Hilarious

This is one of those weird, harmless, funny stories making the rounds this week:  apparently Alec Baldwin's wife has been engaging in some sort of long-running Andy Kaufman performance-art exercise in pretending to be of Spanish heritage. Even funnier is that some of the self-appointed keepers of the "cultural appropriation" watch have declared themselves put off by this peculiar avocation of Hillary -- ah, I mean Hilaria Baldwin.

These subcultures are fascinating to me when they reveal themselves to the larger "culture," such as it is. If I understand the situation correctly, Hilaria has ensconced herself in the coveted "momfluencer" niche, getting attention and teevee time and emoluments not only for being married to a talented actor (who is a quarter-century her senior), but for being seen using certain brands on her Instagram feed.

Imagine being able to get a nice check delivered to your mailbox, simply by taking a selfie of you, for example, using Goya beans in your kitchen. Amazing times we live in.

It's all about what aspects of this "story" people want to fixate on. What's weirder -- that a thirsty celeb-adjacent milf entered an arena where such characteristics tend to be CV boosters, and leveraged a mythical aspiration as an extra foot in the door; or that there are upper-middle-class women out there for whom such a person is considered to be "influential" in some respect? How dare this person, whom I don't know but from whom I take merchandising cues, present herself as something she is not! Why, I never! (Well, maybe you should.)

Even funnier is that she has been playing this character for years, and only now some enterprising celebrojourno decided to do about thirty seconds of digging through public records to figure it all out. Well done, yournamalistas. Good thing there's nothing else worth getting to the bottom of these days.

If nothing else, her and her parents' love for Spanish culture appears to be sincere. Maybe she really wishes she were Spanish, rather than from privileged Boston Brahmin stock. Big deal. Look at the extended tedium of the Kardashian-Jenner tribe, and their exhausting, constant leg-humping to pimp and peddle and schmooze every goddamn product straight up 'murka's collective asshole. Look at Kanye's tiresome attempts to pretend to be a genius, or even pass as a functional human being.

This is going to sound completely sexist and lookist and chauvinistic, and I don't give a good goddamn -- anyone who can squeeze out five kids in seven years and still look like that can pretend to be whatever the hell she wants, and good luck with it.

Old King Coal

It's good to see that at least some of the coal miners that Trump catered to bullshitted in 2016 are seeing the light. Better late than never. Welcome aboard the reality train.

What's important for them to understand is that coal employment has not declined because of inconvenient environmental regulations (as if the people who, you know, live in those areas should either go in pocket to move or wait to die young of cancer), it's because of rapidly dropping EROEI (energy returned on energy invested). Because "mining" is now more blowing tops of mountains and excavating the giant hole, rather than sending hundreds of doughty dwarves and their lanterns and pickaxes and lusty "Heigh-ho" shanties into narrow shafts [giggity]. It's simply not as labor-intensive as it was back in the day, even twenty or thirty years ago. It takes fewer work-hours to produce the same amount of coal. More than twice as many people work for Best Buy than in the entire coal industry.

Fracking and low oil prices took care of the rest of it. Natural gas and oil are simply cheaper per workforce unit to procure. As with most things, once you start looking closer at them, it's not politics, it's math.

That's why it's really important for these folks in Kentucky and West Virginia and Pennsylvania to really think clearly about whom Trump was actually talking to, when he was reaching out to the coal industry. He was not talking to the workers; he was talking to the owners, telling them he would stand aside while they busted their own industry out -- letting them pollute to their hearts' content, take profits, declare bankruptcy, and leave the workers jobless and empty-handed.

What a coincidence that West Virginia's governor, the Pynchonesquely-named Jim Justice, is a billionaire who's profited mightily from Dear Leader's gutted enviro policies, while simultaneously cashing in on "distress" loans that will never be paid back, and screwing over the workers all at the same time. Pretty neat trick. These companies literally ripped these workers off for thousands of dollars each at Christmastime. That's who we're talking about here, people for whom Monty Burns is a rather weak role model. That's who Trump was really talking to when he made his appeals to coal country.

There are always going to be a few who won't get the picture right up to the moment they get pink-slipped and hosed out of their severance pay. I don't what you can tell them or do for them; they have resolved to ignore common sense and a clear pattern of empirical data. They'll die younger than they should, in more pain than they should be, and angry at the climate change "hoax" that took their dream job away.

The path to the Green New Deal -- and to getting coal workers' support for it -- is this:  subsidize the fossil-fuel companies to switch over to manufacturing renewables -- solar panels, windmills and armatures, etc. It will not be easy and it will not be pretty -- oil companies in particular long ago got used to steamrolling their way through things by showering decision-makers with cash and/or women, and then laundering the profits.

But it can be done. These guys may not want to "learn to code," and frankly, even of they did and could, you wouldn't want all of them to do the same thing in the first place. But if you pitched it to them that they could be making the same amount of money working above ground, either in a manufacturing warehouse or outdoors installing, instead of breathing filth in a back-breaking hole and dying before the age of sixty, and leave a cleaner planet for their kids and grandkids, well, they just might listen to that.

The thing they really need to take seriously is that ultimately their "way of life" is not going to be around much longer, again for economic and productivity reasons much more than because of regulations. That's just a fact, and the sooner they start preparing themselves for that eventuality, the better off they'll be. And if not, the outcome will be the same regardless, just on a slightly different schedule.

They All Knew

Of course Trump knew. Did anyone really need Bob Woodward to sit on that amazing revelation for seven months to come to that realization?

(I hope every meal Woodward eats for the rest of his life, food purchased with the royalty checks from these courtier journals, tastes like blood. Because it's fuckin' blood money, pure and simple. Shame on him, and shame on anyone paying a red cent for his goddamned book.)

People are going to focus on the raw moral perversion of Trump knowing back in January that the virus was real, and dangerous, and could kill a lot of people. And that's true, as far as that goes.

But here are some other things he knew, and that everyone close to him knew right from the start:

• There would be multiple opportunities to cash in along the way -- stocks for companies producing various necessities.
• The procurement system could be gamed heavily, not only for profit, but for leverage. So bootlickers like Ron DeSantis got more PPE than he needed in the first place, while Robert Kraft literally had to fly supplies in on his private jet -- in a state with a Republican governor -- so that the feds wouldn't hijack them like the cheap Goodfellas knock-offs they are.
• Every dime of aid that has gone out has been with the condition that employees forced back to illness and death have no recourse against the fiends who sent them in to die. How's that chicken taste now?
• Every key Republicon senator and house member was in on it, right from the start, cashing in every step of the way. Kelly Loeffler, Richard Burr, those are just the ones you may have heard about. Wait till someone audits Matt Gaetz's transactions, or Ted Cruz's. You just watch.
• The billionaires' club has collectively gained nearly a trillion dollars over the summer, while tens of millions of working schlubs are still out of work, facing eviction, watching the world burn around them, watching loved ones die on a remote Zoom feed.
• All of it was preventable, but it just wasn't profitable. So you cash in on the crash, then you cash in again on whatever recovery is to be had (or allowed).

Good thing the mediots are still showing up for Kayleigh's Hour of Lyin' fer Jebus. So helpful. You guys are really preserving democracy there. Try not to pull any muscles patting yourselves on the back. Remember, folks, MagaNinny came directly from CNN. Keep that in mind next time you're watching Tapper or Lemon or whoever. Zucker's shop is Satan's boiler room, period.

Good thing the Democrats are utilizing every single procedural power at their disposal  to respond to all this. Let's see -- Chuck Schumer lamented that Trump lied. Yeah, I think I saw that on the cover of No Shit, Sherlock magazine back in the fuckin' Nineties, bro-ham.

So Chuck, are you calling out your scumbag colleagues for not stopping this fucker before he killed two hundred thousand Americans? Rep. Pelosi, are we drawing up articles of impeachment for, shit, any of probably two dozen various things over the past six months? Are we impeaching Bill Barr for finally dropping any remaining pretense about being Trump's personal lawyer?

No, they're "not worth it," according to Madame Speaker. You got that? We'll be over a quarter-million dead by Thanksgiving, and they got him on tape confessing to knowing, but Trump's not worth it. Oh, and he's a rapist, and the attorney general of the country is openly bending the law to prevent his accountability, but Barr's not worth it either.

I wonder, but am reluctant to ask, just what awful deeds these would have to do in order to be worth upholding the law. I think that the day after this election, regardless of how it turns out, Democratic and liberal voters should start asking that very question of Democratic politicians. Because while they may have plausible deniability of knowing what Trump knew back when he first knew it, they've known it since then. They absolutely know now what the fuck he's capable of, and still they choose to wring their hands and chant about waiting for November.

Whether or not you know someone who's been directly affected by the #TrumpPlague (and by now, odds are that you do, at least secondarily), everyone's been affected by it. An entire year of everyone's life has been essentially wasted on this -- on top of all the needless deaths and waste and economic destruction. Trump's fuckery and incompetence are the wellspring whence all this comes, but he doesn't operate alone.

Primo Levi said that it wasn't the monsters you had to worry about -- they're easy to spot. It's the ordinary minions willing to do the dirty work, or just willing to look the other way. Think about all the individuals who could have done and said something, who still could say and do something, anything. The leading newspapers and politicians who should have been calling for his resignation months ago. The people who work in the White House -- from the custodial staff to the paper-pushers -- who could walk out in protest. The congress-weasels who could call out their faithless colleagues for their support of this vainglorious would-be despot. Hell, John Kelly, who literally let Trump talk shit about Kelly's son's service and sacrifice at Robert Kelly's grave in Arlington. Doesn't get more in-the-tank than that.

At the current rate, another thirty thousand Americans will die unnecessarily, waiting for November. That's on them as much as it's on him now. Too bad it's not "worth it" to do anything about it, or at least try.

Accelerated Decline

Interesting thread here, food for thought. We're not there yet, but we are clearly on that path. Best case scenario -- Biden wins in a landslide, Dems increase lead in House and retake the Senate 55-45 -- it will take at least a decade to undo the damage wrought by these fuckers, and to get a handle on the redneck gangs and their buddies in uniform.

That's best case scenario, that the work will just be starting, and it will be treacherous and uphill the entire way.

I've talked a lot in the past, in my North Korea posts, of how that nation really needs to be deprogrammed, if it is ever to rejoin the community of nations. The US is not quite there, not yet, but again it should be clear that there is enough of a "cult bloc" that has been thoroughly programmed and conditioned, that some form of deprogramming needs to take place.

Since this is really the latest front in an extended plutocratic insurgency, a war of the billionaires on everyone else, it can only be de-escalated by rounding up "our" billionaires and encouraging them to do some effective counter-programming. Again, where are Bloomberg and Steyer and those types, soi-disant limo libs who routinely make empty claims about loving a "free society," yet are strangely silent right now, when their country could really use their help. They could each dump five or ten million into the Senate races in KY, SC, ME, GA, AZ, NC, and more, and not even miss the couch-cushion change. Bloomberg and Steyer each dumped nine figures into their futile primary runs, the former supposedly spending over half a billion.

Well, you got the candidate you wanted, guys. How about you finish what you started and get him across the line securely, with a tailwind of senators that will actually show up for work? Their islands in the sun will only stay above the rising tide for so long, and when it comes down, it's gonna come down on them and their type as well.

That's probably a pipe dream -- despite its constant bleats about freedom and rugged individuality, Americans are some of the most cowed, compliant people on the face of the earth. And with good reason -- who in their right mind would want to get caught up in its medieval for-profit carceral state, just to make some noise at a meaningless, futile street protest?

But at some point, enough people with nothing left to lose will start acting accordingly, Millions are facing eviction in the coming weeks, just in time for winter and a #TrumpPlague resurgence and the actual flu season and, oh yeah, a likely recession or depression.

We could have avoided all this, and for much less money, if the thieves that are lawn-darting the country had just given every household, rich or poor, a $10k check and said, stay home through March and April. We'll re-open May 1st. Enjoy your staycation. Nope, we had to spend $4 trillion bailing out cruise lines and televangelists and Trump groupies, like the Central Asian despotate we are aspiring to become.

So Bloomie and Tommy and their ilk mght want to take stock of the situation, and consider doing the right thing for once, and at least atone for their unconscionable fuckery in the primary.

One Weird Trick

I swore off the Vichy Times long ago, because: 1) life is too short; and 2) they suck rhino balls. However, I'll lift the shun for a second here for this nifty bit of trolling from Jamelle Bouie, who turns out also to be a fine cook, as my wife recently made one of his recipes for poundcake, and it was excellent.

It’s not too late. With a little more than two months until the election, the [piece of shit] can still reverse course. But he cannot do so as long as he and his campaign indulge the fantasy that he is blameless and untouched by the crisis in “Democrat cities.”

....

Face to face with law enforcement at the site of a terrible tragedy, [Fuckface] will have the chance to rebuke both bad policing and the self-styled militias who raised the heat on an already tense situation.

[Fuckface] needs to show swing voters that he cares about the rights of African-Americans and has a plan to handle police brutality and violence. He needs to show his independence from the most radical parts of his base. It’s an opportunity he shouldn’t let go to waste.

Obviously, nothing close to any of this will happen, nor would it help him anyway, and Bouie of course knows all that. Which makes it even better -- Bouie is really taking aim at the cheap performative rituals his own newspaper indulges in routinely, without thought and only against Democratic candidates.

When we reflexively dismiss the "both-siderism" of the elite gatekeeper corporate media, what we tend to forget is that it really isn't expecting the same things from both sides, that the bar is immeasurably, inexcusably lower for one side than the other. Democrats are expected to genuflect for every perceived gaffe and pre-emptively stake out rhetorical ground in order to attract the elusive unicorn voter.

Republicons, on the other hand, can do and say and openly support the most vile things. It was disclosed yesterday that the leader of one of Loozyanna's largest neo-nazi groups has donated at least a couple grand to Hair Fuhrer. That's just the latest among literally hundreds of other things that ordinarily would have given reputable news orgs cause to demand resignation due to manifest unfitness for office.

That may be one of their main nefarious superpowers -- the ability to manufacture consent in the face of common sense and decency, the need and desire to keep stupid, reprehensible people in the spotlight, getting paid ten or a hundred times as much as the audience of dupes they lie to so smoothly. They keep doing it because enough people haven't made it clear to them that they shouldn't.

Opportunity Costs

Throughout the summer, I've been thinking a great deal about the various opportunities we have managed to collectively squander -- chances to rethink fundamental assumptions about "how" "things" "work" in "society," what all those terms mean for various stakeholders, and how quality-of-life metrics could and should have been improved upon or at least touched in this crisis, but instead, of course, were ignored, scorned, repudiated.

This essay is a nice distillation of that grand -- yet very small, personal, intimate -- idea. What kind of life do we want for ourselves, and for the people we care about? What was our dream, and how has it changed?

Few things sum up the dynamic of brutal end-stage capitalism than a handful of millionaires, hustling away at the behest of billionaires, telling the working-class rubes to get their lazy asses back to work, that an extra $600/month for a few months will turn them irretrievably into lazy slackers. You know, like the Wal-Mart heirs and all their kids.

Wait, you say, Wal-Mart is a corporation. They provide goods and services the free market wants. They earned whatever money they have, and can bequeath it how they see fit.

Fair enough. But Wal-Mart also has always used taxpayer-funded gubmint largesse to fund its lucrative operations. From the long-term tax abatements and incentives to open up in economically depressed areas, to deliberately shorting employee hours so they have to get public assistance for food and health care, the Waltons have always suckled at the teat of Uncle Sucker.

You paid for that two-hundred-foot yacht where the family celebrates New Year's in Sydney Harbor. You paid for the useless grandkid who went to USC and paid a classmate to write all their papers and take their tests for them. You paid for the infrastructure improvements that were necessary just to get the stores built in all those little towns.

Public subsidy, private profit. It's a phrase that crops up a great deal, once you start doing a little digging on where the money comes from, and where it ends up.

There are countless opportunities for a better society that we have always passed on, obviously. But during the #TrumpPlague, three huge ones stand out:

• Education. In a world where information is at everyone's fingertips, we no longer need a century-old indoctrination system we borrowed from the Prussians. Education now is about three valuable things:  knowing what knowledge is useful; knowing where to find it; and hands-on experience. It's more involved than that, but those are the basics. Socialization is fine and valuable, but the toys have already changed the coming generation in ways we oldsters could not have anticipated and cannot turn back. The problem is that from the management end, the education system is really a funnel designed to ensure pliant workers and consumers for our magical hyper-capitalist singularity future, while also keeping the kids properly warehoused so their parents can work. And the higher education system is just a financialized grift, pushing kids into schools to get a piece of paper that they'll be paying for until they're fifty. It's credentialism as much as education or experience. And it's all about to change drastically anyway. Wait and see how many small colleges go broke over the next six to twelve months. But going forward:  what sorts of things do "we" want "our" kids to learn, and how much should they be charged against their futures for the privilege?


• Work. Who are the "essential" people? What specifically do they do that makes them essential? Are they paid accordingly? What role do you as a consumer have in all that? Should you pay a little for meat from your local butcher, or produce from your local grower, before supporting the factory-farm supply chain that coerces people back to dangerous, low-paying jobs? Do we want to "restore" the vaunted American manufacturing base? Well, here's the deal with that:  it cannot happen to scale unless and until we decouple health care access from employment status. That's all there is to it. Next time you're watching your friendly corporate or cable "news" broadcast, no matter which channel, no matter what time of day, watch it for at least a half-hour or an hour, and count how many health care commercials you see. I bet you didn't even notice until you started taking count.


• Money -- more specifically, wealth inequality. I've used this analogy many times before -- think of the economy as a massive circulatory system, and money is the blood. If you get too much concentrated in a single area, what happens to the body? Why did our elected representatives shovel trillions of dollars at people who were already obscenely wealthy, and will just hoard the money? They literally could have given every household $31k (based on a low-ball estimate of $4 trillion in economic assistance so far), and that money would have poured directly into the real economy. Shit, you could have picked four million people at random and given each of them $1M, as opposed to the equally arbitrary tactic of handing money to people who already had millions or billions. We have been bamboozled to believe that the Dow and the GDP are accurate barometers of the economy. They are not -- they are betting predictors for a handful of whales at the NYSE casino, where the house always wins, and if the shit blows up, well, Joe Sixpack will be forced to help them keep their extra vacation homes. In return, Joe gets his shitty health plan whittled away, and his pension fund ripped off. Same as it ever was.

It's easy to say that the idiots have dragged us all down with their nonsense, and certainly they have, but this has been a long time coming, and from many angles. The bestiary of American idiots is large and varied, from the coal-rolling shock troops heading into the cities (outside agitators) in the hopes of escalating violence and mayhem, to the hapless good-governance liberal dupe who still believes in institutional integrity and the rightness of their principles.

If this country had anything resembling moral leaders or a collective conscience, they would have been calling for Trump's resignation months ago. Instead you have a seedy subculture of hackcess journos pretending to protect the sanctity of the republic with their court stenography, working at the behest of publishers and editors-in-chief who are there explicitly to protect their own role as elite gatekeeper media -- that is, elites talking to each other, and thus setting the tone for "general discourse," but really just trying to make a horserace out of a corrupted process, in order to -- wait for it -- sell you more boner pills and big ol' trucks. Meanwhile, the "serious journos" hang on to the good stuff for their fucking books.

It's all slipping away, right in front of us, thanks to a deliberately engineered plutocratic insurgency decades in the making. The good news is, it's still up to you to some small extent, though this is almost certainly our last best chance to salvage what's left and try to start putting things back together. Ignore the polls, and the vicious, corrupt machinery that churns them out. Ignore the media's cynical spins and gutless hot takes. Remember that if your vote didn't matter, they wouldn't be trying so hard to cheat you out of it.

But you have to show every goddamned time, not just on Super Bowl Sunday. Everything from dog-catcher on up matters. That's how the fuckers got in charge at every level, because they took it seriously. Being a citizen is a job, and if you fail to show up or pay attention or take the right action at the right time, someone else will be more than happy to make those decisions for you.

No more excuses. Put up or shut up; fuck or walk. Make sure you can vote, and then bloody well do it, every time. You wanna make good trouble, that's the best kind.

The Courage of Your Convictions

Christ, he's such a fucking pussy:

“It was a disappointing meeting,” declared top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer, saying the White House had rejected an offer by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to curb Democratic demands by about $1 trillion. He urged the White House to “negotiate with Democrats and meet us in the middle. Don’t say it’s your way or no way.”

To be somewhat fair to Schumer, he did at one point in his full press meet assert the fact that the House had passed the HEROES Act back in May. But that should have been all Schumer had to say, other than maybe ending with "....if only Moscow Mitch gave half as much of a fuck about the working people of his state or the country, as he does about shoveling unqualified dipshits into lifetime sinecures in the federal judiciary, and handing pallets of money to fuckers who already have more than they could spend in twenty lifetimes." What the fuck is this "meet us in the middle" shit?

This is yet another of those "what would it take" rhetorical questions that we all ask ourselves now. What would it take for a Trump cultist to change their mind and see the light of basic empirical reality? What would it take for leading Republican politicians to put country before party and stand up to the pig? What would it take for leading Democratic politicians to stop with the stupid pretense that we're all on the same team and want the same things for the country and can work together?

The answer to all of those questions should be clear by now, and of course it is the same answer for all of them:  Nothing. There is no conceivable event or situation that will cause any of these groups of people to find the moral courage to do what they know is right. None of them stand for anything except raw power and/or money.

Schumer and Pelosi should be in front of every camera repeating over and over how these fuckers didn't have any second thoughts about shoveling trillions of dollars to the hotel and cruise line industries -- even though those are dead or crippled for the foreseeable future, so the money just went to the execs anyway, and the cruise lines are American in name only anyway, since they register the ships in Liberia or Panama, and are mostly staffed with non-Americans. They should be telling the truth and shaming the devils, not this mewling, puling gosh, why won't they play nice bullshit.

You know why working-class dumbasses keep voting Republicon, above all else, even though they know they're being ripped off? Because they fight. Even when the fight itself is futile and stupid.

Because when Obama was in charge, and the Democrats ran Congress, and Moscow Mitch didn't get his way on something, he went straight to the cameras and railed about the fuckery, and he disciplined his party minions to go forth and do likewise. They are never not on message, and their message is fuck you.

And while they're in power, the appended message is make me. It's a nihilist death cult from top to bottom, and it's long past time to recognize it as such. Again, Chuckles, us peons on the street can go out and get a big bag of nothing on our own. You should at least be able to convey in a convincing manner that the animals you are up against are not your fucking friends, nor are they the friends of any American who is not in the coveted "net worth" club. For fuck's sake, at this late point, 160k people dead and 40M out of work in about four months, it should not be that difficult to put across that simple, toxic dynamic.

That thumb-shaped dickweed openly killing the Post Office met with Schumer and Pelosi yesterday. Today he scrambled the top execs of the USPS just to fuck it up even more. So that must have been a super-effective meeting yesterday. Can't wait to hear their big plan to preserve electoral integrity, or just to get the exterminator in to fumigate the White House and make the cockroaches leave even if we are allowed to vote and there's a landslide.

We all hear and say a lot about how the Republicon party needs to be ended completely, how they have utterly abdicated their role and face a generational landslide blowout blah-blah-blah. And that is true enough -- IF THE ELECTION ACTUALLY HAPPENS. And day by day, that prospect is being whittled away, right out in the open. And nobody is doing a goddamned thing about it.

So an equally real existential dilemma is staring the Democratic Party square in the eye -- when they're not looking at the ground, slump-shouldered, hat-in-hand, hoping for another crumb from the table. If they don't win this in an indisputable blowout, they're doubly screwed, because their own base will abandon them, since they can't get anything done anyway, and the Republicons will absolutely go medieval on their asses.

Hoping for some Fitzmas, deus ex machina, miracle whatever bullshit ain't gonna cut it. They're gonna close all the physical precincts, and refuse to deliver the mail-in ballots. They are openly stealing the election, point blank.

What are they doing about it? And they want my vote, and my donation? For what? A fucking means-tested 401(k) carve-out or property tax deduction or some dickless bullshit like that? Two-year interest deferment on loans for minority-owned small businesses? [rolls eyes, makes jerkoff motion]

This is not some standard mediot "Dems in disarray" guff. The problem is that the Democrats appear to be arrayed exactly as they intend to be. Fortune favors the bold, and time is short, and their colleagues are actually their mortal enemies, and they really should have noticed that about [checks watch] ten or twelve years ago.

One way or another, the problem will be resolved in less than ninety days.

Shit Doctrine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dezinformatsiya

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Epistemic Closure

There's an interesting juxtaposition to be observed between these two articles:  one in the Wall Street Journal, the other in Counterpunch (not that I read Counterpunch, but this turned out to be a somewhat noteworthy one to stumble across).

It takes a tedious corporate appendage like the WSJ to grant op-ed time to an asshole who doesn't even have the good graces to be ashamed of himself for insisting that he "deserves" an exemption from the tariffs he supports. Fuck that guy, and fuck his employees. I don't what kinds of drugs you have to take to even start growing balls that fucking huge, but there are probably side effects. They got what they voted for. I don't see what the problem is.

As for the rural Ohioans caught up in the "shit-life syndrome," as it were, gee I wish I knew what to to tell you, folks. There are a lot of things wrong in this country, but two consistent verities are:  one, public education is not only free but mandatory, twelve years' worth, in fact; two, even dying shit-hole towns have free public libraries.

Get this -- you can walk in, pick out a book that contains information about something that interests you -- maybe even info that increases your skill set and enhances your employability -- and take it home for a couple weeks and read the motherfucker. You can do that over and over again, as many times as you like. Imagine that.

Those things are free, it should be reiterated. There is also, I'm told, a ton of free info on just about any subject you can think of, on this thing called The Internet. Turns out it's not just for jerking off and playing online slots, there are other uses for this not free but relatively inexpensive entity. Who knew?

Look, I do have some compassion for these people. They are definitely in a bad way. The problems in these small towns get compounded because almost all the smart kids who don't have family businesses to inherit get the fuck out of there as quickly as possible. They head off to college and they never look back. That leaves a serious imbalance of intelligence and talent. So the same handful of relatively successful people in the town just run things for themselves for generations, the losers keep losing, and the vicious cycle gets perpetuated.

This passage is something else, though:

I talked to Trump voters in 2016, and many of them felt that Trump was not a nice person, even a jerk, but their fantasy was that he was one of those rich guys with a big ego who needed to be a hero. Progressives who merely mock this way of thinking rather than create a strategy to deal with it are going to get four more years of Trump.

So let me see if we have this straight -- you make the time to stay informed and engaged on the issues and the candidates, you give a shit about something other than what's right in front of your nose and benefits you, and this is your reward? Being warned over and over again by these fucking op-ed writers that now you must pay attention to the special needs of the opioid-soaked denizens of Slapdick, Ohio? Cater to their goddamned fantasies?

My English is not so good, so let me be certain to phrase this correctly:  Fuck. You. Oh, and fuck them, too. Fuck them especially. You want another four years of winning, have at it, guys. I am not going to read the cultural tea leaves to search for which putatively Democratic candidate has just the right amount of "unconventional" voodoo to placate the fist-shaking codgers of the haunted diners of Pennsyltucky.

It is everyone's job as citizens of a free republic (hurrr) to pay attention and vote accordingly. It is expressly not our job to find a better brand of pro-wrestling kayfabe, in order to soothe the jangled nerves of hapless morons who couldn't be bothered to do the most basic elements of their jobs as citizens. They hate welfare until it's their dipshit kid getting it. They complain about immigrants, even as they need them to build their houses, kill their chickens, clean their hotel rooms, muck out the dairies. Who the fuck do they think is doing all that scut work for them, the fucking Keebler elves?

Again, we're all beyond tired of seeing and hearing this ridonkulous, braying jackass sucking out every molecule of oxygen left in the public life of this dying dinosaur of a nation. I'm pretty sure both of my middle fingers are permanently sprained from flipping off my teevee and computer screens scores of times daily.

The Counterpunch guy is right that one would think that a party supposedly in the pocket of the Hollyweird creative claque would do at least an adequate job of conveying a quick, effective message that maybe, just maybe, the Lyin' King doesn't follow through on his "promises," that they've been suckered yet again, and that maybe the least they could do for their country is either grow the fuck up or just stay home on election day.

But that day is still ten months away, and Dear Leader has provided plenty of fodder for mashups and compilations. Whether our wondrous corporate media will get their shit together as well remains to be seen. Maybe they could start figuring out what their job is, and do it already. I don't think any of us are holding our breath.

The two articles, coming from opposite ends of the economic spectrum, strike similar chords. And the correct response to each is the same:  This is what you wanted. He told you he was going to do all these things, and he's doing them. He's not sneaking anything in on you, he was quite open and upfront about all of this. If you're tired of all the winning, then take that into the voting booth with you. Otherwise, kindly go fuck yourselves. This is what you wanted. This is what you get.

These people seem to think that threatening the rest of us with four more years of Dear Leader is more of a threat to us than it is to them. And while four more years of this destructive, mendacious behavior will no doubt accelerate the fall of the empire, and expose many more millions here and around the world to grievous harm from war, climate change, environmental depredation, disease, and deaths from despair, the fact of the matter is that these people are cutting their own throats, not ours.

(Demographically speaking. I am well aware that there are plenty of folks on the edge who showed up and voted for Butter Emails, and are getting shafted. That sucks. But we are talking in the statistical aggregate here.)

They're the ones who are going to suffer the most, and the idea that we're supposed to stand there with sorrowful, empathetic looks and plead with them, No, please don't! is just too much. I don't want them to keep killing themselves, mind you, but I simply don't have the time or inclination to keep futilely trying to talk them out of their tree. For one, I don't negotiate at gunpoint, which is what these quasi-journalistic plaints and threats feels like after a while. I've never done it in real life, and I'm not about to start in the political abstract. That way lies failure and frustration.

But more importantly, the fact of the matter is that the gun is not really pointed at my head to begin with. They're pointing it at themselves, saying Stop or I'll shoot!. Well, okay then, don't let me stop you, hoss. Reminds me of that old Polack joke where the guy comes home and finds his wife in bed with another man. Distraught, ol' Stan grabs a gun from the drawer and holds it to his own head. The wife starts laughing. Stan says, Don't laugh, bitch, you're next!

Look. When in doubt, always keep this in mind:  there are 325 million people in this country. Some of them are idiots. Some of them are assholes. Some are both. That is not a political observation, just the law of averages. Also, as George Carlin said, consider the average American, and remember that by the definition of that word, half of 'em aren't even that smart.

There are never any demands made of them to get their shit together and fly right. It's always, always put upon the people who actually pay attention and give a shit, to compromise and make the supposed move toward the middle, while they get to take yet another step back away, so you have to keep trying to meet them in the new middle.

It's a ridiculously transparent tactic, and I don't know why people keep falling for it. It's bullshit, pure and simple. Maybe they need the old "Lucy with the football" graphic to get the fucking picture already. Or maybe, per Upton Sinclair, they get paid to not understand how it really is.

These constant entreaties to dumb yourself down to their level, to do something stupid or self-destructive to make them feel better about their own stupidity and self-destructiveness -- I have no interest in any of it, any more than I care about people who were stupid enough to get rolled by something as preposterous as "Trump University."

You know? Maybe they need to stop being fucking morons. Maybe life has to snap one off in their asses before they get the message. Maybe they still don't get the message, even after the fact. I don't know what to tell them. I do know that I am going to do everything I can to insulate my own life from the consequences of bad decisions made by dumb, toxic people.

Maybe that's really all any of us can do in the end. I'm not going house-to-house, like some goddamned Jehovah's Witness, trying to convince my neighbors to register to vote and do their damned job as citizens. Life's too short to wipe everyone's ass for them. If they can't be bothered, then I have better things to do, and I'm going to spend that time reinforcing my own ability to withstand their repulsive indifference.

It's a cheap parlor trick designed to look like cogent political strategy, this idea that we have to placate "real 'murkins" in order to win. It is a terrible lie built on an obvious fallacy. It is the attempt to commodify magical thinking and pig-blind stubbornness, things that by their nature cannot be predicted or controlled. This is all because the plutocrats and oligarchs who are gleefully wrecking this country cannot be persuaded to part with even a couple percent off their ill-gotten pelf, for the betterment of the country whose systems and institutions have benefited them enormously.

That's your real problem, right there, not trying to figure out how to second-guess the Cletus vote. The sooner these dopey scriveners get wise to that and get on the same virtual page, the better chance we'll have of getting through this more or less intact. As always, don't count on it.

Treason's Greetings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Space, Forced

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Failure of Imagination

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

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

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

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

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

Dunning-Krugerocracy

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

No More Billionaires

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fakebook Is Not Your Friend

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

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

OK Bloomer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poll Smokers

Ignore all polls -- yesterday, today, last week, next week, next month, a week before the election. I don't mean you need to remain ignorant of the polls, but seriously, what sort of person lets a poll result affect their vote or any part of their decision-making process? A dipshit, that's who. You already know that, though, you don't need some internet wiseass to point that simple fact out to you.

Much like reality teevee, the constant churn of meaningless data is a very real and metastasizing cancer on this country. It has poisoned the impressionable brains of simpletons, people who shouldn't be allowed out of the house with money or without a helmet.

Unlike every other modern representative government on this groaning, beaten planet of ours, the US is blessed with a perpetual campaign machine. It's another in a long list of uniquely American rackets that turn out to be lucrative, because we are largely a country of willing dupes.

So, for example, the health care system is a collusive racket between the insurance companies, HMOs, and big pharma. The university system is a collusive racket between the schools and Wall Street. Both are designed to do exactly the same thing -- hoover ungodly amounts of usury out of the pockets of a captive market.

Now, the perpetual campaign racket is similar in that it is basically underwritten by most of the above entities, since they all buy ad time on the corporate media propaganda outlets. But instead of sucking money directly out of your pocket, they grab your eyes and brains with piles of the worst sorts of tea-leaf-reading bullshit and pseudo-analytical nonsense.

Why are white men without college degrees twenty-five percent likelier to vote for Trump than any other demographic? they ask. I dunno, because they're idiots? Who knows? Who cares? I don't give two shits who my next-door neighbor or my relatives or some fist-shaking codger in a haunted Pennsyltucky diner is going to vote for -- at all. I mean, I care in the sense that I hope they don't make the stupid choice, but whatever their choice turns out to be, it doesn't affect my choice in the slightest.

But when you have billions of dollars thrown at weaselly consultants whose sole mission is to convince you that some doofus "swing voters" should be courted like a busload of horny supermodels, you have your racket. And it's every bit as pernicious a racket as the health care or college rackets, maybe more so in some ways.

The real job of this dipshit consultant with their focus-group polling, appearing on a panel with other useless assholes on Jake Tapper's show or whatever, their real job is to convince you that any bold ideas that might upset the billionaires who own everything is Bad, and makes Candidate X "unelectable." This is explicitly designed to force Candidate X to "moderate" their tone, coin some "conciliatory" phrases in order to reassure our benevolent plutocrats that All Is Well, why, we would never so much as dare to dream of anything beyond a life of pointless make-work, eternal usury, and endless advertisements.

So the real "problem" with Elizabeth Warren proposing a plan to move to a "Medicare for All" type of system, is certainly not that it might displace some number of paper pushers and bill collectors whose jobs would be made redundant, nor even really that a "wealth tax" would be instituted to pay for it. The problem the billionaires have with it is that they are unclear on where their revenue stream  is in the proposed new system. How can we monetize it? How can we financialize it? Where is the magic pond in this plan, the one where I get to wet my beak for eternity?

As I keep preaching, their equity is an amalgam of other peoples' debt, just as your personal debt could be pieced out as other peoples' equity. They have a clear vested interest in keeping as many people as possible broke, stupid, and on the debt hook for the rest of their goddamned lives. An important part of gulling people into voting against themselves over and over again is to make them feel like they have at least a small stake in life, something worth not losing or risking, and then destabilizing them with barrages of data -- some true, some false, none of it matters -- in order to induce a state of fear.

Fear of losing your job or your house because the company you work for pulls up stakes overnight and moves operations to China. Fear of losing your crappy health insurance, because if you or your wife or one of your kids gets cancer or hit by a bus or whatever, you're fucked. Hell, even if you do still have your insurance, you're probably fucked. But at least there might be some lube involved.

(Of course, the hospital will charge the insurance company a thousand bucks for the one-ounce tube of lube, which the insurance company will then deny and send you the full bill on the EOB, against your five-thousand-dollar deductible. But I digress.)

And so the pelf-grubbers and the usurers and the spreadsheet-diddlers who produce and create nothing, but own everything, are welcomed on to the corporate media which is institutionally aligned with them, to lecture the peons about the "moral hazards" of not gouging every possible cent out of working people, for a product which typically does not recoup its cost in the first place, never mind the next decade or so of vig added on.

And then they'll turn around and have that nazi Spencer on, or the liar Kellyanne. The mission is not to inform, but to deform -- to irretrievably mutate the terms of discussion, so that a truly honest debate can never be had. It takes some serious balls for these fucking hacks to grind on Liz Warren's proposal -- which is all it is, we're not even into the primaries yet -- and not provide a side-by-side comparison with that flag-humping Caddyshack reject, who has done nothing, has proposed nothing, to resolve or even address what most people across the political spectrum agree is a serious problem.

It's a game, and we need to stop playing it. People like Jake Tapper and Chuck Todd really ought to be ashamed of themselves. What they do is not journalism, it's (as Frank Zappa once memorably put it) the entertainment branch of industry. It's PR for the Koch brothers and for Exxon, and whoever else is paying the bills.

The perpetually changing polls in the perpetual campaign are critical pieces in keeping the average rube unsettled and destabilized. They're designed to give the just-over-half-bright viewer a few simple talking points they can memorize the next time they have a run-in with their smarty-pants co-worker at the water cooler.

They can prattle about the two million clerical and admin jobs that might be lost in the M4A transition, which would take years to implement in the first place, without considering that part of the problem is that at least some of the money that comes out of your paycheck to pay for your shitty insurance pays for those jobs, and that maybe creating a real marketing efficiency would not only save you money on your insurance premiums, but give those workers an opportunity for something better than churning out EOB forms.

They can recite Leon Cooperman's bullshit about the moral hazards of student-loan forgiveness, without thinking about the fact that Cooperman owns a stake in Navient, so yeah, students' debt is his equity, where have you heard that one before? I think we're at the point where you could start a super PAC called "Chickens for Colonel Sanders," and no one would see the irony in it. We're post-Onion now. And it's because mediots with no sense anymore of what is actually newsworthy decided to give infinite air-time to people with no scruples or principles whatsoever.

So I don't care what the polls say, even when I agree with them. And I don't care what any media monkey says, even if I nod along with them. I have already made my resolution, and it's best phrased in A.R. Moxon's tweet at right:

I used that exact argument with a Trump-supporting friend a few months ago. I reminded him that I was very much a ticket-splitter for a long time, but as the Republicans have increasingly soiled their brand with hucksters and scumbags like Newt Gingrich, Lindsey Graham, et al, I've written them off forever.

I figure I've got another seven or eight presidential election cycles left, and I don't care how bad the Democratic candidate is, I will never vote for a Republican again, not even for so much as fucking dog-catcher. My wife will never vote for a Republican. My daughter just turned eighteen, and is very much looking forward to casting her "fuck you" drop in the ocean against Trump and his scummy ilk next year, and for the next sixty or seventy years. And we already stopped buying from companies that support Trump or Fox, watching shows made in Georgia, all of it. Yes, it's a bit of a hassle, but I am fucking done with all of these people, and refuse to give them anything -- time, money, attention.

Just as I know more than my share of Trump supporters, I also know a good number of people who, like myself, did vote Republican sometimes, but now regard them with a snarl usually reserved for child molesters and red-light runners. Trump is not the cause of all this, but the natural outcome of their efforts for my entire lifetime. It's not just him, it's always been them. They're fucking scum, top to bottom, whether they vocally support Trump or not. Silence is complicity.

And I will make sure that if a pollster calls me, they know that, that it's not just "no" to Trump, but "never again" to the Republicons. They're a party of Fredo Corleones, completely dead to me. I think maybe Matt Bevin just found that out the hard way as well, and Trump may finally start figuring out that despite what the paid prognosticators and his bullshit in-house surveys tell him, people don't like that motherfucker, because he's an awful excuse for a human being, and a goddamned embarrassment to a majority of Americans.

Fuck the pollsters, and the mediots who put them on the air. Let's get this party started!