Sunday, May 31, 2020

Do Not Resuscitate, Conclusion: Descent

American society has fallen under a series of collective madnesses, all of them perpetuated by the people who profit from them. This is all quite out in the open, but people have been conditioned not to look too closely. All of these mass beliefs fall under the rubric of Buy Now, Pay Later.

The republic has been financialized for a couple generations now, to the benefit of a handful of profiteers and robber barons, and the can has been kicked down the road throughout. But eventually the bill comes due, and we are in that time now. We hear a noise outside at four in the morning, look out the window, and see the repo man making off with our pre-owned leased Beemer.

The long project of the money class has been to suck up all the profits while making the peons eat the shit sandwich. They have been enormously successful in this project so far, and the COVID crisis has served to be (again to use the industry jargon) a force multiplier. Four trillion has been dumped into their coffers, like a dead hooker into the Hudson River after a Don Junior coke rampage.

To offer up a comparison, four trillion would cover student loan debt and infrastructure repair, and still have plenty left over to bribe the fossil fuel companies to shift to renewables without sucking and squeezing every goddamned drop of oil out of the ground.

The myth that wealthy people have pushed on everyone else is that they're smart and you're dumb, they work hard and you don't work hard enough. What we're finding out -- some of us a bit slower on the uptake than others, but all of us finding out the hard way eventually -- is that they're mostly luckier than everyone else. And a lot of that luck comes from the self-reinforcing dynamic that wealth imparts to those lucky few.

There's an economy-of-scale mathematically baked into net-worth levels of money, which are impossible to achieve from the bottom rungs of the ladder, and almost impossible to lose from the top rungs, unless you're just a complete dipshit wastrel cokehead. For every Michael Jackson that you read about, spiraling hilariously into debt thanks to the expenses of keeping a private zoo and paying off victims, there's a Paris Hilton or a Wyatt Koch, a completely useless person who never worked a second for their inherited fortune, who does nothing but indulge their base instincts every moment of every day, and still manages to remain solvent.

Now, instead of doing the human thing and simply securing their wealth while leaving the peons alone, they decided that most of everything is just not enough. They want it all. And Trump is just the guy to get it for them, because he uniquely understands what rich people want and what poor dipshits want. And he's more than willing to gull the latter group into helping him dump it all into the pockets of the former group.

This is the logical outcome of fifty years of Republican and conservative poison permeating the culture, the airwaves, public discourse. Trump is the culmination of this, not the cause, the symptom and not the disease, etc., etc.

But one of the other symptoms of the disease is the liberal teleology that the Republican/conservative base has been tricked and bamboozled into their voting patterns. If only they knew, blah blah blah. Well, don't worry, they know. They know what's best for them, and they fucking hate you more.

It's like the recent "lockdown protesters," the neckbearded goobers roaming the state halls with their dick replacements, the big revelation that it's a big astroturf operation, like the tea party crap from a decade ago. These assholes aren't taking a fucking check from Betsy DeVos. They're doing it for free, and they're more than happy to. Don't kid yourself. This is not about money or policy, or any concern about contracting the plague and taking it home to Grandma. This is about fuck you. This is about horrible people doing what horrible people do.

I encourage them to do it all -- take the hydroxychloroquine, drink bleach, congregate without masks on random sidewalks to harass passersby and hapless mediots. Crowd themselves into bars and churches and restaurants. Take Captain Clorox's medical advice along with his financial advice, see how that works out for you on both fronts. If I encountered someone who thought that drinking bleach had curative properties, I would seriously try to convince them that drinking twice as much would be twice as effective.

You know the real problem with this fucking country? There are no longer appropriate consequences for being stupid. People used to have to keep their wits about them and pay attention. Not anymore. Again, if you're the sort of dope that seriously turns to Donald Fucking Trump for any sort of advice about anything, you deserve every bit of what you get, good and hard. No sympathy, no mercy. If you needed yet another reason to stay the hell away from your Facebook uncle, there ya go. Just step back and watch the fun. Yes, it sucks that they will take some innocents with them, but it's not like there's anything you can do to dissuade them anyway. They are determined to act out their performative psychoses.

We like to tell ourselves that these fools are merely statistical outliers, a small but extremely vocal minority. Okay. What does it say about this huge country, with its enormous population and $15 trillion economy and its sophisticated systems of communication, that a supposedly tiny sliver of angry morons can so consistently drive the modes of discussion? What does it say when people who were previously out on the margins of extremism have been mainstreamed so thoroughly?

When I call those people losers, it's not really to be a mean asshole, although I  definitely am a mean asshole, and I make no apologies for it. But it's really to emphasize that they have no real agenda, no goals, no ambitions, not for themselves or their communities or their state. They just want to wave their dicks and whine that they can't get a haircut or go to Red Lobster.

So? Fucking go already, please. Get your riblets and your shitty beer and your got-damned haircut. The rest of us will be watching patiently, eating the proverbial popcorn, biding our time until nature finally has its due, without the constant interference of civilization. We don't create or innovate anymore, we just hustle each other and feebly attempt to mitigate self-inflicted damage.

And the bottom line is that only a failed state, a hollowed-out husk, would allow such people to dominate the debate and draw the lines of discussion. Only a polluted media ecosystem that is wholly in the tank would continue to give a handful of slapdicks a daily soapbox for their imaginary grievances. They could have been talking to doctors and nurses, photographing mass graves and refrigerator trucks stacked with bodies. A few have done those things; most have been content to sit there and faithfully transcribe the lies, as always.

I don't know about you, but the battle going on my brain right now, as we all watch multiple cities descend into violence and subversion and fear, the collective rage of the oppressed being sabotaged by undercover cops and white-power operatives salted into the crowds to start the window-breaking and the looting, the battle for me is no longer trying to figure out how we can "save" the nation, but whether it's even worth saving at this point.

Save what, exactly? A corrupt system where psychopathic billionaires bleed the masses dry and rent thugs to keep them from reacting to it? A series of financialized rackets designed to preserve and heighten wealth inequality and reject economic justice, and a political system designed to buttress all that?

Look at all the ugliness that has taken place just in the last few days, the chief executive stoking fear by talking shit like a dime-store Ceausescu, openly licking his chops at the prospects of siccing his mutts -- human and canine -- on peaceful protesters. He's a fucking piece of shit, a deformed soul in a deformed body with a smooth brain of oatmeal and dementia and unearned resentment, and forty percent of the people in this country still support all of it.

This country needs a reckoning and an enema, both on massive scales, and it beggars the imagination to see how either of those things happen. If things get too weird, the oligarchs will probably be happy to let Trump dangle and Biden win, if only because they can get nearly the same cut of the action under Biden, without all the grief and drama and toxic stupidity. And they can spend the next four years grooming Josh Hawley or Tom Cotton, while triumphant Dems pat themselves on the back and get complacent all over again.

At best, the angry sidewalk chumps want things to "go back" to what they used to be. That is no longer possible nor desirable. Anything written about them that doesn't frame it as such is doing a disservice to them and to the rest of us. Playing into their delusions and self-pitying anger does no one any good. There is nothing to discuss with them or convince them of, because they are not there for that. It's just a prolonged temper tantrum with guns. Maybe law enforcement oughta, you know, start enforcing the fucking law, before this gets out of hand. I gotta dump my keys and phone and shit into a tray to go into a courthouse, but these assholes can take long guns in there? Bullshit.

You have to recognize such people for what they really are, and decide and act accordingly. Not just at the ballot box, but every day. Your ballot is important, but not nearly as important as your wallet.

Because I'm a Rush fan, I am fond of paraphrasing Freewill and saying something along the lines of choosing not to decide still counts as a choice. That's true enough, but the stakes are high and getting higher, and it seems that one close corollary to that argument is this:  if you choose not to decide, someone else will step in and make a decision for you. How's that sound?



As they walked through the doorway of the room at the top of the great pyramid, a thousand or five thousand steps high or more, Aapo felt a thought unbidden lurking in the back of his mind.

This is the weirdest dream I have ever had.

This is not a dream. The jaguar looked at him, head cocked slightly, eyes blazing from gold to orange.

Aapo looked around the room, which seemed somewhat larger on the inside than it had appeared from the outside. The room was suffused with a green light that had no apparent source, illuminating the walls, which were bare, and the floor, which had an array of various mundane objects strewn about -- work gloves, a ring of keys, a rechargeable driver, a wallet, a photo of a family, dishes, a remote control. Aapo bent to retrieve the photo and it shimmered as his hand went through it. He stooped lower to get a closer look at the people in the photo -- a man, a woman, two young children -- but did not recognize any of them.

If it's not a dream, then where am I?

You are in the bardo, the plane between planes. Your previous visit to the world has ended. You are waiting for your next visit. We will see if you learned anything from before that you can take with you into the next one.

Aapo struggled to take this all in. I'm dead?

You have lived and died many times. This is just the most recent time. Do you recall anything about any of your past visits?

Long pause. No. Nothing at all.

That is not surprising. At most, we may see something that you can learn from. Put your hand on my shoulder.

I thought I wasn't supposed to touch you.

Well, you're not supposed to pet me. But I may be able to help you see your pasts with more clarity.

He reached tentatively to put his right hand on the mighty cat's left shoulder, which was at Aapo's chest level anyway.

Immediately a series of images and scenes swirled and converged in his brain. A bartender in what appeared to be a Wild West saloon. A military pilot miles in the air in the cockpit of a plane of some vintage, pressing a button and looking at a landscape below, colored tiles suddenly in full bloom. A farmer in a field, behind a plow being pulled by two yoked oxen. A medium-sized dog in a filthy alley. A woman in what appeared to be a laboratory, wearing goggles and a lab smock. A young girl on a boat in the middle of a large body of water, no land in sight, crying for her mother as the storm and the sea overtake the craft. A chicken in a large, crowded hutch on a farm.

More vividly:  a man, looking much like the reflection Aapo saw in the stream, operating a large earthmover, pushing dirt, dumping concrete into enormous pads and foundations, erecting high fences and walls topped with giant coils of razor wire. He wore a blue work shirt with a small oval crest on the left chest that read "Mike."

Aapo could see Mike continuing with these various building projects, all of which seemed to be for structures that were meant to confine or repel. Then he saw Mike in a nice suburban backyard, sun out, ice chest and barbecue grill on a large wooden deck, neatly manicured lawn below. An attractive woman brought Mike a bottle of Michelob. Mike took the bottle with an appreciative swig, kissed the woman and playfully patted her ass, and flipped the burgers on the grill.

This looks familiar, he murmured. The cat rumbled in response.

Another scene of Mike sitting in his truck in an empty parking lot, dusk falling off to the right, an abandoned KMart in the background. Mike held a mostly empty bottle of Wild Turkey, and fiddled with the radio knobs with his free hand. He looked despondent, exhausted. A gun lay in the passenger seat of the truck.

Mike and his wife fighting, Mike scolding his kids, Mike pouring more concrete, Mike playing with his kids, directing work crews on the construction site, laying in bed with the wife, drinking in his truck, uncoiling razor wire, mowing his lawn, yelling at the wife and kids, standing in front of what appeared to be a freshly constructed penitentiary, on and on and on.

I used to build things. Buildings.

The jaguar looked at him with its flat gold eyes. Prisons. Walls. Detention facilities. You were a construction foreman for a company that solicited contract work for certain types of structures.

Nothing else? Houses, schools, playgrounds? Office buildings? Skyscrapers, museums?

No.

Well, I had a family to support.

Everyone does.

What was I supposed to do?

The cat made a gesture that almost looked like a shrug. What do you think you were supposed to do?

So you're going to punish me for what I did in my previous life, is that it?

If it was up to me, I would have punished you already.

Aapo/Mike was taken aback by that blunt assertion. What -- why?

It's nothing personal. In fact, as far as individuals of your kind go, you seem to be not so bad. But collectively, your kind destroys much more than you create or nurture, either for material gain or just for the joy of destroying. Your kind have all but exterminated my children, and the children of the other spirits. You kill and take, and enslave others to help you take more, and are offended when anyone proposes that you might at least clean up your mess, return the place to what it was before you came and took.

But I didn't do those things.

No, not you. Someone like you. Many someones like you. It doesn't matter. It is not my role to judge and punish you. That is the role of the judges.

What judges?

You will meet them at some point. Soon.

How will they punish me?

It depends on what you can show you learned in the bardo. You can go back as a human with a bit more enlightenment of your role in the great game, or as a dung beetle, or something in between.

Aapo/Mike looked again over the "items" along the floor, lingering on the photo and the wallet, the keys, eyes flickering past the gun a bit more quickly. He noticed a small hole in the far right corner of the room, where there appeared to be a set of steps descending.

Where does that go?

Depends.

Are you going to keep doing that?

Look, my role here is not to judge your previous actions, nor to give you all the answers for the next round on the Great Wheel. I am here to show you possible paths. You can draw your own conclusions about your prior actions and motivations, and decide for yourself what you wish to take forward with you.

But I don't know.

Most don't. Life is complicated, and most would rather not make the effort to sort out those complexities. But that affects the outcome, in the judges' view. Either you are willing to learn and apply, or not.

Aapo/Mike furrowed his brow. I don't know what I did wrong. But I don't want to be a dung beetle.

That's unlikely. Those who made a life out of preying on the vulnerable, victimizing the helpless, those are usually the ones who get that level of punishment. Mostly it's because they are never repentant.

Really?

Really. They don't think they did anything wrong. They always claim that they were conforming to some set of "natural laws" that always just happens to favor them and oppress everyone else. They don't think there's anything to learn. So they get to start back from the bottom.

How many lives does it take to get to the top?

There's no set sequence, and there isn't really a "top" for that matter. For most it's a few steps up, a couple steps back, over and over again. Some reach enlightenment in a dozen or two dozen lives, some take hundreds, some never get there.

How many have I had?

Hard to tell. It doesn't matter anyway. Don't worry about the "top," just concern yourself with learning a little more each time, and sharing it with whoever you can.

That sounds like a religious cult.

No. It doesn't mean you go door-to-door proselytizing. It means you identify what is true and correct for yourself, and live that truth consistently. In fact, it's not really about right or wrong, or good or evil. It's mostly about recognizing cause and effect.

The jaguar continued:  Humans think that the Universe moves toward some ideal of "justice" that they invent for themselves. It does no such thing. The Universe moves toward its own balance, through entropy and decay and attrition. Every organism, every inert object, every elemental molecule and every grain of sand, is deployed toward that end. It is up to the judges to determine in the bardo whether an individual has come closer to that understanding, or not.

Aapo/Mike furrowed and squinted again, clearly uncertain of what this meant.

Think about the ones who become dung beetles, all the things they have to do in order to earn that punishment. They can't do everything themselves. They need others willing to help them.

Help them?

Consider the worst of the worst. Emperors, kings, tyrants throughout your history. The demented and sadistic. Countless innocents died because of them, but they themselves killed very few people at most. Others did almost all the dirty work for them. They could have said no, but didn't. Maybe out of fear, maybe out of greed or power or lust or ideology. But they did it all the same.

Now Aapo/Mike was confused, frustrated, defensive. Are you saying that I'm responsible for what they did, because of the projects I worked on?

Maybe not as much as the people who profited from the suffering of others and directed you to do the work, but yes, they couldn't have done it without you.

Someone else would have taken that job.

Ek Balam chuffed. Yes, and I would be having this conversation with them, and a different conversation with you. Are you saying that the only things you were good at in your previous life were dumping mud and stretching wire? That's what you wanted to do with the time you were given?

No. I loved my wife. I loved my children. I'm sure I had things I enjoyed outside of work.

Yes, but you also saw the anger and frustration you carried with you. Where do you think that came from?

I don't know.

Yes you do.

Aapo/Mike looked over again at the dark descending staircase, unlit and forbidding, yet strangely beckoning at the same time. He walked over to the head of the stairs and peered down. There was a little bit of light after all, a dull glow that did not reveal much, but at least made the steps visible enough to navigate.

Where does this lead?

Down into you, your previous life, your lives before that, all the thoughts, hopes, dreams, fears, motivations, schemes, desires you have ever had throughout all of your incarnations. Each layer down another previous life, each a maze unto itself.

Can I go down there?

Can you?

Aapo/Mike rolled his eyes and looked at Ek Balam sternly. You're being cryptic again.

No, I mean it. Do you really want to do that? Do you really think it's necessary?

Will it help?

It can. For some it can grant enlightenment. Others are driven into madness. Consider the ramifications seriously before making the decision to go. You might not be able to find your way back out. It comes down to your ability and will to see things as they are, instead of how you want them to be. All of those things that comprise your existences, they are each like separate entities, hungry ghosts seeking to justify themselves to you. They will trick you if they can, and they will try.

There was a protracted pause between them, dead silence. No animal sounds outside; indeed, aside from the doorway behind the jaguar leading back out to the top platform of the pyramid, there was no indication that there even was anything outside this strange little room, with its sourceless glow and hollow images of personal items laid randomly around the floor.

Where is my family? Are they still alive?

That is not your concern. They are not here with you, so chances are they are still in the upper realm. Or they are simply not in your jati, their souls do not travel in the same small group as yours. You may have different things that you must reckon with than they do.

How did I die?

You have to see that for yourself. It is not for me to tell you such things. You may not want the answer.

He lowered his right foot down from the top, toward the first step, slowly and then with more certainty. I have to see. I have to find out.

It is better if you know what you are looking for before you set foot in there.

He set the next foot down to the next step, looked back over his shoulder at the great rumbling beast. I think I know. I hope I'm right. I wish you could come with me. Another step down.

I think you know that I cannot do that. Another step. He could no longer see the jaguar.

Yes, I know. Only the top of his head was still visible.

Be safe. Stay alert. I will be here when you return.

Ek Balam lowered his body to the floor, laid his head on his paws, and listened to the echoes of the slow footfalls down the steps.

Friday, May 29, 2020

Do Not Resuscitate, Part 5: Parasite

I've seen the entire Sopranos series cycle several times, but it's been at least five years or so since the last time. One minor story arc that keeps popping up in my mind lately, as I observe the tactics and operational ethos of the hideous people who run this crack den of an administration, involves the unfortunate landscaper Sal Vitro. The poor guy gets the shit beaten out of him for mowing a lawn that was in someone else's "territory," so he then turns to Tony's capo Paulie for protection, and by the end of the series, poor Sal and his son are mowing (for free, it appears) the enormous lawn of Tony's useless blob of a sister, who has wheedled her way into Johnny Sack's old estate. Remember all that?

I think what really stuck with me about that extended (though again, very minor) storyline was how subtly it underscored the point that these well-off men of power and influence had their tentacles in everything -- construction, garbage collecting, and yes, landscaping. No opportunity was too small for them to pass up, including enslaving small business owners in order to line their pockets with just a few more illicit bills.

That's what rings true about Fat Donnie's crew, too -- as dumb and useless as they are just in terms of being able to do any sort of legitimate work, as vile as they are in terms of basic human decency, no opportunity is too small. We are, after all, talking about someone who infamously cashed a thirteen-cent check back in the day. Someone once joked that Trump was the kind of person who would line his own coat pockets with latex rubber, so he could steal soup. Interesting visual, and entirely accurate.

We have a society where for-profit incarceration -- and therefore a clear vested interest in keeping people incarcerated, and finding more people to throw in the clink -- is commonplace. We have a society where using incarcerated labor at substantial discounts -- or even for free, since they get paid pennies per hour and then have to use that to pay for their basic commissary items -- is routine.

And now, the plague has given the monsters a new and grand opportunity. The official unemployment rate has tripled overnight to almost fifteen percent, which means the real rate is probably at least twenty percent. The Senate is in the process of leveraging aid to states and counties on the condition that businesses be indemnified from liabilities incurred from (to put it politely) economically coercing people to go back to work, since unemployment insurance systems are deliberately inoperable in many states. You know, because you lazy motherfuckers will just take advantage of it.

The goal has never been to prevent pandemic or mitigate damage. It has always been to make sure someone else gets blamed for everything, while continuing the racketeering, and the hijacking of PPE supplies to be fenced, the profits laundered and offshored. It's the ultimate no-show job for Sil's crew, combined with Paulie's crew robbing the cigarette trucks, and pushing all the proceeds through the Bing. There's really nothing more to it. Anyone still talking about misgovernance is completely missing the true picture. Things are running exactly the way they want them to run.

There is a perfect -- and by "perfect" I mean perfectly horrible -- economic storm brewing. For years, private equity has been quietly chewing through the backbone of many vital American employment sectors. You know how people blame the internet for killing off newspapers? That's only partly true. Private equity firms have been doing most of the heavy lifting.

Another sector where private equity has been working overtime is the retail and service sector. Have you been to a department store lately? You know how many people work in those employment sectors? Again, Amazon bears part of the blame for this, but not as much as one might first assume.

Regardless, ten percent of the total population has been dumped just in the last two months. The reason the stock market seems bullish boils down to two important factors:
  1. These people are fucking scum. Seriously, they're nothing but vampires, profiting from mass immiseration.
  2. They are herd animals, all trying to to get in that final second of profit-taking before the whole thing blows up.
The economy (again, what is the economy, precisely, and for whom?) is famously a lagging indicator, as they say in the 'hood. The repercussions of the past eight weeks will not be felt till, oh, around the Fourth of July, by which point the second COVID wave will have hit, because everybody needed to get back to their jobs that don't exist anymore, because there aren't any more consumers, because our leaders decided that the most important thing was to bail out the fucking cruise lines. And everyone was in a mad rush to get out for the Memorial holiday weekend.

We're way too complacent about all of this. We watched these monsters herd refugees into for-profit detention centers, where children get raped and people pass communicable diseases around, under the rubric of keepin' out them illegals. Everybody agreed that "someone" should "do" "something," but could not apparently reach any sort of consensus -- or even a quorum -- on who and what and how.

And we're fine with lubricating the machinery of the scut-work service center in this country with the blood of illegal immigrants. Who the hell do we think is processing our meat, picking our produce, cleaning and cooking and serving food in our restaurants? Who else, besides people whose entire lives are spent under the thankless lash of economic coercion, would do this crap for peanuts, have to listen to useless losers talk shit about them 24/7, and then be told to risk their health by going back to those jobs after all that?

Think about where all your food is coming from. Buy local as much as you possibly can. The best way to dismantle the system is to starve it as much as possible.



At first they mounted the endless line of stairs with a sense of resolve and purpose, regular man and giant cat. After about ten layers of the pyramid had passed, they began pacing themselves.

Who built this?

An ancient civilization. They have been gone for many eons.

How did they build it?

They did not leave any records that anyone has been able to decipher. There are hieroglyphics, but they appear to mostly be descriptions of their customs and daily lives. No one knows for sure. All we know is that the building is here, in this place.

As they passed layer after layer, Aapo noticed that he did not see any seams anywhere -- not between layers, nor between steps. Rather than being assembled brick by brick with dressed stones, it appeared as if an immense block had been placed here, and then chipped and carved into this form, or vice versa. It was an unnerving idea to think about. And there was no vegetation at all on the structure, no climbing vines or flowers or leaves of any kind.

He paused on a step, looked down at the top of the jungle canopy, emerald and chocolate and ebony, then looked up and around the sky, noticing that there were no birds, no clouds, no sun, just as endless expanse of subtly variated yellow, a screen of firmament that reflected light without revealing the source.

The steps were high and steep, and while Ek Balam traversed them with the sure foot of a mountain goat, Aapo kept his line of sight intently on the next step, and the next one, and the next, in order to retain his footing. The embarrassment of a trip or stumble on these hard marble steps would be nothing compared to the pain of smacking face-first into one.

Yet for a second, Aapo decided to look up the stepped path, in order to see what was left, and was dismayed to find that he could still not see the summit.

How much farther is it to the top?

Don't worry. We're nearly there.

Aapo pondered how that could possibly be, when he had just looked up to see an endless flight of these seamless steps. Suddenly -- or finally -- they stepped on to a plateau, a square of about twenty-five feet to a side, with a fifteen-by-fifteen foot cube with a doorway set atop the square. Like the rest of the pyramid, the cube was chalk white, smooth as marble, hard as granite.

Aapo stopped and took a deep breath, expecting to be thoroughly winded and sore by now, as they had been climbing for nearly an hour -- or was it a day? Yet he felt fine, strangely exhilarated in fact. He took a few deep breaths and looked down to his right, to see the jaguar looking up at him rather impatiently, then to the doorway.

Thursday, May 28, 2020

Of Mice and Maniacs

There is something deeply, ludicrously ironic in the spectacle of Big Pussy using his favorite superpower to try to strong-arm Twitter into letting his lies go unchecked. It's as if it doesn't occur to him that such an action frees up people even more to respond in kind about him.

Not just the stuff we know is absolutely true and well-documented, but the things that are probably true or highly likely, like those Taj Mahal execs he had lawn-darted in a chartered helicopter, or the well-known fact that "executive time" is when he jerks off to photos of his eldest daughter. That sort of thing.

We've been conditioned by decades of entertainment tropes to a default setting of seeing tech dweebs like Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk as basically extras from Silicon Valley -- charmless but essentially harmless dorks whose lack of social skills pushed them, like blind people who compensate with superhuman hearing, to greater heights with their natural skill sets. That narrative has blinded us to the notion that maybe these guys are just creeps and assholes and opportunistic weirdos, not really all that different from Stephen Miller or Stephen Bannon, or any of the other barnacles and remorae clinging to the side of this whale carcass.

Like Big Pussy and his crew of human colostomy bags, the tech weasels have not tried to hide any of this at all. Zuckerberg contradicts himself with each appearance before a congressional panel or media interlocutor, his waxy, uncanny-valley visage and spun-to-the-gills eyes conveying a, to put it mildly, conflicted inner dialogue. Best case scenario with Zuck is that he really just doesn't give a fuck, he'll be glad to sell out his country to these monsters for a piece of that sweet campaign action.

Twitter is a bit of a different nut to crack, and Dorsey is caught between having to play ball with Big Pussy's idiotic whining, and not getting dumped by his own board and replaced with an even more pliant CEO. Dorsey probably realized some time ago that he should have done something about Trump's poisonous bullshit way back when he was pushing birther conspiracies and other lies. Too late, hoss, you waited too long, and now here we are.

The big tell here is that Trump could just, you know, stop posting on Twitter altogether, start up a new personal account on Parler or Gab or whatever gutter these turds are rolling in this week, and instantly take over. The reason he doesn't just do that is because this is another test run for future mayhem. People keep saying that the EO can't supersede the written law, as if they haven't been watching this motherless fuck wipe his ass with the fucking Constitution every goddamned day for the past four years. Who's gonna stop him? Chuck Schumer? Ruth Bader Ginsburg?

He's laying groundwork, with Bill Barr's evil guidance, so that if he manages to steal the election, he can go full hog and start taking down critics for the next four years.

This presents a real moral dilemma for me, personally -- while there's obviously a lot of repulsive garbage on Twitter, there's also a lot of excellent writing to be found. It would be great if they all jumped en masse over to Counter Social, but I get why they might be loath to suddenly ditch the quarter-million followers they spent years building and curating.

But this can't go on this way for much longer. Something has to give. If the social media weasels aren't going to push back against these aggressive encroachments, their users will have to, or Big Baby and his big-igloo fail-children are just going to take it over for good.

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

Fight Liar with Liar

It's a very strange ongoing phenomenon to observe, on at least weekly and sometimes daily basis, not just the constant lies, personal attacks, innuendo, and outright slander and libel, but the degree to which it goes completely uncontested.

Let's look at just two (2) of the more recent notorious examples.

The first example is the recent resurfacing of the conspiracy theory arising from the 2001 death of Lori Klausutis, who was an aide to outgoing congressman Joe Scarborough. It's easy to forget, after nearly twenty years, that in fact there did seem to be some shady shit around that event at the time, and it chased Scarborough around for a few years. It doesn't help that Scarborough's default setting is "smug, supercilious prick."

But whatever. For this example, it doesn't matter whether Morning Joe had anything to do with Klausutis' untimely demise. (For the record, I don't think he did.) From a cursory glance at his Twitter feed, it appears that Scarborough has chosen simply to take the vaunted "high road" and express sympathy for her family getting all this dredged up again, and retweeting supportive messages. All well and good.

But DID YOU KNOW [arches eyebrow ominously] that back in 1989, Donald Trump had three of his Taj Mahal executives killed in a helicopter crash, not long before the whole money-laundering operation went tits-up? It's true!

I dunno about you, but if some cheesedick piece of shit was publicly accusing me of murder, and said asshole had roughly a metric fuckton of serious dirt, rumors, allegations about him, and I had my own teevee show, I'd make a point of finding the nastiest thing I could, find a few bucks in the production budget for a couple decent private eyes, and flog that mule till the motherfucker dropped. Just keep hammering on it every day until someone squealed.

But hey, if Joe Blow wants to keep that "thoughts and prayers" high road, more power to him. We can see how well that has worked for so many other people, who just didn't want to sink to that level. [rolls eyes]

The second example involves Trump's ongoing lies about how the previous administration left the federal government completely unprepared for the current pandemic. He has repeatedly blamed Obama by name. This op-ed piece from the St. Louis Times-Dispatch lays out the lies pretty well.

Now, the general election campaign obviously has not really gotten into gear yet, but as someone who voted for Obama twice, I would like to see the man defend himself. I don't want to hear any bullshit about "presidential protocols" of not attacking other office-holders.

That taboo has clearly been shattered, and it's an odd thing to see one side uphold it while the other repeatedly, gleefully violates. Sorta like watching a duel where the participants agreed to use swords, but one side showed up with an assault rifle, and the dope with the sword just stands there, occasionally murmuring "but we agreed to use swords."

I want Obama to defend himself, and call out Trump's repeated, blatant lies for exactly what they are. But I also want him to say that on my behalf, and on behalf of the millions of Americans who supported him, and still do for that matter. He's not just saying you sucked, Barry, he's saying we were suckers for supporting you.

If I had the pulpit to say that's a fucking lie, I would. Then I'd remind everyone that he won't show his tax returns because he's been laundering bratva cash since before 9/11. But I don't. I'm just an anonymous schmuck, a drop in the vast internets ocean. It doesn't matter what I think or say.

But it does matter if a former President responds to the worthless piece of shit currently festering in the White House, and debunks those lies with specificity. Especially when the current guy is also lying about voting by mail, because he wants get those disqualified, so that he can cheat his way in for another term. Do ya think the situation is getting urgent? Okay then, it might be time to respond with a real sense of urgency. Waiting till November is not an option, when there's a significant non-zero chance that the election will be rigged or postponed.

I do think it's likely that Obama and/or Biden will respond to those lies at some point in the relatively near future. But the responses should be in real time, and should be forceful and declarative. No dancing around with carefully nuanced phrasing and word choices. These aren't "falsehoods" or "untrue statements," these are LIES -- as in they are completely false and Trump knows it.

I'm not a fan of Rick Wilson's history of political cockpunching, but I will say that he's talked better trash, baited Trump ably, and put together several powerful ads, than just about anything I've seen from the Democrats. It's kinda sad that a career rent-a-Republican wants these fuckers out more than the Democratic Party seems to most of the time.

Like I said at the top, this is a very strange phenomenon. We've become accustomed to it. People have decided that nothing can be done about it, so nothing gets done about it. No one even tries. Every Democratic politician should have been flooding the zone, every panel show, every Sunday shitshow, with a unified message -- that's a fucking lie, period, end of sentence. You are allowed to call liars what they are. Keep going down this path, and you might find that changed pretty soon. The bottom line is that no one has to take this shit from this fucking guy.

Did you ever know a kid who was bullied in school? Did the bully ever stop because the kid ignored them? Sometimes you have to fight back, and you might even end up with a black eye or a bloody nose. But the fucker knows you're gonna fight back next time, and that makes it more likely to move on.

When they know you're never gonna fight back, why should they move on?

Some of Those That Work Forces

Who you gonna believe -- the lying fascist thugs in their paramilitary gear, or your lyin' eyes?

This is a predictable outcome of a chief executive literally telling cops to bang heads and tune up "bad guys" -- well, not the white guys who loot pension funds, or the white guys who launder bratva cash, or the white guys who stalk the halls of gubmint with their AR-15s and their Meal Team Six getups, who spit and scream in the faces of cops for their inalienable right to a haircut.

Not those guys. You know, bad guys. Some of those who burn crosses are the same that hold office.

Again, these people are not shying away from telling exactly who they are, and exactly what they intend to do. They are not trying to hide it, there is no attempt to conceal it. All you have to do is observe, not even all that carefully.

People like to say it is what it is. But the fact is that it is what it has always been.

Some people need to support the lie, because the truth is too devastating for them. Identify them as such, and treat them accordingly, as people who are okay with racially targeted extrajudicial murder under color of authority.

There's an evil synthesis of race and class issues baked into all of it. The bottom line is this, for anyone not in the 1% of wealth and/or power:  if you haven't run afoul of (selective) law enforcement yet, you're still nothing more than livestock; if you have gotten on the bad side of the paramilitary forces, god help you.

But as of late, there sure do seem to be an awful lot of incidents involving LEO or ex-LEO murdering black people. It is supported from the top, and nothing will be done about any of it. Maybe an Amber Guyger slap on the wrist, where the murderer is eligible for parole after just five years served, and a key witness for the prosecution gets capped shortly after testifying.

You just watch. The incompetent turds who murdered Breonna Taylor on a no-knock warrant (at the wrong fucking address, when they had the perp in custody already); the father-son pillbillies who shot Ahmaud Arbery in the street like a fucking dog; and now this thug who asphyxiated a prone, handcuffed man with a knee in the throat -- one or a couple of these fuckers may do a little time, or maybe even see a bit of financial damage. But there is no goddamned way any of them will carry a murder wrap.

And as always, it's interesting to see who gets the tear gas, and who never needs to even worry about the possibility. That's what country this is.

Do Not Resuscitate, Part 4: Destroyer

Let's say you wanted to undermine an entire country. You would start by building your own base of power, and consolidate that base by creating a world for them that separated them from empirical reality. You would tell them what was true or false, what was real or fake, who were enemies or friends, and you would dictate the tempo of those shifting narratives -- when, for example, a trusted ally had suddenly turned into a bitter foe, when Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

You would gather unto yourself the few people you trusted the most -- relatives, lackeys, and their closest contacts, and gradually create a network of like-minded individuals who either allied themselves to you, or were at least willing to rent themselves to you.

Loyalty only really matters to the point of complicity, then the other person is balls-deep in the game as well. Now you have them, and they know it. There is no getting out clean for these people. Considering the sort of people who would work for you in the first place, they may not even worry about that sort of thing, except insofar as it affects their bank accounts and future prospects.

Now, with your network of rented minions and dogsbodies, you would set about immobilizing or subverting the institutions holding the national framework together. In a nation that at least still pays lip service to the principle of rule of law, you would co-opt the bodies of law -- the legislature, the judiciary, the administrative infrastructure entrusted with enforcing laws. You would make them all beholden to you personally, again by gradually bringing them in, until one day they realize that they are now accomplices.

You would actively undermine the country's foreign policy, using the "middle kingdom" trope that every civilization that has ever existed has used to justify their actions, to deny the framework of mutually-beneficial interdependence that has mostly kept (relative) peace for the last fifty years, or at least kept things from getting even worse. You would sell it out to the countries you have been currying favor with for years, whose governments rent entire floors of your real estate.

You would encourage the brutes and thugs and killers of the world, while telling your friends to go fuck themselves. You would make sure your knuckle-dragging supporters know it's all just a big joke, except when it isn't.

You would identify the more violent, reactionary strains in the society, and bind them to you by signaling your alignment with their marginal concerns. Find common ground between those elements and their companions in more conventional institutions -- the military, the police, people with money who will do anything and everything to avoid losing even one cent of that precious, precious money.

We all like money, even if it's just for the obvious reason that having money enables you to not have to constantly worry about not having money. But consider the type of person who already has more money than they could possibly spend in their lifetime, more than their great-great-great-great-grandchildren could possibly ever squander, yet still cannot bear to part with, say, a marginal three-percent tax after the first billion dollars.

The type of person who would rather spend hundreds of millions of dollars renting senators and funding think tanks and doing everything they can to rend the fabric of their country, in order to avoid even a one-percent increase in their taxes, which they frequently don't even pay in the first place.

The type of person that wants to make government as ineffective and inefficient as possible, in order to bolster their claim that government is useless and even harmful, that it serves no purpose beyond bleeding the noble taxpayer to a dried husk.

The type of person who sincerely believes that poor people are dumb and/or lazy, even as they themselves piss their inherited pelf on five-figure handbags and nine-figure mega-yachts and such. People who have no identifiable skill, but as charter members of the Lucky Sperm Club, use their privilege to rent those who do have skills, in order to legitimize their own existence.

The type of person who believes that accountability is for other people.

If you wanted to undermine and destroy a country, these are the people you would use to do it, and these are the things you would have them do.

With that in mind, consider the people running this nation right now, and all their statements and actions over the past four years. The point is not to speculate whether Donald Trump and Jared Kushner and the rest of these fuckers are agents of foreign powers, installed to rob the country blind and destroy it from the inside out -- they clearly are, there's really not much to speculate about.

The point is that even if they aren't acting in such a capacity, they really might as well be, because that is the practical, predictable outcome of everything they've done and said. Perhaps the strangest part of all that is that they've barely tried to conceal it. Most of this has taken place right out in the open. Enough of us, citizens and their representatives who actually wield power, stopped caring enough to do anything about any of it.

How about that? Like a broad-daylight bank robbery without any weapons or masks, just vague threats and menacing looks.



The beast was at least nine feet long, four feet at the shoulder, impossibly muscular, black in color, yet he could still see spots and rings and knurls along the coat. The jaguar looked at him impassively, as if waiting for him to make the first move.

He reached for his knife, not just automatically this time, but with purpose and fear.

Your knife won't help you.

Startled, he glanced back over his shoulder quickly, seeing the trail whence he came, spotting all the high roots and low branches and all the little obstacles that marked the escape route.

You can't run fast enough.

He looked back at the cat, its left lip curled in a snarl -- or was it a bit of grin? Suddenly it was difficult to tell.

Tell what? Whether a telepathic jaguar is smiling at you?

He took a deep breath through his nose, hoping to clear his head. This is just a dream, after all.

Who are you? he asked the jaguar.

Who are you?

He felt his brain grasp at straws, searching for purchase. I -- I don't know, he responded with a puzzled look. He glanced into the stream and briefly saw his own reflection, reassured that he looked the way he remembered looking -- when? -- yet still unable to put a name to the face.

I'm not sure what my name is. But I asked you first.

True, the jaguar responded, but you are a guest here. The jaguar lifted and turned slightly, and the black coat shimmered to a dark yellow, and back to black. Some of your kind call me Ek Balam.

What do you want?

What do you want? the jaguar replied, again with that hint of a sneer-smile.

I -- I'm not sure. I don't know how I got here.

You don't seem to be sure of very much.

No. I don't even know where here is. I woke up in the desert and walked, and now I am here.

Here is better than there. At least there is water here. And you can get out of the sun.

Yes. But I want to go home.

Where is home?

His eyelids drooped slowly in frustration, and he exhaled audibly. I don't know. He shook his head slightly.

The jaguar peered intently at him. If you don't mind, I will call you Aapo.

Why Aapo?

The jaguar curled his paw into the stream and splashed himself with the water, then lowered his huge head and took a drink. Why not?

Okay.

Look past me, Aapo, and tell me what you see.

He looked back into the jungle past the great cat, a hundred feet or a hundred miles, and saw the white cube he had glimpsed through the high tree canopy earlier -- much nearer, and impossibly larger than before. The two cubes he had seen before were maybe the size of a room and the size of a house. This one on the jungle floor was so large he couldn't see either end of it.

Then he saw, about fifteen to twenty feet above, the next level in the stack. And another, and another, but still not able to see where the left and right ends of any of the layers were.

A giant pyramid, he replied to the cat, almost as a question.

The jaguar growled, and Aapo felt it in his bones, reverberating in his core, yet it seemed that the growl was not a threat, but an assent. Ek Balam turned and began walking toward the structure.

Follow me.

Aapo forded a narrow waist of the stream with a running jump, and cautiously trailed the jaguar.

Quickly the full breadth of the enormous white wall revealed itself, and the path veered off toward the left side. As they approached the corner of the massive structure, a beam of sunlight hit the jaguar, making the coat shimmer prismatic, from black to gold to white to green to chocolate and again to black, all before the cat had taken another full step. For a second, Aapo forgot himself and nearly reached out to touch the fantastic beast.

Do I look like a fucking housecat to you?

Startled, Aapo retracted his arm so quickly and with such force, he felt a mild pain in his shoulder and his side. He chided himself:  Of course this is not something you pet, you idiot.

The jaguar chuffed and rumbled as they rounded the corner and came to the foot of a set of stairs that climbed up the middle of this side, seemingly all the way into the very sky. Aapo looked straight up and could not tell where the stairway ended from where they stood.

Side by side right in front of the bottom stair, Ek Balam and Aapo looked at each other. The jaguar turned his head back, laid his mighty paw on the stair, and the two began their ascent.

Monday, May 25, 2020

Do Not Resuscitate, Part 3: Comorbidities

The rest of this benighted year will feature countless where do we go from here? thinkpieces, again none of which will explore the possibility that many people might not want to "return" to what was, that it didn't work for perhaps a majority of people, and that maybe concentrating massive volumes of wealth in the hands of a few indifferent sociopaths might not be the best way to run a railroad.

On the one hand, it is not unreasonable for people living in less densely populated areas to want to get back to work, especially since the government has told them to go fuck themselves, that they are on their own, that we only bail out billionaires and cruise lines and hoteliers now. Life is a series of calculated risks, some more than others. The people who govern this hollowed-out oligarchy have made it abundantly and repeatedly clear who can count on assistance and protection in times of crisis.

On the other hand, when some of those folks show up at their state capitol buildings in militia cosplay gear, weapons at the ready, screaming at law enforcement and threatening elected representatives, many messages become clearer:
  • Only white people can get away with this shit.
  • There are no consequences for behaving like domestic terrorists.
  • There are a surprising number of people who not only don't care about anyone else, they don't even care about themselves.
Still wondering why people who are not white men have a problem with how laws are enforced?

Hillary Clinton famously used the pejorative "basket of deplorables" to refer to these chuckle-headed mutants. She was far too kind, it turns out -- these people are losers, straight up, as in people who have lost at the business of life, people who have no serious prospects for the future, who regard the entire world merely as a vague extension of what they can see right in front of them at any given moment. The failures they do acknowledge are always someone else's fault, never their own.

Seen from that perspective, a narcissistic sociopath is the perfect avatar for their deepest resentments, as well as the logical culmination of fifty years of Republican sociopathy and stupid games, the grand project of undermining the republic coming to fruition. Not only do they openly despise the notion of compassion or caring or helping anyone else, they would even sacrifice themselves and their loved ones, as long as it granted them the opportunity to fuck over some caricature plastered on whatever Fox News shithead they prefer to watch.

They hate their countrymen more than they love their country. This is crucial to keep in mind, every bit as crucial as the fact that Kim Don Un literally does not care how many people die from coronavirus, he only cares that he and his inner circle get to wet their beaks.

People keep searching for reasons and details, trying to ascribe this or that utterance or lie or contradiction as evidence either of sheer incompetence or baroque conspiracy. The answer is both and neither -- there is a coordinated effort and he is a fucking moron, and yet the simple truth of it is that the entire sum of his adult life is his unshakable fixation on self-enrichment. Other peoples' money, other peoples' praise and adoration -- these are the currencies that he trades in. He will do anything to generate more of both. There is nothing more to it than that.

There is no point in debating the details or what is to be "fixed" in preparing for the inevitable summer wave, or the third wave during the regular flu season this fall and winter. From the standpoints of Trump and Kushner, and the people still willing to stand on stage with them and grant them legitimacy, it's already fixed. It is doing what it's supposed to do.

This is not an accident, or happenstance. This is by design. Never forget that. This was all preventable, all of it, the death, the economic devastation and fallout, the continued destruction of whatever value this scab of a nation, with all its self-serving hustles and lies, still manages to hang on to. They chose not to prevent it. They are deliberately continuing with the logical outcomes of that choice.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

As we hit the 100k body count, two Vietnam wars or one World War One or whatever metric one chooses to use to illustrate the quick carnage, it is important to keep in mind at all times -- they don't give a fuck. Not even a little bit. No matter what the number ends up being, it doesn't matter to them at all.

In the most literal sense of the phrase, this country is being run by a death cult. Everyone who still works for them, pushes and amplifies their lies, supports them, is part of the cult, and need to be observed and treated as such. No, that doesn't mean you need to call your goofball Facebook uncle a serial killer the next time you see him, but if you haven't shunned and ignored him already, what the hell are you waiting for? There is simply no debate or engagement worth having with any of these people. They have always operated in bad faith, but now the stakes are higher. We're not bickering over what nuances of tax policy are more or less "capitalist" or "democratic socialist" or whatever.

People are dying (and sometimes being incapacitated even when they survive the virus), losing their jobs and businesses, and the monsters running the country see only opportunities for disaster oligarchism (as this is no longer a true capitalist society, in any realistic Adam Smith definition of the word), and the mediots can only veer between whatever meaningless gaffe Joe Biden had, or venturing into a crowd of these DURR MUH HAIRCUT rubes, and whining about being heckled and verbally abused.

When the historical coroners perform the autopsy on the USA, they might identify a single factor that finished it off, but mostly they will find a convergence of things, each of which were harmful, but collectively left the patient massively -- and unnecessarily -- vulnerable to that final bit. No matter how bad it gets -- and it's going to get worse, count on it -- keep in mind at all times: none of it had to happen. It could have all been prevented. But the people who own and operate this popsicle stand would rather poison the worm-ridden brains of neo-confederates and motivate them to violence, than see so much as a dime of their precious fucking money get spent on someone they deem undeserving.

It's a death cult. Treat its members and acolytes accordingly.



The sound of the water stayed faint, even as he slipped along the forest trail, stepping over outgrown roots here, ducking under low branches there. Pine and birch trees were more prevalent, the duff covering the forest floor thicker and more pungent. Sunlight still brightly penetrated the high canopy in spots, but fewer and farther between as he progressed.

And yet the sound of the water remained the same, neither closer not farther away.

Now the trees became larger, denser, covered with moss and vines. The tops were higher, blocking out more and more sunlight. It was darker, but he could still see. More animal chittering, perhaps a small troop of monkeys, off in the distance, but once again it was difficult to tell how distant.

A group of trees off to the right side all appeared to be bleeding a milky fluid, dripping slowly down the trunks. One huge tree to the left, massive in breadth and height, loomed over the trail. He looked up and could not see the top of the tree, and it had to be at least a hundred feet around its trunk, which was not round, but more like a giant star, with huge "arms" buttressed out from the central structure of the trunk.

The dense undergrowth of vines and shrubs surrounding this tree seemed almost to be moving of their own volition, as there was faint motion but barely a breeze. He could see large thorns on some of the vines, and was glad the trail managed to stay clear of this collection of plant life, which suddenly seemed terrifyingly sentient.

He passed by the tree cautiously, catching himself making an effort to be quiet, as if the thorny vines or the tree itself might hear him. He kept looking over his shoulder at it, subconsciously thinking this thing might follow him somehow, might curl its thorny tendrils around his ankles and pull him, screaming, inexorably into some hidden, gaping maw.

Turning forward again to concentrate better on the path ahead, he could see through the impossibly high weave of deep green leaves, out into the bright light from an invisible sun. Peeking up over that aperture was what appeared to be a white cube, set atop a larger cube. Then the perspective changed and all he could see was the leaves again.

The sound of the water was suddenly closer, more urgent, the jungle foliage denser, more pungent, more alive. His left hand slipped back, again mostly on instinct, then not seeing a threat, slid forward a few inches to the hip flask of reposado. He popped the cap and took a swig, more deeply than the initial taste when he first found the flask on this belt he had never seen before, with clothes he had never worn before. He swirled the tequila around for a second, felt it on his tongue, and swallowed, all while monitoring this microcosm in front of him, this miniature universe of alien life forms.

He stepped around a small group of miniature palms that surrounded a mangrove tree, again stepping over roots while watching for low branches. A green snake, easily six feet in length, slithered up the trunk of the mangrove. Several sets of small, glowing eyes peered out from burrows dug into the soil in front of the tree.

Coming around the tree he finally saw the small creek bisecting the trail. It wasn't especially deep nor wide, nor flowing fast, so he could ford it without too much trouble. The water looked clear and cool, the rocks at the bottom burnished smooth and clean, no moss or fish or motes that he could see.

He knelt and reached into the water with his right hand, again sliding his left hand back toward the knife without being conscious of the motion. The water felt as cool and refreshing as it looked. He splashed his forehead with his hand and felt rejuvenated almost instantly, even though despite all this time (what time?) and distance (how far?) he wasn't tired or hungry or thirsty.

Still, the water felt good and right. He scooped his hand into the stream and took a tentative sip. It tasted clean and refreshing, as if it had come from a high mountain stream, rather than the floor of a fertile jungle.

You're not thirsty now, but you might be later. You should fill up the empty hip flask.

The thought came into his head, but it was as if he had heard someone else saying it to him in his head, instead of out in the open, instead of the thought being his own. The voice was deeper than his own, with perhaps a menacing tone beneath it.

He looked up and saw the giant cat, directly across the stream from him.

Saturday, May 23, 2020

Movie of the Weak

And they say no new movies will be produced for a while because of the plague. Sort-of known guy Antonio Sabato's got news for y'all.

Here's the logline:  The Expendables + a cast of washed-up deplorables = The Availables.
Bakersfield; Calif — Antonio Sabato Jr. is getting set to shoot a new movie. One he is directing and writing called "Trail Blazers". It is a modern day western about "good" Vs "evil"; angels and demons.

It's a faith based movie that he hopes will encourage others to stand up for their faith, but at the same time provide tons of action. He is working on marital [sic] arts and gun fights for an action packed movie.

Antonio plans to bring back his acting friends that have been shun [sic] from Hollywood due to their conservative views or Christian faith. Actors such as, Lorenzo Lamas, Kevin Sorbo, Dean Cain and Kristy Swanson have all signed up to be in the movie. There [sic, Jesus H. Christ] hope is to shoot the movie in a few months in New Mexico.
Well, that was painful to read. I sure do hope Scooter got a decent grade on that book report. Guy works in the feckin' media you say? Forget the basic spelling and grammar errors, the content itself reads like a high-school intern cranked it out so he could go on a sandwich run.

Anyway, the movie. Sounds hilarious. Here's the poster. Try not to be surprised at the names in the cast. The brief character descriptions in the right-hand column are just [chef's kiss]. As writer, producer, director, and star, Sabato of course has cast himself as John, The Slick One. So there may be oil or Vaseline or Astroglide involved at some point.

For my money, though, the one that literally made me laugh out loud, startling the cat and prompting a What? from my wife, was Scott Baio's description, The Furious. Which instantly called to mind the 1999 cult comedy Mystery Men, about a gang of "superheroes" who all had shitty superpowers. Ben Stiller, of course, played Mr. Furious, whose "superpower" was -- you guessed it -- getting really pissed off. So now I just envision Chachi sitting there, smoldering and seething with rage until he finally blows his top.

In fact, looking at the other character descriptions after Baio -- The Wise One, The Shadow, The Gracious -- they might as well just plug in some of the other Mystery Men superhero names. I could definitely see Kevin Sorbo as The Shoveler or The Waffler.

The rest of it is padded out with Trump-humpers like Dean Cain and Kristy Swanson, people who couldn't hack it in Hollyweird and blamed it on political correctness instead of a lack of talent and a nose for lousy projects, and MMA fighters like Bas Rutten and Tito Ortiz. (Cain's real claim to fame is taking Brooke Shields' virginity, when she was 22 years old.)

Then there are lesser-known actors, such as Australian actor Robert Rabiah and Baywatch alum David Chokachi, who don't seem to be especially vocal about their politics, certainly not in the way Sabato and Baio (both of whom spoke at the Republicon convention in 2016) have been. Nor do they appear to be semi-pro trolls like Cain and Swanson. Nor do any of their public-facing outlets (Wikipedia, Twitter, etc.) have any mention of this thing. Which is kind of a hint.

So unless maybe Tony S. humps the right leg for money -- maybe Stephen Bannon or Robert Mercer, some shithead whackjob with money to match their mental problems -- it either won't get off the ground, or worse, it'll get made on a shoestring. It'll make the cheesy Sonny Chiba chopsocky stuff from the '70s and '80s look like Citizen Kane.

For what sounds like it's supposed to be an action movie, the cast is awful long in the tooth. Baio turns sixty this year, Sorbo, Lamas, Michael Dudikoff, and soap actor Ronn Moss are all well into their sixties. The only thing that kept James Woods and Jon Voight out of this was tertiary syphilis. Count on a lot of "creative" angles for the action scenes, especially for Mr. Furious.

The only real surprise in the cast is Robert Wagner, but since Wagner is 90 years old (and a more, uh, interesting character than his usual public persona has indicated), I'm betting he doesn't have much screen time in this little epic. In fact, I'm betting he never appears in it at all. Sabato is claiming that the cast will house together during shooting in New Mexico, in order to self-quarantine. If Wagner is involved, it'll only be because they spliced in five minutes of him on his veranda, reading a few expository lines about why he's the "Father of Faithful Ones."

Anyway. Looks like loads of fun, maybe one of those "midnight movie" type deals like Showgirls or Rocky Horror Picture Show. More likely, I'll see it on the rack at my local supermarket, peeking out from behind God's Not Dead 3 or something like that.

Mostly though, the world could really use less of this sort of shit, these tedious, thinly-veiled and poorly-written allegories claiming to impart moral truths, coming from people who gleefully support daily indecency and mendacity, open theft and shameless indifference to mass death.

They want to lecture us heathens about good and evil and christian values, maybe they should take a fucking look in the mirror, while reading aloud the Sermon on the Mount. They support death and lies and thievery and cruelty and shameful hypocrisy. They don't have enough goddamned sense to be ashamed of themselves and each other.

Friday, May 22, 2020

Do Not Resuscitate, Part 2: Square One


We think we can go back. (Who, exactly, do I mean by we? What, exactly, do I mean by go back?) Again, the animal instinct to "return" to "normal" and resist change overtakes the higher functions of considering the larger ramifications of what we are seeing.

This is just beginning, both in terms of medical science and in economic terms. Eighty thousand people already dead, a couple thousand more every day, thirty million people out of work. In about eight weeks.

And that's what we know about. That doesn't count deceased who may have been intentionally or accidentally misdiagnosed by coroners, who in many cases are really just county sheriffs and not medical doctors. That doesn't count states like Florida who are openly concealing (there's an oxymoron for ya) COVID-related numbers, because the governor, like all Florida governors in recent memory, is a corrupt slapdick who cares more about kissing the chief executive's bulbous ass than protecting his citizens. He's like a character out of a Carl Hiaasen novel, except even Hiaasen would have dialed down the caricature out of artistic responsibility.

Whatever your particular circumstance during this crisis so far, it may have occurred to you at some point that the people who are supposed to be managing it -- that is, Trump and his dead-eyed failson-in-law -- are not doing a quality job of it. Indeed, they appear not to be interested at all in finding ways to improve their response to the epidemic.

In fact, if you were to go by what they've said and done so far, you might start to think that they are completely indifferent to the human consequences of the plague. That is to say -- and I mean this quite literally -- that whether the final death tally had actually been zero, or if it ends up being five or even ten million, their reactions and responses would be unchanged. They do not care. At all.

This is a powerful, disheartening thing to consider, for sure. This is the ethical code of serial killers, that human life has literally no value, except insofar as it affects someone they actually know and care about, or their precious, precious money.

There is -- or was, it seems to have already passed by without notice, much less consideration -- an opportunity to think with moral clarity many of the things we take for granted in this weird, predatory society we share -- housing, health care, money, food, education, and yes, even climate change. In the past decade, the Ebola and Zika scares were just mere hints of how pandemics, aided and abetted by the broader tropical and temperate zones created by climate change, could wreak havoc on complacent, unsuspecting societies -- especially ones like the US, completely unwilling to do any serious thinking about any of it.

Then again, we have not been a serious nation for a very long time. Serious nations don't keep shoveling impossible amounts of money and power over to obvious grifters and shitheads. Half the gastropods in this fucking hellscape would fight each other with rusty pocketknives for the opportunity to give their paychecks to such people, so long as it affirmed their idiotic prejudices and imaginary grievances.



The other side of the ridge at first appeared to be a vast expanse of desert emptiness, waterless plants somehow persisting -- even thriving -- in this permanently baked wasteland. Looking more intently as he descended carefully, he could see larger pockets of darker greenery, colors of wooded copses and even perhaps jungle canopies further back.

Time and distance still did not register clearly, not yet anyway. It was warm and bright, yet there was still no sign of the sun and he wasn't sweating. There was no evidence in sight that any human had ever ventured here.

He adjusted his walking path slightly toward the nearest small grove of trees, suddenly aware that there was no way to situate it as a cardinal direction, "north by northeast" or whatever. No matter; it was over there slightly to the right several hundred yards. Or several hundred feet. Or a mile.

Take it a step at a time.

Finally -- or suddenly -- he found himself in front of the grove of what appeared to be madrone trees, bark peeling, fat clusters of red and orange berries hanging from a few of them. He wasn't hungry and the berries didn't look especially good anyway. Faint chirping and chittering rose in the air and fell, like the water ebbing from a tidal pool.

He kept walking into the grove and instinctively reached to his belt with his left hand, and was startled to feel a knife handle sticking up from a sheath, right behind the hip. Had that been there? He pulled the knife, not out of worry that it might need to be used, but just to see it. It was a beauty -- eight-inch blade Bowie, carbonized Damascus steel, serrated top edge, light but sturdy bone handle.

Holding in his left hand, hefting it for a minute, feeling the knife's weighted balance, turning it back and forth in the dappled light, as the dark patterned steel almost seemed to glow at certain angles, he kept thinking, Where the hell did this come from? He sheathed the knife and looked more closely at the workman's belt.

There was a small flask at each hip. The one on the right felt empty, while the left flask sloshed a bit when he shook it. He opened and sniffed cautiously, detecting a subtle aroma, not sure. He took a sip, tentatively, and was rewarded with the flavor of a fine reposado, the cool of the blue agave followed by the rush of alcohol warmth. The flask felt about halfway empty.

Or, you know, maybe half-full.

He returned the flask to its loop on the belt, shaking his head incredulously. What the hell? Looking deeper into the grove, he could see the duff and ground cover around the madrones and white oaks, a subtle but clear line breaking through, heading back into denser foliage.

Left hand dropping behind his hip to the knife almost out of pure lizard-brain instinct, scanning the ground, he slowly pressed forward down the only thing resembling a trail. The animal noises of the forest lulled and then ceased, and after about fifty feet (or five hundred feet), he could hear the faint burbling of water.

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

Do Not Resuscitate, Part 1: Lockdown Blues

[Trying something new -- pairing the usual current-events common-tarry with a short fiction piece. This will be serialized in six parts over the next week or so. As always, all comments, suggestions, observations, and critiques are welcome.]

It may be a vestige of the sad cliché of "white liberal guilt," or (more likely) just my own personal inclination toward an overall sense of justice -- or at least an intense natural aversion to injustice -- but I feel like I've been doing quite well throughout this COVID crisis so far, while a lot of people are suffering and/or dying and/or going broke and/or going crazy.

There is a collective fixation on "returning" to "normal" and "restarting" the "economy," without slowing down for a moment and perhaps exploring or even pondering what people think they mean when they use those words. Maybe one (1) enterprising corporate journamalist, while they're sitting there waiting to stenograph the daily barrage of lies and insults and nonsense, could ask such a question:

What is the economy? When you talk about "reopening the country" and "restarting the economy," what precisely does that entail?

Of course, no one realistically expects anyone, certainly not the oatmeal-brained chief executive, to dive with any real granularity into the subject, nor does anyone seriously expect a paid emissary from Corporate America to ask such inconvenient questions.

Broad strokes would suffice, and not merely to emphasize that Trump is insufficient even to talk about economic issues in general terms, but to point out the fact that the "normal" economy was already not working for a substantial chunk of the population, that maybe there's more to life than mere survival in a gig economy, that perhaps humans were meant to do more than serve as delivery monkeys and rickshaw drivers to the petit bourgeoisie.

Here's how it's gone for me so far:  I'm on a two-man IT crew. The other guy has been telecommuting, since we do most of our work remotely anyway. There has been a significant amount of on-site work lately, but nothing I couldn't handle myself, with a bit of prudent scheduling. I see fewer than a dozen people in-person in an average week, and I've always been OCD about hand-washing. So, since our second-floor office is positioned between a training lab and a conference room (neither of which, obviously, has been used or will be for some time), I've literally had half of an office floor to myself.

I brought up an old weight bench and a pair of dumbbells, about a hundred pounds of plates, set them up in the training lab about six weeks ago. Fifteen laps in the conference room equals a quarter of a mile -- jog five laps, drop and do a set of burpees or lunges or whatever, lather, rinse, repeat. Knock out a few sets of dumbbell exercises, music fucking cranked. Rough balance of 25% cardio, 50% bodyweight, 25% free weights, but those ratios change slightly throughout the week.

Also actually working -- with half the staff telecommuting, there's plenty of that. I get in a half-hour early, usually stay a half-hour late. Aside from a few scheduled conference calls during the week, I have total flexibility in my schedule, so I can work for a couple hours, then take fifteen or twenty minutes to work out.

Every Monday morning I go next door to the supermarket while it's still mostly unoccupied. Despite the noisy clowns we see on our screens and feeds, everyone is extremely well-behaved. Most people are wearing masks, many are wearing gloves. Everyone is keeping their distance. I spend about twelve bucks on a week's worth of healthy snacks:  berries, bananas, cherry tomatoes, carrots, nuts and raisins, protein bars. During the month of April, I lost about five pounds net, but it was more like losing ten pounds of fat and gaining back five pounds of muscle.

The wife and daughter have been stuck at home since mid-March, and both have been surprisingly good sports about it. There is a fair to even chance that my wife's job might get eliminated in funding cuts over the summer, but we can get by on my salary. Not great, but again, so many people are already enduring so much worse, and have nothing on the horizon.

Again, I feel guilty about all of this. Not so much that I'm going to stop doing what I'm doing, mind you, because there's nothing I could change that would make a difference on that front. I come to work, I eat well, I work out, I go home. Not a bad deal.

We also support the local restaurants, which have switched to a pop-up/take-out format with prepared meals. Tip generously, folks, seriously. Many of the recent COVID cases are happening at giant meat-processing facilities (surprise!). Well, chances are you have at least one butcher in your locality, someone who processes locally-sourced meat in a non-assembly-line workspace. Support them.

If you have any Latino population in your area, there's probably a carniceria nearby too. Same thing, check 'em out, support them. I like Costco too, but you don't actually have to get everything there. You ever grill up real carne asada or carnitas? A Mexican friend once showed me the secret -- orange juice and Coca Cola. Caramelizes the meat just right. Get some Negra Modelo and some decent salsa to go with it. Maybe a nice bottle of Patrón or Cazadores.

In California, there are strawberry vendors all over the place right now. Few things are better than a fresh strawberry.



He awoke with a start in a desert landscape, brightly lit by what felt like a morning sun, yet he couldn't actually see where the sun was in the sky, nor did he have any way of actually knowing what time it was. Or how he got there, wherever "there" was.

He stood up slowly and looked around, seeing what appeared to be a shallow ravine, two-thirds up the side of a scrubby ridge. Down looked passable, yet pointless, as it just went to the floor of the gully, same hills on the other side.

He looked at what he was wearing -- long-sleeve work shirt, jeans, work boots, sunglasses, hat -- wondering where such items came from, why he was outfitted like a ranch hand. Whatever, it was the right outfit for this desiccated moonscape.

He saw what looked like a Gila monster -- had he ever actually seen such a creature up close? -- skulk into its hole under a large boulder. Looking at the ground around, thinking about what other dangerous animals -- scorpions, tarantulas, rattlesnakes -- might be waiting to pounce, he started up toward the near crest of the hill.

There was nothing resembling a trail, nothing indicating that a humanoid footprint had ever trod this baked hardpan, but vegetation was sparse and easy to walk between. He saw sage and blackbush and a few yucca trees, and wondered for a split-second how he knew to identify these things as such. Plenty of cactus, of course.

It was probably only a hundred yards to the crest of the hill, and not steep, but it seemed to take longer, like it had been a half-mile or a mile. He took it slow, again watching for rattlers and scorpions, but seeing only a prairie dog peeking up for a glimpse, and immediately ducking, as if assuring itself that it had not been seen.

Finally he got to the top of the ridge, and was instantly dismayed -- more desolate, empty, alien terrain, as far as the eye could see. Shit. Just how far was "as far as the eye could see," anyway? Let's find out. It's not like I have another choice here. He began to slowly make his way down the other side of the ridge.

A Republic, If You Can Banana It

You guys, I think he might be trying to steal the election.
[Piece of shit] Donald Trump mischaracterized Michigan’s absentee ballot policies on Wednesday while threatening federal funding to the state if election officials there do not retreat from measures meant to facilitate mail-in voting.

He made a similar threat to Nevada, which has a Republicon Secretary of State.

Let's cut the shit here, and stop pretending Trump has some sort of specific hard-on about voting by mail, or even voter fraud. He and his shitbag family all vote by mail. Military personnel vote by mail. I've voted by mail for the past twenty-odd years, never been a problem.

The fact is that, if it was a "safe" state for him like Alabama or Oklahoma, he'd let 'em vote by email, or a fuckin' paper airplane if that's what they wanted. Nobody is fooled by any of this.

But these threats break the law, even if he doesn't follow through on them. This is illegal. This is literally what he got impeached for, what he tried to do to Ukraine.

I know we're all having a larf over Nancy Smash calling out Vagina Neck McJellyroll on his morbid obesity, but personally, I'd feel a hell of a lot better if the third most powerful person in the fucking country stepped up when the law is being shat upon. I know, I know, Murc's Law and all, but this whole "wait till November" super-strategy of theirs ain't worth shit if Fat Elvis is allowed to slap his mushroom on the electoral scale.

The question has never been is he breaking the law?, it's not like he's tried to hide any of it. The real question is who's gonna stop him? As limited as their powers may be, the people who have at least some power and agency in this need to act with some sense of urgency, at every single opportunity.

I mean, for all practical purposes, it's probably all over with anyway. But this time around really is the one last possible chance to preserve what's left. It would be a fine thing if certain people started acting like that was the case, instead of making excuses.

Friday, May 15, 2020

Superduperman

You know, if this babbling moron manages to win again, despite being THE STUPIDEST MOTHERFUCKER ON THE PLANET, this nation deserves every bit of what it's going to get, good and hard. I mean, I really don't know what to say anymore. It shouldn't even be close. Who looks at this shit and says, Oh yeah, this is what I want? Fucking super duper missile, like a dopey little kid wanting more ice cream.

I think you can get by in life being an idiot or an asshole, but not both. (Unless, of course, you have enough wealth to insulate you from the consequences.) Obviously, it's better if people are neither, but we all have our moments here and there. I think I've made a pretty solid case here over the years of being a straight-up asshole. Some of it is schtick, to make things more entertaining to read and maybe provoke a few laughs along the way.

But most of it is absolutely real -- I have zero patience for ignorance or stupidity, because I consider those things, in a world where information is mostly free and constantly available, to be a voluntary decision. You have to decide to watch Fox News rather than, I dunno, read a fucking book once in a while, or a newspaper, and learn how to mentally sort empirical facts from mere opinions and conjecture. Or better yet, just get off the fucking field and let the grown-ups handle things. Go back to the shack and play with your truck nuts already.

Still, many people are not terribly bright, nor do they care, and that's no crime. But combine it with the asshole temperament and real power, and you have the problem you see before you -- this elderly, doddering dunce, mincing around in his fat-guy suits and his shoe lifts that make him stand like a fucking centaur, his comically applied Oompa Loompa makeup with the raccoon eyes, spouting ridiculous nonsense like (again) an annoying four-year-old, knowing that no one has the guts to tell him to his face that he's a fucking degenerate, a metastasized tumor of a soul with a bag of rancid pudding where his brain should have been.

A nation that put this ludicrous simpleton in charge of anything beyond a broken pinball machine needs its collective head examined. There is no excuse for any of this -- yes, our political system is broken and run by the corrupt and the timid and the rented and the outright bought, but who the fuck put them there, keeps them there? Who keeps falling for this shit, over and over again, whether it's flag-humping and Jebus-stroking on the ratchet right, or stern "we can never ask for better things" N8er b8er lectures from the pawl center? (Aside from Bernie and AOC and maybe Barbara Lee, there are no real leftists anywhere near the halls of actual power.) Who decided they had better things to do in 2010 and 2014, instead of showing up to shore up what power they did have, which puts them into a real position to ask for those better things?

Hell, what do I know? I'm operating under the assumption that people can look at empirical reality, see what could be improved and what their role is in that, and then act accordingly.

Maybe the real problem is with my assumptions. Maybe not enough people are willing to take the time and effort to sift through things and figure out the mess for themselves. Or maybe they do know, but don't care, or would prefer to bitch and moan about it while watching whatever basic-cable panel of shitheads chokes their chicken for them.

I dunno, and at the end of the year, I won't be asking about it anymore. All I know is that if enough people out there don't pull their ever-lovin' shit together and act like this matters, it's gonna be a hard rain that's gonna fall. And I'll be in my boat, spraining both middle fingers.

Media-crity

Not sure who is more deserving of the "simp of the week" award:
Did you learn anything new from either of those narratives? Of course not. There was nothing to learn at all.

In the first example, we affirm the fact that in a nation of 325 million people, some of them are assholes, some of them are stupid, and some are both. It's up to you to figure for yourself just what "some" entails, but it's funny how often the camera pans up from these stupid "lockdown protests," only to show that, well, it's really just a few dozen idiots who just got tired of spanking their hapless monkeys to Judge Judy or whatever.

Who gives a fuck what they think? We already know what they think, because they never shut the fuck up. I mean, great job Journamalist Guy, for finally giving voice to belligerent slapdicks. Up to now, we really were in the dark as to what these cousin-fuckers were thankin' 'bout.

Jesus Tapdancing Christ. This fucking guy. Mommy, I stuck my head in the chimp cage, and they threw doo-doo at me and tried to rip my face off! The hell you say.

The second example is even more consistent and pervasive, since these accredited saps keep showing up for this fucking nonsense. It might be a good idea to return to basic principles and ask fundamental questions:  What is the purpose of a White House press conference? What is our purpose in attending these things, when we know they're lying, the public knows they're lying, and the liars know that everyone knows they're lying? What do we hope to achieve by daily transcribing this malignant guff, for people who have already made up their minds?

When there is no point to it, when it's all just a street-corner three-card monte game, you effectively are just a conduit for agitprop, the jet plane by which the lie gets around the world while the poor truth is still struggling to get its socks on. You can tell yourself whatever you need to in order to sleep at night, but you're really just helping Team Satan.

I didn't need you people to tell me that Kayleigh MagaNinny is an awful human being, utterly without principle, happy to sell her country out in order to cash checks from someone she knows full well is a monster. She defends his monstrosity with lies. That is her job. Used to be that a journalist with integrity would flat-out refuse to give oxygen to a subject that could not be vetted or fact-checked -- a subject that was, you know, a fucking liar.

Tune these fucking losers out, all of them -- the shitheads that do stunt coverage like this, and their subjects. The only reason any of them are doing it is because outrage sells, it gathers eyeballs and clicks. Fuck these people, let them ply an honest trade for once in their got-damned lives.