Plague Diary: Wasted Daze

There is no reason good can't triumph over evil, if only angels will get organized along the lines of the Mafia. -- Kurt Vonnegut, Man Without a Country

Saturday March 21
Wife and daughter furloughed from work and school for the time being. "Temporary," as if they'll be able to knock four to six weeks out of the school year (at least), and just pick up in June where they stopped back in March. No one knows anything right now.

Slept in until 8:00, had a nice breakfast sandwich and coffee, talked about what we're going to do with our day and weekend, per usual Saturday breakfast. Unsaid is the idea that "weekend" may last a bit longer than normal, and I'm still not sure about where my own job will be come Monday. I have two months of hours banked, between sick and vacation, so not too worried. Push comes to shove, I have time to work on home projects and record some music, finish some writing efforts, etc.

Watched a couple YouTube videos on lawnmower repair, to save a hundred bucks or so and get some of this grass knocked down. Very mild winter, so not the usual foot-in-a-week growth we tend to see this time of year, but it's getting shaggy. You can learn just about anything you want for free on YouTube. I don't know why that isn't mentioned every day in every media outlet. Music and instructional videos, all for free, and people are screwing around watching cat videos.

I have a large lawn, roughly a third of an acre, mostly even terrain with a few trees. It usually takes two blocks of about two hours each to cut it all, so I do it over a weekend. I prefer to use a regular push mower, which perplexes some of my friends, who wonder why I wouldn't rather spend five times as much on a riding mower. For one, there are some areas that aren't accessible with a rider, but mostly it's that I happen to enjoy mowing the lawn. As with a good walk, it allows the "monkey mind" to disperse its chatter, and open up to more constructive wool-gathering.

I get a lot of good, very creative ideas doing any of four things -- sleeping, showering, walking, mowing -- none of which lend themselves to immediately recording those brilliant emanations for posterity. This too is a strength -- it forces me to think them through and develop them a bit while I do whatever I'm doing. The ideas worth remembering and using tend to stick.

The weather is fantastic, and after mowing I confer with the wife and we decide to walk about a half-mile up the road. Already traffic has thinned, at least motor vehicle traffic, on our little country road, which is usually busy with assholes driving like they stole it, and truckers using our proximity to the highway as a handy turnaround. They can all go fuck themselves, and lately it appears they are doing just that.

But there are plenty of families walking and bicycling around, which is wonderful to see. Sometimes these small groups bump into each other, maintaining proper distance, but chatting. It's nice.

On the way back, a neighbor's horse comes to the fence to greet us. I always feel like I should have an apple or carrot or something, but I never do. I don't know much about caring for horses, but I know their stomachs can be sensitive and unpredictable. I'd hate to give a horse a treat, and then have it come down with colic. So we pet it and scratch it and talk to it, and the horse never gets tired of it.

Return from the walk, shower, rest of the day is wide open. Finish the quick-read Lehane novel I was halfway through, break out the guitar and fool around with some new chord progression ideas. Check out some tabs for a few classics -- Waterloo Sunset and Sunny Afternoon, some old Van Halen. Can't be shy about nicking someone else's ideas, as long as they're good ideas. Barbecue some chicken for the coming week, a couple beers and a couple fingers of Jameson's, Butch Cassidy and some more reading. Pretty damned good day.

Sunday March 22
Second verse, same as the first. Breakfast, exercise (Sunday is "heavy day" with weights), finish mowing, protein shake, shower, reading, guitar, movie, more reading and guitar. We'll see how things look back at work tomorrow, but there are worse things to get used to than this.

You speak like someone who has never been smacked in the fucking mouth. -- Puscifer, Remedy

Monday March 23
Back to the grind, to see how the governor's "shelter in place" orders affect us. We are considered "essential" personnel, so everyone is still onboard -- in fact, since they want as many people as possible to start telecommuting, they need to order dozens of laptops, all of which will need to be configured and networked on our VPN client. It's a good problem to have, and the fact is that in our IT unit, there are plenty of days where we don't see anyone face-to-face.

Wednesday March 25
Turns out there is more work than ever now, so the days are going pretty quickly. I look up and it's already four in the afternoon. Seems like we just got in at seven-thirty this morning.

There is an interesting balance forming, in being aware of the day-to-day changes happening "out there," and yet not immersing in it or feeling the need to react to it. Nobody knows anything for certain yet, except that this is going to be bad, and nobody who can actually do anything about it seems to really care.

The suddenly ramped-up workload proves to be helpful in winding down. I fart around with some music ideas, checking into a few Pro Tools projects just to review the progress, see what needs to be added before a final mix, etc. Still checking out all the cool sounds and features on the keyboard I picked up before Christmas; it came with a ton of sound modules with thousands of sounds and patterns, and I've only had time to scratch the bare surface. Another good problem to have.

I sleep like a rock, dreaming of a clear, uncluttered landscape, not necessarily a "utopia" but a place where people are happy and have enough. Seems simple, but apparently too much to ask of the current society and government.

Friday March 27
Never a dull moment, both "in here" and "out there." What kind of society do we want to live in, really? It should be unacceptable that wealthy people are so brazen in profiteering from a disaster of this scale. And yet it's accepted with a shrug, as it always is. Just when you think that this will finally be the thing to get people motivated enough to give a shit and do something, there it goes, off into the ether, as we all wait for the next outrage in the next news cycle.

We all know that corporations are people, my friend, but maybe people would get a fair shake out of this deal if they could be considered corporations. Capitalism is when taxpayers are forced to bail out billionaires; socialism is the other way around. Imagine a society where -- well, shit, just imagine a society, rather than a loose confederation of transnational merchant princes and feudal lords and usurers, pitting the serfs against each other with poison and lies. The mission of the media is to keep the rabble confused and docile. They do a pretty good job of that, it turns out.

I enjoy watching all those wife-swapping pervs in "The Villages" with their voluble refusals to maintain a decent physical interval between each other. It's all tricked-out golf carts and house-to-house thunderstickin' for these gross Viagralympians. I'm a hugger, dammit. Cool story, gramma, keep on huggin'. No one will miss you, you know. If the virus don't get you, the tertiary syphilis is probably making its move anyway.

Do they have lemon parties in hell?

'Cause you were bred for humanity and sold to society. One day you'll wake up in the present day, a million generations removed from expectations of being who you really want to be. -- Jethro Tull, Skating Away

Sunday March 29
Another great weekend, more barbecuing, reading, guitar, et al. Sucked it up and made a Costco run, to stock up before the real wave breaks in a week or three. The line to get in wasn't too bad, maybe ten minutes, everyone keeping their proper distance. Of course they're out of toilet paper, because this is a country mostly comprised of unserious doofuses and profiteering scumbags. Everything else was there, though, and aside from a quick weekly produce run, and my daily back-and-forth to my private office (the next best thing to actually telecommuting), we won't have to leave the house for another month if need be.

I feel bad for all the restaurant workers and service workers who are out of luck on all this. If only there was a political entity that cared about them and looked out for their interests. Serves them right for not being billionaires I guess.

I like how Good Ol' Joe, when given a softball by Chunk Toad of all people, couldn't even muster simple anger at the ongoing spectacle of Kim Don Un openly coercing states and their governors, insisting that they kiss the ring before he'll lift a finger to save American lives. It shouldn't be too much to ask that the front-runner of the opposition party oppose this sort of thing -- you know, murder and extortion. But as always, it is too much to ask. Anything more than bare crumbs is always too much to ask.

This crisis could have been an ideal opportunity to rethink how and why we do the things we do as a society, as a country. There is enough to go around, and there always has been, and it could be done by lightly taxing people who already have more than they can ever spend or use. Instead, it became merely another opportunity to do more of the same. Same as it ever was.

Hard, deep sleep again, dreaming once more of that mythical place where people get to live real lives of genuine self-actualization. I wonder if that's ever actually happened, going back all the way to Sumerians cultivating the alluvial soil between the two rivers. Seems doubtful. Do we ever wonder whether or not there ever existed a single child whose aspiration was to grow up to be a task monkey or a box stuffer for the more fortunate? No. It is easier to simply keep consuming, devouring, and to never look down, never look back.

Monday March 30
Lolwut -- the fucking MyPillow asshole is now a super-duper virus helper or some shit. "Retooling the factories." Jesus H. Christ. Do they think he's doing that for free, that the masks are going to be given away or something? No, they'll force the evil blue states to outbid each other, maybe get their governors together and make them eat bugs or something, earn that PPE. Dear Leader "picked on" Yamiche Alcindor again. I guess I should feel bad for her or something.

The "media" works against the people of this country, against their own stated self-interests, against their own job descriptions even. They need to stop running these rallies live. They need to stop showing up to the rallies, period. There is no useful content; indeed, much of it is active disinformation. Leave it to QANN and Newsmax and the rest of those potted plants. They are doing nothing but broadcasting and amplifying and legitmizing blatant lies, dangerous, deadly lies. People are dying because of those lies.

Maybe Yamiche Alcindor -- yes, the daughter of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, perhaps my all-time favorite NBA player, very cool! -- could deploy her considerable journamalistic expertise in a more productive fashion. Literally anything else, including staying home and doing nothing at all, would be more productive and useful and helpful to the American public, than sitting there and transcribing the prevarications of evil people. Maybe she could throw a dart at a map and visit a hospital in that city, talk to the nurses and patients, instead indulging this tedious charade that Baghdad Don has anything helpful to say.

Just a thought, lost in the void like all the others.

Tuesday March 31
The possibility of an economic contraction of over twenty percent and an unemployment rate of over thirty percent -- an honest-to-Moloch depression -- by June is hard to conceive, but not nearly as difficult as processing the idea that the "people in charge" somehow manage to be even more greedy and short-sighted than even the most hardened cynic could have supposed.

Every problem that this country faces always gets the sneering how ya gonna pay fer it? response. But the dirtbags that already own everything and everybody in this goddamned country get trillions of dollars shoveled at them the very second they get a slight haircut. Fuck them. They'll never get it, but they deserve tumbrels and guillotines.

Something to consider as this becomes the new normal -- where will the wealthy go to spend their pilfered hoards, when every glamorous port is an incubating hot-spot for the next zoonotic virus, when the oceans rise and swallow the seaside resorts, when the remaining enclaves become fewer and smaller, more stringent security measures but somehow less secure? When you have given billions of people nothing to lose and nothing to win, just so you can dump a little more into your Scrooge McDuck swimming pool, how sweet is it if you have to look over your shoulder in the few places you still even want to go, knowing that everyone despises you?

How much is enough, and what are you willing to do to acquire it, and what do you do once it's yours? What do you tell yourself to believe that it's worth it?

I'm glad the work is there, endless, stretching off into the distance, both professionally and personally. I could take three months off right now, work eight to ten hours a day every day, and still not finish up everything that's on my list, between home and creative projects. It's still a good problem to have, but it would be good to get traction on some of it as well.

One piece at a time.

Every time I pick up the guitar lately, I come up with several decent riffs and chord progressions. It's a joy paring them down to the best one or two, take some notes, work 'em a few times to get them tight, move on to the next one.

Turns out starting up a musical idea is a hell of a lot easier than seeing it all the way through -- developing, arranging, recording, refining, mixing, mastering. And that's just the instrumentals.

It's a good problem to have, though.

I think a lot lately of Kurt Vonnegut, one of the more humanistic of the 20th-century American writers. Most of his work plumbed the absurd joys of humans and their complex motives and emotions, finding the humor in things that were frequently not all that funny.

But in his final collection of essays, Man Without a Country, Vonnegut described an incurable frustration with the lies and violence, and with the witting acceptance of those things by people that Vonnegut had previously trusted to be fellow absurd travelers who had simply chosen a slightly different path. He gave up on humanity itself.

He was no longer able to reconcile the rank, unapologetic hypocrisy and spite, the flat-out refusal to repudiate indecent people and deeds and circumstances. He had, in his ninth decade finally given up on a species that propagated stupidity and venality as virtues, lies as convenient operational principles, an inhumane economic system as the most just and perfect.

Vonnegut suggested that maybe the planet was tired of our shit, and was trying in various ways -- earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes -- to shrug us off, to rid itself of our toxic presence, to cure itself of our centuries of poisoning it. Using its immune system.

Maybe we're the virus -- we continue to allow ourselves to be "led" by people who don't care about the planet, or about anyone else, or really even themselves, beyond their own appetites. We continue to think that cheap dunks on Twitter somehow accrue imaginary points in a fruitless competition, while our pockets and those of future generations are picked clean. This is because we've been almost completely disempowered and disenfranchised otherwise. But stupidity is always a factor.

The people who watch the daily agitprop sessions from Doctor Bonespurs, or get their virus facts from Sean Hannity or from their grifting pastor, or still read the New York Times, deserve what they get. The warnings have been abundant, libraries are still free, and they keep choosing the easy path of bullshit and noise. Go ahead and go to your megachurch, see what it gets you.

The many people trying to do good in a genuine crisis are routinely undermined by the most awful examples of our species, yet everyone who has the ability to do or say something that could affect that situation chooses not to. The awful people may very well preserve power, at which point the choice to do something will continue to attenuate, until one day they go to look for it and it's gone.

The stated goal now for the chief executive, who declared just a month ago that this was all a hoax, that only fifteen people had the bug and it would be down to zero before you knew it, is now between 100,000 and 240,000. That's the goal, over the next few months. There's going to be a 9/11 or two every week for the next couple months. You like apples?

By way of comparison, the US lost about 116,500 soldiers in all of what we now call World War One, but was really just the first chapter of a century-long war for oil and imperialism that is still going. This might be an opportune time, incidentally, for the opposition party to step up collectively and (again) forcefully and volubly oppose this insanity. This was preventable, avoidable, He screwed the pooch and now -- even now -- holds political fealty over aiding American citizens. Silence is complicity.

The "doctors" who still stand with this thing, providing aid and comfort to his deadly lies and naked self-dealing, are culpable too. They are costing more lives than they think they are saving with their abject participation. They know it. You can see it in their eyes. Good thing they are old enough to scuttle off and retire after they finish disgracing themselves, sparing future citizens from their self-serving bullshit. Shame on them.

This is a dry run at best, this extended mass quarantine. This weird combination of sociopathic indifference and unspeakable incompetence is how they've chosen to handle it. And as far as they're concerned, it's working, so it's how they'll handle the next one, and the next one, worse each time but with the same or worse process and the same or worse outcomes. The next one will be another excuse to plunder, to clamp down, to stick a fat thumb in the collective eye of whatever decent people remain. Everything is up in the air right now, but that's one thing you can count on for sure.

I wonder how the stock market did today.

Shit Doctrine

Looks like four Republicon Senators so far (Richard Burr, Kelly Loeffler, Jim Inhofe, and Ron Johnson) are known to have sold off large quantities of personal stock holdings, after receiving briefings early on regarding the impending severity of the "hoax" virus. What do you think the mathematical probability might be that there are many more -- including, of course, Kim Don Un's family of grifting locusts -- that have been profiteering in real time from the delays and denials and supposed logistical difficulties in preparing for and responding to the situation?

I've expressed skepticism of the actual severity of the plague early on, and you could say I've cautiously revised those early assessments. Again, going from empirical data and common sense, it is now more clear that the numbers were artificially "low" here because no one's been tested yet. The numbers are likely to skyrocket in the coming weeks, and people will die.

(I'm still not entirely convinced that completely shutting down the world and trashing the economy is a practical solution, but clearly something needs to be done, since certain people were not as proactive as they could and should have been.)

Other people will be laid off or cut loose from their jobs, and in a country where a significant number of people are four hundred bucks away from the sidewalk, that can be as much or even more of a death sentence than the virus itself. Poverty is a health-care issue, duh.

And these fuckers are making a smooth buck of it, cashing in on the misery of their countrymen. Loeffler is the wealthiest member of Congress, worth half a billion dollars. Her husband is the FUCKING CHAIRMAN OF THE NEW YORK STOCK EXCHANGE. But she got the briefing several weeks ago, cashed in a few mil, and turned around and bought stock in Citrix, since people will be working from home for some time, doncha know. (Those that still have jobs, anyway.)

And the entire time, these dirtbags have been praising Dear Leader's competence and manly stamina, like the dutiful little bootlicking worms that they are. They knew what was coming down, could have taken any number of actions publicly or at least in their respective home states. But no, there was a precious dollar to be had. Money always comes first with people like that. Always. It is not figurative in the least.

Entire states are being shut down now; just a few hours ago, the governor of California instituted a "shelter in place" order for the entire state (the order had been going county-by-county over the past several days). One in eight Americans lives here. Forty million people, who now can't go to fucking work to get money to buy food and pay rent.

I feel grateful and fortunate that I have almost two months' worth of vacation and sick time banked, though given the extraordinary circumstances, I might not be able to use them. I won't know until tomorrow or Monday. I have enough in the bank to last us a couple months as well, though. The thing is, I know a lot of people who don't any such cushion. I'll try to help out a few friends if need be, and maybe find a way to donate to the local food bank.

But a lot of people are well and truly fucked, and are about to find their lives in a hole that may take them years to get back out of, if ever. Debt can be a prison of sorts, especially in an economy explicitly designed to keep the vast majority in a state of permanent precarity, of always being a missed paycheck or bad health-care break away from living in a van down by the river.

They should know that a small group of people deliberately profited from their misery. They deserve to have a political party that actually represents them and fights for them, instead of gutless incrementalists that couldn't lead a scout troop across a dirt road.

I've been thinking about this post I wrote last weekend, almost since the very minute I finished it. I was way, waaayyyyy too hard on Matt Colvin and the rest of the "garage arbitrageurs" in that article. I have read enough of the "side hustle" and "nichepreneur" blogs and articles and mini-books to know that there really is a very small but very committed group of folks out there that do this for their living. Usually through Amazon's affiliate program, they do things like find clearance pallets on Alibaba -- or, in Colvin's case, driving around to all the dollar stores in a hundred-mile radius, buy items that they know they can sell for a markup on their affiliate page, and move product or have it drop-shipped.

It's work, and while it occasionally ends up being some asshole in Tennessee sitting on a garage full of hand sanitizer, trying to gouge desperate panic-buyers, the fact is that we should be able to muster a proportionately larger volume of genuine outrage at wealthy people who have sworn a legally binding oath to never use their elected office for personal profit. The Tennessee Attorney General seized all the contents of Colvin's garage last weekend, and I sincerely hope Colvin was at least compensated for his expenses.

As long as the health-care gougers and corrupt politicians get away with their evil shit right out in the open, I feel embarrassed for even picking on a schmuck like Matt Colvin, who at the end of the day was trying to get what might have amounted to mid-five-figures at best. A life-changing amount for him and his family, unlike the couch-cushion change Kelly Loeffler sold out her country for. But I'm leaving that post up, unaltered, as a reminder to myself at least.

Another prime example from this week is that spring break kid from the Florida beach, who just wasn't all that concerned about the virus. If I get it, I get it. People expressed their outrage at his "selfishness," as if we weren't all that way when we were nineteen. As if that kid, and everyone in his generation, hasn't been explicitly told their entire lives, tough shit, your problem. Climate change? Your problem. Mass shootings in schools? Your problem. Decades of student-loan usury and gig-economy wage slavery? Your fucking problem. We got ours, sucks to be you.

But yeah, surfer dude's the selfish asshole. Right. I'd say he's internalized the lessons that have been taught to him his entire life.

A decent society that had a real understanding of what it's facing right about now would truss up that cohort of Senate profiteers like Thanksgiving turkeys, set up a guillotine in front of the White House gates, and commence with justice. It's bad enough that they'd happily watch you die in the gutter, but they decided to cash in on a situation that they knew would worsen drastically, and say nothing about it. They aided and abetted an ongoing crime that will kill people and ruin lives. They should be punished accordingly. The Republican Party is an organized crime syndicate that needs to be detained, investigated, and imprisoned, before they completely destroy what's left of the country. Really, it might already be too late now.

Since we are no longer a decent, serious society, and maybe never really were, we all already know what will happen to them -- nothing. They won't resign, they won't get censured or fined, there might be some insincere mea culpas and a few enraging homina-homina moments from the prime suspects, and then maybe some canned rebukes muttered on whichever MSNBC host needs a guest at the moment, and that will be that. It's all just a big game to them -- your life, my life, all of it.

Because let's face it, folks -- the real problem right now, the one truly undermining the stout fabric of a once-proud nation, is that the Chapo Trap House guys are dicks, and someone was mean to Bret Stephens on Twitter that one time. Priorities, people.

Oh, and fuck your feelings. Remember that one? Good times. They weren't joking.

Dead Cat Bounce

This is what a hollowed-out state looks like -- perpetually stupefied, listless, unable to agree on even a common shared reality, much less some plan of action. Reading countless posts and articles over the years about the profitable cruelties and bland, indifferent immiserations of the for-profit health-care system has the cumulative effect of the old "everyone complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it" joke.

The country has for decades been run by an increasingly aggressive group of institutionalized rackets -- health care, higher education, finance, the privatized carceral industry, the perpetual political campaign and consultancy machine -- that control and confine every life to some extent in this country. Very few individuals ever manage to stay completely off the grid from any of them, much less all of them. People are either under the thumb, or they're a shareholder in the hand. Sometimes both, futilely hoping to climb over that spiked iron fence and into the country club.

It does not matter if the Dow loses ten thousand points next week, or gains that amount. On a gain, the profiteers would do their thing and recoup their losses. You would get crumbs, at best. On a loss, taxpayers would be forced to bail out the billionaires once again in some form or other. You would get nothing in that instance, beyond the warm feeling of helping out your betters once more, so that they can keep you wriggling on that debt -- which is their equity -- fishhook forever and ever, amen.

The billionaires' losses would be, to use a word that is politically potent these days, socialized. You may remember that particular hit song from about twelve years ago.

When Barack Obama won the 2008 election by a bona-fide landslide, the economy's death plummet halted and slowly reversed. People began to feel that the ship had begun to right itself, after eight years of in-your-face malfeasance from the Cheney regime. (Remember those guys? Good times.)

In retrospect, maybe the long run proves that declining societies, like bad stock runs, have dead cat bounces -- brief periods of apparent recovery that quickly revert to the overall declining trendline. And the overall trend has steadily worsened for a very long time, and shows no signs of abating.

Remember that chart I linked the other day, showing the largest daily losses and gains? Look further down, to the "Largest intraday point swings" chart. Seven of the top eight are from the past six weeks; six of those are since March 2nd. That sort of volatility indicates that investors are getting squirrelly about their near-term prospects.

South by Southwest, which brings in over a quarter-billion per year to Austin, has been cancelled. The rest of the NBA season has been suspended. The NCAA basketball tournament, cancelled. Major League Baseball, postponed for at least a couple weeks. The Olympics may get cancelled, may still be held in closed stadiums, without paying spectators. Broadway shows postponed and cancelled until further notice, small concerts cancelled and postponed, and on and on.

So that's athletes and performers, but also concession workers, transport, equipment hauling and handling, caterers, crew members. Some them may have things to fall back on or jump to, some don't. Either way, it's a huge amount of money lost to local economies which, unlike billionaires who just hoard and keep score, actually spend and circulate money. That's all just in the past week or two, and the economy is always a lagging indicator -- the results from what's starting to happen will be felt more acutely in the next two fiscal quarters. Just in time for the election, if there is one.

I've used this analogy before -- if the circulation of money is the lifeblood of a stable economy, what happens to the human body when 80% of all the blood suddenly ends up in one spot, like the head or the foot, instead of circulating properly?

Look at how easily hundreds of billions of dollars have been "injected" into the monetary system, just over the past seventy-two hours or so. Nearly two trillion dollars, and interest rates dropped to zero. Interesting how when billionaires need a break, everyone springs into action, but figuring out a way to get minimum-wage workers a few sick days so they don't spread the plague? Well, hopefully we can hammer out a deal, but not one that impacts the largest minimum-wage employers or anything. You understand.

We can never find money to fix all the ongoing daily crises in this country -- crumbling infrastructure; no plan for climate change mitigation; working class on the debt hook of the rackets that run this country; expensive, shitty health care system; homelessness; food insecurity; and so forth. Informed, passionate people draw up wonderful plans to address these issues and are immediately bombarded with how we gonna pay for it plaints.

But boy howdy, one of Trump's oil-sucking butt-buddies loses some couch-cushion change in the market last week, and there's not even an ask -- we're dumping trillions of dollars of liquidity into the market for their benefit, and we might even be forced to bail out the shale oil industry, even though they were on the verge of financial insolvency well before the virus hit. This too is a hallmark of a hollowed-out state, an entity that retains just enough legitimacy to ensure that the people who own the system get to use everyone else's money to bail themselves out.

It is not a coincidence that the only two identifiable skills Donald Trump has are:

• Losing other people's money.
• Finding more suckers to invest in his next scheme.

This is all the federal government is now, and all the eleven-dimensional chess dreams from the Democrats won't change that. You either fight and kill the monster, or learn to live with it. They chose the latter a long time ago. Until you have more AOCs and fewer Bidens, that's how it's gonna be. Even then it might be too late already. We're way down the road, one real plague or Cat 5 hurricane wiping out Miami from seeing that. We've been very lucky for a very long time, and no longer have the reserves and resources we used to. The weasels stripped the car and sold the parts, and now we're all just sitting on cinder blocks pretending to drive somewhere.

Whatever the eventual pathological impact of the coronavirus ends up being, we know that there's an incubation period, and that the virus can live on surfaces for up to two weeks, and that people stricken with the virus can carry the disease in their respiratory system for up to five weeks. So there's a lag, which means that as bad as it is now, it is highly likely to worsen in the coming weeks.

It does not help that all the key players in the federal disaster management system are more concerned with buttering Dear Leader's worthless ass than anything else, including the well-being of human beings who don't have money or political influence.

But if it hadn't been that, it would have something else -- war, natural disaster, mass shootings, economic collapse caused by some mathematical probability in an over-leveraged system designed only to hoover money from people who work for a living and give it to people who own and acquire things for a living. The main dynamic in play is that the federal government is largely ceremonial these days, and retains operational capabilities only insofar as it can be utilized to further stuff the pockets of its rentiers.

That's really how it is, and most people understand at this point that there is no longer any "good" choice, there's just choices that make you feel slightly better about flooring the accelerator over that cliff. Because neither arm of The Party is going to do what really needs to be done, because it is in their best interest not to.

Let's construct a "best case" hypothetical:  Good Ol' Joe wins a decisive victory over Preznit Tide Pod Challenge, one that cannot be cheated or ignored away. Not only that, several states come to their senses and eject their Republicon senators -- McConnell, Graham, Collins, and more. Now you have maybe fifty-five Democratic senators. The House retains its Democratic majority, even adds a handful more, thanks to all those abrupt Gooper retirements the last few years.

Ginsburg and Souter retire the day after Biden is inaugurated, and two suitably liberal replacements are instated. A few noises are made to investing in infrastructure or climate change mitigation, maybe incentivizing the fossil fuel industry to move to manufacturing renewable energy equipment. Great.

But you can be sure that by fall 2021, the Democrats will reflexively start tacking toward their old reliable "we have to shore up the party for the midterms" guff, the usual excuse for not actually moving anything forward -- better working conditions, better voting processes, a real commitment to economic justice and fixing the planet for The Children, Who Are Our Future, etc. Sorry guys, just can't do it this time. Don't forget to vote!

By 2024, whether or not Biden retires and his veep (probably Kamala Harris) steps in, disaffected party voters will have had one too many go-rounds with Lucy and her magic football, and either stay home, primary the incumbent, or start up a third party and stick with it.

All of that ignores the significant possibility that the virus abates over the next month, thanks to the measures taken by state governments and responsible private entities such as sports leagues and amusement parks. They're trying to get out in front of this thing while Nero plays his fiddle and fiddles with his tiny old wiener. The people who did nothing, or bragged about how they're still gonna get their Red Robin on so fuck you will immediately gloat that it was all just an overhyped hoax in the first place. And the morons who believe them will keep on believin'.

And then six months down the line, fall and winter -- and the next flu season -- arrive, and the virus renews, as they do, adaptively mutated to cause just a little more damage, and the panic begins anew. By then they'll be ready, in the sense that "readiness" consists of operational measures to ensure profiteering and "security"; that is, enforced quarantines. Careful what you wish for there, and think about whether you want Donald Trump and Mike Pence and their gutless toadies deciding when you're permitted to go out for a burger or to shop for toilet paper. In the meantime, you can bet they'll be cashing checks from all the testing and vaccination processes that will be in place by then.

Greedy plutocrats and their soulless minions have hollowed out the state for their own benefit. Until at least one political party commits in a major way to undoing that regression, nothing will ever change. And honestly, it's unclear if there actually is any singular event or even a trend that will make that fact clear and imperative. A million or ten million people dying from the virus would just give 'em an excuse to do what they do best.

We've turned into the Soviet Union circa 1988 -- people can't find toilet paper and school children are prevented from graduating for owing school lunch money. The rich fucks should be very pleased with themselves -- not only do they get away with all of it, but they've convinced enough of the peons not to hold them responsible for any of it.

Posting here will be even more sporadic than usual for the next month or so. I have a backlog of home and creative projects that need attention, and there will be plenty more opportunities for disaster porn in the weeks and months to come. If you run out of toilet paper, you can probably snag a few copies of Art of the Deal from your local Barnes & Noble cutout bin. Stay frosty, folks.

Your Periodic Reminder That Newt Gingrich Is a Piece of Shit, and Should Have Been Flushed Decades Ago

If you have ever looked around at the parlous condition of the United States in the last, say, twenty-five years or so, you can always remember that Newt Gingrich was the prime architect of all of it -- the lying, the hypocrisy, the open corruption, the literally Orwellian manipulation of language for purely political ends, the obstructionism, the borrowing of North Korean lickspittle tropes used to convey approval for Dear Leader's every stanky burger fart and dusty old-man ejaculation. You want to know why your government has been rendered impotent and ineffective in the face of rapidly spreading problems and events, Gingrich is one of the main proponents of that movement.

Gingrich pioneered the industrialization of all of that and more. He's done more to deliberately and methodically destroy this country than any single person outside the Billy Graham-Jerry Falwell multigenerational axis of evilangelism. A decent society would have shunned the likes of him -- and them -- long ago.

The man is pure scum and Italy can have him for as long as they can put up with him. He's a cheap snake-oil huckster of the absolute lowest order, and deserves far worse than he'll ever get. He should die penniless in a back alley and be discarded into a vat of eels for food. It's no wonder Gingrich idolizes Trump; neither man has ever been tethered to anything resembling a moral compass. Shame on any media outlet that gives Gingrich any sort of venue to peddle his wares. The more respectable thing for Newsweek to do would be to give O.J. Simpson or Harvey Weinstein a regular column.

I think what I'm saying here is fuck Newt Gingrich with an ebola-laden baseball bat.

Scum

Suspending my FTFNYT boycott for five minutes, only to say that I literally cringe to think about the many awful things that could happen to these plague profiteers, and it would only amuse me. If his house burned down tomorrow with his "investment" and all his worldly possessions in it, and it turned out he had no fire insurance or family to fall back on, I'd actually laugh out loud. I don't know what the hell happens to people that they turn out like that, where every crisis is an opportunity to screw over your neighbors.

I didn't used to be this way, wishing real misery on idiots, but then we didn't used to be this way, at least not so easily and publicly. The panic-buying of toilet paper is beyond stupid, but there has been a concomitant rash of stories like this across the country, these little weasels hitting all the Costcos and Dollar Trees in their area, buying up all the cleaning supplies, and sticking them in the garage, in order to jack up the price several hundred percent for their neighbors.

However, to be (a bit) fair to Matt Colvin and his ilk, how is what they are doing any different that what the various collusive legs of the health care stool do? Every facet of that filthy industry -- HMOs, insurance companies, pharmaceutical corporations -- all engage in the very same type of "disaster arbitrage" Colvin is trying to pull. You think those COVID-19 tests are going to be free? You think treatment is going to be fully covered, even if you have insurance? Really?

Don't get me wrong, these jerkoffs are messing with the well-being of their communities, trying to turn a quick buck off of other people's panic and pain. They've earned your scorn, and it would serve them right if all they get out of it is a lifetime supply of Clorox wipes and Charmin. Just keep in mind that they're pikers and amateurs compared to the companies that profit mightily every single day from extorting money out of a captive market, all so their CEOs can rake in twenty million a year or so. As bad as Matt Colvin is, the people who gouge $500/month for insulin or $600 for a pair of Epipens that cost one-tenth of that to produce are a thousand times worse.

Or the people in the federal government whose job it is to protect the population from a pandemic, absolving themselves from responsibility and fawning over Dear Leader's stellar planning and astute stewardship, this heedless clown who literally claimed the disease was just a hoax right up to two weeks ago.

You think I'm indifferent to the fate of these Amazon arbitrage weasels, don't get me started on the health care execs and Trump's bootlickers. If every single one of them suffered and dropped dead from the bug it would seem like a fair exchange. Their conduct has been at best a complete dereliction of duty, their silence nothing more than complicity with a scheming, chiseling lunatic who would nuke Omaha tomorrow if he thought there was a few bucks or a few poll approval points in it for him.

Maybe it's time we all take stock of ourselves, and each other, and decide what kind of society we really want to be. Because if this is what we've fallen to, these chumps who are so out of options that they think that hustling a garage or pickup bed full of household goods at inflated prices is going to change their lives for the better, we're in deeper trouble than we think.

A Floating Speck In an Entropic Void

I think I've told this story before, but it's been a while, and like many things, it bears repeating. You can learn solid life lessons just about anywhere, if you're open and aware to the situation and its relevance to you. A big one found its way to me a quarter-century ago in a Guitar Center, of all places.

In the summer of 1994, I took a road trip down-state to visit my dad for his seventieth birthday. He lived out in the Coachella Valley, being a lifelong "desert rat" as he always put it. I hadn't been to SoCal in several years by then, so I decided to hit one of my favorite places -- the Hollywood Guitar Center on Sunset -- before heading out to the moonscaped canyons past San Berdoo.

I had been playing music for over half of my twenty-seven years at that point, and guitar for nearly ten of those years. I had spent the late '80s learning all the hard-rock heroes of the day -- the usual ones like Eddie Van Halen and Randy Rhoads, the classic British guys like Page and Beck and Blackmore, Hendrix of course, and the European proto-shredders like Michael Schenker and Ulrich Roth.

By 1988 or so, hair metal had taken over, and it was not unusual for me to call in sick to work, and spend the entire day with a stack of tab books, blasting through the so-called "neo-classical" players, your Yngwie Malmsteen and Steve Vai types. I knew my scales and arpeggios backward and forward, drilling with speed and precision. I still have several binders full of all the violin partitas and sonatas that I used for practice material.

I got to the point where, in the middle of playing Roadhouse Blues on stage, I would flip the guitar behind my head and do double-tempo runs of Bach's Invention #4, or a couple lines of a Kreutzer etude. My playing was not as broad-based as it should have been, but I had a decent mix of "classic" and "modern" rock playing under my belt, with some classical flavor and modality. I felt like I was pretty damned good.

So anyway, there I am in the Sunset GC, farting around with some Sabbath and Pantera riffs with an Jackson guitar and a 2x12 Crate amp on the main floor, not too loud but starting to get into it, when a couple guys come in. The store was about a third the size it is now, and was in the middle of some renovations and add-ons. There was a small mezzanine section off to one side from the main entrance, about eight or ten steps leading up to the deck.

There were a number of toys on the deck, but the main attraction was this Soldano full stack -- two 4x12" cabinets topped with a 200-watt customized head. I don't recall exactly what they were asking for that setup, but it was several grand. I wasn't going anywhere near that fucking thing and making a fool out of myself, but it was impressive to look at.

These two guys headed straight for it, one of them short, like 5'6" or so, but wearing high-heeled rocker boots and pants and a jacket that, in the middle of the grunge era, made him look a bit out of his time, like maybe six years or so behind schedule. Sorta ridiculous in the flannel-shirt epoch, but he carried it with a confidence that made you wonder if he was with Extreme or White Lion or one of those type bands. But I didn't recognize him, and I knew every signed band you could think of at the time.

So the little guy just walks up the steps in his heels, grabs the Charvel guitar propped next to the stack, turns it on without a second thought, and just starts blazing. Ultra-fast, clean, precise, and loud. And musical, without a doubt. A lot of that stuff came off as "switched-on Bach", but this guy had done his homework. You could hear the ten thousand hours -- at least I could, because by then I had put in those hours as well.

The guy just rips for about eight or ten minutes straight without missing a beat or flubbing a note, stops, sets down the guitar, turns off the amp, heads down the steps, walks out the door. Just like that. Doesn't say a word to anyone, barely looks around. His sidekick didn't do much of anything the whole time but stand and watch.

At the time, I figured that someone that talented must be with a band. And I'm sure he was. I bet if I had hit the Whiskey or the Rainbow that night or the next, they probably would have been there, working on their Racer X retreads or whatever. But I never saw this guy in any band, before or since. Probably a student at GIT (Musicians Institute), which was just a few blocks away.

Now, that kind of music really is geared not just toward musicians in general, and not just toward guitar players in particular, but toward a very specific niche of guitarist. It takes a ton of carefully applied work to get those patterns down to high-speed muscle memory. You're running all this stuff with a metronome, logging your speeds, and then working it to the next "level" on the metronome; at lower tempos you might be able to jump up six or eight beats per minute per week or two, but at higher tempos it's more like four to six or even just two to four bpm increments per month.

And just like with athletes, it is very much a "diminishing returns" scenario -- it probably took me as much time to get from 180-200 bpm as it did to get from 100-180 bpm, which was a couple years in each case. It takes real work and dedication. You can't half-ass it. You may even have to tear down and rebuild significant parts of your technique in order to obtain the efficiencies of motion necessary to just move your hands that quickly and precisely. You really have to love the process.

And yet -- there I was, sitting there in that room on that day, with untold thousands of hours of practice and probably eight hundred or so live performances under my belt, learning a very important lesson in about ten minutes, something that any person in any walk of life should know and keep close to their heart at all times:

There is always someone better than you. Whatever it is you're good at, there's someone out there who is better at it than you are, than you'll ever be.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, mind you. It's healthy, even freeing. I mean, music is about being musical, not about playing with perfect calisthenic precision and stamina at impossible speeds. I've seen some of those "speed contests" on YouTube before, and they give me a headache. There's nothing remotely musical about any of it. It's just a mechanical trick and some calisthenic conditioning. So being "better" is obviously and incredibly subjective ideal in any creative area.

I took it as a reminder to focus more on making music that would connect with people, and less on pursuing this unreachable athletic ideal that would only appeal to other guitarists in the first place. But as I began broadening my horizons and cultivating other skills, it was a valuable lesson to keep in my back pocket at all times, to listen and observe other people who could do those things well, and learn from them.

There was another lesson learned as well, but it was a few years later, when I realized that I had no clue who this very talented person was, and probably never would:

Sometimes you can be great at something, phenomenal even, and it doesn't get recognized like it should, because no one ever knows about it.

Maybe you don't have the people skills to go with that technical or creative skill (I have seen this multiple times with creative types; woodshedding is an intensely personal experience, and can make you a bit of a loner). Maybe you just have bad luck. Or maybe you just don't have good luck, which is a different thing.

And that's okay too, when you love the work for itself, because it doesn't really feel like work. You would do it for free, and lo and behold, you are. That may not seem "fair" when you see lazy halfwits derp their way into fortune and fame, but whoever said anything in life was fair?

We reassure ourselves that virtue is its own reward, that the harder you work, the luckier you get. But that's not always true; in fact, it's impossible to quantify or even estimate just how often it isn't true. Lots of people practice and hone a skill, turn a buck at it for a while or pursue it as a hobby, and die.

The NFL is a great example for this sort of thing. I frequently think about two of the most talented players during the 1980s, when I was coming of age and really starting to appreciate the game:  Barry Sanders and Dan Marino.

Obviously, Sanders is easily one of the most talented people to ever pick up a football and run with it. He routinely did things only a handful of others could. Do yourself a favor and watch a couple of his classic runs on YouTube, they never get old. Amazing, almost superhuman at times. And yet he never even got close to a championship game.

Marino had more success, getting to the Super Bowl in his sophomore year and losing to the Bill Walsh juggernaut. But that was it for him. He spent the next fifteen years chasing that dragon, finally going down in the 1999 divisional playoffs to the "expansion" Jaguars in a humiliating 62-7 blowout. Never won the big game, nor did Tim Brown or Randy Moss or countless other superbly conditioned athletes who worked impossibly hard with a singular goal in mind.

You might say that at least they made it to the big game, even if they didn't win it, and you'd be right. But that's not what they worked so hard for. I don't personally know any NFL players, much less any who played in the Super Bowl, but I feel pretty confident in speculating that if you were to ask them, every single one of them would tell you that it's not remotely the same. As the prophet Ricky Bobby sagely advised, if you're not first, you're last.

Sometimes hard work is just hard work, and sometimes lazy, stupid, vile individuals get to cut to the front of the line. Not even "born on third base, think they hit a triple," more like shat out on the floor in a stadium bathroom, and insist they hit a grand slam, and insist that everyone around them repeat that as gospel truth. And they never receive justice, or karma, or any of the other narrative tropes we have been conditioned to believe are inevitable stations on the story arc.

Assholes and thieves and killers get away with it all the fucking time. Fact. Justice only occurs when it is the goal of a sequence of deliberate actions by a sufficient number of people with the right ability, skill, communication, and luck. Any one of those elements is not present, it doesn't happen. For every Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein, there's a Roger Ailes or Les Moonves or Brett Ratner, or many of them. And so on. Life isn't fair, nor has it ever pretended to be.

Depending on one's perspective on life, that can be profoundly depressing, or it can free you from preconceptions and assumptions and  bullshit "obligations" that we saddle ourselves with unnecessarily. If we stop trying to assume whom "everyone else" "thinks" can "win" -- and really question our assumptions about what all those terms even mean -- a different candidate emerges and gains traction. If we each make our personal decisions about what we expect out of our short time on the planet, and not what "everyone else" expects from us, a different path reveals itself. It may be narrower and rockier, but the view is much better.

Hang in there. Don't despair, prepare. Whatever it is, vent, grieve, and then get back at it. Never give up, never give in. It does get better, but only when people stop second-guessing themselves, or waiting around for "someone else" to do "something," and simply start taking action and doing what they know to be right.

Gravity and Karma

Two thousand points. Most of it came in the first few minutes, so quickly that the "curbs" kicked in automatically to shut trading down for a few minutes. Then hours of wavering, a slight dead cat bounce in the middle to spot the marks still at the table, culminating in a frantic final hour that ended up nearly eight percent down.

Two thousand points. Seven-point-eight percent. In a single day.

The eleven worst single-day Dow point drops have occurred under the current regime. Twelve of the top thirteen. Fifteen of the top twenty. Six of those "top" eleven have occurred since the beginning of this year.

In the interest of, uh, fairness, it should also be pointed out that ten of the top twenty largest single-day gains also have occurred during the tenure of this festering anal fissure of an administration. All but two of those occurred when the DJIA was higher, which means all of those bigly beautiful gains have been wiped out.

How's your portfolio doin'?

No, Trump didn't cause the coronavirus outbreak, nor did he force the Saudis to start an oil-production trade war with the Russians. But as with everything else, he did and does nothing to prepare for such events, to have knowledgeable people on hand who can provide useful advice on how to mitigate these things when they happen.

His thieving children and scum-in-law cannot help. The White House and halls of Congress and the environs of the capital city have turned into a barracks of worthless toadies and bootlickers and -- worse yet -- televangelists.

Lost in the midst of Trump's usual empty bravado about what a great medicine man he would of made, or his usual sociopathic "concern" that allowing cruise ships to dock might fuck up "his" numbers, is the likelihood -- which means eventual certainty -- that he slow-walked testing kits early on because he owns stock in the company that is now getting the huge contract to produce the kits.

Per usual, Jim Wright has a great analysis of how the virus scare hits the poorer parts of the country, the people who can't just take a few sick days and get healthier, or not spread the plague. It's fine as far as it goes, but I might cock an eyebrow at this sort of thing:

If you're a selfish greedy predatory asshole like Rush Limbaugh, you tell those poor people the coronavirus is just the flu, just a cold, because anything else makes Trump look bad. Because if Trump looks bad, then Rush looks bad. And trust me, every confederate flag waving son of bitch who doesn't have a pot to piss in down here listens to Limbaugh like he's the second coming of Dale Earnhardt Jr.

As always, I get where Jim is coming from. I live in deep red country in Northern California. I have friends and relatives and people I like and respect who, after all this, are still on the Chump Train. I don't pretend to know or understand their rationales, and at this point, I don't care.

I don't want anyone to get sick and die, but at the same time, I give up on responding to people who listen to Rush Limbaugh and watch Fox News. There is nothing I can tell them. They don't want to listen or think, or even admit to themselves for a second that maybe they got rolled, and it's time to cut their losses while they're still, you know, alive and have a pot to piss in and a window to throw it out of.

It is, for many of them, literally a matter of life and death, whether they choose to believe the very stable genius and his ragged cadre of agitprop mercenaries, or their own lyin' eyes. Forget whether "you" or "I" or "we" can "help" "them" -- they want to believe it's another librul hoax.

It's a logistically peculiar understanding of the world and how things and people work. On the one hand, libturds are such cuck pussies that they're afraid of hamburgers and internal combustion engines, and couldn't beat Dear Leader in a free and fair election; on the other hand, they're so all-powerful that they induced China to quarantine sixty-five million people, and forced Italy to lock down their entire country.

That's some very selective mojo, you have to admit. Right up there with running an international pedophile ring out of the basement of a pizza parlor that has no basement. Because where else would you run your child-trafficking ring for the wealthy and powerful, right? A fucking dump in the middle of DC. Brilliant.

They've been telling us all to go fuck ourselves for years now, and I cheerfully take them up on their offer. They can cure themselves with their "Fuck Your Feelings" tee-shirts and Mike Pence's prayer-warrior groups for all I care. They can grow the fuck up and act like responsible citizens and see for themselves what's really happening and who's really trying to kill them, or they find out the hard way.

No one in a position of power or influence ever tells these angry chumps to meet anyone else halfway, or compromise with their political opponents. It's always in one direction. Well, sorry, no. Life's too short and there's no fucking point to trying to persuade idiots. They've made up their minds, and either life snaps one off way up their asses, or they get lucky one more time. They can't see that they're just being used for their angry gullibility, and they're not interested in better eyesight.

They're getting exactly what they wanted, what they voted for. They weren't fooled or bamboozled by Limbaugh or Trump or anyone else. They knew exactly what they were getting into, and now they're seeing the natural outcome of those decisions.

That is not at all to say I told you so or anything terrible like that. It's more like I can't believe you seriously thought there could be any other outcome. I don't know what to tell you, if you can't see it for yourself. Good luck. You're gonna need it.

There is no convincing or "outreach" or any magic mumbo-jumbo you can muster to wake these willing dupes. All you can do, it turns out -- and this goes for the credulous shitheads who think the animals at the DNC have anything significantly better planned for them -- is do whatever you can as an individual to insulate yourself from the stupidity and self-destruction of these people.

Anything else is just pinheads dancing on the heads of angels.

Warren Piece

As much of a clown car as the Democratic primary season began as, the real absurdities piled up as the field winnowed. And now, thanks to a lazy, sexist media nudging a lazy, sexist voter base, the (by far) most qualified candidate has bowed out, in order that we might be afforded the privilege once again of "selecting" among a handful of elderly, cantankerous white men, some of whom may or may not be losing their faculties.

One valuable anecdotal insight the corporate media did bestow upon us leading up to Super Tuesday was the repeated observations that voters preferred Warren, but were going to vote for Biden or Sanders because of the "electability" factor. This dumb, self-reinforcing circular logic undermines the whole point of a primary, and cements the hold that the party establishment and its corporate owners hold on the public's well-being.

It is not a coincidence that all the major pharma stocks experienced a generous bump yesterday morning, or that Jim Clyburn has benefited from the largesse of that particular industry during his political career. Make of that what you will.

"Electability" is a lie. You know who was considered unelectable? Barack Obama, a black guy with a thin political résumé and a Moooslim sounding name. You know who else was considered really unelectable? Donald Fucking Trump, a ridiculous asshole and multiply-failed "businessman" who'd been making a fool out of himself for decades. All the professional pundits and common-taters said so. No one in their right mind would vote for those guys. They were gonna get their asses kicked.

So when those same brain surgeons all preach from the same "a progressive will end up like McGovern against Nixon" hymnal, I check my bullshit detector. They're constantly wrong, and still somehow employed. These are the same people that always insist that Democrats and liberals must find common ground with their opponents, but never seem to get around to even suggesting such a thing for Republicans and conservatives.

Why do you think that might be? Hmmm.... [scratches chin thoughtfully]

I wonder if -- and just hear me out here -- if we think about our perpetual electoral-entertainment-industrial complex, about who buys the ad time, who owns the broadcast entities that rent out the ad time and run the ads, what other vested interests all those entities might have, and how that impacts which politicians they might decide to support, if all those factors have anything at all to do with one another, or with why Elizabeth Warren was essentially ignored, except to occasionally hint that she might be a hectoring schoolmarm who concocted a weird lie about getting fired for getting pregnant.

I wonder.... [scratches balls thoughtfully]

The fact is that of the main candidates, only Warren and Sanders would actually do something. So Bernie becomes this insurgent commie who wrote some weird slash-fic fifty years ago, and might shoot Chris Matthews in Central Park to celebrate Che Guevara's birthday or some shit. And Warren, again, is a shrill know-it-all bitch who just reminds all the he-men out there of their first wife -- or worse yet, of her divorce lawyer.

It's tempting to blame that insane dynamic on all the media or on Trump or whatever. But the blame rests squarely on the shoulders of the Democratic voting base, who collectively decided to outsmart themselves by trying to game who they thought everyone else would vote for, rather than who they actually thought would do the job best.

And so now you're gonna get Joe Biden, who has spent his entire career supporting the rackets that run the country and make American life so financially ruinous and spiritually deadening -- health care, student-loan usurers, Wall Street thieves. Hell, even Clarence Thomas.

The narrative for now is how Biden is so "smart" and "decent", and that's true enough, as far as it goes. You know who else is smart and decent? Elizabeth Warren. Even Bernie, as loud and angry and off-putting as his energy tends to be, does seem to actually give a shit about something besides himself. Joe Biden does not have the market cornered on knowing how things work, or on being a decent human being.

I understand that in a country that has desensitized itself to the daily depredations of a scummy grifter and his vile family, that qualifies as a shocker. But we got stuck with Trump for largely the same reasons -- smug complacency from the Democratic party leadership, and an inability to understand the seething anger coming up from the increasing pool of downtrodden in the glorious gig economy.

I don't know who wants to break it to Nancy Pelosi, but uh, turns out end-stage predatory capitalism isn't much fun for most people. And where Trump sussed out that anger in 2016, and got just enough people who weren't regular voters to push him across the goal line, Sanders has captured that crowd on the other side of the aisle.

Many of the Berners will indeed come over for Good Ol' Joe when the time comes, because they rightly despise Trump and the dirtbags around him. But an indeterminate -- but possibly significant -- portion of them will just stay home, because they didn't plan to vote -- they planned to vote for Bernie. Failure to recognize that and give something to them to keep them motivated is every bit as bad as their stubbornness and apparent apathy.

A.R. Moxon had a fantastic thread this morning on the illusion of "compromise" as a governmental principle. Compromise is upheld as this ideal of opposing sides coming together to find common ground and work together for the good of the country. But that stopped happening a very long time ago, and only one party seems to recognize the situation for what it is.

Republican politicians don't even pretend to reach out to Democratic voters, or even moderate Republicans, so we don't even need to bother with that notion. Democratic politicians strive for this illusory ideal of placating the elusive "swing voter" -- as if someone who is still on the fence at this late date can possibly be considered a rational actor or an honest broker -- while "shoring up" their own base. In other words, their preference is to compromise with people who will probably vote, but may or may not vote for them. But they flat-out refuse to compromise with the people who will definitely vote for them, if only you give them something to vote for, besides more of the same.

Here's a pro marketing tip for all you would-be politicians and influencers out there -- it is very difficult to generate enthusiastic support from people if your only sales pitch is to threaten them if they don't buy your product.

Best case scenario is they buy your product -- which again, offers them nothing except the dwindling possibility of preventing things from getting even worse -- and loathe you and themselves afterward. More likely is they just make a poker face, nod in mock assent until you fuck right off already, and then stay home.

Please note:  this is not at all to say that you shouldn't vote. No matter who the nominee is, no matter how much they suck, you should vote for them, and vote in all the down-ticket races as well. Biden is at least lucid enough to know what he doesn't know, and to fill those gaps with smart people, rather than dumb, greedy bootlickers. A second Trump term will be catastrophic for this country and the world, period. Both Biden and Sanders have profound flaws, and I have deep reservations about each of them. But either of them is infinitely superior to the alternative, just for the Supreme Court alone, but for so many other reasons.

That said, I also think that the Democratic Party and its principals are at best engaging in an ongoing pattern of dereliction of duty, one that can only be rectified by giving it a complete overhaul, the very second after the Republican Party is eradicated completely from the American political system.

Consider the vaunted "blue wave", and how and why they were voted in for the midterms. People wanted shit to get done. They wanted Trump's corruption and criminality investigated and prosecuted. A majority of Americans polled indicated that they wanted Trump impeached and removed.

What did the House leadership do? They balked and slow-walked it the entire way, only finally investigating and impeaching when the crimes became impossible to ignore. They cherry-picked two narrowly-drawn articles of impeachment, though there were certainly more to choose from, to keep in the chamber for backup.

And when McConnell did exactly as predicted, and moved through a sham trial, the House Dems folded and gave up. No contingency plan, no further pursuit of criminality, no impeachment of Bill Barr, even though Barr lied in his confirmation interview and has operated quite openly as Trump's lawyer, instead of the country's lawyer. Again, either the law means something or it doesn't, and inaction speaks as loudly as action.

They claimed they wanted to focus on health care instead. Okay then. So now we have a global pandemic brewing, the administration lying and covering things up, as they do. People are dying and getting sick. The labor situation is such that poor people cannot afford to take time off to go see a doctor, much less pay for treatment, which will only exacerbate the situation. We will be very lucky if this doesn't cost a large number of lives in this country; it's already claimed some.

So. What is the opposition party doing to oppose this murderous negligence? What are they doing to shine a spotlight on the open malfeasance? Say the corona virus peters out tomorrow and there are no more casualties -- the administration's handling of it has made it clear that when the "real" zombie-apocalypse death-virus does come down, the country and the world are royally screwed. They'll just ignore it until enough people have died and the economy has stopped, and then toss people into camps in a half-assed attempt to quarantine them. They are unprepared because they clearly just don't give a shit.

Where is the Democratic leadership on all that, or are they still crowing about all the bills they passed that just die on the Senate floor, thanks to Traitor McConnell's hate for this country? It really doesn't matter if you pass four hundred or four million bills, if everyone knows they're just going to sit there in a stack, while you bleat about how that sucks. Yes, it sucks. Are you going to figure out what to do about it, or are you just going to shake working people down for more money and canvassing time, so you can keep your job and continue not to fix the problem?

It says a lot about the current state of the Democratic Party that, up until a few days ago, their candidacy for the presidency had essentially been hijacked to the point that two of the top three contenders, Bernie and Bloomberg, were not even Democrats. That's a sign of a party that has lost its moorings, and is not convincing its base anymore, because it doesn't stand for anything effectively and forcefully. It makes all the expected noises, but doesn't actually accomplish anything to move the proverbial ball forward. They've always got a shitload of excuses ready, though.

These are just some of the things that Liz Warren would have actually improved and changed, without meaningless bleats about "reaching across the aisle" to open traitors, hoping to appeal to the better nature of thieves and scumbags. Maybe Biden comes around on this. I hope so. Honestly, I'm long past tired of being right about all these people. Every goddamned time.

I'll tell you something that you will rarely see any Extremely Online Person ever ever write:  I would very much like, just once, to be wrong about all of this. And I don't just defy the people that I write about to prove me wrong, I would gladly thank them for doing so.

But it starts with us, in the collective sense, to stop falling for these ludicrous people and their transparent lies and bullshit narratives, to grow the fuck up and start voting with our brains and our wallets, instead of our feelings and our fever dreams. More than anything else, that was the promise that Liz Warren brought to the table, along with the willingness to actually stand up and fucking fight for something valuable.

But If You Try Sometimes, You Just Might Find You Get What You Need

Our old buddy Damian provides some healthy food for thought here. All of us get caught up to at least some degree in this friction of being in the world, of staying alert and aware of the depredations and injustices that occur every second, but also trying to not be too much of it, being a reed that follows every direction of the shifting winds.

I find myself doing exactly that, more and more, as I attempt to phase things out here in our little comedy treehouse, and move on to more fulfilling pastures (at the end of this year). Where I find myself getting snagged is that it is fulfilling to find perspectives on current events, and challenge myself to come up with observations that are interesting for me to write and for you to read.

As the world and its inhabitants become ever more baffling to me, this becomes more and more of a challenge, and it can at times feel like pissing in the wind. There are only so many variations one can muster for "[So-and-so] sucks."

But Damian's analogy works very well for me, as I am just a few years older and so am going through the same sorts of personal changes and realizations. It began physically, with eating better and exercising and sleeping more, and has spread to the more abstract life of the mind, this notion that we are what we eat, that physically and mentally we shit what we consume. Garbage in, garbage out.

Bread and circuses are fine as a sometimes food on your cheat day, but as the only meal it is obviously unhealthy. The problem is that it's cheap and easy and convenient, and everyone consumes it. It makes it that much harder to change your diet, and for some, going cold turkey actually works, while most people have to make gradual, committed, consistent changes over time, and stick with it.

I used to be a huge Frank Zappa fan, not only for the instrumental virtuosity and the doo-doo jokes, but I loved that he envisioned his crazily diverse catalog as one gigantic masterwork, which he referred to as Project/Object. Zappa's thesis was that despite all the different musical styles under his unique umbrella, there was "conceptual continuity," a unifying theme.

The nearest cultural comparison I can muster to it might be The Simpsons, where rather than focusing on individual episodes, taking the "helicopter view" of the entire body of work shows a well-realized miniature parallel universe, with fully fledged characters, and arcs and narratives that mirror real-world counterparts. Behind the barrage of pop-culture takes is a truly devastating insight to how human beings actually function -- dumb, short-sighted, messy, hypocritical, occasionally blundering into doing things that aren't completely selfish and venal.

The silly guessing games as to which state "Springfield" is "really" in miss the point -- Springfield is America.

When I do check in here these days to pound out a few missives to the virtual abyss, I am in the back of my mind teasing around for that common thread -- well, after fifteen years, it's more of a rope or a cable than a mere thread -- that describes whatever conceptual continuity exists here. I think it does exist, even though it's only occasionally on the tip of my brain just what that common rope might turn out to be.

Venting is important, and we all have our own ways of expelling those ill humors that collect over time, the mental chaff that results from the daily friction of being engaged with the machine. Maybe we have to reach a certain age or stage in life to come to our individual realization that there is an "equilibrium of engagement," for lack of a better term, that differs for each of us, and that that equilibrium moves as we move through our lives and things happen, people come and go, careers change, etc.

Ultimately, though, while the personal metrics are customized, the principles are more or less universal, and we can all stand to eat a little bit healthier. What we get out of it in the long run is a better perspective on ourselves, and what our expectations are out of our own thoughts and deeds, rather than frantically worrying and reacting to everyone else's. I have to remind myself of those things periodically, and I bet I'm not the only one.

It's already a weird, interesting year, and it's only going to get more so. Stay thirsty, my friends.