Leap of Fate

Here's a (probably) unpopular but nevertheless a surface-of-the-sun take:  the hysteria over the corona virus seems maybe a tad overblown so far, considering that tens of thousands of people in the US alone die every winter from, you know, the "regular" flu. This is not to say that the COVID-19 can't or won't be a real crisis, just that so far, it's not yet The Stand, you know?

But even if it disappears tomorrow, the fact is that it has already solidified a great many assumptions about the incompetence and corruption underpinning even basic service components of this Florida outhouse of an administration. Starting with the predictable mendacity of how basic vital information is released and communicated, to the abject, subservient controls put in place on people who dare speak the truth or express any skepticism over the handling of the situation, clearly these animals will not be happy until a sufficient number of casualties have been counted.

Then there's Iran, a country whose problems with the virus do seem to be increasing rapidly, and in no small part due to the incredible dishonesty and bad faith the US has displayed in abrogating the JCPOA, and dumping sanctions on Iran that has notable prevented them from obtaining the medical equipment necessary to prepare and combat an epidemic. The Obama administration had opened pandemic control and information offices in nearly fifty countries, including China; Trump closed eighty percent of them, while gutting the CDC here.

Sad to say, maybe this is what it takes now. It sucks that people have to die in order to (maybe, just maybe) get a sufficient number of people here to see just how pig-headed and malicious and stupid these fuckers really are. It's not hyperbole, it's not snark. These people are flat-out evil in their sheer indifference and irresponsibility. Literally, innocent people are dying simply because this sociopathic dipshit can't stand to be "wrong" about anything. Tell me again about karma.

This is the natural consequence of decades of right-wing pols, buttressed by talk-radio scumbags, doing everything they can to underfund and undermine competent governance, so they can then point at how government never works. The Trump cult is the apotheosis of that brutal ideal, purging even the whiff of competence, and replacing with pliant homunculi, notable only for their boot-licking prowess. So of course nothing works right anymore -- everyone who could do anything competently has been pushed out, or quit in disgust.

Take my assertion in the top paragraph that while the virus could be a big deal, that maybe it isn't really quite yet, that maybe there's a bit of hype and paranoia right now. I hope I'm wrong, but again, let's say I'm right and the whole thing just disappears over the weekend. No more casualties or deaths. It's done, they rush a vaccine to completion and production and the world is saved. It's not going to happen, but let's say for the sake of argument it does happen.

Even in that unlikely event, these people still deserve to be thrown out of office at once, for their sheer ineptitude. Because let's face it -- if this is how they're going to handle things when the industrial-strength mega-super-flu comes around, we're fucked, medically and economically. There is no plan in place for any of this, for rapid response, treatment, mitigation, any of it.

This should be a clear warning for natural disasters as well, because when the next Cat 5 hurricane finally drills Miami and puts it six feet underwater for a month, you'll have Pence with his dick in his hand, Kudlow scratching his neck waiting for his next eight-ball, and King Fuckface shitposting how it's all the Dummycrats' fault. That's a fucking guarantee, and we all know it.

I couldn't care less about the stock market, and not just because I don't have a portfolio to fret over. The only way to get the owner-donor class to have any skin in the game is for Fuckface to be bad for business. They don't care otherwise; a hundred million people could drop dead tomorrow, and as long as the precious keeps rolling in, they won't even blink.

But if the stock market keeps plummeting next week and beyond, and the virus really is a crisis, then these cadaverous skinflints have a reason to care about something other than their ill-gotten hoards. And when they vote with their wallets, we all hear the rumble.

Our Liberal Media

I'm obviously not a fan of "celebrity journalism" -- gossip tabloids and such, but it does have its place, and at least shows the double-edged-sword side of fame and publicity. I don't read it, and it seems like the practitioners of that particular dark art should go out and find respectable work, such as giving handjobs for crack in a needle-strewn gutter. But it's easy to see how people can enjoy the temporary rush of reading tacky, scurrilous innuendo about the hapless souls who are at some indefinable -- even to themselves -- point on a predictable arc from discovery to love to loathing to (maybe) redemption.

But what really makes this Esquire profile of the Page Six tabloid is how eager these celebro-journos were to compromise themselves ethically, and then how many of them made the jump to other areas of manufacturing consent.

Toward the end of the article, it mentions how many of these turds would show up at Harvey Weinstein's big parties, with many popular stars in attendance, and omit details about Weinstein's frequent abusive outbursts, and accusations of physical and sexual assault, in order to ensure their invite to the next one. This appears to be the rule for these people, rather than the exception.

Earlier in the piece, it mentions how one of the tabloid writers, Tara Palmeri, eventually got on with ABC News, covering the White House. Now, this is not to single out Palmeri as a particularly noteworthy offender (especially since, frankly, she's fucking hot), but to suggest her as a rather mundane example of how "journalists" as a general class become accustomed to operating. They take the same shoddy ethical standards and style of coverage with them from entertainment to sports to news.

And that is the problem with the American corporate media ecosystem, right there in a nutshell. You cannot cover the people who run the damned country in the same way you do PR puff pieces on Matt Damon or LeBron James, and expect to maintain any sort of rigorous standard in the content you produce.

This is how the New York Times has been compromised so badly, and it seems that the Washington Post is sliding back under that low bar as well. Both papers (but especially the Times) tend to rely heavily on unnamed sources "speaking on background" regarding whatever bombshell-of-the-day they're peddling. As stupid and oafish as Trump may be, he at least understands, as Jimmy Breslin pointed out decades ago, that the media monkeys come cheap and easy -- all you have to do is return their phone calls.

So what do you think the likelihood is that Trump has people all through his inner circle who understand just how to use the credulous dupes at the Times to broadcast their messaging for free, in the guise of "reporting"? How much fact-checking do you think Maggie Haberman bothers with, to corroborate or refute whatever White House shithead "leaked" to her? The only thing this human centipede of an administration does competently is propaganda, and they know how to use the Times for their own means, just as Harvey Weinstein knew how to use Page Six for his.

But in the end, it's a free market, and companies don't sell what people won't buy. Jabbering assholes like Tweety Matthews are still on the air because someone's dumb enough to keep watching him, even though he has yet to have a fresh or interesting observation on any subject. Vulture capitalists are tearing through local and regional newspapers like a swarm of army ants because they can, and because no one will stop them.

This situation will never get better until enough people become more discerning consumers, and stop rewarding shoddy, cynical hacks like we have now.

In Bloom

Many times over the past few years, I have consistently warned about the "next" Trump, the 2.0 version that's slicker, smarter, even meaner, not a slave to his impulses and his pathetic need for daddy's love. I just thought it would take until the next electoral cycle for that character to arrive, but it already has, in the fun-size-billionaire known as Mike Bloomberg.

You have to give Bloomberg some credit in a very important area -- he knows just how to push Trump's buttons, and is unafraid to do so. In that, he models some valuable tactics for actual Democrats to use at least once in a while. The main thing is to never take his shit. You want to know why most of Trump's supporters really like him? That's why. He's like the old joke about John Wayne toilet paper -- doesn't take shit off anyone.

Other than that, though, Bloomberg is just the fucking worst. He's the epitome of the "plutocrat philanthropist" that Anand Giridharadas profiles so well -- a person who, rather than simply paying his taxes so that the government can be funded to do the work it is commissioned to do for the common good, decides to "donate" money to his pet causes and peeves, in order to target his own priorities, take the writeoffs, and pat himself on the back in public for what a generous person he is.

In many ways, Bloomberg is a bit of a spiritual mirror to Trump. Where Trump is vain, narcissistic, weak, impulsive, shallow and stupid, Bloomberg is actually intelligent, and is obviously a real billionaire, many times over, not some ludicrous fake tycoon from a cheesy reality show, a comic-book character with ridiculous hair, and who somehow manages to constantly look like he's in the middle of a pumpkin pie-eating contest.

Trump's open and constant embrace of his vulgar appetites is perhaps the most stark contrast to Bloomberg's uptight urges to purge the community of their bad habits. But the bottom line is, both men are authoritarian control freaks by nature. And Bloomberg is every bit the arrogant racist and misogynist that Trump is. He's just not a buffoon, because he's not a three-year-old with no impulse control, the way Trump is. The paths are different, but the destination is roughly the same.

The big differences are that Bloomberg would be highly unlikely to stock the courts with unqualified Federalist Society mooks, and he would probably tell the evilangelist hucksters to fuck themselves and each other. He would be more likely to seek qualified counsel for areas where he did not have knowledge or expertise. He would be able to admit to those gaps in knowledge, for fuck's sake. There would at least be some semblance of comparative normalcy.

So in those respects, Bloomberg would be an improvement. Anything would be an improvement. But let's face it -- if Bloomie really cared about the country, and really wanted to save the day, there are plenty of better and more dollar-efficient ways to go about it. And he's smart enough to know that. He could (and still should, and if he doesn't get the nomination, hopefully will) dump a fraction of what he's spent so far on the contested senate races, and dump the incumbents who enable Trump's open corruption.

Hell, as at least one internets observer has noted, Bloomberg could easily buy up all of Trump's debt, and then have him over a barrel on repayment terms. It would not be too much of a stretch for him to kick him out of his own tower. This is a pissing contest between two NYC elites who have known each other a long time, and who don't like each other.

So it's a bit puzzling why Bloomberg doesn't just go that route, and work out his personal vendetta against Commander Babyfingers in the most publicly humiliating way imaginable. Bloomberg has already dropped nearly half a billion on his ubiquitous ads, so money is not the problem.

Run, Don't Walk Away

Oh good, another one of those tedious, disposable I went to a Trump rally and it really opened my eyes to the truth farticles. If I had a plug nickel, yada yada. I find these people nearly as repulsive as the actual unrepentant cultists, mostly because of their preening intellectual dishonesty, posing as some sort of truth-telling.

This one is rooted in another tiresome artifact of the era, the "cancel culture" plaint. What makes this one slightly more interesting is that it took place in, of all things, an online knitting community. And yes, the SJW shitheads in that community, badgering people for supposed racism and cultural appropriation and all that, are despicable, and should be slapped upside the head.

But again -- and this apparently cannot be repeated too many times, since there still are countless people out there who refuse to consider this -- they're just jerks spouting nonsense at strangers on the internet. They're not imprisoning (and shooting) immigrant children; they're not stealing money from essential programs to pay for a pointless wall, as a monument to a doddering slapdick cult leader; they're not purging the federal government of competent, dedicated public servants; they're not robbing the taxpayers to stuff the pockets of billionaires just a bit more. And so on.

There is no sense of proportion or degree with these fools, none at all. The Republican party is collectively undermining the rule of law, compromising the very principle of elected representative governance, right out in the great wide open, defiantly, petulantly. And all this sap can whinge about is a handful of puling dopes in a niche online spot.

Face it, lady, you hung out with people who willingly, gladly support a liar and a thief and a traitor, period, full stop. You can qualify it with all the "they were meeeaaaan to my wittle fwiends" and "Democrats are mean for calling racists racist" demurrals but there it is. Go tell it to one of those refugee kids getting raped in Dear Leader's for-profit internment camps, before they get "adopted" out to a fine white "Christian" family..

Trump and everyone around him is rotten and vile to the core, and the rally cultists are just a step removed. It is a fiction that they put up with him while "wishing he wouldn't tweet so much" or whatever. They don't love him despite his faults, but because of them. I don't think they are at all representative of the "average" Trump supporter, but at this point, there's no confusion or question about what he is and does. You should buy Stephen Miller a fucking drink or something. You know you really want to.

On the one hand, if this chump is so easily swayed, then she was never really a Democrat after all, which is fine, but the real problem is that she's okay with all the corruption and malfeasance, because the cult was nice to her, as cults are when you just stand there and listen respectfully to tendentious nonsense and blustery, hateful lies. Just because someone doesn't blurt racial slurs over and over again doesn't mean they're not racist. The trope early on with Trump, even back in the campaign, was don't worry about what he says, watch what he does. Okay. How's all that been working out?

There's going to be a lot more of this as the year moves along, these random useful-idiot pieces purporting to speak for much larger numbers of people out there. I think -- I hope -- most people are at least sharp enough to not fall for this shameless gaslighting, but you just never know. I mean, here we are. If someone had described the current scenario to you just five years ago, you'd have laughed them out of the room and called the guys with the nets.

Dezinformatsiya

Should rational folks be dismayed, annoyed, concerned even, at the dead-certain likelihood that the Rooskies will deploy their Macedonian troll farms and Serbian voting-machine software and all other means available in order to disrupt the election here? Absolutely. It's a problem, and simply pointing out that "we do it too" to other countries, and have for decades, even centuries, is not a moral offset.

But it should be even more concerning that these preposterously transparent forms of disinformation actually work on anyone. The problem is not that such folks are stupid or gullible or any of that. They're not being fooled; they're being affirmed. They are being fed lies they already take as gospel, and they were never interested in being straightened out on the "facts."

This is what generations of being immersed in mental garbage at every turn, whether it's "reality" teevee, talk radio, pro wrestling, "celebrity" ass-sniffing, "true-crime" dramas, endless iterations of cookie-cutter comic-book movies, music that consists of a thump and an auto-tuned warble. I'm not pretending to be better or superior with these sorts of "cultural" artifacts; I've certainly been known to partake (very lightly) in at least some aspects of these things from time to time.

But we're awash in it anymore, and there are a lot of people who seem happy to just float adrift in that polluted river. Over time, theater and spectacle become more critical factors than wanting to -- or even being able to -- sort facts from lies. They don't care who caused the fifty-car pileup anymore, so long as they get to drive slowly and gawp at the explosions and bodies. It's fun! It's exciting! Someone else will clean up the mess!

This is how you slide -- or push, to be more accurate; this motion has always been at the volition of various and sundry players, some of whom make common cause, and some who have their own agenda -- away from the veneer of democratic republicanism, and into the soft, false security of authoritarianism.

Because we've become conditioned to react only to the emotional peaks and empty button-pushes, we worry more about reacting blindly to Trump's outrage du jour. That just reinforces the trope that he's merely an aberration that will disappear in a year or five years, rather than the culmination of concerted efforts by well-funded, influential entities who have always been in the river, just below the waterline, occasionally coming up just long enough to peer at where the fresh meat might be dangling legs off the boat.

So we have multiple, massive problems in play, which are dangerous on their own, but now operate in symbiosis, gathering strength and momentum. Consider:

• Money determines political outcomes. Duh.
• The people least concerned with "facts" or "truth" or "law" or "intellectual consistency" generally overlap with people who are least concerned about creeping authoritarianism. As long as it's their thug doing the pushing, anyway. This fluidity of principles makes them especially subject to cheap marketing and psy-ops tricks, such as microtargeted Fakebook ads.
• Imagine a politician with the ethos and character traits of Trump -- thieving, lying, scamming, unable and unwilling to discuss or tolerate any dissent, completely unyoked to any semblance of a moral compass -- but without the obnoxious, blustery demeanor, and with a functioning brain and the capacity to learn and do new things.

Just imagine. This really is as much about 2024 or 2028 as it is about right here, right now, this year. It's about whether we keep moving down the road to Junior and Ivanka jumping into the seat when Daddy finally gets bored with telling everyone to go fuck themselves, and toddles off to his resort chain to keep soaking the taxpayers -- while still telling them to go fuck themselves.

There's really (at least) three groups of people whose words and actions are completely against the ideal of a free society with duly elected representatives:  the donor-owner class who will literally burn it all down before allowing their precious billions to be taxed even one more percent; the rubes who buy into every precept that is designed to cut their own throats; the saps who are just too lazy to find sufficient motivation to get off the fucking couch and cast their lot.

That's really what you're up against -- every single day, not just on election day. The people who produce the disinformation, and the people who buy into it because they like it, or they can't be bothered enough to care either way.

But people have to stop buying the ridiculous, debunked notion that Trump is anything but the logical outcome of decades of marketing and agitprop. And they have to stop the equally ludicrous belief that "Americans" are "too good" to endorse the malignant, corrosive antics of this reeking outhouse of an administration. Some people were just looking for a cult to join, and now they got all the kool-aid they could ever want.

For the record, I do believe that much of the performative hand-wringing is yet another artifact of our increasingly useless librul mediocracy. But for those few holdouts whose distress is genuine, stop telling yourself "if only they knew" -- they know, and they fucking love it.

Why Do You Keep Hitting Yourself?

One of the constant refrains of online libs and mods and such is how horrible the putatively liberal members of the mainstream media tend to be, day after miserable fucking day. Columnists for the NY Times receive mild criticism as harbingers of tumbrels and guillotines. Network news anchors such as Norah O'Donnell do PR puff pieces with murderous petrocrats, and praise Dear Leader's showmanship hours after a State of the Union speech that was probably discarded from an early draft of Idiocracy for being too ludicrous. This week, Chris Matthews and Chuck Todd have separately characterized Bernie Sanders and his (admittedly bumptious) supporters in ugly, corrosive terms.

It will be a matter of minutes or hours, a day or two at the most, before another supposed liberal betrays the cause or whatever. And then countless virtual soapboxes will be mounted with alarming quickness, with accompanying videos and Twitter threads documenting the atrocity of the day.

Here is some free advice, and it may not even be worth that much:  Cut them loose. Stop watching them, stop reading them, stop patronizing their networks, their advertisers, all of it. These well-heeled turds have been poisoning the well with their worthless observations and hoary rhetoric for as long as I have been alive, always getting worse and never better as time has passed. Some other rented piece of shit in a suit will step in for each of them after they retire and spend their dotage crowing about how their bullshit kept 'murka's sacred promise alive. Write them off and don't look back. There are plenty of people out there plying an honest trade, not content to be PR flacks for billionaires and defense contractors.

Obviously, conservative outlets such as Fox News, Blaze, OANN, and the vast reserve of talk-radio douchebags have been far more poisonous, for far longer. But those entities barely even bother to pretend to be serious or real. They are comic-book caricatures, a combination of the worst elements of pro wrestling and televangelism, designed explicitly to appeal mostly to the credulous dupes who take both of those things seriously. I mean, come on. You basically have to be a Homer Simpson-level doofus -- a slow-witted, angry sap unwilling to read anything longer than a postcard, and really just needing a daily fix of button-pushing nonsense, to engage with any of those media at all.

But the "legitimate" outlets, the networks, CNN, MSNBC, they all posture and preen like a bunch of fucking show cats, smug and secure in the comfortable lie they tell their audiences, which is the same lie they tell themselves in order to be able to sleep at night. And then they turn around and have Kellyanne Conway or Rudy Giuliani or Alan Dershowitz on, because only by giving liars and propagandists an equal platform with facts and truth can we reliably ascertain a clear narrative, right? There is simply no other way to skin this poor squirrel.

If you've seen my NFL playoff predictions over the years, then you know how spotty my record of prognostication is. But I can guarantee you this with ironclad certainty:  they will never stop being terrible until they are forced to. I honestly don't believe too many people need to be told this. But it's like everyone is waiting for everyone else to turn away, so no one does.

And frankly, I literally can't believe that anyone who doesn't have a clear vested interest in the political consulting industry, the machine that never stops churning in this country, chewing up dollars and gaslighting citizens, making them crazy and turning them against each other, actually watches or reads any of these puling dipshits. Seriously -- do you personally, or anyone you know, actually fucking watch Chuck Todd, or read David Brooks?

Clearly someone is patronizing these tools, because they sell ad space and have teevee shows. But if you're not in the game, there is no point in watching them. They're not talking to you. They're talking to the bookies and grifters who infest the seedy demi-monde of influence peddling and favor trading. They're telling each other whom to make book on for the coming week or month.

It's awesome, in a way, that in a week where you literally had a throng of masked, hooded white-power creeps skulking through the nation's fucking capital city, faithfully guarded by their law-enforcement allies, there were dispatches from leading corporate media figures wringing their hands over the unseemly behavior of the Bernie bros. Why, I hear they may have heckled a few unbelievers on the ol' Twitter machine!

(Side note re the DC "Reclaim America" march:  The marchers' stated contention that they are fighting back against elements who wish to see them erased from American society are, in fact, correct. No one in their right mind would miss the cancerous presence of these people. There's a reason they were fully -- and illegally, but they're white, so.... -- masked and wearing sunglasses, like a rural militia with a rather theatrical flair. They don't understand much, but they know very well why they can't afford to be recognized. And they know why they had to be flanked by a cadre of bicycle cops the entire time, like the snowflakes they really are. They can't admit it, maybe not even to themselves, but they know. They know they are failures, that the very act of participating in that....thing is a profoundly shameful, stupid deed. Fortunately only they and their fellow snowflakes know what they've done, who and what they really are. Let them live long with the full shame.)

But the ongoing perfidy of the corporate mediots should encase your anger in carbonite, and ensure your resolve to never give those worthless cocksuckers a moment of your time, except to track the sponsors and toss 'em a quick template email explaining in a hundred words or less why you'll never buy their product again.

There is no other reason to watch any corporate network or cable news, nor to read the NY Times. These people are profiteering from the chaos, nothing more, nothing less. They are in cahoots with the regime, in effect if not in scheme.

I always think about that scene in Howard Stern's Private Parts, where the program manager explains to Howard that the people who love his show listen for an average of ninety minutes, while the people who claim to hate the show listen for an hour longer than that.

If the people who are pissed at Chuck Todd (or whoever the dipshit of the day is; there'll be another one tomorrow, coming right out with the rising sun) simply hit his mentions one last time, simply saying something like, Fuck you, I'm done, and I'm emailing your sponsors to let them know I'm done with them too, it would be over for them. Curtains. Kaput. Because once the hate mail and nasty comments drops off, that's a hit for their audience KPI.

So, uh, let's get this party started already. There are worse goals in life than to see Tweety Matthews and Chunk Toad be forced into cushy retirement.

Groundhog Day

Ho-hum, just every single day now, where you have a trial, and not only does the jury foreman openly collude with the defendant on the outcome ahead of time, but the defendant's lawyers openly bribe the jury foreman and key members of the jury.

This is your country now, America. How do you like it?

Super Bowl 54 Prediction

I used to do NFL game predictions and analysis throughout the playoffs, but stopped a couple seasons ago, thanks to a mediocre guessing percentage and decreasing interest on my part.

But this year's game should be a really good one, with the Chiefs favored by just a point, probably due to their amazing comeback and beatdown of the upstart Tennessee Titans, who where kind enough to pave the road for Kansas City by knocking out the two best teams in the AFC, the Ravens and the Patsies. After letting the Titans get ahead 24-0 by the second quarter, the Chiefs roared back with four touchdowns in just over six minutes of game time, taking the lead by halftime and never looking back, eventually smoking the overachieving Titans by twenty points.

The 49ers, on the other hand, have won most of their games with a punishing run attack that chews up the clock and keeps opposing offenses off the field. This will certainly be the strategy to use against Patrick Mahomes, who is arguably the best QB in the league right now, and has a wealth of fleet receivers to work with. When Mahomes is on the field, he'll face Defensive Rookie of the Year Nick Bosa, whose nine sacks on the year actually understate how disruptive he's been all year for opposing quarterbacks. Bosa finds himself in the backfield on more plays than not, and the Chefs will need to account for him at all times.

Look at the stats from the NFC Championship game from two weeks ago, with the Niners throttling the hapless Packers in a repeat performance from Green Bay's previous visit a couple months ago: Despite Green Bay compiling more total yards, first downs, and time of possession, they were down 27-0 by halftime and ended up losing 37-20, and it wasn't even that close. This is entirely due to just two things:  San Francisco's defense causing three turnovers; and running back Raheem Mostert running like Bo Jackson from the old Tecmo Bowl game.

The Niners actually have three very good running backs, but Tevin Coleman got hurt (dislocated shoulder) early on in the championship game, and Matt Breida has had some fumbling issues lately. So Mostert rolled up 220 yards and four touchdowns on 29 carries, daring the hapless Packers to find an answer. Quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo threw just eight times the entire game.

Coleman is apparently healthy and ready to go, and should add some dimension to Mostert and possibly Breida in the running game. Garoppolo is nowhere near the quarterback Mahomes is, but he's mostly been a quietly efficient "game manager" type. SF coach Kyle Shanahan was, of course, the Atlanta Falcons' offensive coordinator in their disastrous 25-point choke to the Patsies in Super Bowl 51, but he has done a fantastic job all year with the 49ers, so if he manages to get up on the Chefs, expect him to drop the boot on their neck and grind the clock mercilessly. Kansas City's run defense was 26th in yards allowed this season, and that's including playing half-assed teams like Denver and Oakland twice each.

If the Niners' defense has a weakness, it's mobile quarterbacks. In five games during the regular season, QBs Lamar Jackson (Baltimore), Russell Wilson (Seattle), and Kyler Murray (Arizona) all proved difficult for SF to stop effectively. Mahomes doesn't scramble a lot (43 attempts for 218 yards and 2 TDs in the 2019 regular season), but when he does he averages 5.1 yards per carry, so he may give them some headaches.

It's really too close to call; this is strength against strength. Maybe the biggest surprise on the betting line was the 54.5 over/under. It seems like it should be something of a shootout on paper.

But it could also be very much like Super Bowl 48, where the irresistible force of Peyton Manning's league-melting offense met the immovable object of Seattle's "Legion of Boom" defense. In the end, I think the Niners' defense is better than the Chiefs' offense, and San Francisco's offense will be able to methodically grind the clock and give them their sixth Super Bowl ring.

Final Score:  San Francisco 34, Kansas City 21.

Tech Wars

Interesting deep dive about the competition for G5 infrastructure, between the US and China, and Huawei's role in all that. About all I would add is that the telecom lobby is one of the most powerful in this country, and hey, how are you liking your internets and streaming services that you pay through the nose for? Remember that South Korea and France have waaayyyyy better service, speed, and bandwidth, for practically nothing.

Anyway, the story is a good reminder of the benefits of "soft power," something we used to be pretty good at, but is all shot to hell now, while China methodically encircles us, setting the stage for the rest of the century to be theirs. It's the long game, another thing we once played well, but Grampa Walnuts only plays pigeon checkers:  kicks the pieces over, shits on the board, and struts around like he won.

Travel Bans

I wouldn't worry too much about the travel bans. Another four years of this shit, and this rotting husk of a nation will be a place no dirty fur'ner would want to check out anyway. It will just be a place where the Saudis who own Trump and his shithead failson-in-law buy all the high-end real estate just to squat on it, and the relatives of Russian and Chinese oligarchs to come and have their anchor babies in Dear Leader's hotel rooms.

Which Way to America?

It cannot be overstated or exaggerated -- the more someone professes to be "passionate" about the sanctity of the Second Amendment, the more likely it is that they just mean for white people. These are exactly the sort who, if they saw a black guy with a Glock in his waistband at the Starbucks, would assume the worst and ask questions later. Every goddamned time.

Fun fact:  it is illegal in most states (including Kentucky) to go around looking like you're about to knock over a fucking bank. Again, they get a pass because if it ain't white, it ain't right.

Every. Goddamned. Time.

Don't Retreat, Reload

What A.R. Moxon says. To beat on a recent neologism, this cannot be emphasized enough -- the Democratic House members need to be preparing for another round of investigations and new articles of impeachment. Preznit Sling Blade has provided more than enough material to do so, and all of us -- especially the traitorous Republicon senators who gleefully sold their country down the river for a cheap sack of tarnished silver -- know it.

We already know what the Goopers are made of, and what they've become. They are now openly in collusion with a chief executive that they know and admit to being thoroughly corrupt, and are defying anyone to do anything about it.

No, this is now about finding out what stuff the Democrats are made of, how far they are willing to go to do what's right. There is no percentage in them doing what's expedient, or collegial, or any of that. As Moxon points out, pushing an agenda that is aggressively barbaric and even illegal, and that a consistent majority of the public oppose, has never stopped the Republicons. Never.

The Republican Party needs to be completely dismantled, root and branch, piled up and immolated, the ashes scattered to the winds and the remainder pissed and shat on, covered with lime and salt to prevent anything from ever growing there again. Its members have aligned themselves individually and collectively with thugs, traitors, polluters, tax dodgers, evangelical hucksters -- and that's just Trump we're talking about there.

No, seriously, take a good look at what that party has stood for, for decades, and what it looks forward to, and decide if that is a world you want for your children and grandchildren and so on. Every person in a leading position is pure scum, someone you wouldn't trust with a ten-dollar bill, much less your pension or health-care.

And they're gonna come after your Social Security too, which I would heartily endorse if it just meant the fist-shaking codgers that voted for this shit. I am not remotely kidding when I say that I hope every one of them ends up living on cat food and wondering why their kids and grandkids stopped talking to them, oh, roughly around mid-2016. But there are plenty of seniors out there who voted against that fucking thing, and are every bit as vulnerable to these coming depredations.

Of course, the SS cuts won't hit the current generation; the boomers managed not only to fuck up the world, but really to never pay any generational consequences for it. No, they'll take it out of my generation, like they always have. I just love being part of a generational cohort that has been treated like absolute fucking dogshit by the generation that came before it, at every possible turn. It would be difficult to find a historical parallel of one group of people that had such a palpable, abiding hatred for the succeeding generation.

Ahem. In the meantime, let's hope that Adam Schiff is leading the charge to get the next round moving ASAFP. In fact, it would be a fine publicity stunt if the Democratic members of the HPSCI made a point of skipping the utterly useless State of the Union speech on Tuesday, and made sure every news org understood that it would be so they could have a closed-door strategic session on upcoming matters. A good place to start would be to subpoena Lev Parnas and John Bolton, and broadcast that testimony far and wide. Take away Dear Leader's crowing victory lap while they're at it.

Whether they like it or not, the Democratic leadership is now not only in the role of trying to salvage what remains of the country, but it's going to be a fight for their own survival as a viable political party. Nancy Pelosi turns eighty in March. Who is being prepared to take over when she retires? What will things be like for them when Sling Blade squeaks by in November -- or loses but refuses to acknowledge the results?

There are no easy choices for them anymore, there is only fight or die, roll or be rolled over. They have a few dozen weeks in which to figure out a strategy and begin executing it. Let's hope they see it clearly and act accordingly. Get a fresh set of hearings going, a few talking points to hammer home relentlessly on the Sunday follies shows, flood the zone, stick to the script, speak with passion and conviction, and people will get behind it.

Somewhere between 70-75% of the public wanted witnesses, so that has to have included a good number of Republican voters. This is a popular, bipartisan issue. This is no time to be timid and worry about what Chuck Todd thinks, or some imaginary "swing" voter in Pig's Knuckle thinks, or what their "colleagues" across the aisle think. It should be clear by now that Ben Sasse would slit their throats for a pat on the head from his master. Keep up the great work, Nebraska!

So let's get this party started, again and again, right up until the election. Make the traitor turtle have to explain himself over and over for the next nine months. There is literally nothing to lose by fighting back as hard as possible now.