Notes and Errata

Hadn't planned to post anything before the new year, but there were a few interesting things to clear off my Firefox tabs:

Just Above Sunset has an interesting rundown of a possible impending schism among evilangelicals. All I can add is that I hope he's right, and that we should all be rooting for injuries. I don't want to hear any wishy-washy bullshit about "crises of faith" or any of that nonsense -- either they're on board with this fucking monster, or they understand that he's simply using their faith for his own ends. Like, you know, Saaayyyyy-tn (ay-tn ay-tn ay-tn)?

They can lie to themselves and each other all they want, the rest of us aren't having any of it. The choice before them is simple and clear:  follow Jesus or follow Trump. There is no way to do both, and they know it, no matter how much they try to deny it. Grind their hateful bullshit out of politics for good, and then make the shitbag megachurch grifters pay their fucking taxes. Hell, make them pay back taxes. If they own a Gulfstream, they can throw a few shekels to the least among us, like that one guy said a long time ago.

I really don't think a word exists in the English language to describe just how very much I despise the televangelist scum, and I'm not terribly fond of the willing dupes who listen to them either. They're not beneath contempt, they are worth every dram of pure contempt you can spare. The next time they start living the teachings of Jesus will be the first time.

***

When I first heard about the now-notorious Olivia Nuzzi profile of Judy Ghouliani in New York magazine, the initial reaction was a predictable, Christ, when will these morons stop giving this traitor a national soapbox? But Nuzzi is a sharp writer, and her details on this doddering boozehound are devastating. As always, if there's any good to be found in this endless hogshit-lagoon of corruption, it's that competent, ethical people long ago saw Trump for what he was, and so all but the most craven and opportunistic of slimeballs have declined to be his bagmen.

And it's not a joke or an exaggeration:  Rudolph William Giuliani is as close to the conventional definition of a traitor as you are likely to find outside #MoscowMitch or #LeningradLindsey. Giuliani is a disgusting, utterly amoral dirtbag who is openly undermining this country's national security interests, to line his own pockets and to distribute propaganda. Journalists need to start treating him accordingly, instead of just inviting him on to take a huge dump on their studio carpet, and then spend the next several episodes smearing it into the carpet while trying to clean it up.

***

Finally, here's another interesting New York profile, this one a photo essay on the growing number of white nationalist crews popping up all over the country. It's an interesting read, although it tends to be underpinned with the false assumptions about "blue states" or states outside the south and Jesusland. I don't know why journos tend (or pretend) to cling to that mythology; pretty much everyone in the country knows already that exurban America, no matter what state, is culturally very different than in the cities.

This is driven very heavily by the reversals of fortune that those areas have suffered since, well, Saint Reagan deregulated everything. Financial crooks, freed from the constraints of borders and accountability, financialized every little thing, sold junk bonds over it, outsourced the manufacturing to some child-labor craphole, and turned around and sold the goods to a generation of unemployed dopes who blamed Meskins for their lives of futility.

It's not difficult to piece together if you just follow the bouncing ball, but for some folks it's easier apparently to commiserate with fellow dropouts, and maybe run a fake Touched by a Predator sting if you're really bored. I'll be damned if I know what you do with these people; their job prospects are limited, what with their bad attitudes, ninth-grade educations, prison records, and um, swastika tattoos. But while there is a component of "economic anxiety" that plays a causal role in all this, the bottom line is that these are just not good people.

I would support a gubmint "gang rehab" type program to help them complete or extend their education, get them competitive in the job market, remove the gang tattoos, and whatever else they might need to get straight. But I bet fewer than half would do it. I don't worry too much about these guys as far as large-scale mayhem; the numbers really don't seem to be there. But that doesn't mean we should ignore them either. It doesn't take that many to become a real problem. They're not ankle-biters, they're smart, organized, and genuinely dangerous.

Treason's Greetings

Even if you're a filthy atheist like me, it's easy to recognize some of the ideals Christmas stands for, or at least should represent:  charity; humility; compassion; the momentary contemplation of the idea that even the lowliest of people may turn out to be something special after all; that humans, individually and collectively, harbor within themselves an ineffable goodness, even if they have to be reminded of it once in a while.

An illegal immigrant couple, with a pregnant wife who has a really hinky story about how she got that way, sneak into an empire run by a mad king, and have their anchor baby. It's a story that should have extra resonance these days, at least to a population that wasn't already hopelessly desensitized by daily depredations, and Amazon commercials every thirty seconds exhorting them for the love of Christ almighty to fucking buy something and now.

Obviously, when someone bestows a gift on someone else, the gesture and the gift say something about the giver as well as the recipient, and about the nature of the relationship between them. So, for example, when the emperor decrees -- around Christmastime, no less -- that food assistance to the growing numbers of needy and desperate people shall be cut, it sends a message.

Ordinarily you could just say that that message is something along the usual grotesque lines of we don't give a shit, but when you factor in that some of these recipients are children, and many of the recipients live in states where they still loves them some Orange Foolius, that message gets a bit more complicated. Now it becomes something more like at least there might be some libturd out there taking it in the shorts worse than you.

But at least they can say Merry Christmas again without some jackbooted thug dragging them into the street and mercilessly truncheoning them within an inch of their sorry lives. I mean, that's what had been happening before Fat Orange Jesus came along, right? Pretty sure it was in all the papers.

To draw a scene in rather broad strokes, it seems that what passes for 'murkin dumbocracy these days boils down to four basic equations:

1. One citizen = one vote.
2. One dollar = one vote.
3. One acre = one vote.
4. One vote = waste of time.

Everyone falls into at least one group, though there is some overlap between the second and third groups. This is how greedy pelf-snuffling scumbags keep winning, by making sure that somewhere around half of the citizenry stays disgusted and demoralized enough to hang in the fourth group, and then by pitting the second and third groups against the first (most idealistic) group. It's Jay Gould's wicked dream of a hundred years ago writ large -- as long as the rabble are divided against each other, they can't unite sufficiently against the owners.

Filter that through a corporate media that keeps eating itself alive, in a futile attempt to recapture lost revenue, and a population that increasingly prefers to retreat into their epistemic bubbles, and it's become quite simple to maintain control.

I hadn't read King Leopold's Ghost in years, and on the re-read it has additional thematic impact for our current dynamic. The details of the Belgian genocide in the Congo are horrific, but what really hits home is the complicity with which everyone operated, heedlessly, always maintaining what good Christians they were. Locals were bribed or coerced into cooperating as well, committing atrocities on their neighbors in the next village, at the behest of greedy Europeans who paid them in brass rods and trinkets. Most of the journalists of the day preferred to merely chronicle the "achievements" of Leopold and his colonists, rather than discuss the brutalities that underwrote those accomplishments. Same as it ever was, as it's always been.

This may seem to be at odds with our earlier Christmas observation about (most) people being "good," but maybe it's just that "evil" is its own force multiplier. That is, it only takes a relative handful of genuinely rotten souls, with the assistance of their bribed enablers and minions, to subvert a much larger proportion of ordinary decent people. Fear and inertia and passivity do the rest of the heavy lifting.

The "good" news here is that, in this paradise of end-stage capitalism, even seemingly hardcore ideologues and religious fanatics are almost to a person really only and always about the money. Stripped of their true god, they have nothing. All the rest of us lack is the collective will to financially shun them.

As I mention from time to time, all we need to do is consider two seminal names from the lore of non-violent protest:  Rosa Parks and Mahatma Gandhi. The way their stories are conveyed and perpetuated obscure their true impacts, which reveals a great deal about who tells those stories.

For example, when most Americans hear Rosa Parks' name, they might get as far as "that lady who refused to go to the back of the bus." But that's not why you know her name. After Parks was arrested, the boycott of the Montgomery bus system by the black-majority rider base forced the system to change its policies.

Same with Gandhi; his crowning achievement, the one that really got the ball rolling against the British colonialists, was the simple act of leading masses of Indians to the sea, where he showed them how to make their own salt, thus depriving the British of a key source of colonial revenue.

The powers that be want you to believe that the only way you can get anything to change is by taking to the streets. The reality of this is that only two outcomes are possible:

1. You get the shit beaten out of you, whether by counter-protestors or cops.
2. You come out of it unscathed.

Either way, nothing changes. They can wait you out. Eventually you have to go back to work, pay your bills, live your life, get out of the weather. Standing around in a public place with a sign is just that and nothing more. I'm sorry, but that's really the way it is. Unless it motivates a sufficient number of people to take a specific, collective, concentrated set of actions -- something you can do with a social media account -- it won't matter, it'll be forgotten twelve hours after it's done.

We've become conditioned to anticipate the actions of others, whether we agree or disagree with them, and then to apply those assumptions to our own actions. Look at all the hand-wringing among Democratic voters over which candidate they "should" support. Many of them are frustrated because they feel obligated to support Diamond Joe Biden, because as awful as he is, he's been anointed as the most "electable."

[strokes chin thoughtfully] Hmmm, I wonder if the entities who own the media outlets who make these assessments and prognostications might have any vested interest in supporting candidates whose policies are most closely aligned to theirs?

Let me tell you something about "electability":  the person who makes the most people want to vote for them is the one that is the most electable. Crazy, right? Especially in a primary season, the minute you start trying to guess who other people will or should vote for is the minute you start playing a game you just can't win.

I think we'd all be surprised at what might happen if people simply decided who they want to vote for -- not the person they think "can beat" Trump, not the person they think this or that demographic voting bloc will vote for, but the person whose policies and statements most closely connect with what you believe.

I don't care who "black" people will vote for; in fact, I think the assumption that they (or anyone) are a predictive monolithic voting bloc is borderline insulting. And I really don't give a shit who people think the Real 'murka midwest cracker bloc will go for.

Here's a clue: if they voted for it last time, they'll do it again, no matter what it does or says, no matter what sort of class traitor tries to run neck-and-wattle against it. Those folks are getting what they want, and they want more of it. No matter how badly they get trampled by its policies, the rubes now have added incentive to simply not admit to themselves just how badly they fucked up. All I can add to that is that I sincerely wish I could let each and every one of them know that, aside from the headache I get when I hear their jabbering retard emperor open his burger-hole, I'm doing fine. I'm not losing the farm my grandfather built from nothing because of some idiotic trade war.

All those second-guessing games are designed to divide the opposition and muddle their thinking, pit them against each other with clever little diversions designed by soulless cubicle-rats pawning their services to moneyed weasels. Don't overthink it.

So to the extent one can bestow gifts and hopes and wishes upon distant strangers, here they are:

• To the grifters and traitors and abusers actively running and abetting this human centipede of an administration, I sincerely wish them all the very worst things this life has to offer. Use your imagination. They assist with the daily monstrosities and incompetencies, knowing full well the collective effects on actual humans, and they still do not care. Their indifference is vile and inhuman, and they know it. Their worst nightmare is full accountability. I pray it finds them.
• To the fools at large who still support this shitshow, people with nary a pot to piss in nor a window to throw it out of, taking it straight in the ass for the benefit of the aristocracy, I wish for them the gift of reflection and insight, and everything that entails. The politicians they support use them and despise them. They're being hurt much more than the elite libturds they've been trained to hate. They can either stop for a moment and really think about the big picture, or they can continue down the road they're on, and find out the hard way when they're flushed like a handful of used toilet paper.
• To the corporate media, the gift of honesty, though most of them would have no fucking clue what to do with it. So maybe a sense of shame would be a more useful gift.
• To the people who see these things for what they really are, and are rightly despairing because the times have also revealed a disturbingly large percentage of people as willing dupes at best, I wish for them to have peace of mind and patience. Remember that two-thirds of Americans fucking despise Trump and everything he stands for; remember that if the Republicans weren't worried, they wouldn't be retiring in droves and trying to cheat; remember that the kids, whatever their faults, recognize greedy boomers and shady evilangelists for the hypocritical cowards they really are, and will remember their perfidy as the oceans reclaim what's theirs.
• To the non-voters out there, I offer the hope that they reflect for a moment as well, and make a decision that, as much of an exercise in futility as it may seem, it is actually not all that much to ask to take a few minutes to register, and then to actually cast that vote when it's time. I know they make it tough in some places -- but that's why they make it tough, to discourage you from exercising your rights. So just sack up and do it, every time. You might be surprised by what happens. Stop worrying about what other people might or might not do, and just make sure to do it yourself.
• And to the people who are doing it right across the board, voting with ballots and wallets at every opportunity, just keep at it. Keep doing the right thing, simply because it is exactly that. Live your life, while still paying attention, but not getting sucked in too much by the swirling chaos. They win by buying off or demoralizing people's innate sense of justice, that's how The Party gets you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. Once you make the decision for yourself that those things are your own, really all you ever will have in this world that's permanently yours, the rest falls into place. Keep this in mind at all times:  fuck those people. Whatever else, they can't take that away from you.

All of that could probably be summed up as simply hoping that everyone gets what they deserve. Whatever your holiday is, celebrate and enjoy. See you in 2020.

The Pope of Staten Island

You want to take down a cult leader, make him (and all churches) pay taxes. You want to take down Cult 45, it's even simpler -- point and laugh at him. Every time.

This is not complicated. It's as plain as the as the tang-coated, adderall-stuffed nose on his fat fucking face. You don't need another interminable psych composite to recognize a narcissistic sociopath when you hear and see one, especially when you can scarcely avoid them for years on end.

The defining characteristic of this honking, soulless turd is his vainglory, and its complete lack of being tethered to reality. It would be one thing if he had some or any skill or core competence. It should be clear to all but the cult that he does not, unless you count incessant lying and losing other people's money.

Where he gets traction is that he recognizes that we are in a time and a society that has little use for facts or empirical data. This allows people with no conscience or character to simply manufacture self-serving lies, or repeat a familiar litany of them that the fan club can sing along to. The sociopath also knows that his honorable opponent will waste time and energy trying to refute the lies, while the sociopath just shrugs and moves on to the next one.

What do I keep saying about knowing your audience? A corollary to that would be if you want to poach market share from a competitor, you should not only know your audience, but your competitor's audience as well.

Shame Spiral

The collapse of empire continues unabated:  Li'l Nero's six-page manifesto, apparently copy-pasted directly from his Twitter feed. Hilarious. Exactly what this country deserves, a place where (among countless other daily signs of sheer wretchedness) kindergartners hold bake sales so their classmates can eat lunch. But hey, at least we can say Merry Christmas again, amirite? We all recall the dark years when people were dragged by the hair into the middle of the street and beaten severely for such things. It was on the internets, so it must be true.

Wait until the actual impeachment vote comes down tomorrow, or someone explains to him that during the impeachment process, the pardon power is suspended. Buckle in for the Christmas rage-tweet-palooza. A bottle of Jameson's would be good to have on hand.

Never let them forget, the politicians and the voters who continue to give their support to this thing:  this is what you support, this doddering, raving, preposterous old man who never earned an honest dollar nor gave a straight answer. Hang it around their necks for all time.

Living on a Thin Line

The main common thread between the UK elections a few days ago, and the US election next year, is simply that both countries -- like all countries -- have sizable groups of people who are either too stubborn or ignorant to listen to common sense, and they don't get it until life and the universe break one off in their asses.

Jacob Bacharach has an interesting analysis of the situation, one that for the most part jibes with my understanding of the dynamic in play. The greatest danger is not that the UK vote translates over completely as a direct repudiation of "leftism" in the US, but that the leaders of the Democratic Party, diffident even when they win, will respond as if it does, and therefore will that interpretation into existence, with the ever-present helper monkeys of the corporate media, of course. No vested interest for them in all this.

There are plenty of great pull quotes, but this stands out:

In this, Labour’s defeat is not just a warning about the dangers of failing to take a stand on a critical national political crisis in an election year, but about the dangers of electoralism itself, about building a movement around casting a vote every few years.

Exactly so. The reason they keep winning and beating us over the head with it is because they are at it day after bloody day. The fight is all they have, and so they have it with a consistency and constancy that can only come from a well-oiled, well-funded machine that knows its audience well and gives it to them by the metric ton. There are no true liberal counterparts to Fox News, the Federalist Society, the multitude of think-tank magazines, or even the NRA, that rail with the vigor and sprawl that all those entities (and more) do.

It's not just that one side "fights dirty" while the other "plays by the rules," so much as one side has a much better sense of mission and direction and focus, and they are prepared to hit it consistently, day after day. It all harks back to the old direct-mail marketing days, and as cheesy and obnoxious as those things were, they were effective. Take those marketing principles and apply them to the internets, and a society that no longer even pretends to care if the marketing claims have any substance at all, and the effectiveness has now been ratcheted up by several orders of magnitude.

Democrats will reflexively say that their diversity is their strength, which is all well and good. But from a marketing standpoint, from the position of someone trying to create a value proposition for their product, it can end up with a message that is crafted simply not to offend anyone. The first rule they tell you, whether you've invented a great new manufactured widget or written a novel, when you have something to sell, you have to ask yourself who is your audience.

Apply that logic to the Democratic platform at large, and to the leading candidates in particular, and then square that with the messages -- the marketing strategies -- each of those entities are using. Now apply it to their counterparts on the other side, whether Trump himself or McConnell or Graham or some back-bench galoot like Louie Gohmert. They're all vile and in many cases completely stupid, but they succeed because they are consistent. They know their audience, and their audience knows them.

I keep saying that every day is a vote, whether you know it or not, whether you agree with it or not. Your ballot may only show up every couple years or so, but your wallet is a daily endorsement of something, whatever it is. And as wealth and social classes, and the parties that putatively represent them, have shifted, so do the marketing strategies.

Brexit would absolutely be catastrophic for most of the British, in a multitude of ways. But they voted for it, and they should get it, good and hard. It's telling that they know how badly they fucked up, the way they keep trying to avoid actually implementing this thing they voted for over three years ago. Maybe it's time they found out and got it out of their system.

And now their health care is going to get privatized, so there's another thing we'll all have in common, a miserable racket that siphons money and sanity out of working people in order to stack it at the feet of a handful of chiselers who already have more than they can ever spend.

I don't think any of the current Democratic candidates have the high negatives that Jeremy Corbyn had -- yet. Don't you worry, whoever gets the nomination will be subject to more deep fakes and outright slander than you can imagine. You thought Hillary had baggage? Wait till they start putting out doctored videos of Biden sundowning, or Warren's voice going super-shrill, or Mayor Pete saying the n-word.

It seems like many liberals and Democrats still wish to cling to the happy fiction that Russia colluded with the evil puppet-masters at Fakebook to bamboozle good hard-workin' Americans to vote against their own rational self-interest. They certainly did engage in such collusion, but that carries with it the implication that if all those bullshit micro-targeted ads hadn't run, these good foke woulda voted the correct way.

I am but a humble messenger, but this is my message -- any candidate who sincerely believes that and strategizes accordingly is doomed. The truth is that, as the prophet John Cougar Mellencamp once sagely pointed out, some people ain't no damned good, and they vote in that fine spirit. They weren't fooled by those fake ads, they were motivated by them.

This is the culmination of the global financial pandemic that I have been talking about in here over the past fifteen years -- wealth hoarding and inequality by a handful of transnational merchant princes. All they care about is hoarding more and more and more, and they will do and say anything to chisel one more goddamned penny. It has only gotten worse, and capital mobility has increased, and so the ever-burgeoning numbers of peons in every country have swelled, even as they have been mercilessly squeezed under the rigors of the data-tracking surveillance state.

Sound like paranoid tinfoil hattery? Okay, all you have to do is look back at all the major transgressions committed by the world central banks -- money laundering for drug cartels and human traffickers, ripping off customers and selling their identities, playing with interest rates to screw over the masses and benefit the wealthy few, with zero accountability -- to see the pattern. There is never any real accountability to be had, maybe an occasional scapegoat to be hauled off to a country-club joint for a short stretch. But the main culprits are still there directing traffic, renting politicians, etc.

Meanwhile there are ever more refugees seeking asylum from war and climate change, and the squeezed peons in the industrialized nations don't want to share the dwindling crumbs. This is why right-wing nationalism is on the rise in so many prosperous nations, as well as rising powers like India, where nearly one in every five humans live now.

People who are trying to gird themselves for 2020 should get a better prescription for their glasses. This is never going to end, not in my lifetime nor yours. The only variable that we can collectively affect is how much worse it will get. You get rid of Trump and take back the Senate and keep the House, you might have a chance to start turning things back toward sanity.

But those are tall odds, and even then you need the right people in those roles who are going to stand up and fight, not pusillanimous fake-idealists who would fight, but you see we have to consider the next election. If you stood them all together in a row, they would mostly stand around and hem and haw, waiting for someone else to take a lead that they could safely follow. The few who are willing to take a risk and speak up, like Elizabeth Warren, are promptly heckled by the ankle-biting corporate media as too strident and shrill.

How will we pay for a write-down of student-loan debt, or stopping climate change? I dunno, how the fuck are we paying for Space Force? You want to take planning tips from the usurers profiteering from student-loan companies, or from the extraction industries who make their nut befouling the planet, go right ahead and see how that works out for you.

As I've mentioned a couple times over the past year, barring some unforeseen change, I will probably be shutting down this blog at the end of next year. I am working on several personal and professional projects that are going to be taking more time in the coming months, and ordinarily I would probably just shut it down at the end of this year.

But there's this weird sense of completion and symmetry that I feel when I decide to run it through 2020. It frequently feels like I've been beating a dead horse for some time; the rotten troll that has infested American public life has sucked all the oxygen not just out of here, but out of popular culture at large. It's sad and pathetic, and underscores what kind of nation we've let ourselves sink to.

Occasionally, however, there seems to be a bit of breath in the old equine after all, and this is still a good outlet for me to test out ideas, see how they look written and fleshed out. And it promises to be an interesting -- probably too interesting, you know -- so there will be plenty to rant about. But in the meantime, it's probably not a terrible idea to take a look at real estate in Ireland and Scotland.

The Handmaid's Trail

You know, maybe if we'd had abortion on demand sixty or seventy years ago or more, we might have avoided having to watch all these ludicrous slapdicks insist on mandating procedures that medically do not exist.

Becker told the newspaper he never researched whether re-implanting an ectopic pregnancy into a woman's uterus was a viable medical procedure before including it in the bill. Sheets declined comment.

"I heard about it over the years," Becker said. “I never questioned it or gave it a lot of thought.”

Well, at least he's honest about his deliberate stupidity. Durrr, I never gave it a lot of thought, I just wrote a fucking law that would force women to have this procedure done, or face a murder charge. Fuckin' jabroni.

Go home and get your fucking shine box, Cooter, manage your burger stand or whatever the fuck you did before leaving the manure pit behind for the bright lights of Columbus, Ohio. Let the adults have a crack at this gubmintin' thing for once. And get your shit together, Ohio. You should be embarrassed.

Stairway to Bevin

The Republicon party is nothing but a huge bag of shit at this point, and few individual logs demonstrate that more clearly than ousted Kintucky gubner Matt Bevin. First Bevin refused to concede the election, then claimed that he lost because Phil Breshear got too many of them urban types to show up and vote. Then he connived with his buddies in the state legislature to stonewall Breshear at every future opportunity. (Note: this is going on in pretty much every state where the governor is a Democrat, but the state lege is Republicon.)

Now, as a final "fuck you" to common decency, Bevin has pardoned some real scumbags:  one raped a nine-year-old girl; one beheaded a co-worker he was having an affair with after she ended the relationship; and the third kicked down his victim's front door and gunned him down in front of his family. That last one got out after his family threw Bevin a $25K fundraiser. Wouldn't at all be surprising if there's a money trail with the others as well.

That's who the fucking Republicons are, period. The party needs to be ended and ground into the manure whence it sprang.

Down the Rabbit Hole

Boy, it sure is strange how quickly it all disappeared -- the odd demise of a fake-billionaire pervert who had cultivated a stable of wealthy and powerful friends/blackmail targets. Weird how the money all seems to interconnect. Peculiar how many high-end Rooskies bought into Fakebook early on, and how key players like Larry Summers are in the loop.

Not that the country was ever really yours, you know, but these fuckers are shamelessly stealing what's left right out in the open, defying you to do anything about it. Dirtbags like Zuckerberg and Summers are in it for the money, the Russians are in it to foment chaos. Between the US and UK, so far Putin is two for two. The thing about disruption is that it's not about "winning" so much as disrupting.

For Bill Barr, an Opus Dei creep with a pervert dad, it's more personal -- he's a true believer who thinks that cleansing the evil world of its perfidious sins involves placing it squarely under the jackboot of a good christian like Donald Fucking Trump.

I use Fakebook these days strictly to keep in touch with family and friends around the country, but it's time to just go through the list, weed out the ones I don't really talk to anymore anyway, and put the rest on my phone contacts list.

Remember that with Fakebook, no matter what they try to tell you, you are not the customer, you're the product. They're Russian malware, operated by a creepy incel shitbag who goes around squid-inking credulous mediots with free-speech claims. It's time to boycott the app, and leave it to the old fuckers who are determined to screw over their children and grandchildren by any means necessary.

Space, Forced

Here's another interesting thread, a bit longer than the last, which I encourage you to check out, as it comes from someone with -- get this -- actual non-partisan expertise in an important technical field.

I am fairly agnostic on the idea of the "Space Force," as it turns out. The idea, as such, is at the very least reasonable, and based on some very long-standing premises, which predate space exploration and even this country:

• Whether we like it or not, whether we agree with it or not, at some point in the future, the arena in question will be explored more thoroughly, weaponized, and militarized.
• The policy of this country -- indeed, of any country with any standing for any significant period of time -- is to at least endeavor to stay as far ahead technologically as one's closest rivals.

So with these principles in mind -- it's going to happen, might as well get out in front of it -- the problem here is not the formation of this new branch of the military. Nor is it that there is no granular detail available as to what it will encompass; after all, there is no reason to show Xi Jinping your hand at any moment before absolutely necessary.

The problem is that it is clear that even the broadest of strokes have not yet been determined or even discussed. Certainly they have not been conveyed, or so much as hinted at. And yet we're already throwing tens or hundreds of billions of dollars at something that appears so far just to be a bunch of cheap swag festooned with some cheesy logo from an Ed Wood movie.

It is not at all a partisan or political assertion to simply point out that right here, right now, there are many other areas in more urgent need of that funding. Sending that ludicrous dunce out to Cooter's Holler every couple weeks to interject "Space Force!" over and over again, between hoots over her emails and such like, add nothing to the mix.

I alternate between wondering what the hell is wrong with the people whose enthusiastic buy-in is predicated on such a sad sales pitch, and wanting to get them on my mailing list so I can fleece them out of their Social Security checks.

It could actually be a good idea, given the right conception, development, and execution. Given the track record of these thieves and their gutless minions, though, it is entirely reasonable to assume that it's all just a boondoggle funneling tax dollars into whatever shady shell corp Fat Daddy and his failchildren have bought the most stock in.

Failure of Imagination

As I cobble together a more extended post for the weekend (or, if you prefer, for the weakened), here's the first of a few Twitter threads that caught my eye (and, per Steven Wright, dragged it for twenty yards).

For those of you who choose not to click on the link, it's basically chronicling the assertion of Commander Combover that daughter-wife Princess Snowflake has, perhaps through her incredible magickal prowess at something-something, "created" more than twice as many jobs as have actually been "created" over the past three years.

While most will simply gawp at the seeming audacity of this ridonkulous "14 million" number, I look at it as a stark shortfall from Genius Q. Dealmaker's usual honking bluster. A real master promoter, you see, would have uncorked some fantabulous billionty-kajillionty type of number. In for a penny, in for a pound, as they say, and in no instance is this principle more true than when neither word ("penny" and "pound") really means a goddamned thing.

These sorts of numbers serve a bizarre purpose anyway. In the past, they would have served as a sort of totem for Inner Party wonks to populate their talking points with, even as they set their thumbs on the numbers judiciously and worked their voodoo to determine what the real numbers were, so that the NYSE/NASDAQ whales would know where to set the limit prices and call their brokers.

Now the numbers are strictly meant as base prole agitprop, as well as a daily distraction/finger to the professional scriveners who, as they sputter and fume once again at the millionth iteration of open, shameless mendacity, must at least be reconsidering their choice of occupation.

Chop Shop

Just what you needed -- another checkdown on the plight of the Stockholm Syndrome corporate mediots. The self-referential version of a Cletus safari, the corporate media's other wonderful contribution to the "discussion."

Look, you morons, it's pretty simple:  if you stop showing up to these useless "yellicopter" stunts, he'll stop doing them. What the reporters, as individuals, and their employers are really afraid of is that if they act on their "principles" and don't show up, everyone else will still show up.

These things add no value to the average American citizen's ability to discern the nuances of policy emanating from this human centipede of an administration, like a stream of wet Family Guy farts following a feast of chili made with roadkill and Old Milwaukee. Like much of what the ragebait media does now, it is worse than useless, it has been outright harmful.

When you look at the valuable examples of media work, for example David Fahrenthold or Natasha Bertrand, you instantly see the enormous qualitative difference between what those two (and a few others like them) are doing, and the useless (funny how much that word crops up, but it's the right word) sound-bite coverage. The latter of the two merely serves as a convenient channel of lies and propaganda, presented as "oh, look at what this doddering rage-monkey said today," as if it was any different than what he said last week or last year.

But functionally it falls under the rubric of the old saw that the lies runs halfway around the world before the truth gets its shoes on. And frankly, he's doing this worthless custom a favor -- White House press conferences have never not been little more than routine agitprop events. Trump and the mutants who work for him cannot help but let you in on the joke.

They hold anyone who questions or doubts them in very deep and cynical -- but completely sincere -- contempt, and this holds exponentially greater for the tedious scriveners who wait on the lawn to have lies screamed at them incoherently. And they make no attempt to hide it. The next step will be to limit Trump's press availability to "executive time" -- that is, he will only allow them to ask questions of them while he's growling out a huge, smelly Filet-O-Fish dump.

I don't feel sorry for them or their viewers and readers. Platitudes and bromides are useful in this context:  People will treat you how you let them treat you. When you expect little out of life and out of yourself, that's generally what you'll get. The only things Trump loves in life are money and the empty adulation of dipshits. And so on. Go back and read some Mencken, and be refreshed by what today turns out to be his rather sunny optimism.

Grampa Walnuts is dumber than a bag of snot, but he knows that the housebroken media monkeys will show up and dance to his tune, every fucking time. It's all they know how to do. It might be time for them to think about what their job really entails. Maybe this isn't what they aspired to do. God, you hope for their sake that they didn't intend to do that for a living, to serve as a collective rage-tampon for a demented criminal's daily rantings.

Not that investigating and uncovering the various nefarious activities of these scumbags is likely to change anything; America is nothing if not a deeply cynical nation, betrayed and bored to death by the mutual ankle-biting of the "elites" that the rabble somehow keep getting tricked into voting for. But what they're doing now comes with an ironclad no-bullshit 1000% absolute guar-on-tee that it will accomplish absolutely nothing. Might push a few more magazines or cheeseburgers or pharmaceuticals, but that's it. There is no scoop to be had in these things. It's a bad cat's litter box.

Trump's right -- it is fake news, in the sense that it's a contrived, cynical event, broadcasting things he says that he, they, and we all know to be untrue. There's nothing real or useful about any of it, and if the reporters had any goddamned self-respect, they'd just walk away and do some real digging. They'd rather stand there for hours in bad weather like a bunch of assholes, waiting for nothing, knowing full well that this evil old bastard is a sadist at heart, that their discomfort gives him a tiny chub.

Tune them out, turn the channel, boycott their sponsors. Withhold your business from all of them, as much as possible. That is the only thing that's going to change this sorry paradigm. Shut them down.

Going Down with the Ship

Navy Secretary Richard Spencer has been fired. Here is his resignation letter. It is pretty much what you would expect, boilerplate from an old hand whose first duties are to the false gods of protocol and decorum. He does ultimately mention that his orders from Trump to reinstate convicted war criminal Eddie Gallagher go against the oath Spencer took to defend and uphold the Constitution. (The same oath that Trump and Gallagher took, by the way.)

One sentence about halfway down stands out for me:  The rule of law is what sets us apart from our adversaries. This is untrue. Every country we have ever fought against had codified laws. What happens with dictators and despots and tyrants is that they bring in lackeys and minions to administer the law. They use henchmen to cow the channels of communication to the public, in order to poison the well from which the populace collectively drinks. And on and on. We all know how the fascist model works.

But the rule of law is there the entire time. The difference is that the despot simply declares that the law means what we say it means, much like a pelf-grubbing evangelist declaring their interpretation of the bible to be the only true reading. He appoints ministers to oversee the law to his preference; he installs judges who have pre-declared their fealty to him. He stacks the deck, and defies anyone to do anything about it.

A good con man understands his marks, knows what they think they need, knows how to diagnose their problems and sell them the snake oil to cure it. He also knows how to spot key players and use them, making them complicit in his crimes. These are Trump's skills, his only ones aside from losing other people's money and never being held accountable.

He knows that his base hate libtards far more than they give a shit about the well-being of the country. He knows that Republican politicians are hopelessly greedy and in thrall to the tax-free evangelical nutjobs. He knows that the pols that aren't on someone's payroll are constrained by "norms" and "rules" and that sort of worthless honor-code bullshit. He knows that military chiefs are bound by codes of duty and honor as well, and are also political players once they reach the ranks of general or admiral (even before then, really).

He knows that Rupert Murdoch's propaganda organs will say and do whatever he wants them to and keep the ignorant rabble in line, because Murdoch is a greedy scumbag who doesn't care about anything but hoarding precious money. He knows that he has an advantage over his opponents, because they insist on playing by the rules, while he is unconstrained by such nonsense.

These things are all assets to the con man. By making them all complicit, they can't turn against him without taking some heat themselves. Perhaps they tell themselves that concepts such as "nation" and "country" are mere abstractions, and therefore betraying is not real, like cheating on your spouse or something. The old saying about how it takes one to lie and one to believe it also holds true.

But the rule of law is there the entire time. Laws and norms and rules only matter when everyone agrees to abide by them, and when there are consequences for violating them.

No one should be surprised by any of this. Trump has been open and consistent in this area, as with all of the other areas where people (mostly idiot reporters and panel-show dickheads) profess to be "shocked" or "concerned" or some such.

But right from the start, on the subject of war, the draft-dodger has been on point from the start:  fuck their heathen religion, plunder their oil as the spoils of war. War crime? You and what army is gonna enforce that?

So of course he pardons a shameless murderer like Eddie Gallagher, whose own platoon, every one of them, turned him in for his crimes. When Trump claims to know more about ISIS than the generals, or have some special insight on warfare that apparently escapes lifetime military professionals, he's shitting on their service and commitment.

He's talked shit about wounded and tortured combat veterans, as well as Gold Star families who have lost their loved ones in combat. Nobody in his family has ever or will ever serve in the military, because that would require real sacrifice and some level of selflessness, two concepts that are utterly alien to him and his scummy, chiseling family.

Not to mention the other two enormous implications of dumping Spencer: the first is obviously that this sends yet another message to the nations we occupy now and in the future that we can do whatever the fuck we want to them, without repercussion; potentially even worse is that the military justice system and the operational chain of command has been openly subverted, sending a message to any miscreants in the service that all they need to do to get out their jam is to get to Pete Hegseth or whichever Foxtard can get on the morning show and make his case for Grampa Walnuts.

Old jokes about "military justice" oxymorons aside, there is a system in place, and if its functions are subverted by a senile autocrat, with no pushback or accountability, what's to stop him from unilaterally thwarting a directive from a federal court or the Supreme Court? Pointing at law books and reciting statutes doesn't work if no one is going to enforce them.

For the thousandth time, you are dealing with someone who has done wrong all his life, and never really faced any consequences for any of it. Someone else always pays his bills. He sure as fuck doesn't pay them, and no one ever makes him. Why should this be any different? All his life, the people who are in positions to tell him no refuse to do that simple thing.

So when military personnel claim to support him, you have to think about what they're really supporting. Same as the women who support him, even though he's an enthusiastic sexual assaulter and serial pervert. They know who and what he really is. People need to get honest with themselves, and stop warbling about how these rubes have been bamboozled by Russian trolls and memes on Fakebook. They know what they're doing. They know what they're supporting. They're good with it. They want more of it.

Dunning-Krugerocracy

Lol, turns out Adam Neumann is somehow a much bigger dirtbag than had previously been known. Can't wait for the next big thinkpiece on how billionaires make the world such a great fucking place. I sincerely hope he reaps everything he's sown, but I also know that shitheads like that almost never do.

At the Movies

Scorsese is one of my favorite directors, although not infallible -- I thought Casino was about an hour too long and a pale follow-up to Goodfellas, couldn't make it through Age of Innocence, and oddly just never got around to seeing The Last Temptation of Christ.

But there was also one other Scorsese movie I had never seen, indeed wasn't really aware of, that apparently is seen as an overlooked classic by those in the know.

After Hours (1985)

(It's a 35-year-old movie, so of course there are spoilers.)

The premise actually sounds kinda promising, in a lighthearted '80s screwball comedy way:  office nebbish (Griffin Dunne) meets cute with a girl (Rosanna Arquette), gets invited to her place, and adventures ensue when he tries to return home. The cast looks promising. Teri Garr! John Heard! Cheech & Chong! Catherine O'Hara! Late '80s/early '90s babe Linda Fiorentino! Even Bronson Pinchot makes a brief appearance.

And it does start off promisingly, with Dunne as a bored office drone who catches Arquette's attention in a coffee shop while he's reading Tropic of Cancer. She gives him her number, he calls her later that night and she invites him over....at 11:30pm. Okay then.

Obviously, the plot of just about every screwball comedy turns on misunderstandings, implausibilities, and coincidences. Usually some combination of one or two larger ones, and maybe two or three smaller ones. Something to drive things along, and the audience just goes with it mostly because there's no movie without it.

But that's all this movie is, is a string of increasingly dumb implausibilities and coincidences. Dunne heads over in a taxi traveling at roughly Mach 1, and decides for some reason to take a $20 bill -- his only money, important plot point here you guys! -- and stick it in an ashtray, with the door window behind his head wide open, in order to suck the bill out of the high-speed taxi. Nutty, right?

Dunne arrives and goes up to the loft, looking for Arquette, instead finds Fiorentino, the goofy "sculptress" roommate hacking out her papier-mâché objets d'fart. Even though Dunne just told Arquette on the phone that he would be there in forty-five minutes, she decided to bail down to the midnight pharmacy, as one does, thus leaving Fiorentino the golden opportunity to come on to Dunne before falling asleep on him.

Arquette returns, decides to take a shower before beginning their "date" (by now it must be around 1:00am or so), which is weird and disastrous, with Arquette talking about being raped for six hours by an ex-boyfriend (again, as one does -- did I mention that these two just met a couple hours prior?). Dunne wisely ditches her and leaves, only to begin his series of wacky misadventures.

And it just gets worse, and stupider. Rather than pick through every thread of the narrative, I'll just drop a few of the remaining low points:

• Dunne finds his way back to Arquette's building only to find out she killed herself. Talk about a bad first date!


• After failing to jump a subway turnstile, Dunne then finds himself at a bar. The bartender offers to give Dunne a couple bucks (uh-huh) so he can catch the subway back home, but goshdarnit, the bar's cash register -- you know, where currency is stored for exchange with paying customers, like in a business -- suddenly won't open, and the only key is -- get this -- back at the bartender's apartment. Probably stashed way up the tight asshole of an erratic pet chimp, or an impenetrable safe with a combination that requires knowing pi to the thirty-second place.


• As assurance that he totally won't burglarize the bartender's apartment, Dunne leaves his own house keys as collateral. Again:  two in the morning in New York City, these people have never fucking met before, they're exchanging house keys so that one of them can spot the other one two dollars. Jesus Christ.


• Just as Dunne is about to leave the bar, Mister Bartender gets a call that his old girlfriend has just killed herself. In order to make sure Dunne and the audience know that it's the same weird broad, Bartender yells her name about a dozen times, Stella! style, while pounding the bar. Of all the bars in the naked city, right? There's a lottery-ticket coinkydink for ya right there, podna.


• Instead of just saying, you know, I can walk a hundred blocks back to my place after all, I don't really need the two dollars that badly, and getting his keys back, Dunne heads for Bartender's apartment all the same. There's wacky comedic misunderstandings, and there's borderline retardation.


• Did I mention that there's been a string of burglaries in the area lately? Reader, there has, and Mister Bartender's up-all-night neighbors are totally watching everyone like hawks, and see Dunne going in and out of the apartment. Keep that one in your back pocket for later. Foreshadowing!


• Let's see, what else? Dunne comes back to the bar only to find the distraught bartender has left for a few minutes (at 3:00am or so by now), so he hangs out with the oddball waitress (Garr) at her place across the street. Then he heads over to the punk club where Fiorentino and her S&M boyfriend are hanging, which makes you wonder who called Mister Bartender so quickly. He hooks up with yet another weirdo (O'Hara), who drives an ice cream truck and decides he's the burglar, which results in a vigilante mob chasing Dunne through the streets of NYC at four in the fucking morning, raiding businesses and apartments to search for him. Probably because the entire NYPD was taken up with getting Suicide Arquette down to the morgue. Who fucking knows?

Oh yeah, Dean Wormer's wife is in this thing too. What an incoherent mess it is. Mystery Science Theater 3000 would have had a field day with this pile of crap. It's tonally all over the place, every character is a complete idiot or an insufferable goofball, and none of it makes any sense. Who writes this shit?

I'm telling you right now that the only thing keeping people from rating this turd lower than Battlefield Earth is that it has Marty Scorsese's name on it. But because it's him, it's a "hidden gem" or whatever. Bullshit. It gargles rhino balls. I was thinking maybe he had some alimony to pay down or something, but apparently he took this project on after Last Temptation got cancelled, and he was pissed and frustrated and needed something to do. It had a budget of $4M and made $10M, so that's something I guess.

Fuck this movie. I want my two hours back. The only thing that didn't suck is that Linda Fiorentino has decent tits, but she only shows them for a few seconds early on, and for no fucking reason.

Grade:  F- (yeah, I know there's no such thing as F+ or F-)

P.S. I'm still looking forward to seeing The Irishman.

Teflon Don

I couldn't have picked a better couple days to stay home sick from work, than yesterday and today, with the impeachment hearings going on in the background. Hoarse Whisperer has been doing a great play-by-play job throughout, so check it out if you're interested in more granular detail, and throw him a few shekels for his effort.

European Union Ambassador Gordon Sondland is currently testifying, and as many live observers are noting, his demeanor is that of a man who is at peace with what he needs to do. He saw how lifelong ratfucker Roger Stone's time finally ran out last week. Stone is looking at fifty (50!) years in Club Fed, a life sentence. Paul Manafort is doing his stretch right now, and will be in his late seventies -- and broke like a muthafuckin' joke) by the time he's released.

Rudy Giuliani is in the midst of a very slow-motion process of being thrown under the proverbial bus. At 75 years of age and currently going through an expensive and messy divorce from Wife #3, Fruity Gee is surely aware that his best days are now and forever truly behind him. Even if he finds a way to weasel out of major trouble, he knows that he will only be accepted by people that he knows are scumbags. That's all he has left. That "America's Mayor" shit is long gone.

So Sondland sees all that and has adjusted his tack accordingly. He's just a standard doofus with way too much money who thought he'd buy his way into the in-crowd. Well, ya got in, Gordo. How's the weather?

Sondland is now dragging Giuliani and Mike Pompeo and Mick Mulvaney and Dear Leader himself into the ever-widening web of implications. Pompeo and Mulvaney have been trying to find a way to jump ship for months, and Gordo just shanked 'em both real good. They're balls-deep in this, and will be lucky if all they lose is their political careers.

I would only add a few "slightly larger picture" details that are being exposed more and more as this process works through:

• Ukraine is not a member of the European Union. So what exactly is Sondland's official role in all this? Why is he the mediator for these surreptitious transactions with a country not in his diplomatic portfolio? Not to mention the fact that Sondland is a certifiable dipshit -- he testifies that he took no notes of any of his conversations (but gee, he wishes he would have), and he literally held a discussion with POTUS out in the open at a restaurant in Ukraine, on an unsecured line, loud enough for everyone within earshot to overhear what Trump was saying. Again, if you wrote this into a spy novel or a James Bond script, you'd be laughed out of the pitch meeting. It's waaayyyyy too stupid to be remotely believable. And yet Gordo cheerfully attests to all that. Winning!
• Rudy Giuliani has no official role in the United States government at all. He is famously (infamously?) working "for free" on Trump's behalf. It should be clear by now why all that is extremely problematic. As cumbersome and tedious as the appointment-confirmation process might be -- especially to a STRAPPING MAN OF ACTION like Dear Leader -- all of this is why you have that process.
  
  Instead, you have a doddering freelancer, working on the direct behalf of another doddering freelancer, rather than that of, you know, the fucking United States of America. So it's not just that POTUS is explicitly using tools of bribery and extortion on a foreign leader to extract concessions that benefit him personally, it's that his pro bono henchman is subverting national security and foreign policy to work his own side-hustle with whichever Ukrainian oligarch-owned gas company wants to come around and do business.
• This is a case study in how the ongoing undermining of the foreign service corps will have national security repercussions for decades. These shitheads chased out all the competent non-partisan personnel, whose expertise is quiet but essential to day-to-day operations and actionable intel, and replaced them with dipshit lackeys, whose only role is to receive and deliver thick envelopes. The lackeys will be gone at some point in the near- to short-term. It will be very difficult, and take years, to round up a new cadre of professionals, and get them trained and deployed. In the meantime, we will have no operational presence to speak of, in many volatile regions. Feel safer now?
• You hate to use tired clichés such as "scratches the surface" or "tip of the iceberg" with this. It will become clearer when (if) the tax returns are made public. Ukraine is just a small example of how American foreign policy has been monetized -- not for the country's benefit, but for Trump and his family. The Saudis are happy to to just funnel money through the failson-in-law, and get whatever they want -- including American military personnel, who now are apparently mercenaries working for a medieval shithole. Turkey certainly gave him some consideration, in return for his abject betrayal of the Kurds, who fought side-by-side with Americans, and are now being mercilessly slaughtered as you read this. The other side of that coin is the shakedown protection racket, which we just tried on the South Koreans yesterday, walking out of "negotiations" per Genius Q. Dealmaker's super-great how-to manual on MAKING THAT DEAL. Instead of having their protection fees quadrupled overnight, the South Koreans opted instead to sign a security agreement -- wait for it -- with China. And so the Asian century continues apace, without us.
  
  But the point is, Ukraine is just one part of the elephant here -- the trunk, the tail, an ear, whatever. There's a lot more to be uncovered, and the inquiry is probably going to have to be limited in time and scope, for various political considerations. I dunno, if only someone had proposed that this process be started MONTHS EARLIER.

Anyway, the real problem here is that the Republican party politicians, and their disgusting, increasingly anti-American base, won't budge for any of this. Again, you could have indisputably real video of Trump literally robbing a bank and shooting everyone in it -- guards, tellers, customers, his fellow robbers -- and they'd find an excuse for it.

All of the above is a problem for the nation, just as a going concern. But the stubborn obstructionism of Republican politicians, too terrified or stupid to simply observe what's in front of them and do what they know is the right thing, that is a clear and imminent danger. And you're never going to undo the brainwashing of the Fox cult, even if you found a way to pull the plug on the network tomorrow. That damage is done.

No More Billionaires

Like any good lawyer or journalist, Martin Longman asks a question he already knows the answer to. The wealthy like Trump just fine, even as they pretend to distance themselves from his vulgar boorishness. But the end result for them is just the same as with Willard Romney or any other bog-standard Republicon:  lower taxes (with the goal of none, at least for them); fewer regulations (ditto); the ability to repatriate overseas profits without (you may detect a pattern here) having to pay taxes on said profits.

Over the years, I've read and studied and listened to more than my share of wealthy, successful people -- not just their carefully scripted public statements and ghost-written manifestos, but the rare moments of candor, as well as their unvarnished backstories. There are some common themes with them, and you don't have to slog through Napoleon Hill's stuff to see those themes.

One of them is a sense of self-regard, the self-reinforcing tautology of I'm rich because I'm smart, and I'm smart because I'm rich, a sentiment entirely devoid of context, obviously. Smart about what? If you've become successful at something, it's a given that you probably know much more than most people about that particular area where you found success. But you may be completely ignorant about a host of other subjects.

The real key to knowledge is not setting out on some foolish quest to "learn" or "know" everything about every subject. It really boils down to being able to prioritize the knowledge that you can apply to your life and business, being aware of the areas of knowledge that you're not strong in, and knowing which resources (human or Google or Wikipedia or whatever) to refer to when you need to access those weaker areas.

This seems obvious, but consider it in context with the sort of wealthy saps who infest the gubmint routinely. What does Donald Trump know about any subject beyond the immediate grasp of his own stubby fingers? He has never shown any interest or knowledge about anything beyond where he can grease the palms of the local aldermen and get another shitbag hotel built.

But the self-reinforcing tautology leads him to think that because he slapped his name on a hotel in Istanbul, he knows everything he needs to know about Turkey's history and geopolitical importance to us and to Russia -- things which even a moron would recognize to be at cross purposes at best, but which Trump, seeing only through his prism of solipsism, understands only in terms of transactions and opportunities that benefit him and his useless progeny.

The other salient factors to success are consistency and ruthlessness, which you can see across the spectrum, from dipshit trust-fund assholes like Trump to Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. Or even that WeWork huckster that just cashed out while shitcanning 2,000 employees -- he had a non-existent product with a bullshit revenue model, but in true Silicon Valley fashion, the whole point of WeWork was simply to get either to the IPO or the buyout. And he got there, by being consistent to the fiction, and by being willing to screw over thousands of people who were working for his success and counting on him to deliver for all of them.

I don't know whether Adam Neumann is "intelligent" or not, in the conventional sense. I do know that, like Trump, his actions serve as a fine example of demonstrating the clear difference between intelligence and mere cunning. Remember "Pharma Bro" Martin Shkreli, who just got denied parole? Yeah, him too, another good example of that difference.

Probably the single largest factor in wealthy people demonstrating some sort of real intelligence is whether the wealth was inherited, built on, or earned outright. Warren Buffett is a good example of this -- while he is clearly not an idiot, his real genius seems to be having a guy like Charlie Munger, who knows how to measure profitable outcomes and capitalize on them, as his silent partner.

A good example of wealth that was "built on" is Koch Industries. Now, Fred Koch was a monstrous human being -- made his nut literally working for Stalin and Hitler, and founded the John Birch Society -- but he achieved some measure of actual success. His sons, who also are scumbags, took over the company and turned it into one of the largest privately-held corporations on the planet. But there was some combination of those three factors -- intelligence, consistency, ruthlessness -- that made the difference, and catapulted the company into the coveted position of being able to skull-fuck the American political system for the past forty years.

Of course, as has historically been the case, the next generation of Kochsuckers is, well, not so adept at the finer arts of bidness acumen. A morally just society would tax a useless doofus like Wyatt Koch at roughly ninety-nine percent, thereby forcing him to earn his keep in some discernible way. He seems to seriously think that "designing" fat-guy shirts adorned with little bags of money counts for something. I would have more respect for him if I had never heard his name, if he had simply bought a two-hundred-foot superyacht and stocked it with unlimited Ketel One and wagyu beef and Russian hookers, and never set foot on land again. That's pretty much what I would have done.

Anyway. So of course the moneybags set loves them some Trump. They just try to keep it on the downlow, because a lot of them still fund and attend rich-guy hobbies like the symphony, or they clink appletinis at the Hamptons houses in the summer. It's all this Great Gatsby shit about putting on a mask for appearances, and eventually forgetting how to take it off.

It would be nice to think that there will eventually be some sort of reckoning, but of course there won't be. In a modern society where all the wealthy people also own all the modes of communication and disinformation, there can't be. The only reason they caught up with Epstein is because he crossed the wrong people, and it was they who caught up with him, not some oppressed peon. In the meantime, the hoarders will simply dump money on whatever scumbag lets them hoard more, and maybe they'll throw a crumb here and there, disguised as philanthropy.

To Serve and Protect

Part #675,976 of "Gee, I Wonder Why Black People Don't Trust Cops," the latest entry in an endless series. Look, there's no question about what the problem is here, and the thing is that both sides of the equation know it.

Cops understand it just as well as civilians do:  while there are jerkoffs and authoritarians and outright racists in every profession, law enforcement is the only profession where such people are given a deadly weapon and the right to use it, and then are institutionally coddled when they indulge in illegal and immoral behavior. Just like politicians, cops routinely get away with behavior that would get you fired from stocking shelves at the Wal-Mart.

The thing to keep in mind is that the leadership levels of the law enforcement profession consider all that a feature, not a bug. It's the domestic equivalent of bombing a wedding or shooting a civilian in a combat zone, and shrugging your shoulders and saying well, whaddaya gonna do? as if there is simply nothing that can ever be done about such incidents, so why even bother trying.

And until you find ways to weed out and discourage that mindset, it will never, ever change.

Let's Get Physical

So Preznit Fat Albert hey-hey-heyyyyed his way over to Walter Reed yesterday to begin "phase one" of what is apparently a multi-phase routine physical (uh, as such things tend to be?).

To be fair though, it probably will take multiple visits to remove the heads of Lindsey Graham, Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, and Matt Gaetz from Fatboy's capacious cloaca. Plus his intravenous mayonnaise feedings may have to be reduced to once a week.

When that fucker finally kicks off, all his homiez will upend forty-dogs of KFC gravy on the sidewalk. I usually don't indulge in gratuitous fat-shaming, but for that worthless asshole, we'll make an exception. Every time you see him in a polo shirt, his gut and his ass look like three hundred pounds of chewed bubble gum.

Born Every Minute

I don't know how the estimable Daniel Dale keeps doing what he's doing, frankly. He must have a masochistic streak a mile wide. The entire thread is interesting enough, if depressing in its tedious repetition of the rank stupidity that has been mainlined into the body politic.

What sticks out is the tweet in the link above where John Fuckface Kennedy, the You Ass Sinadur outta Loozyanna, who is a millionaire lawyer educated at Vanderbilt and Oxford, and has never gotten so much as a callous or a splinter on his hands in his life, goes on a ludicrous tirade about "goat's-milk lattes" and "avocado toast" and such like. Hoo-ee! Boah howdeh theah, thissa pow'ful sweddy wuhk up'a heah dem lites! Lahk ta cuttin' a big ol' hawg in the ass!

I think it would be a fine thing if these good folks showed us coastal elites a thing or two about avocado toast and all that, and went ahead and elected livestock molester Eddie Rispone by a landslide. And when he jams a fat pool cue straight up their collective ass, we'll still be out here eating avocado toast. (For the record, I have never had avocado toast. Once in a great while I'll have a couple bites of guacamole with chips and salsa.) Boy, you really showed us! I bet you're too much of a liberal pussy to jump off that oil refinery tower!

It's impossible to feel any sympathy or even empathy for these chumps, who sit there and fall for this discount Huey Long shit, this rich asshole engaging once again in po'face minstrelsy, shucking and jiving like (as one of the commenters in the link above brilliantly put it) he's spent his adult life selling onions out of the trunk of his car.

Louisiana is one of the poorest states in the country, with sky-high rates of cancer and pollution, dismal quality of life, and on and on. They are perpetually competing with their neighbors in Mississippi and Alabama to see who can scrape the bottom of the barrel the most. You want hucksters like Kennedy and Rispone to keep you on your back, have at it, hoss. Wouldn't dream of talking you out of it.

Same thing with that worthless evilangelical grifter Paula White, a character straight out of The Righteous Gemstones who now helps Trump in his mission to further degrade the office and the nation. I mean, I wish she'd get taxed at a 95% rate, and she should be kept at least five hundred miles from any person of political influence, but as far as the rubes she rooks with her cartoonish "prosperity gospel" grift? They're sheep waiting to be sheared; if White wasn't doing it there's dozens of others waiting for the opportunity.

Fakebook Is Not Your Friend

Zuckerberg Inc. is planning to lease about 1.3 million square feet of space at Hudson Yards, the project that once had Dear Leader's name attached to it, and now is being helmed by Stephen Ross, owner of a lot of other properties, including the Miami Dolphins, Soulcycle, the Drone Racing League (it's real, and actually fun to watch) -- and is one of Dear Leader's biggest fundraisers.

I don't know what it is that compels these people, who can do literally anything they want in life, to decide to be terrible humans, to become the minions and handmaidens of people who are even more terrible. Life is too short to keep asking why. All any of us can do is shun them as completely as possible. It should be clear by now that they did exactly that to all of us a long, long time ago.

The Show Must Go On

Maybe Bill Taylor should have used jazz hands as he described in detail his utter dismay at the clear pattern of corruption around him. Maybe George Kent should have cried like a punk and screamed about how much he liked beer, made a scene like a day-drunk housewife.

What can our elected officials do to bring more "pizzazz" to these solemn proceedings, so that the horserace media dipshits who get paid way too much to cover these things, and the addled geriatrics that believe them, can walk away entertained by the fact that the executive branch is clearly engaged in an ongoing conspiracy of bribery and extortion?

I mean, it's certainly a service to the nation that Reuters was available to faithfully transcribe the deep musings of Fredo Number Two. The NBC guy, Jonathan Allen, is just as bad, with his avatar of two baseball players. Talk about a meaningless event that is painfully boring to sit through. I double-dog dare anyone out there to watch an entire baseball game, commercial breaks and all, without changing the channel once.

These people are disgusting, sure, but the fact that they remain gainfully employed means that there must be some role in a putatively free market for their trenchant theater critiques. So rather than be repulsed as usual with these sorts of individuals, and wondering aloud why they don't just go find a more exciting line of work if trying to save the goddamned country just isn't interesting enough, let's stipulate that there are two possibilities with these "people think these hearings are boring" analyses:

1. They're wrong.
2. They're right.

Obviously to a certain extent, both possibilities have at least some truth to them. There are 325 million or so people in this country, and some of them are assholes or morons or simply too caught up in whatever distraction-of-the-day has captured their attention, to pay heed to what's going on.

So what I really mean here is that if a sufficient number of people out there are actually interested in the proceedings, and what these witnesses -- serious career people who have decades of civil service and (in many cases) military experience, who have served under chief executives of both parties with the same degree of dedication -- have revealed so far, and will continue to do so.

The public hearings just started a day ago; the meter takes time to move. And a responsible media, focused on reporting the facts and providing a narrative context, instead of lamely trying to guess the engagement of people they don't know and haven't talked to directly, can affect that meter.

And it already has moved since the initial inquiry began, which would tend to lean more in the favor of Possibility #1. That means that the theater critics, instead of trying to provide reality-teevee snark and pigskin-prognosticator bullshit, need to either report the facts or just go find another job better suited to their skill set, bearing in mind that Eric Trump appears to have hands, so he probably doesn't need these fools to jerk him off.

Possibility #2 is much scarier, because if there really is a critical mass of people who just don't give a shit about the open malfeasance of these fuckers, then it's only going to get worse, the country really is done for, and we'll deserve it.

But we're not there yet, so it's good to see people telling the theater critics to fuck off and find honest work.

Two-Ply Journamalism

I'm not bothering to link to the fucking NY Times anymore; its mendacious toadying is a net detriment to the well-being of this society, even once you factor in the occasional "good" article you might get out of them. This Twitter thread describing the latest slop-ed piece is more than adequate in chronicling the bad-faith argumentation that comes out of them anymore.

It takes some real balls to lambaste climatologists, who have been presenting empirical data for decades regarding the dangers of climate change. This is the American political system in a nutshell:  absolve the rented politicians, and the reality-teevee-addled dupes who keep voting for them, by scapegoating the one group of people who actually showed up and did their fucking jobs. Both-siderism is the crushed fentanyl of gatekeeper journalists, who peddle their agenda behind bullshit "op-ed" pieces and anonymously-sourced bits of hackcess journalism. They have ruined this country just as surely as that turd Mark Burnett has.

That's how you end up with a chief executive who literally admitted just a few days ago to running a fraudulent charity that stole money from veterans, and everyone's already forgotten about it by Veterans' Day, of all things. A competent media ecosystem would ask him and his minions about that non-stop for a month, but they've already given up on it. They don't even try. Instead we get puff-piece profiles of billionaires' concerns about actually having to pay their fucking taxes, or provide a decent standard of living for the peons who shovel their shit every day.

Jamie Dimon should have been guillotined in the middle of Wall Street a decade ago, as a warning to the rest of that vile breed. Hope that clears things up.

I am also tired of hearing calls for "unity" from Democratic candidates. Each and every one of us has stark choices to confront for ourselves, and what we might consider our values. Either we are okay with a demented slapdick who lies about everything having all this responsibility, or we are not. Either we are okay with the very real, impending problem of climate change and its many dispersed effects, or we aren't. Either we're okay with working Americans dying from hoarding their insulin because of profiteering, or we're not. Either we're okay with children fleeing unthinkable levels of poverty and violence being torn from their parents and thrown into cages, being victimized by older children while their mothers are drinking from toilets, and ultimately being trafficked to American families looking for a cheap kid to adopt, or we find that sort of thing, you know, fucking abhorrent.

I have no intention of "coming together" with people in the first half of those descriptors. We all have relatives, friends, coworkers in our lives on that end of the discussion, and we've all made our personal calibrations as to how to deal (or not) with that. But that is a different matter than whether the candidate we end up being allowed to select to lead the country for the next four years has pre-emptively decided on a fool's errand of comity and appeasement with the "fuck your feelings" crowd..

This is a practical matter as well as a moral one. Unless Buttigieg and Biden are making cynical political calculations in preaching their unity gospel, they should head to the nearest neurologist and get checked for dementia, because they clearly have lost all short- and long-term memory.

In 2009, Barack Obama won the most electoral votes since Saint Reagan in 1984, and had both houses of Congress, including a supermajority in the Senate. It took the Republicons, years before Trump would waddle into view, about a month after Obama's inauguration to flat-out declare fuck what the clear majority voted for, we're going to obstruct this president at every opportunity, and create more opportunities to do so. And thanks to their little helper monkeys in the corporate gatekeeper media, that's exactly what they proceeded to do for the next eight years.

But Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg are apparently convinced that, between being nice guys themselves and Republicons secretly wanting to do the "right" thing, they can breach this gap. They are fucking high if they really believe that nonsense. Every day in every way, the GOP has told us, over and over and fucking over again, what they are really all about. Power and money, and the various uses thereof. Republican members of Congress refuse to confront Trump over his corruption not because they fear him, but because he's doing exactly all the things they want done.

This is not an aberration. This is the culmination of the party's efforts for the past five decades, explicitly so. They do not deny or try to hide any of this at all.

It's enormously difficult to figure out how Democrats and media monkeys could possibly be this stupid, to not see what has been in front of all of us all along. I assume it's the old Upton Sinclair line about people not understanding something because their paycheck depends on it.

Again, the Republicons make no effort to hide any of it. And they make no bones about what they're willing to do when they lose. Matt Bevin still hasn't conceded his loss in Kentucky. Republicans in the North Carolina state legislature have been openly joking for weeks about how they're just waiting for the Democrats to leave the legislative chamber so they can push a bunch of stuff through (which they did on September 11th, while Dem legislators were at a fucking 9/11 memorial).

Here in California, there is a petition drive to recall Gavin Newsom from the governor's seat. We all laughed at that shit back in 2003, and look how that worked out. It takes a shamefully low number of signatures to get an initiative on the ballot in this state, considering the huge population. There is nothing so low that these fuckers will not stoop to, and it precedes Trump by a longshot. He's just made it easier for them to mainstream it.

Because that's the other thing Democratic politicians need to get past -- this idiotic Anne Frank teleology that people are basically good. Some are, some aren't, and the ones that aren't don't worry about playing by the rules, and are more than willing to rent themselves out to the highest bidder. This idea that indecent people are suddenly going to grow a conscience, like a vestigial tail or something, is just so far beyond stupid, I'm not sure there's a word for it in the English language.

So I don't know what the fuck Diamond Joe and Mayor Pete are thinking when they spout nonsense like we need to get back to working together or whatever pablum they cynically think will win over some imaginary sliver of "swing" voters, who are clearly the dumbest motherfuckers alive.

Refer to the very brief list of terrible things above, and try to imagine the sort of halfwit who thinks there's some sort of middle ground to be had on those things. What if we kept those refugee kids in cages, but didn't let them get raped and didn't illegally give them to strangers? Like that maybe, is that what passes for compromise and unity? Could it possibly be more productive to motivate non-voters to vote, instead of debasing yourselves in a futile gesture to nasty morons?

Bringing it all back to climate change, and what we can hope to do about it politically, this ongoing political and media dynamic is simply not conducive to getting anything constructive done in that (or any other) area. And it has nothing to do with how scientists have presented their findings, or the many legitimate reasons why they tended not to be sufficiently "alarmist" about the situation. Even their moderate, empirically-backed and peer-reviewed claims were immediately shut down or ignored by the fossil fuel companies and the politicians they own.

(And by the way, I have already given you the template of actions that, collectively taken, would have real impact on climate change and the companies causing it:  eat less meat; drive smaller and smarter; have fewer children; consume less; buy local food as much as possible. Just about anyone can make most or all of these changes, and would in fact save money in doing so. But like vaccinations, it requires a critical mass of people to do it, or it won't work. And right now, even the majority of people who are aware of climate change seem to require government action to get anything done. And that's simply not correct. The challenge is in overcoming the average person's base Homer Simpson instinct of wanting someone else to do everything for them.)

And the fact of the matter is that, no matter how much it would cost to invest in mitigating or preventing further damage from issues related to climate change, it will cost more to do nothing. More lives. More money. That's just a fact, and you don't need to spend years comparing a bunch of permafrost core samples to know that, to observe all the symptoms going on and understand the connection.

So what, pray tell, would have gone differently if enough climatologists had gone up to DC and sat before this or that House subcommittee and testified under oath that yeaaahhhhh, about that global warming, if anything we're understating the case, it's really bad and we're really fucked and it's gonna all happen sooner than we think? Mister Slop-Ed can't rightly say, you know, because he was talking straight out of his asshole in the first place.

But he was allowed to talk out of his asshole in the New York Times. And that's the fucking problem.

Respect, Part 3: Keeping the Peace

Some folks are annoyed that this man was arrested for eating a sandwich on the BART platform. They should just be glad he wasn't slammed face-down to the concrete, handcuffed, and "accidentally" shot in the back.

Numbers Game

Steve over at No More Mister Nice Blog has an interesting take on the numbers Trump's so-called campaign manager and number cruncher, Brad Parscale, keeps conjuring in the face of actual results.

Part of the magic and wonder of our bounteous perpetual campaign industry is the constant barrage of numbers generated by pollsters and consultants, some internal to the candidates and campaigns, some of them independent observers such as corporate news organizations. All of them should be taken with huge rocks of salt, not only because the participants frequently have vested interests in the outcomes, but because the outcomes themselves are so fluid and active, especially a full year out from the elections, months before the primaries and the holidays and the 4Q numbers and all that.

But in the Peter Drucker sense of "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it," the numbers should provide guidelines and benchmarks for the politicians and their campaign staff to make adjustments.

There's something odd about the way Trump's "administration" and the 2020 "campaign" tend to generate, observe, and manage their numbers in general.

One example is the unemployment rate, typically the U6 numbers, which Trump whined about during the 2016 campaign, calling them fake. And of course, the second he gets in, they're his numbers, and they're improving slowly but steadily, so suddenly they're "real."

Nothing has changed, obviously, in how the numbers are derived; they are no more "real" or "fake" than they were when they were Obama's numbers. But the point is that Dear Leader is not interested in the real-world economic conditions that determines how those numbers are arrived at. He just knows he likes them.

Another consistent example is the internal poll numbers, the ones Trump regularly tweets about how 94% or 95% of "Republicans" approve of his great and unmatched wisdom. That number does not even closely jibe with the actual numbers, which are still at comically high Saddam Hussein levels, but have slipped recently, from 88% to mid-70s in the recent polls I've seen.

Now, we can cynically assume that many administrations of either party might choose to make the highest available numbers public for prole consumption, while still knowing what the "real" numbers are. But there's no indication that there's any such separation; in fact, all the reports are that the terrified WH minions frantically bring Dear Leader sheaves of carefully massaged numbers in order to placate him. It's very much a bunker mentality where numbers are used to tell you what you need them to tell you, rather than to see them for the empirical data that they are.

In other words, it seems like neither Trump nor Parscale is able or willing any longer to discern how to use their data properly, in order to fine-tune their approach and viability. The good news with that is that by the time they do believe what's in front of their eyes and make necessary corrections, it may be too late to avert a blowout. The bad news is that if anyone has proven time and again that they can fuck up a sure thing by going into a prevent defense, it's the Democratic Party.

Respect, Slight Return

Pretty sure Huckleberry meant to say "mouthful." In a business immersed in rank hypocrisy, this gutless clown takes the cake and fucks it like it's his very first time. What a worthless pile of shit he is. Do the right thing already, South Carolina, and flush your traitorous turd.

OK Bloomer

The plutocrats have worked very hard for decades: gobbling up rivals to stave off the threat of actual competition; buying media outlets to push their free (for them) market freebooting ethos; renting politicians to faithfully carry their water. And it has paid off handsomely for them -- they own pretty much everything, and thanks to an abundance of loopholes and relatively low taxation, they have more than enough to buy everything else.

Some of them will try to purchase public goodwill as well, by using crumbs from their tax savings to fund this or that charitable cause. Their "philanthropy" is really just their way of (to them) ensuring that their tax dollars get spent on exactly what they want, nothing more. (To his credit, Bloomberg's philanthropy is real, unlike Trump's, and it takes place in this country, unlike some others. Not that digging wells in Rwanda isn't important and valuable, but there are a lot of places in the US that give the Third World a run for their horrifically inflated money.)

If only we peons had the same privilege, right? I would much rather my tax dollars stayed in my own state to help out with its many issues and challenges, rather than being sent to some southern taker state that shits on my ilk with every foul breath, but eagerly cashes my fucking checks. Or being forced to subsidize the burgeoning evilangelist grifters who have taken over the White House like a swarm of cockroaches. But that's part of the deal -- everyone is paying for someone or something they personally disapprove of.

So Liz Warren has a plan for everything, and one of those plans is to institute a wealth tax (2% over $50M; 3% over $1B) to pay for something resembling a civilized health care system, like every other modern nation has. Since our media ecosystem is entirely bought and paid for by our insect corporate overlords, and exists primarily to reassure them of their innate rightness about everything, we have seen a barrage of nonsense spewing from everyone with a ten-or higher-digit net worth, fuming that they might end up with only eighty billion dollars instead of eighty-four billion dollars or whatever their fucking problem is.

(Obviously, we know what their problem is:  the two simple words in the English language they refuse to understand are no and enough. And frankly, why shouldn't that be the case? If you or I were constantly surrounded by yes-people, sucked-up to and feted and cosseted by the influencers and tastemakers and power-brokers, we'd be in that epistemic bubble as well. I'm rich because I'm smart, and I'm smart because I'm rich. It's a self-reinforcing feedback loop.)

Whatever else he may be, Bloomberg is not an idiot, nor is he particularly evil. Hell, if he somehow became the Democratic nominee and went up against that fucking thing, I'd vote for Bloomie in a heartbeat. Not even a close call. Same with Tom Steyer.

But this is clearly nothing but an ego trip for these guys, rich-dude wish-fulfillment. Bloomberg and Steyer are intelligent guys; they know full well that if they wanted to do the most good with the most impact for the greatest number of American citizens of all socioeconomic strata, the most effective way for them to do that through the political system would be to find the ten most vulnerable Republicon senators up for re-election next year, and give each of their Democratic challengers $25M.

It doesn't matter if Warren or Biden or Bloomberg gets that shitbirds out of the White House, if Moscow Mitch and Leningrad Lindsey are still pushing ass out of their respective seats. Every single candidate has to know this, whether they admit it or not.

Bloomberg is simply jumping in to take the side of the Monopoly dude with the monocle and the waxed mustache, the misunderstood failsons who inherited every dime and still think they're Hank Rearden. Again, if these guys really wanted to "solve problems" they have the means to do so. No doubt the Wal-Mart heirs are watching closely, to see if one of their spoiled grandchildren might need to "help" by running for governor or senator from Arkansas.