li>Hate and bullshit are easier to digest -- and more profitable! -- if you stuff those turds into a handful of cheesy "jokes" and nicknames, all of which are meant to be taken with utmost seriousness, while also being used as a shield to deflect the opposition's "humorless" rebuttals. <br /></li><li>The bigger the lie, the more they believe it.</li></ol><p>The one thing I actually do hope for Limbaugh is that, in his quiet, more reflective moments, when the microphone and lights are off, when he sits in his vast, empty mansion with his cat and his current wife, that he really thinks to himself about whether the life he chose to lead was the life he had dreamed of when he was younger, and if not, what might have gone differently.</p><p>The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike, and it sure doesn't hurt for everyone to take note that Limbaugh got a much fairer shake out of life than most decent people, and that whether we're "good" or "bad", we all end up the same.</p><p>So you might as well do something you can actually talk about in polite company, something that you don't have to be ashamed of. Carrying water for monstrous billionaires pays well, but the fact of the matter is that after a few weeks of grief kayfabe, they'll shove Charlie Kirk or some equally useless sack of shit in the chair to carry the water and poison the well, and Limbaugh will be completely forgotten within five or ten years, except for those who spit when they say his name, like Father Coughlin or Lord Haw Haw. Some legacy.</p><p>The main thing for liberals and Democrats is not to let themselves be gulled into this "let's be nice" high-road sucker's game. You have no obligation to forgive your abusers or their enablers, nor to mourn their demises. The fact is that they seek this absolution only as a way of minimizing the abuse and its effects. They don't actually care if you "forgive" them or are "civil" to them; it's just a cynical ploy to keep you on your back foot, to remind you that they will <u><b><i>never</i></b></u> give you the courtesies they demand from you at every turn.</p><p>Keep that in mind in the weeks and months (and even years) to come, because the bigger the landslide, the more you're gonna hear this "reconciliation" bullshit, this Rodney King can't-we-all-just-get-along rhetoric, as a hasty attempt to cover their real-world efforts to undermine the Democrats -- and more importantly, democracy itself.</p><p>Never forget what the true endgame is here -- making sure only <i>the right people</i> get to have a say in how their world runs. Limbaugh was an important voice in distilling that toxic brew down to a level where the average Keystone Light swiller could latch on to some talking points, and never have to worry about whether they were accurate in the least.<br /></p>Heywood J.http://www.blogger.com/profile/05627748699423939682noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9908604.post-81585504962273298272020-10-15T20:47:00.003-07:002020-10-15T20:47:46.508-07:00Deep Thought #3<p>Imagine being such a waste of oxygen, <a href="https://twitter.com/mercedesschlapp/status/1316895508267401221" target="_blank">such a completely desiccated soul</a>, that your idea of an insult is to compare someone with Fred Rogers.</p><p>Had enough winning yet, America? Are you better off now than you were four years ago? Are you tired of people like Mercy Schlapp, a concert porta-john of a human whose husband is even <i>worse</i>, being given a platform, a presence, money, power? Are you tired of every day starting with waking up wondering what these fucking scabs have done <i>today</i>?</p><p>Do your duty, folks -- flush twice.<br /></p>Heywood J.http://www.blogger.com/profile/05627748699423939682noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9908604.post-17706604755871816172020-10-15T15:36:00.006-07:002020-10-15T15:36:53.554-07:00Deep Thought #2<p>I'd be happy to #BoycottNBC, but aside from Sunday night football, I never watch it. I couldn't name three shows on that network if you put a gun to my head.</p><p>That said, I mean, come on. Just what do you think is going to happen when this demented, drug-addled, still-contagious dotard is wheeled out to try his schtick on a crowd that is not comprised of his usual gaggle of booger-eating shitheads? The odds of this convincing a single person to vote for him, who wasn't already balls-deep in the cult, is about the same as the odds he'll read <i>Infinite Jest</i> over the holidays.<br /></p>Heywood J.http://www.blogger.com/profile/05627748699423939682noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9908604.post-1061162197867190682020-10-15T15:06:00.001-07:002020-10-15T15:06:10.567-07:00Deep Thought #1<p> Maggie Haberman is a paid Trump campaign operative. Prove me wrong.<br /></p>Heywood J.http://www.blogger.com/profile/05627748699423939682noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9908604.post-37331594442701470632020-10-14T15:28:00.003-07:002020-10-14T21:45:02.202-07:00Street Voices<p>As penance for their miserable collective performance over, oh, let's say this past decade just to be charitable about it, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/10/10/coronavirus-denier-sick-spreader/" target="_blank">for every one of these tiresome missives</a>, there needs to be at least a dozen from people who weren't careless.</p><p>Let me play devil's advocate for a second: look, I get it. Even people who haven't come within a hundred miles or a dozen degrees of separation from a single COVID case have <i>still</i> lost a year off their lives, with no real end in sight. They're tired of being cooped up. You cannot live your entire life as a bubble person, or move around in a hamster ball. You are at greater mortal risk every time you get in your automobile. These are facts.</p><p>But. The layers of bougie self-regard in this article are head-shakingly perfect. Gay and conservative and lives in Texas. So let's break that down to its chief political components: he has a nice comfortable suburban lifestyle, so in a state that is always one hurricane season away from needing a quarter-trillion in emergency funds, in a state that has an atrocious rate of murders of trans people, in a state where slobby, neckbearded goons routinely strap on automatic weapons and drive their coal-rollers to the local Starbucks or Wal-Mart just to show everyone who's boss, this asshole almost certainly voted for a second term for Ted Cruz, and will probably do the same for fellow Trump-cuck John Cornyn. Because they assure him a lower tax bill. Everyone wants good roads and schools and services, but strangely no one wants to <i>pay</i> for them.<br /></p><p>Do we have that about right? I will bet you gin-yoo-wine boner-fied folding 'murkin currency that we're in the ballpark with this one. There is no other reason for a gay man to be "conservative" in a place famous for kicking the shit out of people like him, not to mention the fact that there are no more true conservatives as such, just supernumeraries in a reactionary cult.<br /></p><p>We'll never know, because this guy never quite indicates that he's learned his lesson from all this, from watching his beloved father-in-law (who was younger than <i>me</i>, for chrissake) die from the #TrumpPlague, to nearly dying from it himself. He just gives us a rather gnomic, pensive closer: </p><p></p><blockquote>There’s no relief. This virus, I can’t escape it. It’s torn up our family. It’s all over my Facebook. It’s the election. It’s Trump. It’s what I keep thinking about. How many people would have gotten sick if I’d never hosted that weekend? One? Maybe two? The grief comes in waves, but that guilt just sits.</blockquote><p></p><p>Is he responsible for his FIL's untimely death? I wouldn't say so, but I get why he feels guilty about it all the same. The question becomes, what do you intend to do to make up for whatever it is you feel guilty about? How do you intend to move forward from this year of personal tragedies? It is not accidental that I use the word <i>intend</i>; to absolve our consciences and expiate our sins, real or imagined, requires us to think and act with real <i>intent</i>.<br /></p><p>It would be nice if you could separate the medical dimensions of the pandemic from the political dimensions. It would also be fantastic if a duffel bag packed with unmarked benjamins was delivered to my front porch by a nekkid Scarlett Johansson. Tomorrow morning would be perfect; I usually wake up and start getting ready for work at about 6:15 a.m.</p><p>So I don't know what is meant by the wishy-washy phrasing of <i>It’s the election. It’s Trump.</i> I suppose it shows at least an implicit realization of how Trump's sociopathic indifference contributed heavily to the rapid, dangerous spread of this virus that killed someone he cared for deeply. But it does not convey a seriousness of purpose, an understanding that all the politicians who run the state he lives in bear responsibility for this as well.</p><p>There has been an immense amount of suffering and loss this year, for people of all ages, races, economic groups, geographic regions, all walks of life. The pain has been spread far and wide, but definitely not equally. Some have had to bear unthinkable losses, while some (like me) have had minor inconveniences at worst. It's not fair.</p><p>But it is connected in some instances to how seriously each of us chooses to take the situation, and how our choices inform our <i>intent</i> to move forward and on with our lives, as this plague hopefully fades away.</p><p>Now, what if it <i>doesn't</i> fade away? What if it lingers into next spring, and then next summer mutates (it <i>is</i> a virus, after all) into COVID-21? What do you think your elected representatives at the federal, state, and local levels should do to prepare for such and instance, and react in the event it occurs? Do you want more of the same? How's this magickal year been going for you so far?</p><p>Only Tony Green can answer those questions for himself. But it's those answers that determine whether he's actually learned anything from all this, and whether he intends to move beyond his own personal guilt and grief.</p><p>In the meantime, hey, dear media, what if you actually published something from someone who paid attention, wore the masks, did the distancing, didn't get weird or emotional or flip out over basic acts of common courtesy, just did their part to pull their weight and not spread the fucking plague. I wonder what that might be like, to give just a small token affirmation to the millions of people out there who have been doing all those things, instead of making fools out of themselves at Trader Joe's.</p><p>Part of the reason we have all become convinced that everyone else is some toxic combination of idiot and asshole is because that's all that's modeled for us by our insect corporate overlords. It's always the wizened, bigoted shithead in the haunted Pennsyltucky Stuckey's that gets the coverage, never the church deacon who quietly runs the food bank for the town and hustles shekels from the local car dealers to try to advance his part of Christ's mission, just an inch or two at a time.</p><p>To listen to the American corporate media for any length of time is to slowly condition oneself to think that man-bites-dog stories are routine and average and normal. They have become accustomed to the notion that all over this vast nation of ours, right now people are biting dogs by the score. There is no proper sense of perspective or proportion.</p><p>When the majority of the voices amplified consistently are the voices of
shitheads and scumbags, it's not unreasonable to start assuming that
we're outnumbered by shitheads and scumbags. Who knows? Maybe we are. We're about to find out, one way or the other, but the fact is that either result is going to require <i>action</i> with <i>intent</i>. But I think it's safe to say that the picture they've been painting is not very accurate. Their overweening obsession with clickbait and access and selling boner pills and cheeseburgers has clouded their judgment and compromised their stated professional mission.<br /></p><p>Turns out the news actually <i>is</i> fake, to some extent, though in neither the scope, scale, nor direction that Dear Leader supposes, in his endless parade of self-loathing and eternal butt-hurt. But it's up to <i>us</i> to let them know we've had enough.</p><p>If you think it sucks that the <i>Vichy Times</i> continues to employ a "journalist" who is such a shamelessly lazy hack that she literally amplified a Wile E. Coyote-grade "scandal" from Rudy Ghouliani's scotch-soaked brain, before checking a single detail to find out that it was complete bullshit, then stop giving them your money. Encourage them to fire her worthless ass. Honestly, when was the last time -- or <i>any</i> time -- that Maga Haberman told you anything you wanted to know or didn't already know? When was the last time she didn't <a href="https://twitter.com/Care2much18/status/1021060227096088576" target="_blank">use her access to function as a propaganda vessel</a> for these monsters?<br /></p><p>If you think it's bullshit that NBC "News" has decided to rush a me-too clown-hall event for Dear Leader, then you need to realize that they're doing this as a favor to Mark Burnett, who ran Trump's dipshit fake-tycoon show, and now has <i>The Voice</i> as one of his more lucrative properties. So? Boycott NBC, especially that show. Boycott anything with Burnett's name on it; all he does is reality garbage, so it shouldn't be too difficult to figure those out.</p><p>If we want to get rid of the bastards and monsters who are ruining everything, the first step is to stop giving them money. Otherwise, expect more of the same, since they literally have no disincentive to change anything.<br /></p>Heywood J.http://www.blogger.com/profile/05627748699423939682noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9908604.post-46217207127440530382020-10-13T00:30:00.001-07:002020-10-13T00:30:04.198-07:00Judging Amy<p>The religious fanaticism is only part of Judge Handmaid's problem. Her willingness to undo every meaningfully liberal piece of legislation in the past seventy years is just another part of the problem.</p><p>Don't get me wrong, these are both major problems. But as with Rapebro McGambledrunk, the worst problems are the ones that seem to get the least amount of attention. I mean, yes, Kavanaugh is a piece of shit blackout-drunk party-rapist, but instead of getting into the weeds on some unprovable he-said/she-said shit from thirty-odd years ago, maybe someone should have asked at his confirmation hearing who paid off his mortgage and his quarter-million-dollar credit-card debt. You know?</p><p>So it is with Judge Handmaid. Plenty of people have joked before about Trump trying to appoint "Judge" Jeanine Pirro to the Supreme Court, but Pirro actually spent more time as a judge than Amy Barrett. The judges on <i>The People's Court</i> all spent more time as judges.</p><p>Barrett is nothing more than a partisan hack who clerked for Combover Tony Scalia and became a law professor at Notre Dame, before Moscow Mitch handed her a seat on the Seventh Circuit as a full-throated <i>fuck you</i> to Barack Obama.<br /></p><p>(Maybe it's just me, but if anyone treated me for a day the way McConnell treated Obama for the full eight years, I'd paint that motherfucker's office with Novichok and polonium. I have zero admiration for Obama's ability to silently eat shit from these mutants in perpetuity. To loosely paraphrase Stokely Carmichael, that high-road shit only works when your opponent has a conscience.)</p><p>The idea that she's "brilliant" or even significantly qualified has no clear evidentiary basis. I've seen judges on <i>Law & Order</i> with more purpose and gravitas. She and Kavanaugh are there for the same reason -- loyalty over ability. They are owned and operated by the scummy, secretive billionaires whose prime directive is paying half of the peons to murder the other half, while poisoning as much air and water as possible. <br /></p><p>Our wondrous corporate media, content to fake their librul quals all the way to the bank, are obsessed with asking each other and opining on Biden's refusal to offer specifics on "court packing," which of course is what Moscow Mitch has been doing for a full decade now. After stonewalling Obama on judicial appointments for six years (again, thanks a fucking million, all you Democratic voters who couldn't bother your precious selves in the 2010 and 2014 midterms), since 2016 Mitch has turned the Senate into a rubber stamp for every Federalist Society squid imaginable -- the younger and dumber the better, so's they can infest the system for the next two generations.</p><p>So maybe some enterprising mediot might want to take it upon themselves to ask any Republicon senator about whether they'd pack the court more, should Trump get re-elected and they hold the Senate. Because I would bet you actual folding currency that they will.</p><p>Reversing "cultural" decisions like <i>Roe</i> and <i>Griswold</i> are just the start. Those things are just cover for their real agenda -- turning back employment rights, dismantling the EPA, bolstering the domestic white-power <i>herrenvolk</i> police state, and making sure that fewer and fewer people are able to vote in response to it all.</p><p>There appears to be reason for cautious optimism that Biden could win decisively, and the Democrats could pick up a solid majority in the Senate. It is absolutely imperative, not just for the good of the country, but for the continued viability of the Democratic Party, that if that does happen, they need to act swiftly and decisively, and not worry about what shitheads like Chuck Todd say about it, and to make sure that their treasonous "colleagues" across the aisle are given good reason to fear their own destruction. Any other outcome would be catastrophic.<br /></p>Heywood J.http://www.blogger.com/profile/05627748699423939682noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9908604.post-33963521690275386592020-10-12T23:05:00.001-07:002020-10-12T23:50:28.952-07:00Doctor My Eyes<p>Oh brother, here we go again: <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/10/12/faucis-anger-trump-is-more-damning-than-it-first-appeared/" target="_blank">boy is Doctor Fauci angry</a> with Trump's disrespect and lying <i>now</i>. Ooh, you can just feel the palpating fury and seething resentment, can't you? Yeah, baby, <i>he's had it</i>. Don't make him take his glasses off.</p><p>Give me -- and I cannot emphasize this enough, as they say -- a fucking break. Any "doctor" who continues to ply their trade for these murderous scumbags has abdicated their oath, period, full stop. That is all there is to this anymore. They are flacks for a monster who fantasized about wearing a Superman tee-shirt on his way out of the hospital last week, for some pathetic publicity stunt.</p><p>(Frankly, I think it's a goddamned shame someone talked him out of it. This is the sort of high-fiber content his shitbag cult deserves to be thumped over the head with.)</p><p>You could have made some sort of argument -- one I would still have disagreed with, but one which at least had some amount of good-faith reasoning behind it -- up till about June or July that Fauci felt that his comparatively moderating presence had some sort of practical effect on at least keeping the spread and the count lower than they could be.</p><p>Two hundred and twenty thousand deaths and eight million cases into this, though, and three weeks from the election, this is no longer remotely true. Fauci is, as he has been the entire time, providing a thin veneer of "respectability" to the ongoing carnage. Frankly, he should be ashamed of himself at this point. I'm embarrassed for him. I do not find him a credible figure; the fact that he is permitted a bit of room to roam with public "disagreements" and averrals does not change the fact that he clearly knows what kind of animals he carries water for, and still chooses not to set down the buckets and walk away.</p><p>Fauci turns eighty this Christmas Eve, so this is not about maintaining his career opportunities, or even burnishing his legacy, since his complicity these past months have, if anything, undermined that legacy.</p><p>If Dr. Fauci is truly committed to conveying accurate scientific medical information to a country in crisis from a deadly pandemic, then doesn't it make more sense for him to walk away from his role as a government minion, and be completely unconstrained by destructive, poisonous political considerations? I don't know what the man's fucking problem is, and I give up asking.</p><p>You're not saving a bunch of lives in the next three weeks by letting a piece of shit like Donald Trump dump on you further. Do what you should have done three months ago, and join Biden's campaign, and hit the chat-show circuit with the truth. Get that monkey off your back once and for all, doc. The best legacy is doing the right thing when it matters most.<br /></p>Heywood J.http://www.blogger.com/profile/05627748699423939682noreply@blogger.com0