Judging Amy

The religious fanaticism is only part of Judge Handmaid's problem. Her willingness to undo every meaningfully liberal piece of legislation in the past seventy years is just another part of the problem.

Don't get me wrong, these are both major problems. But as with Rapebro McGambledrunk, the worst problems are the ones that seem to get the least amount of attention. I mean, yes, Kavanaugh is a piece of shit blackout-drunk party-rapist, but instead of getting into the weeds on some unprovable he-said/she-said shit from thirty-odd years ago, maybe someone should have asked at his confirmation hearing who paid off his mortgage and his quarter-million-dollar credit-card debt. You know?

So it is with Judge Handmaid. Plenty of people have joked before about Trump trying to appoint "Judge" Jeanine Pirro to the Supreme Court, but Pirro actually spent more time as a judge than Amy Barrett. The judges on The People's Court all spent more time as judges.

Barrett is nothing more than a partisan hack who clerked for Combover Tony Scalia and became a law professor at Notre Dame, before Moscow Mitch handed her a seat on the Seventh Circuit as a full-throated fuck you to Barack Obama.

(Maybe it's just me, but if anyone treated me for a day the way McConnell treated Obama for the full eight years, I'd paint that motherfucker's office with Novichok and polonium. I have zero admiration for Obama's ability to silently eat shit from these mutants in perpetuity. To loosely paraphrase Stokely Carmichael, that high-road shit only works when your opponent has a conscience.)

The idea that she's "brilliant" or even significantly qualified has no clear evidentiary basis. I've seen judges on Law & Order with more purpose and gravitas. She and Kavanaugh are there for the same reason -- loyalty over ability. They are owned and operated by the scummy, secretive billionaires whose prime directive is paying half of the peons to murder the other half, while poisoning as much air and water as possible.

Our wondrous corporate media, content to fake their librul quals all the way to the bank, are obsessed with asking each other and opining on Biden's refusal to offer specifics on "court packing," which of course is what Moscow Mitch has been doing for a full decade now. After stonewalling Obama on judicial appointments for six years (again, thanks a fucking million, all you Democratic voters who couldn't bother your precious selves in the 2010 and 2014 midterms), since 2016 Mitch has turned the Senate into a rubber stamp for every Federalist Society squid imaginable -- the younger and dumber the better, so's they can infest the system for the next two generations.

So maybe some enterprising mediot might want to take it upon themselves to ask any Republicon senator about whether they'd pack the court more, should Trump get re-elected and they hold the Senate. Because I would bet you actual folding currency that they will.

Reversing "cultural" decisions like Roe and Griswold are just the start. Those things are just cover for their real agenda -- turning back employment rights, dismantling the EPA, bolstering the domestic white-power herrenvolk police state, and making sure that fewer and fewer people are able to vote in response to it all.

There appears to be reason for cautious optimism that Biden could win decisively, and the Democrats could pick up a solid majority in the Senate. It is absolutely imperative, not just for the good of the country, but for the continued viability of the Democratic Party, that if that does happen, they need to act swiftly and decisively, and not worry about what shitheads like Chuck Todd say about it, and to make sure that their treasonous "colleagues" across the aisle are given good reason to fear their own destruction. Any other outcome would be catastrophic.

Twenty Points Down

The popular phrase in preventing the smug assumption that Biden will beat the evil clown in a landslide, even though he clearly should beat that failed attempt at a functioning human being by seventy points and five hundred electoral votes, is to act like you're way behind in the polls. Ignore the polls. Don't get lulled into complacency by months of leading in the polls. And so forth.

This is fine as far as it goes, but it's easy to forget that people have been repeating that mantra for months with regard to a Biden-Trump matchup specifically, and they've been beating themselves with it for several years in general.

And it's a great idea in general. Show up. Make sure you can show up. Don't ever get complacent again, at any level.

With that mantra in mind, combined with current circumstances and rhetoric, it is not unreasonable or unforeseeable that many people are getting concerned about the practicalities of the election itself -- counting the votes properly, abiding by the results, transferring power properly. When you've been dulling your senses for the past four years that at least a third of your fellow citizens are perfectly okay with an open slide into outright fascism, it makes sense that you might start expecting the worst.

So I get where this guy is coming from, as far as the political probabilities go, and I think we can probably be cautiously optimistic about the ultimate outcome here.

But you know, I'd drop the whole quit being so paranoid, you fucking ninnies tone there. This has been a consistent pattern throughout Trump's reign of error -- the insistence that norms and rules and process will ensure correct outcomes. And in each instance, he has proven that none of that shit matters if there's no one to enforce it, if the only side that even respects those things anymore is also the side that refuses to use every tool at their disposal to exert what little power they actually have.

It's not a paranoid pipe dream at all:  Trump has repeatedly said that any election outcome where he doesn't win is by definition illegitimate. He continues to maintain this stance. No one is challenging him on it in any meaningful way -- not his own party, not the corporate media, not the courts, nobody.

It doesn't require any sort of violent overthrow, or even a stubborn "refusal" to vacate the White House. All he has to do is what he's openly threatened to do, and what political observers across the spectrum have speculated -- declare victory early, before mail-in ballots are counted; if Biden is the winner after the mail-in count, declare those votes invalid (as he has been doing for months already); muddy the waters just enough to throw it to the courts and the individual states.

He has all those tools at his disposal. His own party has long given up challenging him on anything; he could nuke Omaha tomorrow and Ben Sasse would say, Thank you sir, may I have another?. The Democrats have made it clear that they are either completely unable or unwilling to undertake any meaningful action. They will wait and dither and agonize until it's too late.

Now, do I think all of these things will happen? Probably not, but there is definitely a non-zero chance of it. It's definitely possible.

And that's the real trick right there, the root explanation for why so many people right now have this desperate, anxious undercurrent. It's not just that Trump is a piece of shit, or that the people who work for him are scumbags, or that the corporate media are cowed by the whole circus and just want clicks. It's the realization that there are more angry idiots and toxic weirdos out there than they thought there were, and that they have real leverage now.

The rise of the QAnon cult -- an utterly ludicrous, incoherent smattering of conspiracy jabber -- is a perfect example. Imagine a group of people that spin these credulous yarns about cannibal pedo cults and sex trafficking, while they emphatically support a party featuring such well known pedophiles and enablers such as Jim Jordan, Dennis Hastert, and Roy Moore.

And Trump himself -- in countless videos hanging out partying with his good buddy (and one-time neighbor) Jeffrey Epstein, on audio and video describing how much fun he had peeping in on teenage pageant contestants getting dressed, on his own daughter being a hot piece of ass, on sexually assaulting women. Right now he's refusing to give DNA that would exonerate him on a rape charge.

And yet you have this seething, teeming, growing movement of cult loons -- maybe thousands, maybe more -- who would rather construct an insane, impossibly baroque conspiracy that has no basis in fact, than confront the very real network of people right in front of them who indulge in sexual perversion.

I know that as good libruls, we're not supposed to judge others on their sex kinks, and 99% of the time, that's a pretty good rule to follow. But in the context of their own words and beliefs, it's helpful to keep in mind:  Roger Stone is an orgiast who gets off on watching his wife get spit-roasted by strangers. Paul Manafort enjoyed setting up gangbangs for his own wife, who has some cognitive disabilities from a horse-riding accident years ago, and may not have been an entirely willing participant.

Again, we're not allowed to judge, but just consider for a moment the sort of sexual pathologies one must have for those activities. This kind of shit makes the Falwells look like rank amateurs. Now keep in mind that Stone and Manafort have been business partners for forty years. One of their earliest clients -- who they still work for to this very day -- was a young swashbuckling real-estate developer named Donald Trump.

Turds of a feather, you know? I wouldn't stay in the same room with people like Stone or Manafort for five minutes, and I led a pretty wild life for a long time. And I sure as fuck wouldn't turn to people like that for guidance or advice on running a country. These are people who have spent their adult lives weaponizing the worms in their brains in the devil's arena of political consultancy, where nothing is true and everything goes.

We have a good chance of muddling through all this ugliness, if enough people are willing to show up and stick with it. But let's not shit on the folks that are getting nervous about their prospects. They have no one they can trust anymore -- their fellow 'murkins have lost their fucking minds, the Democratic party is full of ineffectual blowhards, the Republicon party is full of flat-out traitors, the basic mechanisms of the country no longer function, and the figurehead tyrant has openly promised multiple times to fuck up the electoral process.

You don't have to be paranoid, but you might want to at least wonder what the contingency plan is for when shit starts coming down. Hoping that certain people will "do their job" when that has failed multiple times previously is barely more than nothing.

Useful Idiot

Let's thump the deceased equine one last time for good measure -- if you're buying his music, or his clothes, or any of the other cheap, shitty garbage marketed by Kanye or his hobbit wife or her horrid grubby family, you're part of the fucking problem.

No doubt every country has this to some level, but this country seems to have a special knack for making household names out of utter mediocrities, of taking complete shitheads and turning them into millionaires or presidents, just by getting morons to repeat their names and take sides on their inanities.

Like I've said before, West is to "music" what Trump is to "politics" -- an elevated fraud, a shameless charlatan who's never had the benefit of an honest appraisal or conversation. Despite my usual nods to metal and hard rock, I actually do listen to a lot of modern electronic music as well, and there's tons of unknown players on YouTube that are a hundred times as talented as West has ever thought of. Which is fine -- if people want to waste their money and time listening to sonic garbage and following the exploits of a garbage human being, that's their prerogative.

But now he's meddling, because he has incurable daddy issues, and his current daddy figure "blessed" him with millions of dollars, between tax breaks and PPP loans to his "fashion" line. He's been paid off, and now he's lending a hand in return.

Yeah, Joe Taxpayer, you're putting your hard-earned tax dollars into Kanye West's buttless chaps and plain white tee-shirts, or whatever the fuck he wears and sells. You like apples?

It's interesting that over the past year or so there are these "rumors" floated about West's supposed mental instability. Ordinarily one would express sympathy, but frankly, even if he really is clinically bipolar, I couldn't care less. It's not his main problem anyway -- his main problem is that he's a spoiled asshole, and his dipshit fan club won't stop enabling his vainglorious nonsense. Welp, enjoy the consequences, folks, because you've certainly asked for them. He's not being "tricked," he knows that the hell he's doing.

It's unlikely that West's stunt candidacy will have any tangible effect on the election outcome, assuming we're even allowed to have an election, and that it isn't rendered pointless by Trump's open cheating, stealing, and meddling. But that's not the point -- the point is that given the circumstances and the stakes, he has the potential to be enough of a distraction to affect things.

And West just doesn't care. It's all a big game to him, just like it was to Trump. Every article covering him is one that could have covered Biden, a flawed but serious person who might actually save some lives, just by not being completely incompetent and morally empty. There are serious people who understand the serious challenges ahead, and have real ideas about how to get things done. Forty million people out of work, millions about to get evicted, plague blowing through the country and about to barrel through the public school system, here's ol' Fuckface Junior yanking his dick in Forbes magazine again. Fuck them and fuck him.

Seriously, what a king-sized piece of shit he is. Somebody needs to break it to him that Jesus thinks he's a ludicrous asshole who needs to take his filthy money and just fuck off forever. By the time his kids get old enough to realize what a useless scumbag he really is, he'll be bribing the hell out them just to stay in the room with him.

One of the longest-running themes I've maintained over the years in here is my firm, serious belief that reality teevee is a cancer, pure and simple. All you need to do is look at the sweaty, jabbering muppet encased behind the concentric security barriers recently erected around the people's house, and take that as proof.

Reality teevee is useless and corrosive, and its operational dynamic has been to deliberately stoke the worst out of people, for the empty amusement of bored strangers. It's for people who would otherwise be binging on porn and Faces of Death, but don't have the guts. But it's the same ethos as those types of "entertainment" -- the arch contrivances of porn combined with the nervous frisson of the snuff film. And it's permeated the fabric of this country, turned otherwise sensible people into slack-jawed idiots, and spawned a new generation of "influencers" who don't actually do anything but function as walking billboards for the followers of their mini-cults.

I mean, we all know Idiocracy was a documentary, but people have forgotten that They Live was also a documentary. Put the fuckin' sunglasses on.

Come to think of it, Kanye West is exactly the chief executive this hollowed-out husk richly deserves. Bottoms up, America.

Subverting Norms

Lately I find myself thinking back frequently to a classic Norm Macdonald bit, about a homeless guy who has a dog with him. (Bear in mind that the bit is about thirty years old, and I don't want to hear any politically correct pedantry about othering the houseless or whatever.) The punchline, such as it is, is that Norm figures the dog is probably thinking, You know, I can do this shit on my own, buddy.

That's basically how I feel about the Democratic Party "leadership" much of the time these days. I'll still trudge to the polls and cast my lot with the rest of you schmucks (if we're still allowed, I guess), but I've been building about a hundred feet of fencing and gate around my house, and probably getting another couple guns in the near future to complement my Mossberg and my Sig P226 (maybe a Glock 19 this time). I'm also looking into emigration requirements for places like Scotland and Ireland.

I have no confidence in the Democratic leadership. I see stupid little blurbs like Nancy Pelosi smirking that she refers to Cheetolini as "Mister Make Matters Worse," and am underwhelmed by it. They should be impeaching Bill Barr like six months ago. They should have worked up new articles of impeachment against Trump the day after the last farce was over.

The idea that doing absolutely nothing in the face of open tyranny is somehow better than at least trying and not succeeding in the ultimate outcome, is repulsive for starters.

But doing nothing is also not that difficult. I can do that shit my own, good buddy. What the fuck do I need to pay you for?

Trump has always had a four-step process to everything he does in life, whether it's bankrupting a casino, calling Page Six and bragging about how good he porked that showgirl, or lawn-darting the country and setting its citizens to each others' throats:

1. Lie.
2. Cheat.
3. Steal.
4. Destroy.

That's it. That's the process. It's simple but effective, and why should he change it. It works. It's worked for him for years, because no one ever just lifted their shoe and scraped this fucking dog turd of a human being off the bottom of society's shoe. And now you've got dog shit everywhere, as far as the eye can see.

He could and should have been shut down years ago, but the New York Democrats were happy to hold their noses and cash his checks, and the New York mediots were happy to take his calls and do his PR for free. And so here we are, and nobody who can actually do anything or at least influence anything has the balls to do so.

So in the case of voting by mail, he's been lying about the whole thing for months, right down to how it actually works. Gee, maybe people should step in -- every time -- and correct the lie, and call it for what it is?

Like all marketing, lies work by repetition. That's why he's mostly just doddered around repeating the same bullshit over and over again for years, till the smooth-brained death cult can chant it in their dreamless collective sleep. The usual panel monkeys on the usual shows use the usual colorful phrasing to dance around the word "lie," when all they have to do is say, that's a goddamned lie, he knows it and so do we.

But now he has enough momentum with the lie about mail-in voting, and enough morons believing it, that now he toys with the next part -- muddying the waters just enough to discredit the results, defunding the USPS just enough to cripple their ability to handle the job effectively, and so on.

When that doesn't work, and people (as the current parlance goes) "crawl over broken glass" to do this thing they should have done in 2016 and 2014 and 2010 to prevent all this, he will then simply have his trusty mutt Barr draft up some emergency proclamation postponing or nullifying or whatever his vaunted gut decrees.

And what will anyone do about it? Will Nancy Smash have another smug nickname for His Travesty? Will Barry O have another carefully crafted oratory invoking our better angels?

Better angels? Forty fucking percent of this goddamned country is ecstatic with all of this. Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham could throw white-power hand signals at each other night after night and get two million bastards to tune in consistently. Everyone likes to invoke the old Michael Caine Batman mantra of some people just want to watch the world burn. Yes, they do and they are, and the resolute bulwark against the daily evil is merely to presume that of course we'll be permitted to vote in November.

To which the correct answer is, Yes, probably. But what is your contingency plan if this fucker goes full Mobutu Sese Seko on us? Humor us and just share it with the class, this plan of action in the face of crisis and urgency.

That is where they're failing. There is no backup. They scoff and sneer and harrumph that of course there is no way that this norm could possibly be traduced; why even Lincoln made sure the election was held on time in the middle of the Civil War.

Yeah, but -- and hear me out on this one -- Jesus Fucking Christ, I don't know if you've noticed, but he's not Lincoln. He's a criminal scumbag who's surrounded and insulated himself with like-minded scumbags who will do his bidding, no matter what.

I frequently use the exaggerated epithet "would push their own grandmother into a wood-chipper" to attempt to describe the sort of animal who would do literally anything to achieve their political goal. Well, Stephen Miller's grandmother recently died of the #TrumpPlague. You see him change his fucking rhythm by even a sixteenth of a beat? Me neither.

You think Bill Barr won't sign that fucking emergency memo postponing the election, to keep the "anarchists" from installing Diamond Joe Biden? Fine, then we can agree to disagree.

But just for safety's sake, you should still probably be able to describe what can be done if he does sign that memo, or decide that the election count is unacceptable, or whatever banana-republic bullshit these people have already made clear multiple times that they are completely comfortable with.

So far, I haven't seen any evidence whatsoever that any of the people who actually have the power to affect that -- even in futility -- have taken any measures to do so. Impeach Barr now -- the investigative process alone will at least stall ever-so-slightly his continued attempts to turn this popsicle stand into some Opus Dei freak show. Half of something is always better than nothing.

And for the people in power who choose to just complain and bemoan their lot -- well, I can do that shit on my own, asshole. Now tell me why I should bother voting for you after this debacle, win lose or draw.

Some of Those That Work Forces

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Superduperman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Warren Piece

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wonder.... [scratches balls thoughtfully]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leap of Fate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learn to Swim, See You Down in Arizona Bay

Character is fate. -- Heraclitus

Some say a comet will fall from the sky, followed by meteor showers and tidal waves.
Followed by fault lines that cannot sit still.
Followed by millions of dumbfounded dipshits.
And some say the end is near, some say we'll see Armageddon soon.
I certainly hope we will.
I could use a vacation from this stupid shit. -- Tool, Ænema

Here we go. After a brief feint at pretending to dither over their foregone conclusion, the cowardly scum that comprise the Senate Republicons did their sworn duty to their orange overlord and wrapped this farce up tighter than Yertle McConnell's favorite leather gimp.

No one is shocked or even surprised. We knew they would do this, because this is what they are. They hate this country, they hate most of its citizens, and they fully intend to cling to power by any means necessary. Now that they have openly authorized the chief executive -- as long as he's from their party, of course -- to do as he pleases, up to and including offering monetary inducements to foreign leaders to influence US elections, expect the phone calls and thick envelopes to fly fast and hard.

Like I keep saying:  Don't despair, prepare. Of course people feel like crying or throwing their hands up and saying fuck it, and checking out from all of it. What good does any of it do, if they're just gonna cheat to win?

Well, again, if they weren't worried about the outcome, they wouldn't need to cheat at every turn, now would they? Just a little over a year ago, people showed up for the midterms, and it paid off. Democrats retook the House. All the hearings and witnesses and evidence that came out during this process, the very fact that you were allowed to know about any of it is entirely due to the fact that people showed up in November of 2018. It's the difference between Adam Schiff running things, and a corrupt shit like Devin Nunes brushing it under the rug and running to lick his master's boots.

You don't have to wait until November to start voting either. Vote with your wallet, every day. Make your choices count. You know how much money things like the Kentucky Derby and NCAA basketball and Jim Beam bourbon dump into Kentucky's economy? Sit 'em out this year, until that festering turd McConnell finally gets flushed. Tons of teevee shows and movies are made in Georgia. What companies are still buying commercial time on Fox News?

You want things to change and improve, it's going to take a little work. Those things are bare minimum, but I guarantee you if enough people do them, it will make a difference. If you have more money, donate to some of the opposition candidates; if you have more time and the inclination to act like a Jehovah's Witness, I guess you could go door-to-door or hit the supermarkets, and get people to register to vote. If you have free time and some speaking skills and the patience to deal with idiots in the audience, maybe you run for your local planning commission or school board or city council.

(I've actually been asked by quite a few people in my area over the years, liberal and conservative, to run for some sort of local government seat. I'd be fucking terrible at it. I have the knowledge and passion, but not the patience. I've sat in on a few city council and county board meetings over the years. I know some of the members of these groups. It is nothing more than assembly-line tedium. Everything starts with pro-forma nuisances like reciting the pledge of allegiance, then before actually getting to business you have to give the audience a chance to speak. The only people who have time to attend these things are either elderly folks with nothing else to do, or idiots who are riled up over some $2.00/year mosquito abatement assessment being voted on. (That one is real, I can still recall it quite clearly.) Look at every time a new Krispy Kreme shop opens, or a new $1,000 phone is released with a slightly improved bezel. There is simply a certain percentage of people whose time is worth literally nothing to them. And they all show up at local gov't meetings. The first few episodes of the sitcom Parks & Recreation were pretty much a documentary of that phenomenon. So, thanks but no thanks.)

It's going to be difficult to keep the faith between now and then. The corporate media are engineered and incentivized to demoralize you, the better to keep you in your place. That's why they beat on Sanders and Warren, because either one of those two will actually do something. The media will go after Biden and Buttigieg and Klobuchar as well. It's always someone's turn in the barrel. They want to stir up infighting between the candidates' supporters, to depress turnout in the general election.

This is not incidental, this is the goal. An actual liberal media would not keep doing these tired-ass Cletus safari pieces, venturing out to talk to these spiteful hicks who won't fucking die already, who hate their grandkids and whine about communism but hey, where's my entitlements?

So boycott them too. Seriously, when was the last time CNN gave you anything of value? Why on earth would you read most of the Times columnists, or their lap-dog "reporting" and "anonymous" sourcing?

Of the five remaining "main" Dem candidates, I would honestly say each of them has some chance to win. There are people who have a vested interest in maintaining that Bernie or Warren are "too left" and therefore susceptible to a McGovern-type landslide. You may want to check if any of those folks offered predictions about 2016, and how that turned out.

Everyone got 2016 wrong. I got it way wrong (though, oddly enough, I do think that some of the breakdown and analysis in the linked post might still hold at least some water). Nobody, not even Trump himself, thought he would or even could win. A fake businessman with multiple bankruptcies, ridiculous appearance, a long track record of failure and incompetence, no experience in public office, had no chance against probably the most over-qualified person ever to apply for the job.

But he won because there really is a deep current of frustration and anger in this country, and he understood it well enough to monetize and weaponize it. Sanders clearly taps that discontent with just as much efficiency. Warren is getting better at it too. The panel monkeys and smart-set slop-ed columnists all beat the how're we gonna pay for it? drum like it's the only song they know.

It doesn't occur to them that some under-employed single mom with a sick kid or two and no insurance -- or hell, even with insurance, it's not like it's a vast improvement -- hears that argument and reflexively thinks about all the bullshit that gets paid for without so much as a blink. And now we're three years into paying that fat fuck to play golf on his own courses every goddamned weekend, so he can force the Secret Service to rent golf carts and jet skis and hotel rooms directly from him. Tell us again how we just can't find any money to cut working families some slack on the decades of interest payments they're forced to make to student-loan corporations.

That's the real reason the Cletus safari doofuses need to get their heads out of their asses and talk to some Democratic voters once in a while -- because we're fucking pissed too. There is a misconception that Trump's cult of cousin-fucking yahoos have some kind of monopoly on righteous anger, and that's entirely because they're the only ones the corporate media will talk to. They don't realize that Sanders and Warren have just as much of a shot as Biden -- maybe more -- because those two have learned very well how to empathize with the anger, and give it voice.

The bottom line on all this is to keep in mind one definite inevitability -- none of the remaining candidates will be ideal for everyone. Someone will have to compromise, someone will have to hold their nose for someone they really don't care for. To which I would respond, Are you sure you dislike Candidate X more than the doddering asshole that's been in there? Because that's the choice right now. It's a process -- you remove the person you're tired of, replace them with someone you can live with for the time-being, and then start looking for someone better for the next go-round.

Think of it as a slump-buster, if that helps. Sometimes you just need a warm body for a short period of time to get you out of a rut, until you find your rhythm again. I am fine with having Amy Klobuchar as a slump-buster, if it gets that clog out of the White House toilet. Hell, I'll vote for Mike Bloomberg or Tom Steyer if that's what it takes. We all need to focus on getting that fucker out, period. Worry about policy specs later.

Take a good, long look at the last two weeks, that despicable sham in the Senate. Get pissed. Make them pay, with your votes and your wallets. Be creative, be consistent. Make it hurt and don't stop the pain. Most of all, show up every time. Never forget that that's exactly what they don't want you to do.

Every election is always the most important one ever, which is another way to desensitize people over time to how things really are. I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that this year really is that important, and in fact may actually be a make-or-break scenario for the continuation of what we might still recognize and hope to be a relatively free country. The upcoming sham "verdict" will legitimize what these fuckers have already done, as well as what they are going to do, and they've probably already started doing it.

It's not an exaggeration that a we saw this week a major step toward formalizing the turn into a "soft authoritarian" state, a shell of a representative democracy but really just an open rubber stamp parliament at the behest of the despot and his cronies. This country has always been run by the wealthy and conniving, and we've been heading down this road even before Trump got into politics. But it was done with a wink and a nod and at least a sop to the proles here and there.

It's all wide out in the open now. It's Lamar Alexander -- who turns eighty in July, is independently wealthy, and is retiring later this year -- casting the die for this treachery, as one final favor. Not to Trump, but to Bill Barr, who now heads an organization that has been more or less explicitly empowered to engage in whatever tactics domestically that Barr sees fit.

Bearing in mind, of course, that Barr is an Opus Dei fanatic who is on record as another one of those "moral decay" assholes that really wants to force everyone to go to the same church. Notwithstanding the inconvenient fact that Barr's own father was a pervert who wrote sex-slave pulp sci-fi books and gave Jeffrey Epstein his first real job, a job that Epstein was literally unqualified for.

Remember when the Feds raided Epstein's Manhattan sex castle last summer and confiscated truckloads of evidence? Yeah, good times. Wonder how that all turned out. I don't mean Uncle Jeff's "suicide," I mean what happened to all the fucking evidence? Maybe someone could get a House subcommittee going to investigate that.

I get why people might get confused or frustrated with this endless barrage of connections and people and timelines and dirty deeds done for fun. They can only get so far in before they throw up their hands and decide that they all do it. Everyone is corrupt, doing the same awful things to the same lurid degree. I might as well just either check out, or at least cast my lot with the guy that pushes my buttons.

That's how you end up with a mendacious pro-wrestling clown. That how you end up with fifty-one grown-ass adults who are perfectly willing to sell their country all the way down the road to despotism, under an erratic, impulsive, vindictive, blindingly stupid criminal -- someone they all know full well is guilty and incompetent and corrupt to his bones, someone they all deeply detest on a personal basis, because he is weird and pathetic and needy and completely unlikable in the way a whiny, self-absorbed brat is unlikable. They sold their souls and their country for nothing, for a brief extension to their tenuous grasp on power, and the money they can't take with them when they die.

That's how you end up with such despicable, miserable people -- by abdicating your responsibilities, by not showing up, by hoping someone else will come along and do it, because someone always does. Welp, Superman's not comin' to save the day this time, podna, so you best take stock of the situation, figure out what you can and what you can't control, and prepare accordingly.

There are many ideas and emotions that compel me to persist in pissing my thoughts into the electronic void ad nauseam, but if there is a single key defining characteristic, it's this:  a sense of justice. I hate seeing scumbags go unpunished or rewarded, while decent people who work hard and play by the rules get trampled. It drives me nuts when people just accept it as "the way things are." No, the reason things get that way is because enough people are willing to accept it. As long as it's not them or theirs, it doesn't matter. It's someone else's problem, even if it's preventable.

All that we need to do is to look at these people and the things they do, assess them accurately and objectively, and act accordingly. Liars, hypocrites, thieves, killers, the people who enable them and do their dirty work for them -- bring them to account in all the possible ways. Maybe that means bringing them to account in a court of law if they've committed a crime, maybe it means heckling them out of restaurants if they're just really awful excuses for humanity.

The reason you hear the phrase "cancel culture" so much these days is because there is a subsection of wealthy or powerful or influential people who, thanks to the wondrous technology of social media, are being held publicly to account by people from "lower" classes, who in the past had no way to effect any sort of recourse at all for the Important Person's misdeeds. The Important People can't stand it that the great unwashed can now tell them to go fuck themselves, either in Twitter or Instagram, or in public if there's a sighting.

Sometimes this gets out of hand and hits people who just made a slightly off-color comment that they later wish they hadn't. Sometimes people over-react. Who knew? But the good outweighs the bad, and the proof of that was last summer, when within the space of a few weeks, you had Maureen Dowd and Bret Stephens, two wealthy and influential people who are rewarded handsomely even though they are terrible at their job, both whining (again, in their well-paid sinecures at the nation's (erp!) flagship newspaper) about how all the nasty emails and tweets they got presaged guillotines and Kristallnacht.

I mean, when you can get that level of high-pitched whining and pearl-clutching, you know you've hit the mark. But it's also a sad reminder that, since Dowd and Stephens still have their jobs, someone still enjoys reading them. People out there still plan to vote for Trump enthusiastically, no matter how much of a thin-skinned, incompetent criminal he is, no matter how many farmers hang themselves because his genius trade war bankrupted them.

Having a sense of justice is also the inevitable, hard understanding that it is truly rare. Plenty of horrible shit never gets resolved; countless horrible people throughout history were never held accountable. They slept fine right up until the end and died comfortably. No one did jack shit about them.

That's what you really have to prepare for -- more and worse things could and probably will come out as this year progresses, and there's still a good chance that he wins. The Democrats are already showing their talent for fucking things up in the nomination process, and their fallback position is to complain that the media tools are never fair to them. Obviously the reality goes further than that. There are a lot of people in this country whose actions are incoherent and spiteful, and there are plenty who are so untroubled by all of it, they can't even be bothered to show up. If he wins, it means they win; it means once again that maybe this country isn't what you thought it was.

I don't know much, but I know at least two things:  one, that my dad didn't fight the fucking nazis and imperial Japanese in WW2 for this bullshit, any of it; two, I'm getting old and really don't feel like spending the rest of my years concerning myself with an idea that doesn't exist anymore. In other words, if the majority wants to make Idiocracy a documentary, then maybe it's time to seek greener pastures. I can't imagine doing that to my daughter and eventually grandchildren, sentencing them to some pinched, cruel, oligarchic fascist state that thinks The Handmaid's Tale is an instructional text.

We've got about 277 days or so to figure this out, folks; there really may not be a next one at this rate. We might not even get this one. It only works if enough people have enough spine and sense to stand up for themselves.

And if they can't be bothered or roused or convinced -- well, that too is an answer.

Amor Fati

He'll get away with it, you know. All of it. He always has. No one has ever really held him accountable for much of anything. The closest call he ever had with real accountability was back in 1990, when he nearly bankrupted one of his shitbag casinos in AC, and as part of the bailout the creditor banks put him on an "allowance" of $450k -- per month.

And so he never learned anything from his many failures and stupid excesses, because why should he? There's never been any reason to. Just like the Wall Street wizards who lawn-darted the economy a decade ago, looted the wreckage, and still had the balls to insist on their performance bonuses. We don't hold rich and/or powerful people accountable.

Well, Bill Cosby and Jeffrey Epstein might beg to disagree with that. There are always exceptions. But they are notable precisely because of their scarcity.

And this impeachment trail farce. Right out in the open, like whaddaya gonna do about it, same as it ever was. Ol' Moscow Mitch, he didn't even bother with the pretense of a reach-around, the thin veneer of fake comity and moderation. In what trial court does the jury foreman declare his intent to work with the defendant and the defendant's counsel throughout the process and to acquit the defendant before the trial even starts? And what jury pre-emptively decides that they don't need to call any witnesses or demand any evidence that might prove the defendant's guilt?

More importantly, what sort of diseased society is okay with all of that? We may just be too far gone at this point, seriously, as a functioning republic or democracy or however you want to term it. This is pure despotism, right here. That's all there is to it. And an incredible percentage of people seem to be okay with it, or inexplicably apathetic to it.

The fix is in, and nobody will or can do anything about it. Not his party, because they're all in at this point, counting on cheating, suppression, and pig-blind stubbornness to carry them over the line. Not the opposition party, too intimidated to fully commit to what they've started, yet seemingly not understanding that if they fail and he stays, they're all targets. They should be setting up an ad hoc committee to investigate and draft more articles of impeachment right now, ready to load soon as this dog-and-phony show is through.

The media certainly won't challenge them, long as there's a buck to be made selling tickets to the circus. The librul media helped him in his ascent, every filthy, corrupt step of the way. He may be dumber than a bag of rocks, but intelligence and cunning are two different things, and the ability to read people and spot the most credulous, dull-witted saps in the room is a by-god bona-fide skill.

If you really think about it, the main ability required to screw people over, lie to them constantly and poison their brains, is just a willingness to do it and stick to it. Never relent, never break character, never admit guilt or defeat. There will always be people who want to believe the lies, and there will always be people who will ingratiate themselves to your cause and assist with it, in order to capitalize on the opportunity.

So it comes now to the people of this fair land to sack up, show up, and hold them all -- there's that pesky word again -- accountable. Like the impeachment, and even the crimes that led to the impeachment, it is an all-or-nothing proposition. It is not enough merely to remove Trump; a Democratic president with the House and Senate as is will be hamstrung and obstructed at every opportunity, with no small amount of assistance from the agitprop fiends at Fixed Noise.

The Republicon party has to be removed from power at every possible point, at every possible level. Period. They are nothing more now than a malevolent, destructive force that wants only to sow discord and wreak havoc. That is not an exaggeration. You want this bullshit to end, they have to end. There is no other way.

Frankly, I think voting is pretty much a waste of time. You're either outnumbered by the bastards, or cheated and no one does anything, or you win, but your guy gets prevented from doing much of anything regardless, and is mostly undone within months after leaving office anyway. It historically changes very little, and as Emma Goldman famously put it a century ago, if it did change anything, they wouldn't let us do it.

Having said all that, you should still vote anyway. Not because of any moral or patriotic duty, or any of that flag-humping, group-chant nonsense. Do it because it's the practical thing to do, because of game theory -- if you don't show up, things will definitely not improve, but if you do show up, not only is there at least a small chance of improvement, but the odds go up in direct proportion to participation.

You have the ability to increase the odds. The proof of that is if you didn't, if there really was nothing to be done regardless, they wouldn't keep investing so much in cheating and suppression. You don't need to cheat at a game that doesn't matter in the first place. Again, let math and logic and reason demonstrate what mere "patriotic duty" apparently does not.

And after all that, after all the fine thoughts and good deeds, he still might win again. There's actually a pretty good chance of it. What then? I wish I knew the answer to that.

Back in my wild youth, I did have my quieter moments when I read philosophy and economics, classics, things like that. I probably had a grip at the time on philosophy about like Otto in A Fish Called Wanda, but being older and hopefully a bit wiser now, it comes back around with more heft. Re-reading the Stoics, Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus and Seneca and such, is a good reminder about understanding what we can and can't control, and adjusting accordingly for ourselves.

So at the very least, don't despair, but prepare. Think about what specific aspects of your life will be adversely affected by the return of this demented old wet-brained pervert. It could be something concrete like your access to decent health care, or something more abstract, like the sinking realization that this country has a very deep sickness in its collective soul right now, and it simply may not recover in your lifetime. Maybe never.

All the people and things that we care about eventually come to an end. Toxins build up, systems break down, parts corrode and fall into disrepair. You can treat it and maybe prolong the inevitable, but sooner or later the bill comes due. The people who yap loudest about how much they supposedly love their country, refer to it as a living thing, as she or her, often seem to be the ones causing the most damage. The old gal is taking on some serious water these days, and the people who have the most power to help seem intent on drowning her.

So each of us really needs to consider the odds, and what our responses are to various scenarios. Maybe you decide you've had it, you don't want to leave but you can't stay anymore to continue watching the controlled demolition, helpless and mute. How do you move on? Maybe it's time to get your passport in order, see what the emigration requirements are to various places. Just in case.

For me, it's still a bit cathartic to vent and complain about the whole lot of it, but it's a very small part of my daily life, and I do and engage in other, more constructive things. I'm sure most of you do as well, and maybe it's healthier for us all to do more of those things and less of this thing.. I think we all need to find ways to insulate ourselves from the penumbra of pro-wrestling madness from these people, as well as to assure ourselves of the ability to just keep going with our jobs, families, money and health issues, all the things that we are all affected by to some degree, and can be made worse if we let ourselves get demoralized by the bastards.

There are some things you simply cannot get around -- the monopolies you pay each month for all your utilities; the needs for food and shelter and love and culture -- but we have choices about what we read and see and where we spend our money. Instead of bitching about the New York Times just drop them like a sack of manure, and don't look back. Instead of complaining about CNN having the teen rapist Alan Doucheowitz or the liar Kellyanne Con-Way defiling our teevee screens one more fucking time, just cut CNN loose. They're fucking useless anyway. Instead of griping about why no one is doing anything about climate change, look at what your contribution to that is, and reduce it by ten percent, then another ten percent.

If enough people do these things, all of which are within their power, things will change. A big part of it is the gatekeeper corporate media, whose vested interest is to get you riled up about shit you can't control, and hey while you're here check out our ads for cheeseburgers or boner pills or a big gas-guzzling truck to take your mind off your tiny dick. I stopped watching all teevee news, except for local weather, and that's one sure way to clear your head. I can't recommend it enough.

I don't necessarily agree 100% with the concept of amor fati -- to love or embrace whatever fate has in store for us, but you get the idea. If the fate of the country is Trump getting re-elected and ramping up his agenda, knowing he can get away with literally anything now, I don't think it's necessary or even wise to simply embrace that, or even passively accept it.

But we should prepare for it, not only because of how it will enable him and his henchmen to continue killing off this country, but because of what it clarifies about the citizenry. Blame the electoral college or the media or Russian Fakebook nonsense or whatever, but the fact of the matter is that there are enough people here who are okay with all of it -- they either actively support it, or are simply too goddamned lazy to get off their asses and do their job as citizens.

The 2016 election posed a conundrum to the engaged observer -- did the result reflect what the country had become, or did it reveal what it has always been? It seems to be a large measure of both, now infused and empowered with technology and authoritarianism and incoherent rage.

We can laugh at those dorks in Richmond yesterday, with their Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle camo-drag and their dick substitutes positioned in often comically dangerous places. Look at the photos of these morons, you wouldn't hire any of them to sweep your front porch. They're useless and they know it. Their biggest enemy is not Antifa, it's hardening arteries and sodium benzoate.

But they won. They marched with masks and .50 cal sniper rifles and even grenade launchers, through the streets of a state capital, defying laws and challenging authorities to do something about it. Their intent is to set up "sanctuary counties" where people can have whatever weapons they want, and the sheriffs won't enforce the laws.

And no one did or will do a goddamned thing about any of it. You think these assholes are up on it now, you wait until their boy skates on impeachment, tells Schiff and Pelosi to go fuck themselves in the SOTU speech, and openly cheats his way to re-election.

The beauty of it is, if everyone just ignores all that and shows up anyway, we can beat them back. Always remember, there are more of us than there are of them. We just have to stop dicking around, herding cats and worrying about what MoDo and Bobo and the rest of the slop-ed losers think about anything. They are trying to demoralize you. Stop letting them.

Operation Golden Chicken

If you had a nickel for everyone who got suckered into thinking that Cadet Bonespurs was really going to start a full-on shooting war with Iran, you could retire young. First and most importantly, bullies don't start fights with people who can actually fight back. Big part of the bully ethos.

Secondly, how many times do we have to do this dance before the endlessly credulous media saps and their panels of hacks figure it out? He did this with North Korea and Venezuela, shaking his tiny wiener at them for a while before putting it back in his pants and declaring either victory or love. The dictators of those countries are still in power, doing exactly what they were doing before numbnuts decided to splash his brilliance all over them.

It's helpful to consider the back story to all this, as well as the current ramifications of the pattern of actions with respect to Iran. It hasn't been all that long since Princess Snowflake and Big Daddy were in bed with Qassem Soleimani's Iran Republican Guard (IRGC), laundering money to build a hotel in Baku that -- get this -- never got built.

Most people who hear the phrase "money laundering" go all Office Space and start running for a dictionary definition. To be fair, the practical points of money laundering are intentionally difficult to follow. But it's essentially based on fairly simple premises -- find a cash-heavy business; falsify transactions; create nested shell entities as much as possible. Lather, rinse, repeat.

In the case of Trump Tower Baku, since high-end construction is particularly susceptible to cost overruns (or "cost overruns"), it's easy to run money through there, and chalk it up to a number of things -- materials, labor, overseas accounting practices. Think of The Sopranos scenes where they covered the "no-show" jobs on the construction sites -- a bunch of goombahs sitting around making sure minimal (if any) work gets done, possibly waiting for someone to bring a satchel full of illicit cash to move through the process. They can launder more money if the building is finished, sure, but they can move plenty of cash even if it never gets built.

We've all made fun of Trump's many and varied branding failures -- steaks, vodka, board games, magazines, airline, and so on. Then there's the actual business, the Taj Mahal casino, that he famously bankrupted.

It would be more surprising than not to find proof that all of the above failures were in fact not failures, but simply vehicles for laundering mob cash. Trump's dad got him in with the Italian mob early on, and when they all went to prison or got killed, and the Russians took over in NYC, Fat Donny got in bed with them. It didn't matter if Trump Vodka took off or not -- in fact, it was probably better off for all that it got written off as another speculative failure.

In his 2016 book, David Cay Johnston chronicles the account of how, when the Taj Mahal was bleeding cash and Donald was facing foreclosure, Fred Trump bought $3 million worth of chips to keep him afloat. That's money laundering.

(Incidentally, if you haven't read that book, you really should. It's a very quick read, and it ably shows how Trump's rise to power was greased not by the decades of mendacious fundamentalism of the Republicans, but rather by associations with Democratic politicians, corrupt state gaming boards, and most of all, a gullible NYC media that, as Jimmy Breslin noted long ago, could be bought with a simple return phone call.)

So he's more than corrupt enough to allow himself to have a "business association" with the suddenly psychotic Soleimani. (Don't get me wrong -- Soleimani was certainly not a good guy, responsible for many deaths, but somehow Trump manages to express his love regularly for openly, prolifically murderous despots such as Putin, Kim, and the Filipino thug Duterte, who brags about his extrajudicial slaughter.)

By the same token, Trump is also corrupt enough not only to rent out American troops to the Saudis as mercenaries, he's even craven enough to boast about it. So what's the going rate there, and whose bank account gets the payments? (Certainly not the troops themselves; they are free to fight while their stateside families live on food stamps in base housing. Oo-rah!) What's the payout when someone dies? Does it depend on whether the death was violent, or an accident, or illness or heat stroke once the summer comes? Does the family get some of that sweet Saudi cash then, or is it all for Jared? How does Erik Prince feel about having competition for his services?

Seriously, if we're so energy independent, why are we literally renting American troops to a bunch of inbred petrocrats in the country which spawned the monsters that perpetrated the worst attack on American soil? Anybody in our librul corporate media want to ask them that, or are they just gonna sit there and encourage the Secretary of Defense -- 'scuse me, the acting SecDef, we no longer have an actual functioning gubmint with accountable professionals in identifiable positions of employment -- to lie to them some more about just how many of our embassies Qassem Soleimani was planning to attack?

(Personally, my money is on all of them. It may take a few more days for them to ratchet the lie up that far, but they're nothing if not persistent.)

Compare and contrast with a couple months ago, when a Saudi military trainee murdered three people at the Pensacola Naval Air Station, while two other Saudis filmed the incident, and all Mister Tough Guy did about that was apologize on behalf of the Saudi princes. Yeah, real fucking American hero there.

So this is where Genius Q. Dealmaker's brilliant, once-in-a-lifetime negotiation skills have gotten us -- instead of having the Iranians under a flawed yet effective deal that pushed their nuclear ambitions out to 2030 at the earliest, there is now no deal. And of course they have every incentive to pursue and finish a nuclear weapon as soon as possible, and their previously somewhat restive population is now firmly behind the mullahs.

All because that soggy, senile bastard couldn't handle the possibility that BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA, A DAMNED KNEE-GROW, had managed to coordinate a better deal than he, Fuckface John Von Clownstick, Genius At Work, and the smartest, bravest, handsomest human ever to grace the earth with its tiny footprint, could have done. The fact is that any single member of our intrepid media could, way back in 2015 when this was all just a big joke, simply asked Mister Dealmaker to take us through just one (1) example of his countless masterful deals, and let the camera roll and the clown car empty itself, maybe we could have avoided this.

But we are where we are, and we're going wherever we're going. Just because he probably doesn't have the balls or brains to get into a boner-fied invasion of Iran doesn't mean that he isn't just monstrous enough to, say, nuke one of their cities to make an example of them. He's already spooked them into accidentally shooting down a passenger jet, and you can bet that he won't lose a wink of sleep over the dead. It's beyond arguing whose fault it was -- he literally does not care. At all.

Nixon had his "madman theory," but the subtext was always that he was actually a rational actor, but simply unwilling to publicly be seen prematurely taking anything off the table as a negotiation point. Trump is the other way around, pinballing wildly from one reaction to the next, coming off like a more cartoonish Lethal Weapon Mel Gibson, where you're not really sure what he wants or what all he's willing to do to get it.

What would be a sensible rationale for Iran to sign on to a deal with the very person who wiped his ass with the previous deal they had in place? What sane person even bothers discussing anything with someone like that? What's in it for them? Not getting nuked? Might want to check with yer boss Pootie-Poot then, chief; who does Trump suppose sold those centrifuges to Tehran in the first place?

On top of it all, the Iraqi government has urged that we remove all our troops from their country, to which Commander Babyfingers wasted no time in responding, fuck you, pay me, making us now an occupying force, an unwanted guest.

It's about to get worse, probably in multiple ways, in multiple areas, and this jabbering buffoon can only see how he and his scummy family and friends can wet their beaks from the mayhem. Since nearly half of us learned nothing from the Cheney regime, it's probably what we deserve.

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.