The Great Depression

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Children of a Lesser Clod

Interesting thread here about a group of, um, freedom fighters storming the Oregon State Legislature in Salem. As they say in the 'hood, read the whole damned thing.

Coupla minor and fairly obvious observations:

• 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.
  
• 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 is a mission statement.

  These hard-up slapdicks have no goal beyond durrr, let us into your sneaky Chinee meetin', so's we can cough all over ever'body while regurgitating half-remembered Alex Jones bits! Great. And then what? That's the thing about all these wannabe Braveheart doofuses -- they have no idea what they would do if they "won," or even what the act of "winning" would look like.

  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 suffered one of the most brutal deaths 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.
  

• 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.
  

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 Million 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?

All these herrenvolk 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 [gasp!] obstructing their righteous entry into the Halls of Representative Democracy, well, that is an unforgivably perfidious action.

If there's one thing these dirtbags drag around with them like a fucking cross, everywhere and anywhere, it's this overweening sense of betrayal, 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.

Heh. Re-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.

It would be nice if someone were 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.

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.

Six hunnert bucks prob'ly don't buy too many of them "no step on snek" flags. Maybe they can go terrorize more retail outlets 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 every fucking day now.

Two infamous quotes, from two diametrically different people, running through my mind right now:

"Life's tough. It's tougher when you're stupid." -- John Wayne (possibly apocryphal)

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." -- Hunter S. Thompson

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.

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.

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.

Happy Kempers

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, is now getting death threats from his own party (as well as open harassment from Dear Leader himself) for -- you guessed it -- not 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.

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.

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-larry-us when libturds were crying and scared. Now, not so much.

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!

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.

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.

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 since the election 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.

As for said basetards? There's the real trick, and this is what needs to be broadcast the loudest:  they don't actually care about the integrity of the process. They would have been fine with wide-open cheating, so long as it gave them the results they wanted.

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.

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.

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.

Clarification, Slight Return: You're All Fired

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 and minority veep, and 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 he can't get away with it 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.

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 any of these fuckers -- Trump, McConnell, Barr, Kayleigh MagaNinny -- has ever gotten for their behavior, I'm all ears.

Frankly, they would be stupid not 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 winners of the election about how they must reach out to the losers.

Funny how they didn't inform them 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.

I resent being harangued by some overpaid, weasel-faced ankle-biter that it's my job to reach out to them. 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.

So fuck them too, those insufferable mediots, even if they identify as "liberal" or "moderate" or "Democratic" -- hell, especially if they identify as those things. The fucking balls on these goddamned people, I swear to Christ.

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 what is this common ground of which you speak? Hunh? Hmm? Seriously, where is this mythical halfway point at which liberals -- and only 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?

I have nothing to say to these people that isn't already in that link.

I have no idea what to say to these people, 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.

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.

There is no halfway point between full-throated kleptocratic authoritarianism and democracy.

There is no common ground between ridonkulous conspiracy theories about fake sharpie votes, and a duly counted election outcome.

There is no unity to be found between open, brazen lawlessness, and upholding the law.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Imagine if CNN were forced to stop bringing on known liars for "balance." Imagine if Mark Burnett never had another successful show.

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 The Voice, or any other Burnett property.

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, The Apprentice when it was a thing. I think it's more interesting to try and figure how many soi-disant liberals watched it, knowing it was cheesy garbage and rolling in it anyway.

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.

In other words, what percentage of, say, Duck Dynasty watchers were not just Trump voters, but enthusiastically so? What about viewers of the Duggars (remember them?) or Honey Boo-Boo? How about die-hard SEC football fans, versus the percentage of, say, 49ers fans who voted for Biden?

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.

Experienced marketers will also tell you that it's as much or more about the experience 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 customers. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the meantime, it looks like he's fucking gone, 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.

As always, I hope I'm wrong about all of this.

Street Voices

As penance for their miserable collective performance over, oh, let's say this past decade just to be charitable about it, for every one of these tiresome missives, there needs to be at least a dozen from people who weren't careless.

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 still 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.

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 pay for them.

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.

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 me, for chrissake) die from the #TrumpPlague, to nearly dying from it himself. He just gives us a rather gnomic, pensive closer: 

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.

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 intend; to absolve our consciences and expiate our sins, real or imagined, requires us to think and act with real intent.

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.

So I don't know what is meant by the wishy-washy phrasing of It’s the election. It’s Trump. 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.

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.

But it is connected in some instances to how seriously each of us chooses to take the situation, and how our choices inform our intent to move forward and on with our lives, as this plague hopefully fades away.

Now, what if it doesn't fade away? What if it lingers into next spring, and then next summer mutates (it is 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 action with intent. 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.

Turns out the news actually is 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 us to let them know we've had enough.

If you think it sucks that the Vichy Times 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 any time -- that Maga Haberman told you anything you wanted to know or didn't already know? When was the last time she didn't use her access to function as a propaganda vessel for these monsters?

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 The Voice 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.

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.

Ain't That a Shame

As monstrous and awful as Exxon's corporate strategy is, it is also horrifically rational from their point of view, as long as people insist on consuming what they're selling, as much as possible. Next time you take a drive -- or even a walk around the block -- count the jacked-up king-cab gas-guzzlers you see, and multiply by a million, or maybe ten million. Maybe you drive one yourself.

How much meat do you eat, and how often, and where do you acquire it? How many kids do you have? Are they grown, and if so, what do they drive? Again, multiply all those factors by millions, just in the USA, and you can see Exxon's rationale.

Exxon is not the problem. They are giving a critical mass of people what they want. Sure, the entire American corporate media system is really just a giant PR machine calibrated to turn you into a mindless Homer Simpson consumer drone who self-actualizes through big trucks and bigger cheeseburgers. But each of us -- a cell lit of awareness! -- gets to decide whether we want to wallow in that or not.

Economists talk of  behavioral "incentives" and "disincentives" through taxing and regulating various externalities, and they're not wrong. But the truth is much simpler and darker than that. We want to believe that people are intrinsically "good" and rationally self-interested, but we know that the former is subjective and conditional at best, and the latter is only occasionally true. The most charitable way to phrase it might be to point out the obvious -- that your "good" and my "good" almost certainly do not align 100%, and in fact may not even intersect.

One always has to take pains to preface these sorts of blanket statements with the usual "not all" disclaimer, and of course this applies here as well. But clearly a critical mass of people would rather engage perpetually in a dance of debt with instant gratification and gluttonous consumerism, than take even an afternoon to consider their various choices and make even slight reductions.

I hold no brief for the likes of Exxon. I make no excuses for their sociopathic indifference to the planet they despoil, and the people who eke out a living on it. But like the shitty corporate both-sider media, like the shitty corporate-owned oligarchic governance paradigm, they have identified an active consumer market and cultivated it well. Enough people have made a decision to consume the product, and devil take the hindmost.

It doesn't matter if climate change is a hoax or not, if you can't get enough people to give a shit -- and I don't mean heading over to the be-in for an afternoon, but making modest but necessary changes to consumption patterns. They won't until the planet breaks a fat one off in their asses.

Rapacious resource extractors and plutocratic insurgents have been a problem since probably not long after our Mesopotamian forerunners stockpiled the first agricultural surplus. But that problem has always been contingent on lulling just enough of the peons into a permanent state of disequilibrium, of identifying that magic number of doofuses necessary to leverage, and exploiting that subset to the maximum. We are finding out in so many ways that a committed -- or even a collectively disinterested -- minority is more useful and malleable than a dispersed majority. Look around you, and understand that the US is currently in the part between the "before" and "after" photos of a collapse.

That's one thing they didn't bother to tell you when you were in school -- unless you manage to secure enough money and/or power to insulate yourself from the dumbest third of your average classroom, you will always be at their mercy, one way or another.

Old King Coal

It's good to see that at least some of the coal miners that Trump catered to bullshitted in 2016 are seeing the light. Better late than never. Welcome aboard the reality train.

What's important for them to understand is that coal employment has not declined because of inconvenient environmental regulations (as if the people who, you know, live in those areas should either go in pocket to move or wait to die young of cancer), it's because of rapidly dropping EROEI (energy returned on energy invested). Because "mining" is now more blowing tops of mountains and excavating the giant hole, rather than sending hundreds of doughty dwarves and their lanterns and pickaxes and lusty "Heigh-ho" shanties into narrow shafts [giggity]. It's simply not as labor-intensive as it was back in the day, even twenty or thirty years ago. It takes fewer work-hours to produce the same amount of coal. More than twice as many people work for Best Buy than in the entire coal industry.

Fracking and low oil prices took care of the rest of it. Natural gas and oil are simply cheaper per workforce unit to procure. As with most things, once you start looking closer at them, it's not politics, it's math.

That's why it's really important for these folks in Kentucky and West Virginia and Pennsylvania to really think clearly about whom Trump was actually talking to, when he was reaching out to the coal industry. He was not talking to the workers; he was talking to the owners, telling them he would stand aside while they busted their own industry out -- letting them pollute to their hearts' content, take profits, declare bankruptcy, and leave the workers jobless and empty-handed.

What a coincidence that West Virginia's governor, the Pynchonesquely-named Jim Justice, is a billionaire who's profited mightily from Dear Leader's gutted enviro policies, while simultaneously cashing in on "distress" loans that will never be paid back, and screwing over the workers all at the same time. Pretty neat trick. These companies literally ripped these workers off for thousands of dollars each at Christmastime. That's who we're talking about here, people for whom Monty Burns is a rather weak role model. That's who Trump was really talking to when he made his appeals to coal country.

There are always going to be a few who won't get the picture right up to the moment they get pink-slipped and hosed out of their severance pay. I don't what you can tell them or do for them; they have resolved to ignore common sense and a clear pattern of empirical data. They'll die younger than they should, in more pain than they should be, and angry at the climate change "hoax" that took their dream job away.

The path to the Green New Deal -- and to getting coal workers' support for it -- is this:  subsidize the fossil-fuel companies to switch over to manufacturing renewables -- solar panels, windmills and armatures, etc. It will not be easy and it will not be pretty -- oil companies in particular long ago got used to steamrolling their way through things by showering decision-makers with cash and/or women, and then laundering the profits.

But it can be done. These guys may not want to "learn to code," and frankly, even of they did and could, you wouldn't want all of them to do the same thing in the first place. But if you pitched it to them that they could be making the same amount of money working above ground, either in a manufacturing warehouse or outdoors installing, instead of breathing filth in a back-breaking hole and dying before the age of sixty, and leave a cleaner planet for their kids and grandkids, well, they just might listen to that.

The thing they really need to take seriously is that ultimately their "way of life" is not going to be around much longer, again for economic and productivity reasons much more than because of regulations. That's just a fact, and the sooner they start preparing themselves for that eventuality, the better off they'll be. And if not, the outcome will be the same regardless, just on a slightly different schedule.

Ruthless

We all knew the day was coming, we just didn't know when. The only surprise is that it wasn't, you know, on Election Day or something like that.

Hell, it could have been a week after Election Day, and Moscow Mitch and his little dog Leningrad Lindsey would have bulled through a lame-duck appointment of whatever forty-year-old FedSoc shithead they were instructed to.

The nihilist side of me wants it to happen, wants this whole rotted husk of a nation to find out the hard way what happens not just when Roe is repealed, but voting rights, employee rights, fucking Griswold gets overturned.

As repulsive as the pelf-grubbing Republicons and their moron base and the psychotic billionaires who rent them are, I reserve the greater measure of my contempt for the Democratic voters who couldn't be bothered to show up for the 2010 and 2014 midterms. Forty-one percent turnout in 2010, just over thirty-six percent in 2014.

If you are one of the folks that couldn't be bothered to show up for those votes, but now, now you're concerned, I cordially invite you to go fuck yourself in the neck with a rusty chainsaw. Because you're one of the ones to blame.

Liberals and Democrats talk a good game about "taking action" and all, and inevitably it becomes some lame, meaningless, purely performative street-protest bullshit. People have been protesting all over the country, all summer long, and they have nothing to show for it. Feel free to prove me wrong, show me some tangible outcomes from all that good trouble.

Now, if you want to take some real action and maybe have a sliver of hope to accomplish something, figure out how much money you have to spare, and go here and donate to as many Senate campaigns as you can. I'm going to donate $25-100 to each of the following:

• Sara Gideon (ME)
• Jaime Harrison (SC)
• Mark Kelly (AZ)
• Cal Cunningham (NC)
• Theresa Greenfield (IA)
  
• Steve Bullock (MT)
• Jon Ossoff (GA-1)
  
• Barbara Bollier (KS)
  
• Al Scott (AK)
• Amy McGrath (KY)

I wish I had more to donate. I wish candidates like Abby Broyles (OK) and M.J. Hegar (TX) had more of a fighting chance, because Jim Inhofe and John Cornyn are two of the biggest gaping assholes on the planet, not just in the Senate. But it is, as they say far too often, what it is, and unfortunately it becomes a self-reinforcing dynamic of putting the money where it's going to be most effective -- races that are closer precisely because people have been donating more money to them.

But I think seven or maybe eight of the ten candidates listed above have decent-to-strong chances of winning their respective races, and that's enough to flip the Senate back to a solid Democratic majority. Even five would be enough to do the trick.

And then they have to act, decisively and aggressively, with the fundamental understanding that even in the instance of a blowout victory, this is their last best chance to punish the traitors across the aisle, people who sold out their country for a bag of nickels. No more "norms" or "rules" or polite suggestions about how things should be, but a cold recognition of how they are, what they've become.

Pack the court, blow up the filibuster, ram through as many judges as possible, dig up every punitive procedure you can muster and ram them straight up the GOP's collective poop-chute, no lube, no mercy, no pretenses of collegiality. This is war, and if Democratic leadership is not prepared to lead it and fight it as such, they too can find honest work. Enough dithering and hand-wringing. Fight hard or fuck off already.

Churchill famously said that when you're going through hell, keep going, and so we should and must, if we want to leave anything of value behind for our children and grandchildren. But with that comes, once again, the need to see things for how they really are, rather than how we think they should be. It might be a blowout in the other direction. It might end up close enough to cheat and steal and weasel their way through to an illegitimate victory, but one that nonetheless carries with it the very real trappings of power.

And then you know, without any doubt or uncertainty, how things really are. If there really are enough people who don't care, or can't be bothered to show up -- or there really are as many or more of them than there are of us -- well, now you know.

And you should plan accordingly. Until then, you should expect more of yourselves, more of your fellow citizens, more of the people you send to DC to represent you. No more bullshit, no more excuses.

Give till it hurts. Make sure you can vote, and then show up and do so. Don't worry about the goons and closet-cases with their Dear Leader swag and flapping gums. They can yammer all they want, but they can't physically prevent you from walking through that door and casting your lot.

And then you can at least say you did what you could. And get your documentation in order, because you might find yourself with a sudden need to vacate the Republic of Gilead. Look around you, and see if you can tell yourself that I'm exaggerating even a little bit.

Turd Mentality

Come 2030, only the rats will be happy. -- Stephen King, 1922

The Holocaust is not only history, but warning. -- Timothy Snyder, Black Earth

One hears the clatter, as the corporate media valiantly attempt to revert to their natural horse-race stasis, about the elusive "shy" Trump voter, that numinous unicorn of frustrated pollsters and halfwit pen-jockeys. This is the person who, when contacted by pollsters, supposedly claims as independent -- or even, amazingly, undecided.

I just can't decide between the kindly, ancient lifelong corporatist, or the burbling lunatic avatar of full-throated white supremacy. Neither campaign has sufficiently marketed itself to my delicate sensibilities.

Considering that the median Trump voter has, in its practically infinite guises -- construction worker, harried soccer mom, fist-shaking codger at Wichita Stuckey's -- embodied one common trait, that of incoherent yet sanctimonious fury, it beggars belief that there is an abundant cohort of like-minded individuals who just don't want to confess their devotion anonymously over the phone for fifteen seconds.

Perhaps the "shy" one, like the elusive sasquatch, exists but quietly, secretly, perpetually crouched in a furtive state, appearing only rarely and at random to adorn the fuzzy freeze-frames of hooch-addled mountaineers -- not to mention the credulous rubes of the aforementioned corporate media, very nearly as duped as the noise-addled rage-monkeys they so dutifully chronicle.

Never mind; the ultimate point of such leprechaun-hunting is really to keep it close, keep those ad buy rates as high as possible. Money is the blood of such things, and every campaign season is a newer iteration of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Between greed, laziness, and an unshakable institutional impulse to keep Democrats on a hook while letting their opponents' worst excesses go lightly covered, the practical outcome is to keep liberals and Democrats (to the extent that those actually overlap) always on their heels, always unable to push forward with any real force and/or clarity that might undermine the ongoing plutocratic insurgency -- which, after all, underwrites the entire tedious theatrical exercise.

If there is such a thing as a "shy" Trumpkin, maybe the reason they're keeping it quiet is because they know what they are and what they support, and the secret they're really hiding is that they're embarrassed of it. Which they should have been a couple years ago at most. Maybe they just don't want their friends to know what they are.

I doubt it. I know which of my friends and relatives still support him, we just don't talk about that anymore. It's actually pretty easy to shut down -- once they start bringing up the perfidy of the libturd media argle-bargle, all you have to do is respond, "You don't need to watch the media. All you need to do is watch him unedited, unabridged, unexpurgated on YouTube. There are hundreds of videos to choose from. Pick one at random. Make it interesting with a bottle of liquor. Drink every time he says something stupid and/or untrue. You'll be dead of alcohol poisoning by the twenty-minute mark."

You'd be surprised -- or perhaps you wouldn't -- at how quickly they change the subject, or at least the idiotic "fake news" tack of their dead-horse excuse for an argument.

A functional "opposition" media would be ringing Noel Casler's phone off the fucking hook. Aside from a People (of all things) article a couple years ago, I'm unaware of any major media entity that has talked to him. Certainly not CNN or MSNBC or the networks, these supposedly nefarious, scurrilous bastards who take any and every opportunity to crucify Orange Jebus every chance they get with their entirely made-up attacks.

You can't even chalk that version of institutional cowardice up to the marketplace. Are you fucking kidding? Casler @'s every single one of his targets, every time. Any responsible journamalist would at least run down the allegations, which are numerous and colorful -- and true.

The people that we're friends with or related to are generally not a uniform bunch, unless you grew up in a highly insular, conformist community. But most of us have some sort of balance of these various people in our lives. And we bond with them over different things -- music, cars, food, and occasionally politics is a conversational spice in all that, but generally not a qualifying factor or a disqualifying one.

A reasonable rule of thumb might be that the degree to which someone is eager to befriend or defriend someone for purely political reasons is likely to be directly proportional to your own depth of political fervor. Either that or the other person has become such an insufferable pain in the ass, they don't talk about anything else anymore, which is just exhausting these days. Looks like the ol' #TrumpPlague showed up just in time, eh?

I think what we're finding is that we've always been able to "agree to disagree" over usual, normal differences of policy preferences:  taxes, guns, education, blondes vs. brunettes, etc. And now those days are gone and we're not quite sure how to handle an increasingly volatile impasse.

But what you find when you read these countless anecdotes about people who "just can't even" anymore with their elderly parents, their co-workers, their Fakebook friends, whatever -- it's not really the political specifics that drives the problem. It's that people who live in different realities don't really have all that much to talk about anymore.

I mean, there are some basic principles in the mix as well -- for example, I happen to think rather strongly that the chief executive of this country ought not to be a rapist, an boastful pervert, a shameless asshole, a pathological liar, and/or a clownish moron. These would be foundational for me even if things were going well, though I could certainly be flexible on those ideals if, for example, such a person also managed to resolve some or all of the many dire crises facing this hollowed-out husk of a nation.

But they're not going well, and a big part of that is because of all those vile traits. By way of contrast, one could also be at least somewhat forgiving of current circumstances if said chief executive were kind, honest, intelligent, empathetic, strategic, and made even a modest good-faith effort at resolving some of these crises. But as we're seeing, character really is destiny. It does matter.

And we can tell ourselves it's just because we're all too polarized or propagandized or whatever, but the daily ingestion of this garbage political culture we're all immersed in has this as yet another in a long list of consequences. The contradictions have heightened, and it turns out that how you view all these polarizing events that tumble through our collective view every day or so clarify how you view the world in general, what's "real" and what isn't.

I don't know what to make of someone who sees Trump as competent or qualified for any job. His behavior would have gotten him fired from mop-up duty at a porn theater by now. More seriously, try to imagine a single company anywhere -- even a company that publicly slobbers over him -- giving him any sort of real job.

I'm not bullshitting here. Here's a challenge to consider:  that My Pillow asshole, Lindell? If Trump loses the election, I fuckin' dare that chump to give Trump any sort of actual job duty, anywhere in his company -- production, shipping, sales, accounting, finance. Anything. I defy the most Trump-eyed pelf-grubber out there to put their filthy money where their mouths are, and offer him an actual job that creates measurable value for that company.

It won't happen because Trump is a doddering, worthless piece of shit who's never been good at anything except stealing and lying, and his billionaire butt-buddies are slightly more adept turds of a feather. Lying and hypocrisy are their real currencies. The only thing Mike Lindell or Stan Kroenke or Charles Koch or any of these greedy bastards care about is having more, and you having less.

So of course they love Fat Donnie. But even if he were twenty or forty years younger, they'd never give him any sort of real job, one that involved work. At most they'd cut him a check to do a promo commercial for them. But again, I mean actual fucking work, something that takes skill, focus, ability. Something more than just delegating to minions.

And that reflects a certain way I view the world, and my expectations of the other people who share it. I don't know what to make of someone who saw any of Tuesday's clown hall event with George Snuffleupagus, and came away thinking we're in good hands. I don't know what to make of someone who is so brain-damaged that after five years of watching Trump's incessant prattling bullshit, they still think he's qualified to pick his own drug-decayed nose.

I do know that there aren't any more arguments or debates to be had.

Yes Please

Get a load of this fuckin' maroon:

So, I don't know who gets to break the bad news to the Commander o' Books, but even in a severe economic contraction, the People's Republic still accounts for almost fifteen percent of US GDP (last page of PDF in the link).

One in eight Americans live here in Cali, and we all get to sit back and watch, year after blessed year, as our tax dollars get siphoned away to keep the lights on in the parasite taker states, out there in Real 'murka.

Meanwhile, every year in the Golden State becomes more and more precarious, as more people keep coming in and our crumbling infrastructure gives way, in the face of climate change. Heat waves, wildfires, and rolling power outages all summer, followed by torrential rains and flash floods in the winter, and clean-up in the spring.

I wonder if some of that money we never get back from those fat cats in DC, our tax dollars that they use to keep the countless versions of Opioid Flats barely afloat, could be used here to shore up our own issues? I sure wouldn't mind finding out, and then Doctor Prepper there could take up the slack by showing the yokels how to build a smokehouse for curing roadkill, and filtering urine for drinking water. You know? Maybe if we weren't forced to prop up most of the south and midwest, we godless hedonistic sybarites might be able to keep our lights on and our heads above the rising water.

I've always had a bit of a grudging fascination with prepper culture, seriously. Perhaps it's the romanticized notion of living that rugged, contemplative, Grizzly-Adams-meets-Thoreau lifestyle of self-reliance that appeals to the Stoic gene. To be in the world but not of it, to watch the corrupt "civilized" world burn itself down while remaining safely out of the radius of effects is something that obviously appeals to people across a wide political and philosophical spectrum.

It's interesting, though, to note just how quickly all that went right out the window when the plague hit. These guys spend their whole lives supposedly training and preparing for that dystopian SHTF moment that fuels their lifestyle, and within weeks, boy, they were out in full force wailing about haircuts.

Where the hell do these people think all the toys they take for granted came from? The internet where they trade their dopey conspiracy theories and stupid ideas, the Twitter app where they heckle and jeer, the computers that they use to write and market their prepper books? That shit wasn't invented and developed out in Cooter's Huntin' Lodge, friendo, between rounds of moonshinin' and cousin-fuckin'. That was all college-edumacated elite types out here in the wild west.

I mean, is this guy kidding or what? I couldn't put a number on it with any precision, but I personally know more than a few native Californians who would be fine with breaking away. I sure as hell wouldn't mind. I resent being forced to support people who do nothing but talk shit about my state and the people in it. I would prefer if they just took their fucking welfare check, said "thank you," and went on about their goddamned way. But they won't. They never shut the hell up.

We grow every kind of crop here. We make every kind of product here. We're the fifth- or sixth-largest economy on the fuckin' planet, hoss. You need us, not the other way around. Don't kid yourself.

You want to pay off the national debt, start by demanding reparations from the Republicon Party and their billionaire tax cuts. Check the pockets on Grampa Walnuts' suit, and his family of grifters and ghouls. The fucking balls on these chumps, I swear to Christ.

They couldn't care less about the debt or deficit or any of it, until the Democrats control the gubmint, then they're all about the fiscal prudence. The sooner we just write these idiots off, omit them entirely from all serious policy discussions, and leave them to their masturbatory Red Dawn fantasies, the better off we'll all be -- even them.

Slope of Enlightenment

It would be difficult to put a number on just how many collective hours and column inches have been dedicated to assessing the various and sundry cognitive failings of one Jenius Q. Dealmaker, Fuckface in Charge, and Caudillo of Bedminster, First of His Name.

Clinical diagnoses abound:  the narcissistic personality disorder; oppositional defiance disorder; sociopathy; psychopathy; and on and on. And of course the ever-popular Dunning-Kruger effect, where stupid people are unaware of just how stupid they really are.

Certainly all of those ugly pathologies and more explain the smooth, diseased wad of oatmeal between his ears. But the armchair diagnoses give short shrift to the more immediate pathology at hand:

You, America. Fuck you.

Well, maybe not you personally, maybe not me personally. But take a week or several and make a partial list of all the fucked-up things El Caudillo has done and said over the past five years, and then remind yourself that once again, over forty percent of your fellow 'murkins are fine with it. They want more of it. They want you to have more of it.

Do they sound like the sort of people who can be reasoned with, who can be "met" in some proverbial "middle"? What is the middle on, say, Russia paying bounties to Islamic terrorists for American scalps? What would be the middle on defunding Social Security and Medicare? What is this middle people speak of, as applied to gassing suburban moms and kicking unarmed teenagers in the face, blinding journalists, extrajudicial domestic renditioning for civil disobedience?

That's just a few random items from the past six weeks or so. You know? A full reckoning would be damn near impossible.

The "middle" of a hog-shit lagoon still stinks of filth and disease. The "middle" of hell is still pretty fucking warm. Meeting Jeffrey Dahmer "in the middle" still results in someone ending up in the cooking pot.

Maybe I'm not being clear about this.

Every elected politician, no matter how "good" or "terrible," no matter how "smart" or "stupid," is a reasonably accurate reflection of their constituency. This is a truism that gets ignored all too often, especially by "moderate" or "conservative" Democratic politicians, who are forever trying to convince themselves, each other, and their donors, that "tacking right" on this or that petty social issue is better and more effective than, say, coming down unequivocally for something approaching economic justice for the rabble.

The reason Moscow Mitch and Leningrad Lindsey keep winning, even as they gleefully cut their constituents' throats and sell them down the river at every opportunity, is not because they're great guys doing a great job. It's because there are enough assholes who would rather undermine themselves and their families and communities, watching the exercise of raw power, than risk the chance of giving even one dollar to someone who they deemed undeserving. They would rather spend the rest of their lives wallowing in a pit of impotent bitterness and rage, than come to their senses and admit -- even just to themselves -- that they got rooked by a cheap, obvious con.

So El Caudillo's various cognitive pathologies and biases are also theirs, most acutely the aforementioned Dunning-Kruger effect. In an era where information is free and everywhere, if you are reasonably literate, then being an ignorant dupe is a choice.

You choose to watch the white-power rage-monkeys on Fox News, instead of reading an article -- or god forbid, a fucking book. You choose to forward the nonsense your idiot Facebook uncle sends you, without fact-checking a lick of it. You choose to chortle and snicker at His Travesty's increasingly desperate tweaks of an increasingly useless White House journamalists' pool, knowing that he's full of shit, knowing that you would never buy so much as a canned ham from this grotesque charlatan, much less a car or a house or health insurance coverage.

It's not just that "he's a dumb guy's idea of a smart guy," or "a poor person's idea of a rich person." His fans have that exact same vision of themselves. They decided long ago that they were much smarter than the average bear, so much so that they could decide for themselves what was "real" and what wasn't, who was telling the "truth" and who wasn't. They decided that the only person they could believe was a guy who's been telling provable lies his entire life, defying everyone to call him a fucking liar.

And now that we're chugging into a full-blown economic depression, a quarter-million dead by the end of the year, forty million already out of work, people waiting in line and online for basic goods, they're now distracting each other with some harebrained conspiracy theory about how everyone in Hollyweird is a SEX PREEVERT YOU GUYS WON'T YOU LISTEN?!

In their bizarro universe, celebrities such as Chris Cornell and Anthony Bourdain were "suicided" because they were on the verge of revealing this hidden truth. In that universe the Democrats, partly to protect their fellow child molesters but also just because they're assholes, have rigged this whole "plandemic," which will magically end on November 4th when Joseph "Satan" Biden is installed as the new antichrist. [cue Omen music]

It doesn't matter to them that there is far more photo and video evidence of Dear Leader palling around with Jeffrey Epstein (who was suicided) and Ghislaine Maxwell, or that Epstein literally lived next door to the rat-infested CoronaLago estate for years. They would rather believe that a pizza place that has no basement was running a child-trafficking ring out of its basement.

It takes a peculiar magnitude of cognitive bias to believe that on the one hand, the Dummycrats are too weak and impotent to electorally beat an obnoxious moron, while being simultaneously so omnipotent that they have forced the entire corporate media system and every other world leader to bend to their plandemic hoax. These idiots make 9/11 truthers look like the model of sanity and empirical probity.

They manage to get by in their little bubble, aided by an endless parade of self-loathing journos and politicians who cater to their "real 'murkin" pretensions. They're just as naked as their emperor has always been, long before he got into politics, and they're about to find out that there is an empirical reality, that this is not a simulation, that whether or not their monster manages to cheat and steal its way back in, a hard rain is gonna fall, and they better learn to swim.

Economic Anxiety

I parked my truck and sat in the gallery during the morning session of the legislature. I watched the regard with which Bobby Earl was treated by many of his peers, the warm handshakes, the pats on the arm and shoulder, the expression of gentlemanly goodwill by men who should have known better. It reminded me of the deference sometimes shown to a small-town poolroom bully or redneck police chief. The people around him well know his hatred, of Jews, intellectuals, news people, Asians, blacks; no one doubts his potential with the leaded baton or the hobnailed boot across the neck. But they make friends with the ape in their midst, no matter how violently the tuning fork vibrates inside them; consequently they absorb his dark powers, and secretly gloat at the fear he inspires in others. -- James Lee Burke, A Stained White Radiance

An interesting twist on the so-called George Floyd protests (as if all that pent rage could be attributed in even a moderate portion to one tragic event, but when the camel's back breaks, only the final straw gets remembered, not the bales that were already weighing down the poor beast) is how the long-running effort to tear down monuments to traitors and enemy combatants has kicked back into gear, as well as the desire to remove the 'murkin swastika (aka the stars 'n' bars flag) from the respectable areas of public life.

Confederate memorabilia, like that of the Nazis, becomes "interesting" in the way villains tend to be in a standard fictional narrative. It's only when you sit down for a while and read, say, Elie Wiesel's Night trilogy, or Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad, that the "romantic" trappings of the doomed cause fall away, and you quietly affirm the understanding that these "causes" were not lost in some tragic sense, but fully evil in every respect, and do not deserve to be preserved, except perhaps as museum curios.

Certainly the commemoration of such vile enterprises should be recognized for what they are, and not hidden behind some bullshit lie about "history" or "heritage." A heritage of owning human beings and forcing them under threat of torture and murder to labor for free is nothing to be proud of.

Even in Northern California, one occasionally sees a confederate rag. I don't sweat it -- I appreciate the advance notice that an asshole (and probably several pit bulls and a meth lab) is within fifty yards of the damned thing. I do appreciate this mild twist to the usual Cletus safari, though, and how in the context of the article, we manage to meet at least three identifiable phyla in the taxonomy of the aggrieved southern cracker -- rednecks, peckerwoods, and coonasses. It's a shitbird trifecta, y'all!

It doesn't matter what I think about these folks, to the extent I would think of them at all. They've shown us what they are. There's nothing to debate with them, no discussion to be had. The only thing that matters, to the extent that it actually matters, is that it's a reminder that Heraclitus knew a thing or two, that character really is destiny, and people reap what they sow eventually.

Sometimes that harvest is in the daily tedium of a mediocre life spent watching people drive in circles for several hours, or slinging bumper stickers supporting a treasonous chief executive.

Sometimes that's punishment enough. It's not like there's anything to boycott there.