Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes

I had been wondering earlier in the week if Herman Cain, who had been hospitalized since shortly after attending Orange Foolius' COVID rally in Tulsa last month, was getting better or worse. After four or five weeks, you assume worse, especially when it's a seventy-four-year-old cancer survivor.

And of course, Cain passed away this morning, which is sad and unnecessary, but also entirely on-brand. Not only was Herman Cain a gaping asshole just as standard operating procedure, he made a point of being as much like Trump as possible -- which is to say, as defiantly ignorant and oppositional as he could. This is how it worked out for him.

So neither gloating nor mourning is really in order, since in the end Cain was just another dopey conservaturd whose main mission in life was to tweak stoopid libruls. Alrighty then, buddy. CONSIDER ME PWNED. Go ahead and push up some daisies.

No, if there is any useful salient point to be gleaned from the somewhat premature death of Herman Cain it is this:  he literally gave his life for someone who doesn't even pretend to give a shit. Okay? That's really all there is to it. As far as Trump is concerned, Cain is just another schmuck who bought the farm. Like the other 150,000 or so, it doesn't matter. You could stick another zero or two zeroes to that number, and Trump's reaction would be exactly the same. He doesn't care. He doesn't even pretend to care. Every single Tulsa attendee could die on camera tomorrow and it really wouldn't matter to him.

It's difficult to recognize, much less internalize, that extreme level of sociopathic indifference. But it's important to see it for what it is. Whatever you think of the COVID outbreak, whether you're in the bunker or you think it's a hoax, know this -- it could be a hundred times worse, more aggressive and virulent, like something out of 28 Days Later, and he still wouldn't care. Imagine that for a minute, and then understand it as an empirical fact.

Keep that in mind as we head into the school year. They clearly don't give a shit about the kids, the teachers, the school staff, the crazy logistics involved in just trying to keep everyone safe. That's not snark, it's not an exaggeration. They don't fucking care. At all. They clearly resent even being asked to go through the motions of pretending.

That's the choice, as we head into the homestretch of this dystopian nightmare election year -- you're either good with a death cult running things, or you're not. Everything else is secondary to that cold fact. So either show up, or live with it.

For the Millionth Time, Kanye West is a Piece of Shit

Maybe at one time in the very distant past, it was a goof, but it hasn't been for years. He's an awful person. If you give him any of your money for anything, you're part of the problem. I don't know what else to tell you. It's not just that he's mentally ill; he's an empty, desiccated soul. He sits on hundreds of millions of dollars and does nothing with it but buy show ponies for his kids who are too young to ride them.

Remember what I said about idiots and assholes. Kanye is one of the few people who can give Trump a run for his (other peoples') money in that regard. But seriously, the first step in this national intervention is to defund this toxic asshole.

Idiots and Assholes

Hoarse Whisperer has been one of my favorite reads on Twitter for some time now, and this post is one reason why, because I've made the exact same point before, just from the opposite angle, so to speak. And it's an important fundamental point in why I believe the things I believe, and how I process information against those values and beliefs.

Ideally, we all get through life without being and idiot or an asshole, but that ideal is rarely met. (Fred Rogers, Albert Einstein, a handful of others. Feel free to add your own in comments.) The fact of the matter is that most people are one or the other to some degree -- again, hopefully not too much.

So, to use myself as an example, I'll happily cop to being a judgmental asshole, even impatient and arrogant at times with stupid people, but that's the extent of it. Some people are maybe not so bright or quick on the uptake, but they're decent people, and so you overlook that trait that might otherwise be somewhat frustrating to deal with.

But when you run into people who are idiots and assholes, you seriously have to watch yourself. For one, intelligence is a different thing than cunning, and many assholes are ruthlessly cunning, and idiots are dumb enough to think they'll get away with it.

Consider the soulless monster currently festering in the White House as the epitome of this theory. What are we up to now, three million infected, a hundred forty thousand dead, something like that? The guy is back to golfing every weekend. Why? Because he's bored with talking about his inept response to the plague he caused, but more importantly, because we literally have to put money in his pockets every time he plays golf at one of his rat-infested sumps.

And that goes for everyone who enables him, collects a paycheck from being around him, pays him membership dues, whatever. They're out to screw you out of something -- your money, your vote, your loyalty.

Desaparecidos

If it is necessary to turn the country into a cemetery in order to pacify it, I will not hesitate to do so. -- Colonel Carlos Manuel Arana Osorio, President of Guatemala, 1970-1974

If you had "Portland becomes the Gaza Strip" on your 2020 bingo card, congratulations. In fact, as this summer of mostly police-escalated riots in putatively "liberal" or "Democratic" cities has progressed, the patterns and rhythms are similar from city to city, and are playing a familiar tune.

Even so, Portland stands out in that group. A famously progressive city, the largest city in its state by far, with a liberal Democratic mayor and city council, in a state with majority Democratic state legislators and congressional representatives, a liberal governor (Jerry Brown's sister, no less), and two liberal US senators.

So how's all that working out for them? Aside from a sharply worded letter from Jeff Merkley to Bill Barr (which the latter no doubt promptly wiped his ass with) and a few acerbic phrases from Nancy Pelosi, what precisely is anyone in the Democratic Party doing about the in-your-face authoritarianism, anonymous goon squads in full military gear hustling suspected graffiti artists into rental vans with Florida plates without so much as a word? What the fuck is the Border Patrol doing hundreds of miles from the Canadian border, much less the Mexican one, and in what way is this sort of activity within their scope of work?

It is already being hinted that the counterinsurgency ops (let's call them what they are) in Portland are essentially a proving ground for expansion into other cities -- again, all governed by Democrats -- experiencing the thrill of, ah, "social unrest." Never mind that in hundreds of documented incidents across the country, it has consistently been the various strains of militarized "law enforcement" types who have escalated peaceful protests into violent conflagrations. (Strange how they're always able to find a way to disarm and subdue white nutjobs without any bloodshed, though.)

Which is, of course their goal:  the best way to undermine these movements is to crack skulls, and then discredit the protesters by painting them as rioters and anarchists. And why not? Who's going to stop them?

It's also a practice run for November, in case the election isn't enough of a blowout, and Dear Leader decides not to accept the results. Sounds like a paranoid conspiracy theory? Okey-dokey. I would say that it's unlikely, but by no means impossible. Take a moment and reflect on just how many things over the past four years have occurred, that prior to 2016 you had considered "unthinkable."

It's been three full weeks since it became known that the Russians have been paying Islamic militants to murder American soldiers in Afghanistan -- and not only has no one called for Trumps' resignation, or written up some sort of protest legislation or censure, as far as I can tell, no major media figure has even asked him about it. The same sinecured dipshits that whined for weeks about Obama wearing a tan suit simply cannot be bothered to ask about openly treasonous conduct. If that isn't a stone-cold indicator of where we're at right now, I really don't know what is. We need journalists who give a fuck, just as much as we need politicians who give a fuck.

John Lewis was a giant among men, channeling his righteous anger into a storied career in public service. Seeing him side-by-side with Martin Luther King, both looking so young, Lewis especially at just twenty-three, but focused and committed. The man took dozens of beatings for his commitment and his principles, things that are certainly lost on the thugs currently infesting the executive branch, and the mangy guard dogs who strain at the leash to do their bidding.

Here's yet another example, and you can find hundreds more from the past couple months if you do a little bit of searching. Look at these brave men, bravely beating down this violent anarchist. So fucking brave, really. I honestly don't know how someone does something like that, just this incredibly chickenshit deed, and then goes home and resists the urge to eat their sidearm. I mean, you have to be a real die-hard fucking turd of a human being to withstand the temptation. These thugs can go straight to hell, seriously. Their very worst fear is a fair fight.

They should rename the Edmund Pettus bridge after John Lewis, like, years ago, but certainly now. Pettus was a dirtbag piece of shit who died thirty-some years before the bridge was even built. It was never his bridge to begin with. Some shitheads named it after him just tell everyone else fuck you. Once John Lewis walked across it, it became his bridge, now and forever.

It would be nice to think that Lewis' epic courage and commitment might inspire a generation of Americans, decent people who are at long last exhausted by the wretched hive of scum and villainy that has at long last taken over this plague-ridden cesspool. I guess we'll see in November.

Despite Rep. Lewis' stellar example, I remain skeptical that street demonstrations actually accomplish anything. Yes, they raise consciousness and awareness and all that. I'm talking about tangible, identifiable changes as a direct result.

The main thing is, I'm not willing to do it myself, and I don't ask other people to do something I'm unwilling to do myself. There is nothing here that I'm willing to get my skull cracked for, or shuttled away in an unmarked van for this domestic extraordinary rendition program we apparently now have going, and that again, no one will do jack shit about.

There is no goddamned way I'm going to get my head caved in for fuckin' Nancy Pelosi or Joe Biden or any of those people. The day they risk anything to fight for me will the the first such day. They get my vote because they manage to be slightly less awful, but that's the extent of it. No one should have to sacrifice their bodies or lives in order to motivate people who, for whatever reason, cannot be motivated otherwise to simply show up and do the right thing.

All that said, if someone is determined to get out in the streets and confront the fascist thugs, I would recommend a couple of things that might seem dumb and insignificant, but could make a difference:

1. Flag swag. Carrying a full-size flag, like some Skokie-marching skinhead, would be unnecessarily cumbersome. Put some flag patches on your clothes. Wear a flag-design mask or t-shirt. No sayings or jokes or hortatory rhetoric. Just do it. It makes it a lot harder to paint someone as some commie pinko anarchist.
2. Bring a gun. I'm not remotely kidding about this one. Especially in Portland -- Oregon is an open-carry state, you just can't carry a loaded weapon in Portland city limits. You can make fun of the doughy neckbeards with their Meal Team Six getups and their DURRR MUH GUNZ dick fetish all you want, but you know what? The cops never fuck with those guys, do they?

Weirdly, I seem to be finding new levels of contempt for certain people. Trump is easy meat; the guy's been a shithead since his mother shat him on the piss-stained concrete of a Hell's Kitchen drug alley. Anyone with functioning synapses sees him for what he is and despises him for all of it.

Then you have the people who are willing to be in the same room with him and sell out their country on a daily basis, for a goddamned paycheck. These are awful people who should never hold a decent job again.

But it's the people who are willing and eager to commit violence on his behalf, the thugs and bullies who look forward to "tuning up" anyone who dares to cross them. I don't know what wrong turn such people made in their lives where they end up like that, but I do know that we're all less safe with such people being allowed to carry deadly weapons and use them with no accountability.

Stay safe. Know who the bastards are and deny them your money as well as your brain. Show up in November, and every single time afterward.

Self-Cancelling

I suppose the big "news" of the day is the back-to-back resignations of Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan, from the NY Times and New York Magazine respectively. I assume they are either going to join forces with their tiresome ankle-biting and start some sort of "you can't cancel me" online portal, just as soon as the Koch check clears, or they'll become full-time sidekicks on Bill Maher's Weekly Cancel Culture Zoom Meeting, since they basically alternate weeks there anyway.

Just as political junkies across the spectrum often forget that most people don't engage with that dismal subject to any great depth or breadth, so too do they forget that 95% of the public couldn't identify Weiss or Sully or Bobo or Modo or Peggy Noonan or whoever. Not only have I never had anyone ever ask me if I had read something any of the op-ed dupes had written, I would be hard-pressed to recall the last time -- or any time -- I had read anything from most of them that was at all interesting or insightful.

Most op-ed columnists at these "elite" publications envision a smart-set salon consisting of themselves and their peers and colleagues, exchanging witty bon mots over appletinis and cucumber-and-watercress sandwiches about the weasels who run the country. They are not talking to you, Tonstant Weader, they are talking to each other, posing and preening like fucking show cats, never actually saying anything interesting or challenging.

Since they have no real-world experience, they are acutely unaware of just how out-of-touch they are. The rabble in the street, with their pedestrian protests and quotidian concerns, occasionally make enough noise to be heard way up on the 23rd floor of the ivory tower, but it's an annoyance to Our Betters, who again have never held an actual job but have countless recommendations on how you should do yours.

This "cancel culture" bullshit is one of the more annoying catch-phrases from the past year or so, made all the more annoying as it gains currency among a certain type of schmuck. I think I've made myself pretty clear on the subject multiple times, so I won't belabor the issue here. I will say that I think it's pretty fucking rich that these sinecured crybabies have the stones to take to their elite gatekeeper platforms and whine over and over again about how mean Twitter is to them, how it's just like the French Revolution or Kristallnacht.

I mean, you do get how, if you're complaining about being silenced, but you're voicing those complaints in Harper's or the Times or National Review or whatever, it's literally the opposite of what you're saying. You know? Go to Bari Weiss' own website and check out her CV. She's been on The View, for fuck's sake. I've seen her on Maher's show at least a half-dozen times in the last couple years. She's been writing for the New York Fucking Times. Yeah, damn, real tumbrels and guillotines there.

As with any viral movement, there are excesses. I don't think a young person should be run out of her own family's business because someone dredged up some shit from eight years ago that she apologized for. I don't see the benefit in firing someone for being dumb enough to wear blackface at a Halloween party. Some of this is pre-emptive corporate ass-covering though, the HR department trying to get out in front of something they could probably just brass out for a couple weeks if they really wanted to. It's not like we have a memory or an attention span anymore.

Elite opinion-mongers are a different breed of cat, though. James Bennet got his ass fired because not only did he not see anything wrong with giving a reactionary politician a free soapbox and megaphone to propose using American military troops on street demonstrators, he inadvertently admitted that, as editor-in-chief, he hadn't even read the piece first. Bennet had to go because the Times knew it had fucked up, that its hackcess White House Tiger Beat coverage has already lost subscribers, and that people are losing patience with the Times' routine bad-faith both-siderism.

The "cancel culture" phrase is already worn out; a more accurate term would be "crybaby culture" or "consequence culture" or accountability culture. That's what this is really all about -- spoiled elites doing sloppy work, put off that the peons are insufficiently grateful for the road apples of wisdom that are generously plopped onto the pages of the corporate media's factories of consent.

The Questions You Didn't Ask

Not really questions, so much as a suggestion and an observation.

Suggestion:  Maybe one of these reportin' types, when asking Trump or one his bootlicking toadies about the prospect of starting the school year in the middle of an entirely predictable resurgence of the COVID pandemic, might point out that Trump still has a school-age child. Obviously a rich white kid in a private school is at a much lower risk, but there's still a risk, for the students and the school staff.

We all know the bit about how minor children should be off-limits, but it's not at all out of line to ask if Barron Trump is also going back to school, or if this is just another item in an endless line of Donald Trump trying to wheedle suckers into taking a risk he would never take himself?

Observation:  Obviously systemic racism is an enormous part of the police brutality problem, and is at the root of this wondrous summer of protests (which, again, the corporate mediots prefer to cover only when the proles strike back). But I would offer the notion that Trump whistling past a question about state violence with whoa, hey, wait a minute, cops kill more whites than blacks is not the brilliant defense he thinks it is.

It does qualify, like many of the things the stable genius blurts, as an inadvertent explanation. This is something that's been lost in the obsessive focus on the racism, at the expense of an equally large part of the problem -- this is what modern American police are trained to do, to act like an occupying army, to treat the civilians they serve the same way the Israeli Defense Force treats Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Just another example of how truly gullible and stupid mediots can be, to reflexively get into parsing rates versus totals, without at all touching on the fact that nearly 4,000 extrajudicial killings in the last five years is too fucking many, especially when we've all read and seen any number of examples where the level of violence was unjustified and overwhelming.

The idea of "defunding" the police is a polemic, and an unrealistic one if taken literally. The goal should be to re-examine the role of civilian law enforcement in this country, and to demilitarize that role, to take away the toys gleaned from military surplus, to stop the IDF-style trainings, to review the psych batteries and get the bullies and the assholes and the roid-rage turds the fuck outta there. Use the money saved to fund community engagement efforts and win back the trust of the public.

Again, it's easy to understand all the institutional reasons why these inconvenient questions don't get posed, but it doesn't change the basic dynamic that people have been realizing about the press for a while:  if you're not going to challenge these people, if instead you're just going to show up and sit there and transcribe the lies and nonsense, what fucking good are you?

Promotional Item

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Anyhoo, Winslow has been making anti-Trump videos lately, similar to what you've seen and heard from The Lincoln Project and Meidas Touch. He's doing this out of pocket, and is not asking for any donations or funding. All he's asking is for the word to be spread far and wide, so check it out.

And maybe do yourself a favor and buy one of his books as well.

Job Qualification, Slight Return: Dereliction of Duty

Per the previous post, Adam Davidson has a brief explanatory follow-up as to why and how the money-laundering sausage doesn't get made so much. And while it all makes a certain perverse sense, it's just a lame excuse. "It's confusing"? "It takes too long and doesn't have enough impact"? "Everyone knows Trump is corrupt and has become numb to it"? Really?

If that's their rationale, then my response is, then what the fuck do we need you for? If we already know Trump is a corrupt liar, then what is the point of sending journo minions to sit in carefully spaced folding chairs to transcribe the obvious lies of soulless shills? Is it not the job of good journalists to take stories that are complex and possibly "confusing," and craft a narrative that clarifies and explains, without oversimplifying or omitting salient detail?

Watergate was complex. Iran/Contra was complex. Somehow ways were devised to explain these narratives to the thumb-sucking rube that apparently constitutes the average mainstream media consumer.

I don't blame Adam Davidson for this, mind you; I've read plenty of his pieces and he's one of the good guys. Anyone wanting to be a solid reporter could learn a thing or two from him. But these self-serving excuses from editors, providing cover for their imperialist running-dog corporate publisher overlords, are bullshit, pure and simple.

Take a look around and pick at random from the rancid piles of content garbage Corporate America has made you care about, or at least know about. I've never watched so much as a minute of American Idol or Bachelor or Survivor, but there are names and faces I know and recognize from these products, thanks to constant network cross-promotion and Google News aggregation.

Obviously, that's the first step of effective marketing -- creating awareness through promotion and repetition. You're telling me they can do this with the thirsty wretches of reality teevee purgatory, but not with the fact that the chief executive is a treasonous, money-laundering criminal who literally doesn't care that the Russians are paying Islamic militants for American military corpses? Really?

In the past, when presidents have had especially egregious scandals, journalists felt some editorial responsibility to weigh in, sometimes even suggesting that they resign "for the sake of the country" or whatever. More than one hundred newspapers -- including most of the leading national ones -- called on Bill Clinton to resign before he was even impeached. These days, not so much. They don't want the headache generated by pissing off cultists.

Well, guess what, folks? No matter what you do or what you say, if you're not fully in the tank for Orange Foolius, they will hate you regardless. So you might as well do the right thing. Do your job.

Same goes for Democrats, especially House Democrats. They pre-emptively squash the idea of impeaching again, which gives the angry toddler a pretext to continue his behavior, knowing that it will not be curbed or punished. And why shouldn't he? He has no disincentive not to.

When challenged on this, the reflexive cry is, the Senate will just acquit, so it's pointless, the people just have to show up and vote.

So let's look at those two points separately:

1. House Dems were fond, at least before the #TrumpPlague hit (and hey, there's a missed opportunity for opposition branding, no?) of pointing out how many hundreds of bills they had passed, but that big meanie #MoscowMitch was holding up because he's a dick. Well, by their own logic, this is a stellar example of pointless, symbolic posturing. Why bother going through all the motion it takes to propose, write, troubleshoot, and pass bills when you already know they'll be ignored or rejected? But in fact, it's even more useless than another impeachment would be (or, for that matter, a separate impeachment of Bill Barr). The impeachment process entails extra mechanical process of investigation, which not only adds scrutiny to the proceedings -- assuming a few diligent scriveners can be prised from Kayleigh MagaNinny's asshole, or the East Wing Tiger Beat column Maga Haberman runs for the Times -- but also legally mandates compliance from the targets of the inquiries. In other words, Barr wouldn't be able to just laugh and blow it off, knowing that the Dems don't have the stones to make it sting. He' have to comply, or face criminal charges. This would effectively halt (or at least impede) Barr's ability to continue his behind-the scenes evisceration of the federal prosecutorial system.
2. The people did show up and vote. It was called the midterms. It was in all the papers and everything. It was triumphantly known as the "blue wave." Maybe you heard about that. The idea that the "blue wave" parsed out to, ehhh, just drag your feet into eventually making one half-assed attempt at impeaching this fucking traitor, and when you fail you totally don't have to bother trying anything else until the next election, good job everybody! is a ludicrous lie that only a cosseted, self-serving politidunce could possibly believe. The voters voted. The message was clear. You want me to vote again, I will, but I'm going to make sure to vote for people who take the fight seriously. Gutless dweebs who whine about the battle being lost before it is ever fought need to go back to their fucking car dealerships or whatever. I want people who are going to exploit every media outlet available to them, in order to spread a clear, consistent, unified message, and if that's too much to ask, the unemployment line is over there.

This is the great question we should ask ourselves and each other, about these self-appointed guardians of democracy who always seem to get caught sleeping on the job -- what is the job of journalists, what is the job of opposition-party politicians? I would suggest that maybe the layperson's understanding of those jobs is fundamentally different from the understanding of the people who actually hold those jobs. In that gap lies the real problem at hand.

We can't just keep whining that journos are in the tank for Republicons. If that's the case, then fucking boycott them. If you're still bothering with CNN or the NY Times, you're part of the problem anyway, whether you know it or not. If you're not primarying establishment hacks like Pelosi and Schumer, ditto.

Think back to Obama's terms in office. However corrupt and mendacious and comically awful the opposition party was, they were effective. Their goal was to obstruct and impede, and they largely succeeded. They kept him from doing most of what he wanted to do, and effectively ankle-bit him even when he was successful with something. They don't give a fuck about looking "unpatriotic" or whatever. They go for the throat, lie about whatever needs lying about, and say fuck you to the rest. They don't punt on first down or go into a prevent defense for the fourth quarter. You keep fighting until the whistle blows, period.

Summer is the doldrums, and hopefully the Democrats are using the downtime wisely to run up the score in the homestretch after Labor Day. This is not just about getting rid of Trump and getting Biden in there. This is about retaking the Senate and increasing the House majority. This is about the necessity -- the actual, practical, operational necessity -- of driving a stake through the blackened heart of that party of traitors and criminals, for the sake of whatever's left. This is about putting down a rabid dog.

Whatever the Dems think the score is right now -- 42-17 in the third quarter or what-have-you -- they have to commit to going all out in that fourth quarter and running the score up as much as possible. Make it 84-17 if you can, or 200-0. Changing sports metaphors, go Harlem Globetrotters on them. People like to tell themselves and each other that the best offense is a good defense, but that's not true. The best offense is a good offense. Don't overthink it.

The comfortable fiction -- one that not only Republicons but their feckless Dem enablers need you to believe, for the preservation of the establishment money machine that greases them all -- is that Trump is an anomaly, a political aberration. That is a lie, a goddamned lie. Trump is the culmination of fifty years of tactics and propaganda, come to fruition. If he wasn't such an asshole about it, they wouldn't even be embarrassed to say it.

The Republican party needs to be ended as a viable political entity, full stop. It is a fascist mishmash of grubby plutocrats, sweaty authoritarians, and thieving evangelicals. They hate you and everything you've ever cared about in your life. They are more than willing to completely destroy the country if they can broker the ongoing looting of the country for a handful of billionaires. It is important not only to end all support for them, but for any entity who continues to operate as if they can be "worked with" in good faith.

If corporate media entities can't be bothered with that sort of work, then leave them to their reality-teevee coverage. If politicians can't be brought around to understand who the real enemy is, then it's time for them to go. There is no longer another option.

Job Qualification

If you're not too broken up at or distracted by the invisible perfidies of, ah, cancel culture, here's an interesting thread from the New Yorker's Adam Davidson on the likelihood of King Leer's Scottish golf resort (probably all of them, really) being a useful node in the global bratva money-laundering network.

Martyn McLaughlin has also been doing plenty of work for years on this story on the Scottish side. Natasha Bertrand broke a story last fall about the Air Force having to stop at the base nearby for refueling flights, and staying and playing -- on the taxpayer's dime -- at the golf club instead of at a hotel or on the base.

It's interesting to note how little mention any of this ever gets in the American corporate mediocracy. WaPo's David Fahrenthold has done excellent work for years on how Trump ran his scam charities through his rat-infested resorts, and it eventually got Trump busted and fined $2 million for charity fraud -- which again got precious little mention in the vaunted MSM.

Davidson does note this problematic pattern down in the comments section of the thread. Being the natural-born cynic that I am, I can't help but wonder if, despite the fine efforts by many fine reporters, the editors and publishers who actually own and run the media entities see these "failures" as such. Maybe it's not a bug but a feature that they're always ready, willing, and able to catch the latest volley from the press suckaterry follies, to rub our noses in the daily lies, rather than digging for the truth and pushing that for a change.

As depressing as it must be to be a scrivening journamalist in the corporate 'murkin press corpse, it must be brutal to be a good one, to always know that your heroic efforts are going to be ignored and pushed off the masthead, because Sulzberger doesn't want to anger the powers that really be, or Jeff Zucker's two-decade scam of promoting the worst humanoid in the country makes him and his fucking friends so much precious money.

I know it's not an easy button-push, like the endless stream of sinecured crybabies whining on nationally-disseminated establishment platforms that Twitter invective is squelching their First Amendment rights and repressing them -- EXACTLY LIKE THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, YOU GUYS! -- but it's kinda important all the same. There's a steadily accruing amount of circumstantial evidence that the chief executive of this country has been a launderer for the Russian mob for decades, and he's openly and deliberately taken every possible step to avoid producing evidence that would clear it up instantly.

Maybe people should check into all that? I mean, I'm not a professional journamalist, in that I don't get paid lotsa money to read from a teleprompter into a camera, but it seems kinda important and useful to know. Maybe we could set up a ratio to make everyone feel better, say, one story about Dear Leader's almost-out-in-the-open money-laundering for organized crime, for every, I dunno, ten stories on today's COVID count, or today's lies from Kayleigh MagaNinny or today's yellicopter briefing, or all the other completely useless pro forma exercises the Fourth Estate indulge in every day, instead of just once informing us about shit we didn't already know.

The ability of otherwise well-meaning people to continuously deny what is right in front of them the whole time, to fritter away their opportunities with endless nonsense and fabricated claims of systematic free-speech repression -- like, uh, like when was the last time you saw Noam Chomsky on your teevee screen, or in the pages of the New York Times versus, say, Rudy Ghouliani or Newt Gingrich? -- never ceases to amaze me. Anything to avoid picking the fight that is right in front of them, that would actually affect them and their lives.

After a while, it's reasonable to assume that this ongoing lack of focus, this endless paucity of useful thought and analysis and insight, is not accidental, especially when people -- you know, readers -- keep asking them about it.

[Addendum:  Also, too. Read the whole thing. Yes, much of the info in the thread comes from Times articles, which is to their credit. But again, it's interesting how no one really bothered to pick it all back up during, say, the 2016 campaign, and just beat him over the head with it, and make it a non-stop topic of conversation. Seriously, it has everything, it's right out of a night-time soap opera:  sex, drugs, murder, money laundering, mob ties. If you accept the fact that news and entertainment have irretrievably commingled, that should have been all the more reason to investigate and push this narrative. It is reasonable to ask not only why they didn't do that at the time, but much more importantly, why they aren't doing that now?

Same with the Democrats -- if they're not going to open investigations or impeachment proceedings, the least they can do is keep it in the conversation. Bring it up every single time. If someone asks "why aren't you investigating or impeaching," you just respond with the very second the election is over, no matter what the outcome, we will.]

A Serious Man

This disjointed, rambling "interview" with 'murka's most notorious celeb mental patient -- well, he's not a "patient" in the sense of actually receiving treatment, but he's clearly ill and needs help -- reminds me of a "prediction" I made in October 2018, when Yeezus H. Christ first put the dunce cap on his peanut-headed self:

It wouldn't surprise me in the least if a year or two passed and he and that hobbit he's married to publicly change their minds about their elderly oompa-loompa friend.

Okay, it wasn't that difficult of a prediction, more like "water is wet" or "Kim Kardashian has one or more venereal diseases," but there it is all the same.

Here's another observation, prediction, call it what you will: even if West got the help he needs, whether that therapy or medication or some combination, he would still be an insufferable, narcissistic asshole, dumber than a bag of dicks, able only to externalize his many deep-seated daddy issues. Much like his ludicrous orange friend.

And frankly, West's sales pitch for being chief executive is not worse -- or even all that different -- from Trump's, the same sort of tedious, self-serving free-form prattle. He makes Sarah Palin sound like Marilyn Vos Savant.

This is a good example of why there has always been a sideline of attacking idiotic "cultural" figures in this blog over the years -- not as some misguided chacun à son goût trash talk, but to point out that frequently the doofuses that we elevate in our collective mindless escapism have more of an effect than just the shitty music they produce, or the shitty reality teevee shows they squeeze out of their stanky butt-cheeks and onto our unsuspecting airwaves.

Some of them end up lodging themselves in just enough crania, like the attention-sucking ticks they are, to affect how people make more important decisions. That's why you saw the Duck Dynasty assholes endorsing the orange slob in 2016 (and probably this year). You and I might not give two shits about anything they say or do, but plenty of people did and do. (To be fair, none of those people were going to vote for Hillary Clinton in the first place, nor will they vote for Joe Biden.)

That's not to say that Kanye West's "campaign," if he even bothers to actually file paperwork, is anything worth noting or being concerned about. Anyone who would seriously vote for him wasn't going to vote for Biden either. But as I've said for at least a few election cycles now, elections are no longer a referendum on the incumbent, or any of that conventional wisdom crap -- they're a referendum on us, on ourselves, on each other, on what kind of society we really are, versus what we pretend to be or what we think we want to be.

So is popular culture, in some respects. Garbage in, garbage out.

In the meantime, anyone who's giving West any of their time or money, just as with his orange daddy, they're part of the fucking problem. The media who continue to give them exposure and amplify their toxic foolishness, also part of the problem.

Forget the "cancel culture" nonsense -- this is cancer culture, and it's going to be the death of us all if we don't shape the hell up and stop giving these vile people oxygen.

Wasted Motion

So here's an interesting dynamic, becoming more and more commonplace:

1. Trump breaks the routine tedium of saying and doing stupid things, and selling out American troops and foreign policy, etc., etc., to have an "event."
2. Some F-list rando celeb hitches their non-existent wagon to Dear Leader's ill-fitted coattails.
3. Twitter gathers up a collective "fuck you" to said celebri-dupe and moves on to the next one.
4. "News" and "commentary" sites churn out reliable, predictable content on the "cancel culture" template they all keep handy for such occasions. Like the "obituary roll" corporate news organs keep compiled for quick deployment in the event of the demise of an ancient or volatile famous person, there is now a "cancel culture" roll apparently.

Now, some folks will tell you with a straight face that in a country where police attack innocent civilians at will, and the chief executive makes a point of ignoring Russian bounties on American troops in a war zone, that the collective online sputtering of impotent fury is the biggest problem right now. Forty million out of work, one hundred thirty thousand dead and counting, a "lost year" for the entire planet, but the real problem is that a relative handful of Twitter randos wants to "cancel" Scott Baio or Mary Hart or whoever. It's all so terrible. Exactly like the French Revolution, or Kristallnacht.

Help, help, I'm being repressed!

I would be interested to know how you would go about "cancelling" someone who doesn't do anything. To take the most recent example, Mary Hart never really did anything anyway. She spent some number of years on a syndicated teevee show, regaling shut-ins and people who couldn't find their remote with the comings and goings of entertainment personalities. She read copy that someone else wrote, and pretended to give a shit. If that's a noteworthy skill then we are all superstars, truly.

More to the point, she retired a long time ago. (I mean, I'm pretty sure she did, right? If someone leaves and you don't notice they're gone, were they really ever there in the first place?) She's married to a game-show producer who hasn't done anything in thirty years. If Mary Hart has an appreciable asset that's even worth the bother of a boycott or whatever, good luck tracking it down.

The weird penumbra of bullshit surrounding the "cancel culture" trope is more interesting in its meta-senses anyway, the poutrage generated by the spectacle of completely powerless, anonymous internet commenters performatively commenting about someone who is being a public asshole precisely to generate that sort of reaction.

There's nothing to "cancel" for Mary Hart. She hasn't even updated her Twitter page in a decade. She's out of the game. She resurfaced for that, which tells you what you need to know about her as a person -- if, in fact, you really "needed" to "know" anything about her at all.

Obviously, that's a huge part of the problem with "celebrity culture," this weird idea that these individuals are at all interesting or noteworthy outside of the creative projects they're involved in. Sometimes they are, but just as often they really are just like you 'n' me -- in other words, nice but otherwise ordinary in most respects.

But there's an industry of reactionary "cancel culture" meta-commentary now, counter-reformationist content curation for the addled masses, who want to distract you from the real bullies and thugs with imagined scenes of a dystopian future where the worst thing that can happen is that some anonymous person calls you an asshole when you act like one.

Snowflakes indeed. I dunno. Some guy had a tee-shirt once telling me to fuck my feelings, so I suppose that's as good a response as any. But what this really is is the creation of a cottage industry. It started with the cosseted, sinecured pimps of the NY Times' sorry excuse for a slop-ed page, as MoDo and Bobo and Bretbug gnashed their teeth and rent their garments over the prospect of nasty comments being the rough equivalent of a guillotine in Times Square.

As my Texan great-grandmother used to say, a hit dog hollers loudest -- meaning that the more a criticism is justified, the more its target will whine about how unfair it all really is.

Which is another huge tell --  the people who are the first to tell you how unfair cancel culture is to its "victims" are usually the first ones to tell you that life isn't fair, so long as it's smacking someone else upside the head, but leaving them to peddle their nonsense.

Funny how that works, isn't it?

The Murder of Elijah McClain

The more you read about the details of Elijah McClain's murder, the more unsettling it really is, both in the crime itself, and the larger picture entailed by it. I had no idea that ketamine was being used so routinely to incapacitate civilians detained by law enforcement.

Here's a couple things I do know, just to pick a couple of random, if notorious examples:

1. Back in 2012, when demented shitbag James Holmes shot up a movie theater, slaughtering a dozen people and injuring five dozen more, the Aurora police were able to bring him in without putting him a sleeper hold, or grinding a knee into his neck, or shooting him a half-dozen times in the back, or making him crawl on the fucking ground, crying and mewling like an animal, before dispatching him anyway, just because.
2. When demented racist shitbag Dylann Roof and his bowl haircut slaughtered a bunch of elderly people in a church, the cops took him to fucking Burger King before booking him.

It sure is funny how these people, who have military-grade weapons and armor and training, and are given broad powers of discretion in urgent situations (most importantly, determining whether a situation in even "urgent" in the first place), somehow manage to defuse situations where there's already a pile of bodies. Yet they're pretty good at going full-throttle tough-guy when there's a scared 140-pound kid walking home with a sack of groceries.

Really keeping the mean streets of Aurora safe for humanity, you guys. Be proud of yourselves. Take a photo at your trophy site.

Keep in mind that McClain was actually killed nearly a year ago. The only reason you're finally hearing about it is because of the more recent murders and assaults that have received more notoriety and scrutiny.

So cut to a few days ago, when z group of citizens decided to exercise their supposed right to peacefully assemble and air their grievances, when lo and behold, here come the cops to escalate the situation and gas some people. This has become commonplace, except when the protesters happen to be doughy white neckbeards toting assault rifles and traitor-slaver flags.

One frequent trope invoked by defenders of bad behavior is the "sheepdog" scenario, that the sheepdogs (cops) are there to protect the sheep (god-fearin' law-abidin' citizens) from wolves (criminals), and that the basic premise of protesting killer cops is really the wolf trying to convince the sheep that the sheepdog is not necessary.

Setting aside the obnoxious, paternalistic tone (not to mention exploitative -- sheep are raised and protected as commodities of commercial value, after all) of the analogy, maybe we should focus a bit on the actual mechanics of it. It's not just a dumb analogy, once you think about the specifics and apply them by their own logic. It's a mission statement.

Because here's the thing -- if you're a sheep rancher, and you have many sheep and a few dogs, and one of the dogs keeps attacking sheep, well, you're not going to keep using that particular dog, are you? The dog either comes back to stay at the house, or he goes to a nice farm upstate. You don't keep him out there attacking the flock, and you don't just hand him off to another sheep rancher to attack his flock.

Decades of true-crime and crime-drama narratives -- aka "copaganda" -- have inured many civilians to the systemic abuses that perpetuate, conditioning us to think of these incidents as unfortunate occasions, the unintended consequences of necessary excesses. I get that, I really do. I love well-done crime shows and books, and frequently leave Law & Order marathons going on in the background when I'm working on stuff. It's easy to see how long-term exposure to those narratives conditions viewers to assume that every perp is a potential Jeffrey Dahmer or Charles Manson.

But there's really no excuse for what happened to Elijah McClain, or George Floyd, or Breonna Taylor, or Daniel Shaver, or many many others. The problem is that nothing gets done about the people who commit those crimes, or the systems in which such people proliferate.

Frankly, I'm not terribly bothered by the idea of an actual bad guy getting roughed up a bit, whether from resisting arrest, or getting tuned up in the interrogation room. (Within reason, of course. I am not suggesting that cops should routinely beat the shit out of every dipshit with a gang tat on his neck.) But that's not what's going on here. Over and over we're seeing indisputable video evidence of harmless, unarmed, defenseless, frequently intimidated people getting smacked and stomped and gassed and beaten. There's a clear pattern here.

It's worth considering -- the real protest at the vigil for Elijah McClain was not civilians protesting for the right of a civilian to carry his fuckin' groceries home and not get killed for it. The real protest there was the cops, who are demonstrating for the continued privileges of gassing and beating inconvenient citizens, for the discretion to decide who they get to treat like some IED-planting insurgent in Fallujah, and for the right to avoid any and all modes of accountability when their excesses cost people their lives. They wanted to stir up some shit, just to remind the livestock who's got the whip hand, who's in the herd and who's doing the herding.

A lot of people would probably just settle for identifying the thugs and dirtbags, weeding them out, and making sure they never get paid to carry a weapon or use force on another human being again. But even that is unacceptable to them. That's what the police are protesting. That's why they're escalating peaceful gatherings into riots, shoving elderly cancer patients into sidewalks, macing teenage girls and kicking them in the face when they're already down.

If they were doing those things to MS-13 gangstas caught in the act, you'd probably hear about it, and you might not even have much of a problem with it in general. Strange that it doesn't seem to happen nearly as often.

It may take some time, but eventually Elijah McClain's family is probably going to get some sort of settlement, probably in the six or seven figures. Guess who gets to pay for that? You know what the NYPD's annual budget is just for paying settlements on police brutality and civil rights violations?

There are a lot of livestock ranchers around here, and I know some of them. Dogs don't live out in the pasture with the herd full-time, you know. Dogs are actually only used when it's time to move the herd, to another field or to a trailer to head for the auction yard. That's when "herd" becomes a verb.

You know what most of the sheep and goat ranchers (around here, anyway) leave out in the pasture with the flocks to keep away predators (which, as it happens, are usually loose dogs)? Llamas or emus, sometimes noisier birds such as geese or peacocks. But you would never leave a dog -- or worse yet, multiple dogs -- out in a pasture with sheep. Have you ever seen what large, aggressive dogs do when they congregate in a pack?