New York for Kyiv? Boston for Taipei?

Now that the United States doesn't have bodies coming home from the lesser paved parts of the world (the bodies we're generating tend to be locals and remain where we drop them...) the U.S. public can go back to sleep regarding it's foreign policy doin's around the world whilst the foreign policy nabobs can go back to the sort of stuff they enjoy; pondering Great Power rivalries.

And current events have had a way of bringing those rivalries up in the nightly news. 

First back in October we had worries that the People's Republic of China was - at least - thinking about forcibly re-uniting the island of Taiwan with the Motherland.

Now the focus has shifted to eastern Europe, where Russian military moves appear to be directed against Ukraine.

The larger questions that arise from these potential conflicts are the same ones that have been in place since the end of WW2, namely that 1) as the Western hyperpower the United States is, effectively, the Western "big stick" in Great Power confrontation, but 2) there is always the question of the degree to which a United States would be and will be willing to risk escalation with the other big nuclear powers - Russia and China - over threats to the U.S.'s non-nuclear allies.

Some "allies" don't believe the U.S. is willing to do this at all; one of the prime drivers of the Israeli nuclear program was the desire to be independent of U.S. political will. France much the same (with a heaping helping of post-1940-defeat-shame). 

My understanding is that the U.K. was the only Western nuclear power who hung on to the "special relationship", developing their nukes purely as a way to avoid sitting at the geopolitical kid's table.

There's also the issue of diplomatic linkage.

The European nations are militarily bound up with the U.S. in NATO. You nuke Berlin, it's going to cost you. Israel, too, has always had a (in my personal opinion an unhealthily) close relationship with the U.S. 

In theory those polities can depend on U.S. military power to back their integrity if threatened. They can act as if they had a portion of that power, which gives them a certain degree of geopolitical freedom and international influence beyond their inherent military strength.

(At least that was the c.w. until Trump; now the GOP is full-on ethno-nationalist and "America First" and, frankly, if I was Berlin or London I'd be hesitant to make plans based on the notion that Uncle Sammy had my back 24/7/365. President Trump 47 (or Tom Cotton or Marjorie Taylor Greene) may very well be most unwilling to go to the mat for latte-sipping socialist Eurotrash.) 

Smaller states with relations short of full alliance like Ukraine and Taiwan don't have those options. They pretty much have to design their relationships with their larger neighbors based on their assessment of the willingness - or, particularly, potential unwillingness - of the Land of the Big PX to risk a bigger fight rather than give their rivals the win.

And that means that the U.S. itself has to - or, at least, should - think hard about the degree to which it's willing to risk that fight for those polities. 

After twenty years of lies, damned lies, and delusion the current U.S. administration finally admitted that there was nothing in Afghanistan worth the bones of a West Virginia grenadier. 

Will a non-America-First administration be willing to risk that, and more, to ensure that Taipei remains free of PRC occupation? To keep the Donbass as part of the Ukraine?

What frustrates me about this, and the only reason that I'm writing this post, is because of the combination of indifference, stupidity, and hubris that seems to characterize the U.S. public and most political discussion about these topics.

The U.S. press spends about five or six more times the amount of talking nonsense about "critical race theory" than it does these potential collisions. The degree of public literacy about the risk-versus-rewards of an aggressive Taiwan policy in the linked article above is appalling; if damn near 70% of the U.S. public want their government to recognize Taiwan as an independent nation? 

They've been face-down in the edible weed far too long.

There's discussion to be had - and, potentially, arguments to be made - for resisting Chinese and Russian aggression in places like the West Pacific and eastern Europe. 

Those discussions are difficult and complex...and are not going on. 

Instead the public and, it appears, most media and political talking heads, are trying to reduce the issues to simple us-versus-them jingoism.

Yes. I realize that's how a lot of "geopolitics" gets done here in the Land of the Freedumb.

But, frankly, after the twenty-year-long disaster that has been the Phony War on Terror?

It's really time that We the People grew up and started putting away these childish things.

A collision with China or Russia may, indeed, be inevitable (or, as Andy will remind you in the case of China, is already happening...)

But I'd like to think that if it happens it will happen for sound geopolitical reasons. For U.S. national interests. 

I'd like to think that the systems of supposed self-government - the "free press", the representatives of the People in Congress, the foreign specialists in the Departments of State and Defense - would have conducted a thorough discussion and analysis of the potential gains and risks before it happens.

But.

That would mean thinking geopolitical strategy and, as former friend of the blog Seydlitz would tell you, the United States don't do "strategy".

We do the shit out of "critical race theory", though, so there's that.

Jesus wept.

Whistling...no, partying...past the graveyard.

Perhaps the most bizarre part of the infamous National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) draft EIS is not that it advocates easing up on the emissions standards for American-made vehicles. Comforting business at the expense of the public is, after all, the preferred approach of the Republican Party and the current Administration in particular. The GOP has become not just explicitly the Party of Calhoun but the Party of John D. ("the public be damned!") Rockefeller.

No, it's the part that's buried on page 37 of this sucker. It reads:

"Global mean surface temperature is projected to increase by approximately 3.48°C (6.27°F) under the No Action Alternative by 2100. Implementing the lowest emissions alternative(Alternative 7)would increase this projected temperature rise by 0.001°C (0.002°F), while implementing the highest emissions alternative (Alternative 1)would increase projected temperature rise by 0.003°C (0.005°F) the No Action Alternative."
(NHTSA, 2018)

I want to just stop and think about that for a moment.

This is the U.S. government - and not just the U.S. government, but a U.S. government headed by a man who insists that anthropogenic climate change is some sort of gimmick cooked up with the nefarious yellow Reds to kneecap the Trump Organization's profits - saying casually that the mean surface temperature of the Earth is going to climb almost 4 degrees C in roughly 80 years. Ho, hum. Nothing to see here.

This is not sane or sensible. This is a "What the fucking ACTUAL fuck!?!" moment.

To put this in perspective, historians strongly suspect that considerably more limited climatic fluctuations contributed in large measure to economic and military problems in the Roman Empire in both the Third and Fourth Centuries:

"(t)he crucial development was the severe drought of the fourth century that lasted nearly forty years, one of the worst in 2000 years. Documented by the Dulan-Wulan tree-ring chronology, prevailing drought conditions began in 338 a.d. and continued until 377, when wetter conditions returned. The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (enso) Pacific Ocean climate pattern is a candidate as a broader climate system cause.Both the Douglas Fir data from New Mexico and the kauri data from New Zealand are sensitive to tropical Pacific enso forcing,the most geographically pervasive mode of climate forcing on earth. The extent of this drought in time and space suggests that it played a critical role in driving the mobile pastoral federation that coalesced around the name of “Huns” somewhere east of the Don River, to seek pastures and predation farther to the west and south. The dendrodata confirm speculation about an environmental factor in the Hunnic invasion that goes back at least a century. Historical sources indicate that the Huns reached the Don River by the 370s and crossed it c. 375. Their attacks in the area north of the Black Sea drove the Goths to flee into the Roman Empire and ultimately to attack it, destroying an emperor and his army in 378 at Adrianople (now Idirne, Turkey), one of the greatest military defeats in Roman history."
(McCormick et al, 2012)

This drought was probably the result of a slight cooling period that is estimated to have been less than 1-1.5 degrees C.

(from McCormick et al, 2012)

The temperature change offhandedly predicted by the NHTSA EIS, on the other hand, is closer to the lower bound of what we call the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), which began approximately 55 million years before present. This event is tied to some fairly spectacular changes in terrestrial and marine ecosystems:

"The onset of the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum has been linked to an initial 5 °C temperature rise and to extreme changes in Earth's carbon cycle. Fossil records for many organisms show major turnovers. For example, in the marine realm, a mass extinction of benthic foraminifera, a global expansion of subtropical dinoflagellates, and an appearance of excursion, planktic foraminifera and calcareous nanofossils all occurred during the beginning stages of PETM. On land, modern mammal orders (including primates) suddenly appear in Europe and in North America. Sediment deposition changed significantly at many outcrops and in many drill cores spanning this time interval." (Wikipedia, 2018)"

I mean, we're talking about the rise of an entire ecosystem. The evolution of a small Labrador-sized forest critter into Mister Ed. The emergence of what would eventually become Mitch McConnell and other, intelligent, hominids.

A normal, intelligent-human-being response to this sort of change would be to scream and run around in circles like your pants were on fire.

I honestly have NO idea what a world 4 degrees hotter than this one would look like, but it sure as hell will be different. Wetter, certainly; most if not all the sub-polar land ice will melt, and sea levels will rise some measurable degree. Many major cities, located along the coast or in low-lying coastal plains, will have to be relocated, effectively rebuilt, or be flooded. Coastal structures of all sorts will have to be moved, or protected. Storms will become larger, and more intense, and Infrastructures will have to be hardened to protect from them. Out current global food supply system that provides bananas in the winter and lettuce year-round will have to change in ways it will be difficult to anticipate and may be impossible to sustain.

These costs in money alone will be immense.

Croplands will change; some becoming too wet, some too dry, others simply "migrating" to find climatic conditions suitable for the types of crops, and those may have to change, in some cases dramatically. Some will not be capable of such short-term adjustment, and humans may find that, for example, apples or cherries are luxury items, grown in tiny amounts and offered to a tiny, ultra-rich minority.

Huge portions of the tropics may become effectively uninhabitable, with summer temperatures rising to levels beyond which unprotected humans can reasonably work outdoors. Rainfalls will shift, with some areas getting too much, some too little. Humans will have to move towards, or away, from those areas which can no longer sustain practical agriculture, lack accessible potable water, or are just too hot, too wet, or too dry to live without heroic engineering accommodations.

This is - or should be - a national-emergency-type scenario, a WW2-level sort of national mobilization but against an "enemy" that cannot be defeated. The entire world will change in ways that are nearly impossible to predict with great confidence, other than "it's going to be a really, really big fucking change". Wars will erupt over access to water, or cropland, or DRY land. Entire populations may migrate, with all the associated horrors - Google "mfecane", if you have the stomach for it - and there's no guarantee that any particular military, or political, solution will be effective responding to those migrations. But one would think a prudent, normal intelligent human reaction would be to 1) try and do everything possible to avert the result, and 2) do what one can to anticipate and mitigate the harm if it does occur.

But we are not seeing a normal-intelligent-human-being sort of reaction to this.

The people that run the United States - and I'm not sparing the "liberals" of the Democratic Party here; if they had the sense God gave a goat they'd be running around like their hair was on fire about this - seem uninterested in this coming World War C.

And that, as much as anything else, is what this reminds me of. If you haven't yet, read Max Brooks World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie Apocalypse First, just because it's a cracking fun read, a classic horror tale.

But mostly because of the point that it makes: that human nature hates to look brutal truths straight on. The book is full of "good people" - doctors, soldiers, politicians, scientists - who hide or deny or evade or just refuse to scream for help in the face of what is increasingly obviously a desperately terrifying future. Unlike the Trumpkins, who are simply doing this to make money before the disaster sweeps us away, they all have good reasons; they fear panic, or political collapse, or dictatorship, or being wrong, or causing a backlash. But the book makes the horrible point that, in the words of one of the characters: “Most people don't believe something can happen until it already has. That's not stupidity or weakness, that's just human nature.”

The Trumpkins are just the weapons-grade stupid endmember. The entire human race, nearly every human government, seems eager to avoid the inevitable conclusions made evident by this scientific prediction. The collective response seems to be at best a massive yawn, at worst a deliberate fingers-in-the-ears-la-la-la-I-can't-hear-you denial.

The entire business is just depressing as hell.

Maybe we'd respond sooner, and better, if it was Huns.

Why Trump?

One thing that just seems bizarre about the whole Trumpietsky Soyuz business is...why Trump?

I mean, let's not kid ourselves; the Росси́йская Федера́ция has, at the very least, regional geopolitical aspirations that an aggressive U.S. and Western alliance could, and probably would, be troublesome to deal with. Putin has stated his desire to restore the borders of the old Soviet Union. His ambitions may go even further:

"Andrej Illarionov, the President’s chief economic adviser from 2000 to 2005, Mr Putin seeks to create “historical justice” with a return to the days of the last Tsar, Nicholas II, and the Soviet Union under Stalin. Speaking to the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, Mr Illarionov warned that Russia will argue that the granting of independence to Finland in 1917 was an act of “treason against national interests”. “Putin’s view is that he protects what belongs to him and his predecessors...parts of Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic States and Finland are states where Putin claims to have ownership."

A United States government that is willing to put military force on the line to keep Russia out of the Baltics, or Ukraine (Finland? Seriously? Didn't you fuckers learn the first time..?) would be big problems for that agenda.

So the notion that an autocratic kleptostate would be enthusiastic about reproducing its ways and means in other polities isn't exactly unbelievable.

But if you're a cunning ex-KGB officer (or an ambitious up-and-comer in the GRU or FSB...) why the hell would you pick a guy like Donald Freaking Trump?

I don't know how old you are or where you grew up, but I'm a child of the late Sixties and Seventies. I grew up in southern Jersey/southeastern Pennsylvania and was a young adult in the late Seventies and early Eighties when Trump was all over the goddamn place.

He was, not to mince words, a buffoon. What Bugs Bunny would call "an im-bessel". A joke. There was a glossy "humor" magazine called Spy that owned him constantly, making vicious mockery of his ridiculous boasting, his pretensions and vulgarity, his stupidity and egotism. Remember "short-fingered vulgarian"? Spy. But it didn't take other people mocking him - the dude was a total shitshow, everybody I knew thought he was a complete doofus. I mean...the guy went broke running casinos, a business where people give you money!

And, again, this was forty years ago when the guy was fairly lucid. Go listen to interviews with him in the Seventies. He was still a braying ass, but he could actually parse a sentence and pursue a fairly complex argument. Fairly...this WAS still Trump. Dude had never been a rocket scientist. Still.

Fast-forward thirty years, though?

Christ, you'd think the gomer had been hit repeatedly on the forehead with a brick. He's barely lucid, repeating monosyllables like a third-grader who's drunk a can of Sterno. I'm a Russian intelligence officer, why the hell would I trust this knucklehead? That's always been my problem trying to see Trump as Putin's sockpuppet. No matter how far you have your hand up Trump's ass, it's gotta be damn deadly difficult to make his mouth move the way you want it.

But for what it's worth, I came across something today that convinced me of how this fell out.

Here's my theory, courtesy of Ed Burmila at Gin and Tacos.

"I've never believed, and do not believe, that Russia gives a shit about Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump per se. What they care about is creating as much of a shitshow out of America's increasingly feeble attempts to govern itself so that it, Russia, can present itself to the world as the safer, stabler economic and military protecting power.

Domestic chaos in the US also drastically reduces the chance of American attempts to limit Russian geographic expansion (and if you fail to understand that geographic security is the guiding force behind all Russian strategic thinking for the past five centuries, read up and get back to us). There was no Grand Scheme to "install" Trump. They just saw an opportunity and took it.

The U.S. would do exactly the same – and has repeatedly in the past – if we thought there was some opportunity to install a total assclown dictator type in Russia or another country."

So, yeah. That's pretty much it. It wasn't Trump, or, at least, not because of some particular virtue or value in Trump. He was just what they had - a weapons-grade moron who was deep in hock to Russian mob money - and they were fine with using it to help the goddamn U.S. public vote themselves a nice hole to fall in.

Somehow that just pisses me off more, though.

It would be one thing if the whole Trump nightmare was part of a deeply laid, brilliantly cunning plan concocted by a cabal of evil geniuses - Kochs and Waltons and Putin and Bannon and Miller and Trump - to destroy the New Deal America I grew up in and return us to the appalling depths of the Gilded Age as just another kleptocratic white nationalist shithole country.

But to be relegated to immiseration because some GRU captain got the goods on this ridiculous douchebro?

That's just insulting.

Momento Mori

I never quite know how to deal with this day.

Typically I simmer all day in a sort of low, sullen...not quite anger, more like...irritation, like a peat fire smouldering deep below the surface. My fellow citizens' clueless, careless, indifference to the whys and hows their soldiers died is bitter gall, and the unfortunate alternative is a kind of fawning reverence for some imaginary soldier who has "fought for their freedom" that is almost more irking than the cluelessly indifferent.

I understand that most of these people are trying to say or do something "nice" on a day that has been set aside for what they dimly sense as a sort of patriotic celebration of GIs. They usually have no clue that this is something different from Veterans' Day, and, like a drunk at a wedding, proceed to either offend, with their jingo patriotism, or by their hiding their eyes from the abyss that is death in war.

I want them to just say it; "These men and women died not for me but because of me, because of my choices, or because I chose not a make choices. And many of them, and all of them that have died since the end of the Korean War in 1953, died for damn near nothing, died chasing the ghosts of my fears and ignorance. They died because I thought of dominoes, or of Evil Empires, or of fighting them there so we wouldn't have to fight them here. They died because I let unscrupulous men lie me into fear, into foolish anger, into hate. They died because I was a bad citizen.

And I have never come to terms with that. I've never admitted that, or repented of that, or apologized to the dead for my acts or my indifference."

I know that won't happen, and that galls me, too. We Americans are bad at things like regret, repentance, and apologies.

So I'll say it here.

Fuck, I'm sorry, guys.

I fucked up. I trusted people I never should have. I didn't rage with fire and steel against those people who killed you. No, not the people you fought. The people who sent you to fight for nonsense, or hubris, or greed, or stupidity. And once I knew that they were fools, or criminals, or both I did nothing to punish them for murdering you. They still live, many of them honored and respected, while you are nothing but dust and ashes.

I am ashamed.

All I can promise is that I'll try and do better in the future. I'll try and make sure that they can't make any more of you.

That is all.

Take a break in place and smoke 'em if you gottem.

And, as always on this day; this.

Fruit of the Poison Tree

See, here's the thing.

Torture corrupts.

Call it what you want; "enhanced interrogation", "extraordinary measures", "psikhushka". The systematic infliction of suffering is inherently corrupting to the people who administer it and the organizations that employ it.

Because torture is not interrogation.

Interrogation is intended to gain information.

Torture is intended to gain confessions. Confessions that the torturers want to hear.

A person that uses torture to gain confessions becomes useless as an interrogator and deaf to information. The agonized babble of a person suffering beyond coherence quickly becomes meaningless noise. If you are tortured you will say anything, everything, to make the torture stop. If you are the torturer you lose the ability to find the truth amid the pain and fear.

An organization that employs torture and torturers quickly becomes a servant of the propaganda that the torture is meant to support and the presumptions that the torture is designed to confirm.

Armies that use torture begin to become instruments of that propaganda rather than instruments of policy. Intelligence agencies that use torture begin to become guardians of the secrets of and defenders of the barbarities of torture rather than cold instruments of state. Nations that use torture quickly find how useful it is in generating results that they want in the short term. And the spiral of torture, and lying to hide the torture, and lying to excuse the torture, and lying to hide and excuse the lies, works deeper and deeper into the culture of the army, and the intelligence agency, and the nation.

Until first the torturers end up running the intelligence agency.

And then the torturers become the generals.

And, finally, the torturers become the presidents and prime ministers.

The toxic "war on terror" has been the ground that has nursed this poison tree, and has given it the night and fog it needed to grow. To our shame We the People have never insisted on throwing open the doors, letting in the light that would have killed this noxious weed, never dug deep and uprooted and thrown it and the torturers on the fire. In our fear and hate we have let it grow.

If shame were still a permissible public emotion we should be ashamed of ourselves.

But we will not.

And, instead, we will nurture the fruit of that poison tree in our hands and our hearts.

Update 3/16: Here's a perfect example of what I'm talking about, little Richie Lowry from the National Review, with my annotations:

"The enhanced interrogations were brutal. Zubaydah was struck, placed in stress positions, confined in small boxes and repeatedly waterboarded. During one session, he became unresponsive. By any standard, this was extreme and right up to the legal line." ("Up to the legal line? Seriously? "Unresponsive" means "barely functioning, i.e. close to death" If that's your "legal line" you're working in fucking Lublyanka Prison, not for the supposedly-rule-of-law U.S. government.)

"The CIA didn’t learn of any planned attack in the U.S."(No shit. Because Zubaydah didn't know anything to begin with.); it did become confident that Zubaydah wasn’t holding back anything about one (Why? Because he refused to scream out some lie that matched the torturer's hypothesis to stop the torture? That's the problem with torture - you can't be sure if the screamer is telling something he actually know,s or just something you want to hear, or whether the pain has simply driven him mad and he's screaming anything to make the pain stop.). "From his capture to his transfer to the Department of Defense on September 5, 2006, information from him produced 766 intelligence reports."(That's nice. I can fill more than 700 "intelligence reports" with all sorts of stuff, from trivia to genuine intelligence to complete nonsense. The sheer volume that came from this poor bastard's piehole means exactly nothing other than if you torture someone he or she will scream lots of stuff.)

"In the cold light of day, we would have handled all of this differently. The Bush administration shouldn’t have been as aggressive in its legal interpretations. We should have realized that we had more time to play with, and that the program itself would become a black mark on our reputation overseas and such a domestic flashpoint that we would basically lose all ability to interrogate detainees (droning became the preferred alternative)." (This is to suggest that the "problem" with this was purely political, or organizational, and not moral. This is the language of the corporate torturers of the KGB or the Gestapo and now the CIA; the problem isn't that we're monsters, the problem is that being monsters hampers our messaging. That, in itself, is monstrous. If your problem with atrocity isn't the atrocity itself but how you think it's perceived you ARE a monster.)

There it is. Lowry, comfortably ensconced in his office at NR, can blithely complain that the problem wasn't that agents of his government used pain, fear, and suffering to torment some poor random schulb, but that the torment has bad optics and that we shouldn't cold-shoulder the torturers just because torture looks bad on its' face.

If Lowry were to be snatched up and taken to some nameless place in Central Asia and tortured mercilessly he would be the first to scream out any and everything his tormentors asked of him. So would you. So would I. And yet, he finds that perfectly okay...so long as the person being tortured is NOT him.

There's a place for that sort of person.

And it's labeled: "Here be monsters".

Update 3/16 pm: So now we learn that Ms. Haspel was not in charge of the dungeon where Mr. Zubaydah was tortured when he was tortured by other Americans. No. She was, instead, in charge of the dungeon during the time other people were tortured. And then, like any good little torturer, she beavered away hiding and destroying the evidence of the crimes she and her minions committed.

Here's the important thing to remember about all this.

Every American intelligence official of the War on Terror Generation; Ms. Haspel, every field officer, every first-line supervisor in the CIA (and, presumably, the DIA, and many of the other related intelligence agencies) is tarred with torture. If they didn't torture they knew those who did. Or they received "intelligence" derived from torture. Or they suspected the torture, or should have, and kept silent and thus complicit in the torture.

There are no clean hands here. Not all the way up to the Oval Office, where the Commander-in-Chief, like any other commander, may delegate authority but not responsibility. We the People are responsible, and worse, in that now knowing we have most of us chosen to remain silent and imply our consent.

We are none us innocent of this.

Now we have the choice, whether we sit idly by and let the Orange Fool place a torturer at the head of one of our "intelligence" agencies, or whether we choose to let the punishment for these crimes begin here.

We are either torturers, or we are not.

We are either citizens of a free nation.

Or we are monsters.

More fucking thoughts and prayers

I see it's time to drag this one out. Again.

I know this has nothing to do with the results of the 2016 elections, yet I look around and what I see is just a part of the toxic stew of the very worst of my country that seems to be bubbling cheerfully on every stovetop; arrogant, corrupt, ignorant, splenetic...it makes me think of the piece of Robert Graves' I, Claudius where the cunningly-not-really-a-gimping-halfwit emperor turns his appalling heir loose on Rome, whispering "Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out."

What hits me hardest about these nutter shootings is how they never change anything because of the magical incantation "the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" as if the whole "well-regulated militia" thing was a fantasy and the U.S. Constitution is some sort of Holy Writ, handed down on gold tablets never to be altered or re-imagined.

Well, the Constitution once said that black people were 3/5ths of a registered voter, and that it was illegal to drink a beer.

Both of those ideas were fucked up. So We the People changed the Constitution.

So far, the score of the Second Amendment is "resisting tyrannical government", zero; "butchering other Americans", about a gajillion. I note that all these ammosexuals with their arsenals seem curiously mute about "tyranny" like the idea that the government can freely spy on our communications, or take our stuff if we get arrested - not convicted, mind you, just arrested - for smoking weed. So I conclude that the notion that the "right to keep and bear arms" has pretty much zero percent to do with the sort of people doing actual tyranny-resisting and 100% to do with the sort of fucking people who get a woody out of busting out more than thirty rounds a minute.

But who gives an actual fuck?

Nobody is going to do anything about this. Tomorrow another nutter will take another semiautomatic weapon into another school and another N > 0 number of kiddies and teachers and random poor sonsofbitches will die or be hideously wounded. And we'll hear that there's nothing we can do - in the only industrialized nation that this happens regularly - and we need to have more mental health care (but fuck-all funding for it), and we need to send our thoughts and prayers to the new set of grieving parents and lovers and brothers and sisters whose beloveds have been blown away so I can go to the range tomorrow and bust out 200 rounds of 5.56mm in fifteen minutes.

So, fuck it.

Here's a cute fucking picture of a cute fucking cat.

The Law In Its Impartial Majesty

Here's the thing: by UCMJ, the guy is guilty as hell of the charges he was convicted of.

And the news, as it has always been, has been and is going to be about this one guy, himself, and all his little quirks and tics and the "inside baseball" of the trial and the implications of the not-guilty verdict on the charge of "aiding the enemy". All sorts of people in the U.S. are going to have little hissy fits because this joker is going to jail for being guilty of the crimes that...well, that he did knowing they WERE crimes under the UCMJ.

But here's the other thing; focusing on Manning the man and his trial, is part of the whole damn problem that Manning's acts and his trial throw a damning light on.

Manning uncovered tens, maybe hundreds, maybe even thousands of cases of every sort of problem and trouble in our country's doings both here and abroad ranging from individual and official malfeasance all the way up to arguable war crimes, doings that had been kept from us, doings that We the People as the putative sovereigns of the United States might have been well advised to be knowledgeable of.

We the People responded to that damning knowledge with a massive collective yawn and a fucking shrug.

The problem we're facing in this country isn't that PVT Manning is going to lose the rest of his life at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks. Hopefully he knew what he was doing and did it anyway, knowing that he was going to take the fall for the rest of us.

The problem - and hopefully Manning himself would be the first to agree - is that nobody else, nobody named in all those documents he stole, nobody in the ginormous chain of liars, thieves, grifters, thugs, and butchers that got us into Iraq ten years ago, not a goddamn one of the people responsible for all those deaths, all that loss, all that pain and suffering and misery is going to lose so much as a fucking lunch break over their actions.

And I don't know which is more infuriating; that that pissed me the hell off, or that the rest of my country doesn't seem to give a damn.

Pegging the Moron Meter

Yesterday we finished voting in our "special election" in northwest Oregon.

I've been following this little treasure mostly as a way of checking on the credulity and stupidity level of voters in the Portland metro area, and the final readings of the Moron Meter are now in.

First, on the issue of fluoridation of Portland's water supply, a bizarre coalition of looney Left and looney Right defeated fluoridation because...well, because fluoride isn't natural. God alone knows what these people - about 85,000 of them, by the way - think about pasteurization, immunization, the Germ Theory of disease, and quantum mechanics.

At least we're safe from those goddamn polio monkey serums.

I should note in passing that there are about 446,000 registered voters in Multnomah County, Oregon. And this election was, like almost all elections in Oregon now, done by mail. You didn't have to devote any time or effort to it. You opened the envelope, filled in the little ovals on the form, stuffed the thing back in another envelope and shoved it in the mailbox.

Only about 36% of the electorate - about 160,000 people - even bothered.

But aside from the usual non-interest in the election the real red light on my Moron Meter was pegged to these two guys:

First was a gomer named Lasswell who was running for a position on the Multnomah Educational Service District. Leaving aside the actual role of and value of the MESD, the part that caught me about this guy's ad in the Voter's Pamphlet was is complete and utter incompetence for anything relating to education or any other sort of political administration, for that matter.

The giveaway was his observation about how he was gonna do to the MESD what he'd done in the city of Anfal when he was a'servin' of his Country in Iraq. Because, as we all know, an impoverished Third World city rife with sectarian strife in a former Ottoman province now devastated by war is exactly the political equivalent of the Multnomah Educational Service District.

This goop got 25% of the vote.

Got that? This means that of the some 93,000 people in Multnomah County engaged and motivated enough in the political process to register AND to actually vote in this contest, one in four - 23,382 theoretically-sane individuals - were equally unable to make the same distinction Lasswell could not, between a smashed city in a Muslim state in the Third World and the educational administration of a mid-size American city.

One in four, people. One in four.

But wait; it gets worse.

This goof, name of Morrison, a genuine full-on, rubber-room, unapologetically whackadoodle bull-goose looney whose only issue as a reason for running for Portland Public School board was because WiFi makes your brain all funny (and I tend to agree that someone's brain was all funny here but not that WiFi had anything to do with that) got 18.7 percent of the ballots cast.

Almost 19 percent. Of the people who are probably in the uppermost quintile of engaged and politically aware and socially motivated citizens in the People's Republic of Portland. Nearly one in five. 12,165 people - more than were in the crowd attending that Thorns match I went to watch Sunday.

Voted for a complete and utter tinfoil-hat-grade lunatic.

You can say that, well, fine; the "process worked". The loonies lost.

But think; these are people who shouldn't have gotten anyone's vote. Lasswell, yeah, okay, maybe a handful of people who liked the idea that he was an ex-GI. But Morrison? For fuck's sake, people, the man is certifiable. Around the bend. Ripe for a canvas sportjacket with wraparound sleeves. And yet more than twelve thousand of you fuckers voted for him!

And then you complain about how we can't have nice things.

This is why, people. This is fucking why.

Because a critical minority of you will vote for absolutely goddamn anything no matter how idiotic.

Think about it; if almost one out of five of the most well-informed, motivated, and civically-engaged people in a nationally-known hotbed of social progressivism and intellectual liberalism will vote for a lunatic who is mumbling about electrical radiation melting his brain what the hell is going on out there in places where they think people like Limbaugh, Imhofe, Palin, and Bachmann have a functioning cerebrum?

Jesus wept.

We Are So, so, so, SO Fucked.