Anxiety Attack

I carry a bunch of anger with me. Who I carry it for rotates. -- Daniel Woodrell, Give Us a Kiss

People are apparently getting "anxious" in the final hours, and while it's understandable it's also unproductive. This and five bucks will get you a cup of coffee, but here is my humble advice:  turn that anxiety into anger, and keep it like a grudge. Win, lose, or draw -- whether Biden wins with a 2:1 majority, a ten-million PV lead, and sixty Senate seats, or if Trump somehow manages to cheat and steal and bluff his way through this like he has everything else in his rotten excuse for a life, keep that anger.

Wherever you are, a year from now, five years, ten years, have that anger close by, always there to remind how you felt all year long, how you've felt since 2015. Use it constructively. Maybe you decide to take action at some point -- run for local office, lead a boycott, write off the poisonous people in your life, or just make sure to show up and vote every single time, right on down to dog-catcher.

Beyond that, there's not much you can control. That's why you're anxious. But regardless of the outcome, just as we are approaching the end of one thing -- either the end of a kleptocratic scumbag, or the end of what was left of our hollowed-out husk of a republic -- we are embarking on the beginning of another major project.

And whether that new thing is the long, slow process of trying to restore some semblance of governance and justice to a foul machine, or watching things slide inexorably into violent despotism, the thing for us as individuals is the same:  insulate yourself as much as you possibly can from the decisions of bitter, stupid people who can't let go of their sad, pinched view of the world.

There's nothing you can tell them. There is no point in arguing with them, and there is no compromise to be reached with fascists or supporters of fascism. There is only removing ourselves from their equations as much as possible, and moving forward.

The only things anyone "knows" ahead of time is that it's about to get worse and better. Beyond that, the order and specifics are always in a to-be-determined status. Should the expected take place, and Biden wins by a healthy margin, and the Dems flip the Senate back to sanity (Senaty? Sorry, it was there.), we should all resolve to communicate only with the Democratic politicians, and exhort them to move swiftly and deliberately. Time will be of the essence.

Other than that? You don't owe your Trump-supporting relatives and acquaintances shit. No gloating, no exulting, no "I told you so" or some lame more-in-sorrow-than-pity reconciliation, nor any pwning of conservaturds.

Just this:  they made their decision freely and of their own volition. They have their own bullshit justifications and rationalizations, but after all that is said and done and shat onto the lawn, they know what they supported. Understand them for who and what they are, and understand that it isn't your job to find some half-baked rapprochement with that. They have to take the step of doing the work on themselves to understand just how low they've sunk. You can't do it for them, just like you can't make someone quit their substance abuse habit or gambling addiction or whatever.

My gift for prognostication is not what it once was (and it was never much to begin with), so I'm loath to make rash predictions. I would say there is some non-zero chance for each of the four outcomes I outlined in the previous post. (In order from #1 to #4, something like: 10%, 10%, 5%, 75%.)

More broadly speaking, I think it's really down to one of two possible outcomes:  the statistically likely one is the Biden landslide, but the possibility of it being close enough for Trump to cheat and steal cannot be dismissed. I think we've seen entirely enough he can't do that scenarios where he does that and gets away with it, to just ignore that likelihood. A cornered animal with zero scruples will use everything they have to avoid their fate, and he does have some considerable tools to delay and deny and poison the well just enough. And he knows no one in either party will stop him from trying.

But let's not engage in last-minute doom-scrolling. Let's err on the side of cautious optimism and say that the landslide holds, that it gets called early and the spread only increases from there. That still means two months of Trump's wrecking crew stealing everything that isn't nailed down, pardoning every scumbag criminal enabler, leaving as big a mess as possible, etc. That still means the Democrats will have to be actively nudged by their constituents away from any sort of rapprochement whatsoever with the traitorous fascists across the aisle.

Again, use that anger and keep it by your side, like a faithful pet that you can nurture forever. Use it to remind yourself that who they are right now is who they were all along, and who they will always be until they resolve to change. Character is fate, as Heraclitus knew 2,500 years ago, and so people either recognize their issues and choose to deal with them, or not. The rest of us always have at least some ability to walk away from them.

Season's Beatings (October Edition)

Lost in the narrowed bandwidth of the corporate "broadcasting" channels was the secretly recorded call between Melanoma Tramp and her former sidekick, Stephanie Something-Or-Other-Who-Fuckin'-Cares, in which Melanoma basically said "fuck Christmas." As we all know from Saint Bill O'Reilly of the Church of Loofah Harassment, there's a WAR ON CHRISTMAS, YOU GUYS, which makes the Baby Jesus cry tears of blood or something.

So one might think -- if one were, let's say, stupid enough to expect anything resembling intellectual consistency from the ghouls and rage-monkeys that still fester in that cult of disbelief -- that there might be some sort of outcry or resentment brewing among the Xmas war widows, who have indeed sacrificed more than anyone deployed in an actual war. I don't think anyone's holding their breath, right?

Here's what's annoying about that exchange, and Melanoma's bilious rant:  this fucking broad, who has never done a goddamned thing since arriving in this country but rent out her orifices, has the fuckin' balls to complain about having to put up Christmas decorations. Maybe if we all chipped in and left a C-note or two on the end table, so she feels duly compensated?

I mean, I couldn't possibly care less about White House Christmas decorations, and am repulsed by the Fixed Noise crowd's endless efforts to weaponize the whole thing. I despise all the pro forma bullshit that presidents and even congress members go through routinely, from pardoning turkeys to pledging allegiance to a flag that currently represents nothing but greed and stupidity and indifferent brutality. I actually agree with Melanoma's "fuck Christmas" rant, as far as that goes. But, uh, coming from someone who doesn't actually do anything, but wants all the perks and treats and privileges that come with it? Hey, fuck you, lady. Go back home to your NYC tower and fuck your boyfriend.

This sense of entitlement these people just take as natural, it is not natural, I assure you. The average schmuck is generally grateful just for simple things like good health and stable employment in a job that doesn't make them die inside a little more each day. Most people would kill -- like literally push a button on a stranger -- to have the kind of money and power and privilege that some people take not only for granted, but as their due, as what is owed to them.

Nobody in the Trump family, least of all the current generation, has ever added any value to the world. They just take and consume and pit the peons against each other for their amusement. That's all any of them are capable of, renting weak, morally compromised people to push around. You wouldn't miss any of them if they were suddenly gone, or (better yet) had never been there in the first place.

You want an "alternative history" counterfactual? Imagine for a moment if you had never heard the name "Donald Trump." I don't mean that he didn't get into politics, or even that he didn't exist at all. He existed, but wasn't built up over decades by credulous media dupes. He was just a somewhat wealthy asshole who kept it to himself and stayed off everyone's radar, didn't have to hump the world's leg for decades on end in a futile attempt to recoup the love daddy never showed him. He wasn't given a teevee show for a decade where he pretended to be a big shot and fooled millions of other credulous dupes out there in Real 'murka that he wasn't really a morally depraved money launderer who wanted to bang his own daughter.

Just imagine such a thing for a moment. You feel calmer and more meditative, don't you?

These people are not just bad at politics, they're objectively horrible people, in every way conceivable. I can't even conjure up a proper image of the sort of drooling moron who seriously thinks that any of these scumbags gives half a shit about anyone who isn't themselves. They don't even like each other, they sure don't give a fuck about anyone else.

These idiot fans hang out with their ridiculous cult flags, out in front of a hospital that has a children's oncology ward, among other things, where very sick people are trying to convalesce, while these chimps make noise and bleat undying fealty to their god-emperor-doctor, Kim Don Un, hoping he might come out and wave to them in his limitless beneficence. These sad motherfuckers deserve every little thing life has in store for them.

Extra points for Stormy Daniels' response to Melanoma -- who did softcore shoots of her own, and supposedly some "escorting" as well before she latched onto her booger-daddy -- talking trash about Daniels' five minutes of fame with Mister Man. We can assume it looked more or less like a dick, only smaller.

Ain't That a Shame

As monstrous and awful as Exxon's corporate strategy is, it is also horrifically rational from their point of view, as long as people insist on consuming what they're selling, as much as possible. Next time you take a drive -- or even a walk around the block -- count the jacked-up king-cab gas-guzzlers you see, and multiply by a million, or maybe ten million. Maybe you drive one yourself.

How much meat do you eat, and how often, and where do you acquire it? How many kids do you have? Are they grown, and if so, what do they drive? Again, multiply all those factors by millions, just in the USA, and you can see Exxon's rationale.

Exxon is not the problem. They are giving a critical mass of people what they want. Sure, the entire American corporate media system is really just a giant PR machine calibrated to turn you into a mindless Homer Simpson consumer drone who self-actualizes through big trucks and bigger cheeseburgers. But each of us -- a cell lit of awareness! -- gets to decide whether we want to wallow in that or not.

Economists talk of  behavioral "incentives" and "disincentives" through taxing and regulating various externalities, and they're not wrong. But the truth is much simpler and darker than that. We want to believe that people are intrinsically "good" and rationally self-interested, but we know that the former is subjective and conditional at best, and the latter is only occasionally true. The most charitable way to phrase it might be to point out the obvious -- that your "good" and my "good" almost certainly do not align 100%, and in fact may not even intersect.

One always has to take pains to preface these sorts of blanket statements with the usual "not all" disclaimer, and of course this applies here as well. But clearly a critical mass of people would rather engage perpetually in a dance of debt with instant gratification and gluttonous consumerism, than take even an afternoon to consider their various choices and make even slight reductions.

I hold no brief for the likes of Exxon. I make no excuses for their sociopathic indifference to the planet they despoil, and the people who eke out a living on it. But like the shitty corporate both-sider media, like the shitty corporate-owned oligarchic governance paradigm, they have identified an active consumer market and cultivated it well. Enough people have made a decision to consume the product, and devil take the hindmost.

It doesn't matter if climate change is a hoax or not, if you can't get enough people to give a shit -- and I don't mean heading over to the be-in for an afternoon, but making modest but necessary changes to consumption patterns. They won't until the planet breaks a fat one off in their asses.

Rapacious resource extractors and plutocratic insurgents have been a problem since probably not long after our Mesopotamian forerunners stockpiled the first agricultural surplus. But that problem has always been contingent on lulling just enough of the peons into a permanent state of disequilibrium, of identifying that magic number of doofuses necessary to leverage, and exploiting that subset to the maximum. We are finding out in so many ways that a committed -- or even a collectively disinterested -- minority is more useful and malleable than a dispersed majority. Look around you, and understand that the US is currently in the part between the "before" and "after" photos of a collapse.

That's one thing they didn't bother to tell you when you were in school -- unless you manage to secure enough money and/or power to insulate yourself from the dumbest third of your average classroom, you will always be at their mercy, one way or another.

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

If the Pelosi salon thing lasts longer than twenty-four hours in the endless spin cycle, then this hollowed-out husk of a state deserves to go under, full stop. In the meantime, "I got set up" is maybe not the killer defense Pelosi seems to think it is.

Jesus. [puts palm to forehead, pinches nose, exhales slowly through nose for what seems like an eternity] Jesus H. Christ, people. How the hell, at this point in this infernal game, do the words "perfomative" and "kayfabe" not register with some of these people? There is no need to apologize, or explain, or demur or aver or any of the other cheap lawyer word-games these people play.

Since Trump wasted no time in latching on to this nonsense, all Pelosi needed to do was dump the whole thing in his lap:

Considering just last week Trump had hundreds of people on the White House lawn, clustered and maskless, and spent most of that week racking up dozens of Hatch Act violations, and just yesterday committed a felony and yet another in a long line of impeachable offenses by encouraging voter fraud in North Carolina, maybe he's not the right person to be lecturing anyone else on adhering to regulations. If I committed an infraction or violated an ordinance in getting my hair done, I'll pay the fine and just hire an individual to come to my house next time. In the meantime, you people need to get your fucking priorities straight.

But no, she took this stupid thing both seriously and literally, and so felt compelled to respond in kind. It's difficult to imagine that there are many people left at this point waiting for another reason to vote Democratic, and even fewer whose motivation hinges on the behavior of Nancy Pelosi. But there are a lot of people who would be more motivated to vote Democratic if they just once showed some spine and told their bullies in no uncertain terms to go fuck themselves.

This is not that fucking hard, people. Quit falling for the kayfabe. Stop legitimizing their bullshit as if it's real. Remind them that he won't show his tax returns because he's a fucking criminal. Remind them that they had to drape a fifty-yard tarp over a battleship ramp when he visited yesterday, because he's an infirm codger who can't walk a ramp or hold a glass of water.

I mean, we're not just talking about the Speaker of the House here, we're talking about someone who's held her seat for over thirty years, and usually wins at 3:1 or 4:1 ratios or higher. It's not like she's in a competitive race. And she's eighty years old, so hopefully nearing retirement hint hint.

It's irritating when people -- especially politicians -- who have absolutely nothing to lose play their hand as if there's something to lose. Lady, nobody outside the booger-eating cultists give two shits about your salon visit, so don't even waste the dignity of a fart on it.

At this point, what motivates voters is not "norms" or "decorum" or even ideas and policy positions, it's the understanding that you'll fight, and not put up with ridiculous bullshit. So hey, let's try that.

Cancel Conspiracy Culture

The most interesting question to ask someone in charge of the RNC -- assuming there is someone at least nominally coordinating this hilarious dumpster fire -- regarding cancelled speaker Mary Ann Mendoza is not some arcane specific about whatever high-on-ludes QAnon bullshit she's spinning this week. Nor is it anything about how she thinks the world is under the spell of some shifty J-O-O.

The most interesting way to pose the question would be to get this hypothetical show producer to explain to their own customers why they chose to bump Mary Ann Mendoza, and just watch the wheels spin. This is all a freaky coke circus anyway, might as well send in the clowns.

(Fun fact:  Jerry Falwell Junior was scheduled to speak at the convention. They even told him he could have any time slot on any night. But Ol' Jer said he just wanted to watch. Get it? Just wanted to watch? Hello, is this thing on?)

For some inexplicable reason, I greatly enjoy conspiracy theories, the more convoluted and baroque the better. I find them highly entertaining. But that's a completely different matter than believing them.

One of the more unusual ones I find myself returning to a lot these days is this weird idea that George Soros is quietly funding everything authoritarian douchebags don't like, from the DNC's porn budget to Hillary Clinton's immigrant-child cannibalism pantry to sending every BLM and Antifa protester a fat check for showing up in the streets.

So there's that little Twitter chuckle of where's my check, George? We've all seen that. But let's deconstruct the premise down to its essence:  a shady billionaire is quietly funding a variety of individuals and entities that work in concert against the interests and well-being of the American nation and the majority of its citizens. Sound about right?

Well, that happens all the time, especially on the right. All of the things they think Soros is doing are actually being done by Rupert Murdoch, Sheldon Adelson, Foster Friess, Charles Koch, Robert Mercer, and many others that never make the news because that's the way they like it. The fucking Secretary of Education has spent her adult life funding efforts to privatize Michigan's public school system, in order to scale it nationwide.

No, they're not running a cannibal pedophile cult -- probably. But all the rest of it is right there in front of everyone. They don't blast it out from the rooftops, but they don't make much effort to hide it either. Old money tends to be quiet money. Not a lot of flashy Martin Shkreli types there. But they do spend it, and they do like the minions they rent to know where their paychecks come from. Think tanks, foundations, newspapers, magazines, teevee networks. Who bankrolls The Federalist?

It's yet another gaping flaw in the upside-down logic that rules the bizarro world the cultists inhabit. They sit and watch a propaganda network openly funded by an evil billionaire, where the morning show hosts literally lie about the plague being nothing, while those same hosts are socially distanced and working remotely. Uh-huh. That's a hell of a hoax.

What few specifics I have bothered to read about the QAnon mythos are comically ludicrous enough to give you a headache trying to make any sense of it. The idea that JFK Jr., of all people, would fake his own death twenty years ago in order to lie in wait for Donald Trump -- again, of all people -- to become chief executive and team up to purge the "deep state" of the power-mad sex cult that's really been running things all these years. This is an internet prank that got out of hand, thanks to timely assistance from Russian troll farms along the way.

Let's say, just for the sake of argument, that there is a "deep state" of criminality that includes Bill 'n' Hitlery, Obummer, and the usual gang of Demoncrats Jebus Don't Like, and they've been getting away for years with all these heinous crimes. Let's just postulate that that particular element is empirically true.

Why, then, doesn't Trump simply have his lapdog attorney general, a man whose sole operational principle is doing whatever master commands, investigate those people? Why does Trump need to wait around for John Fitzgerald Kennedy Junior, who has been hiding out in Pittsburgh for twenty years, to see the magical sigil in the sky that the seventh seal has been broken and the time is now?

Bill Barr has made it quite clear that he is ready, willing, and able to do whatever is asked of him, real or not, factual or baseless. They could initiate a complete bullshit investigation of Hillary or Obama or Biden or whoever, just to waste time and get media attention. Why haven't they done so? Whatever happened to Lock Her Up? I mean, seriously, if you got something on her, put your money where your fuckin' mouth is and prosecute her already.

Of course they have no answers, because they're not really looking for them. It's really a weird combination of two intrinsically American phenomena -- cults and porn. Obviously, many countries have one or both of those things, but nobody does those things like Americans.

The doomsday cult convinces its followers that the end is coming on such-and-such a date in the near future. When that date inevitably comes and goes without Armageddon, the cult leader simply moves the date back. A few followers realize they've been taken and peel off, and a few more join up to take their place, and the cycle repeats until the bozos finally die of terminal stupidity.

Porn, in its worst instances, can warp the minds of its frequent users. There are countless studies that have shown that excessive porn use leads viewers -- especially young men -- to have extremely problematic views about women in particular and sex in general. To put it more crudely, some of these dupes get into a routine of spanking it to their favorite jam, and after a while start reflexively thinking that every new woman they encounter really wants to jump their bones, but just doesn't want to admit it. Their brains have been rewired to think uncritically that something non-existent is not only possible, not only likely, but definitely true. They don't know the difference between fantasy and reality anymore -- or they simply prefer the former to the latter.

In both instances, the level of certainty is such that they can't merely be talked out of their tree with [pfft] "logic." That's just something that people who are in on it want you to believe, to divert you from the truth.

There's always been a certain percentage of people who are willing dupes for this kind of nonsense, who have lost at the business of life in one way or another, or who are outwardly successful but have no real inner life, and so cling to these idiotic ideas in order to feel part of something, to possess coveted knowledge available only to a select few. It's a self-reinforcing dynamic, and it's always been around, just because the law of averages stipulates that X% of people are fucking morons.

What's changed, of course, is that in the past decade, social media has served as a handy organizer and propagator for this garbage. Reality teevee has dulled people's critical thinking skills even more than porn, and across a much wider volume of viewers. And you have the worst of both worlds in charge -- a visibly stupid reality-teevee huckster who literally rose to prominence by pushing a harebrained conspiracy theory for five years.

There are a lot of things killing off this nation at an alarmingly fast pace, all of them predicated on a critical mass of people being dumb and angry. But within that is this even more disturbing phenomenon of chumps who, rather than observe what's going on right in front of them, prefer to concoct a ridiculous fairy tale that doesn't even make sense on its own bizarre terms.

Perhaps the most ironic part of all that is that Trump probably never "believed" the birther conspiracy he pushed all those years in the first place. Clearly he doesn't have beliefs as such, beyond how awesome he is, and how every woman wants to ride his thirty-five-inch cock, and pay him for the privilege. Again, you can see the "porn pattern" of empty wish fulfillment in the face of reality.

But he knew that just enough people out there did believe the birther stuff, enough that he could plant the seed, grow the crop, and reap the harvest. And he's made things so much worse since, people are tired and broke and angry and somehow bored all at the same time, wanting it to be over but not sure what they want in its place, since there is no "normal" to "return" to. They've gone from binge-watch to hate-watch, and now they want to the show to be over, but they're still uncertain of what to switch over to.

It would not be surprising if the coming decade is shaped in great part by competing conspiracy narratives, with varying political stances and elements of truth twisted to conform to those narratives. The more bizarre ones will be aimed at more religious types, since the personality traits align for wanting to believe in unverifiable fables that affirm one's preconceptions.

But they'll be everywhere across the board. Given the success they've had helping QAnon along, it wouldn't be at all surprising if the Russians decided to keep sandbagging Democratic prospects by discouraging lefties with some random bullshit about Biden or Harris or whoever.

The main goal is not even to get people to believe a specific thing, so much as to get them into a permanent state of never knowing who or what to believe. If your real goal is simply to enable the vast network of transnational money laundering to keep chugging along, all you really need is permanent destabilization. You don't have to actually defeat or conquer anyone.

It's been known to happen. I read about it on the internets somewhere.

Vanish Armada

The ongoing national shitcom took a turn for the hilarious yesterday with the arrest and indictment of Meth Uncle Stevie B, along with several other shitheads, in a transparent money laundering scheme. I know, we're all shocked. The indictment is a pretty quick read, and I suggest you take a few minutes and peruse it.

Back in the Trump "University" lawsuit days, I opined (correctly) that the sort of schmuck who was willing to hand over their life savings to a cheesy huckster like Donald Trump deserved to lose their money anyway. They would have otherwise given it to a televangelist, or blown it on a sack of magic beans, or valuable moon acreage, some dopey shit like that.

That's not to say that Trump didn't also deserve to get sued, but I continue to live by the sacred adage that it is morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money. That may not sit well with some folks, but that's really the way it is; whether we "like" it or not is orthogonal to that universal truth.

Anyway, take that principle and multiply it by several orders of magnitude with this "We Build the Wall" bullshit. Fuck every one of these people, right in their goddamned neck wattles. They deserve to get fleeced out of every dime they have. If they had actually worked hard to earn their money, they'd have more fucking respect for it.

So there's that. Every single person involved in this obvious scam deserves the worst. I reserve a smidgen of sympathy for figurehead Brian Kolfage, because he really did sacrifice his body for this nation. But by the context of his emails quoted in the indictment, he was at best a willing accomplice.

And he's going to pay, whether or not he does any time. The indictment specifically lists the boat Kolfage used in the stupid Dear Leader river "parade" in Tampa earlier this year, which (along with Kris Fucking Kobach being the scam's legal advisor) is so perfectly on-brand for this crowd it makes your teeth hurt. The only way it could have been better is if Kolfage had named the boat Stugots.

Speaking of The Sopranos, fellow indictee Andrew Badolato appears to be straight out of the Matty Bevilacqua mold -- pump-and-dump scammer who ratted out his associates to keep out of Club Fed, and eventually gravitated to Bannon, who barely bothers to conceal the late-night-infomercial aesthetic that underpins every one of his Wile E. Coyote scams. Overthrow the Pope? Check. Buy a medieval Italian castle, in order to establish some goofball Opus Dei warrior-monk training academy? Check. Say what you will, Steve-O's ambitions have come a long way since his bathtub crank days.

And now this money-laundering thing, which is guaranteed to unravel on at least a couple of high-level people. The thing is, a couple miles of wall did get built, and some of the money did move to the construction company -- you know, the North Dakota construction company that somehow won a billion-dollar contract to build a fucking wall across Texas. Did not realize that Texas had run out of construction companies.

Oddly, only about half of the $50M can be tracked so far. I'd probably check Fat Donnie's super PACs first, but that's me. I promise you that every single one of these schemes that gets uncovered, he and his shitbag family are wetting their beaks. And even if any of the money has been declared in those legendary tax returns, it's all in shell corps that will then have to be unraveled. They'll probably never get to the bottom of it all. Remember when Mossack Fonseca was a thing? Oh yeah, we had all those thieving high rollers dead to rights. Good times.

A fitting solution for all of this would be to throw the perpetrators in jail, recoup costs and heavy fines, and then use the money to tear down the wall and get the refugee families out of the for-profit rape camps these evil motherfuckers threw them into so long ago. But I'll be surprised if anyone actually goes to jail. Every day is Fitzmas in this country -- big crimes, big promises, very little outcome.

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.

Represent

These days, I can't really muster the energy necessary to get too boiled about this sort of shit, mainly because it is entirely expected. I wish I lived in Pelosi's district, so I could vote for her opponent.

Lady, contrary to popular belief, there was a fucking election. It was in 2018, y'all crowed about it as THE BLUE WAVE, and it seemed at the time that people were pretty clear about their expectations. And here you are, defaulting to the usual "wait 'til next election" guff.

I'll vote blue no matter who this time around, but it might be the last time. Because I have better things to do than waste my time on people who won't fucking fight, even when there are openings and vulnerabilities all over the place.

Whether it's in politics, school, the workplace, your love life, whatever, I hate to think that I might be the first person to share this yuge secret with you, but here ya go:  there is never a perfect or even good time to get into a huge undertaking, or pick a big fight. Bokay? That perfect scenario simply never occurs. That's how life is. You take your opportunities where you find them, and you use every tool at your disposal to make the most of them. You play the hand you're dealt, but you by god fucking well play it.

So in the case of impeaching one William "Dad was a sex predator who gave Uncle Jeff Epstein his first job, working with teenage girls, even though he didn't have the necessary degree for the job" Barr, you have to acknowledge at the outset that it is highly unlikely that the Senate will convict and remove Barr.

That is a given:  the Republicon Party hates this country, and the people who live in it, and will do anything and everything to subvert and undermine our interests. They are traitors, pure and simple. That is the terrain in which you must operate.

Now, when you tell the proles and plebes and doofuses that believe you still give a shit that they must wait until the next election (always the next one, isn't it?), it's important that you elide the fact that you're dealing with people who are currently doing everything they can to suppress the right to vote, especially in key states. Unlike your overpaid cable teevee pigskin prognosticators, I'm not going to call them "swing" states, because the fact of the matter is that even if states like Kentucky and Georgia were D+10 states, every Republicon official in those states would do everything they could to just shut down the process and keep blacks from voting.

It's as simple as that -- they cheat because they know they can't win, and they're brazen enough to make it clear that they're cheating. Because they know no one will do a fucking thing about it.

But the process of impeachment itself, whether it results in the removal of its target or not, entails the implementation of procedures and powers that bring the corruption and malfeasance under a spotlight, and especially this close to the election, could by just enough breathing room to ensure a relatively fair election process. The fact that the election is only four months away now necessitates the initiation of this process now, rather than, as Pelosi would have it, postpones it.

It's been a long, strange trip in this blog over the past fifteen years, and longtime readers have seen some of the personal and professional travails I've shared. Over the past five years or so, though, my resolve has been to insulate my life from the decisions of stupid, cruel people. And it's taken some work, time, patience, commitment, but for the most part, I've attained that goal. I'll have a house and a good job either way. I have very little immediate skin in this game anymore. And so I have no interest or need to bother with voting for people who are just going jerk my fucking chain.

Turns out that I have hands, so I am entirely capable of jerking myself off.

But I still have a sense of justice, and I still give a shit about the direction this country has taken, and where our most vulnerable citizens will be if this thing shakes out wrong. I think the situation is truly urgent, and to me, that means by definition that we -- our elected representatives -- must act with a real sense of urgency.

And this is less in anger than in sheer exasperation, but I simply don't understand why the Speaker of the House, in a position to oppose a dangerous, erratic, corrupt, and incredibly unpopular chief executive and his attack dog, fail to actively, strenuously, urgently oppose them at every possible opportunity. Failure to take advantage and action of every chance is simply a dereliction of duty. Take your excuses and shove them sideways.

Either the law means something, or it doesn't. Either you think there's a problem, or you don't. Either you act upon your concerns at every possible juncture, or you punt with the usual bullshit excuses. All I know is that I am sick and goddamned tired of being lectured to show up and vote, by people who, once voted into office, do the bare fucking minimum and still have the fucking balls to lecture some more about how we need to get the next time. Always the next time.

Until you wake up one day, and find out the hard way that there isn't a next time, that your scam has dried up and blown away, and that people figured that if you're not gonna do anything anyway, what's the point of showing up?

The Bigger They Scum, the Larder They Fall

Looks like the Jonestown comeback rally at Tulsa's Sad Trombone Feed Lot didn't go quite as expected. Instead of a million attendees, looks like a million lulz showed up, along with a couple thousand of the usual sweaty orcs and gastropods who signed their X to the COVID (hoax!) waiver. Sad! But also high-larry-us!

It's not entirely clear whether Hills Have Eyes extra Brad Parscale is simply a slapdick IT weasel who's been punching above his weight for way too long, like a bad guitar teacher who's just barely good enough to stay one lesson ahead of his best student, and the clock is finally running out on his ineptitude; or if he's been this smooth meta-grifting super-genius the entire time, setting up a web machine to milk the rubes on swag, while he placates Diaper Don with carefully massaged polls, and now Grampa Walnuts went out to one of the deepest-red states expecting a victory lap and got caught with his old-man pants down.

Guess all those tickets Parscale was bragging about ended up going to TikTok teens who know the game way better than Lurch could ever dream possible. Tens of thousands of no-shows, so bad that Dear Leader had to cancel the outdoor speech, because of the optics of him serenading a mostly-empty parking lot. Maybe if he unbuttoned his shirt and started with a couple of Engelbert Humperdinck numbers.

Whatever the case, hopefully everyone who did show up got what they were looking for, good and hard. We'll find out in a couple weeks, when the incubation period has had its chance. Don't forget to chug your bleach, you guys! Twice as much means twice as effective. That's just science right there.

In the meantime, six campaign staff members tested positive for the #TrumpPlague. Most of the tests available are the swab type, which involves jamming a Q-tip up into your nose until it hits your pre-frontal lobe or thereabouts. Because of the staff members' proximity to Mister Man, they will all most likely have to be tested daily for the next two weeks, as will the rest of the staff.

I am not remotely kidding when I say that that knowledge thrills me to no end, and adds to what has already been a pretty good weekend. That gives me a chub that could hit a dinger out of Fenway Park, I shit you not. They chose to work for that dirtbag, this seems like an appropriate consequence, eventually leading to being drummed out of the political-industrial complex altogether, and being forced to ply an honest -- and low-paying -- trade.

Like these assholes insist every time there's a hurricane or flood while a Demoncrat is in office, maybe your vengeful sky-buddy is trying to tell you something. Repent now, shitheads, while there's still time.

Dezinformatsiya

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everything Trump Touches Dies

As irritating and demoralizing as it can be to watch an entire political party give its collective soul away to a vile would-be caudillo, there are some entertaining and even strategic points to observe in the ugly process. It seems only fitting that these points were mostly provided by none other than John Fucking Bolton.

The most superficial point has been watching the F Troop of slapdicks at Fixed Noise scramble themselves into a frenzy, trying hastily to excise Comrade Bolton from the photos and narrative of the People's Soviet, lest Comrade Von Clownstick be enraged or even inconvenienced by seeing a hint of Bolton's Cap'n Crunch facial hair. I don't know which frontal-lobe-impaired sliver of codgers in their withered audience is going to buy that truckload of horseshit, but Bolton was Trump's handpicked National Security Advisor, and the very same Fox hand-puppets crowed and snorted at all the libturds crying about Dear Leader's wise choice.

Ever heard of YouTube, motherfuckers? They can try to paint Bolton as a trouble-making commie all they want, but there ain't no memory hole anymore. The only people still buying Fox's tripe need it to stay alive now, to offset the possibility they walk too slowly past a mirror, realize what they support and what they've become, and blow their worthless brains out.

Which, honestly, I am surprised that mainstays like Lou Dobbs and Alan Doucheowitz and the morning-zoo crew haven't already done. You can see it in their eyes now. They know what they are -- and worse yet, they know that we know. Let them live with that, long and hard. This isn't business anymore, assholes. They're openly supporting the open betrayal of their country, hooting and yukking it up.

But that's small potatoes compared to watching #MoscowMitch's dopey gang of treasonous shitheads. They were sure as hell going to railroad this shit through, right up 'murka's poop-chute, and the Dummycrats were just going to have to sit there and take it, like Paul Manafort with his cellmate. McConnell was enjoying the prospect, you could see the evil gleam in his soulless eye-holes. He was getting off on it. He was going to get it over with before the SOTU speech, just the way Dear Leader wanted, and then they could get back to bamboozling the cult loons just long enough to make it to November and renew the prospect of looting the many for the very few.

They even brought in the most cynical team of dipshit "lawyers" imaginable:  the main White House counsel, who literally lied during his arguments on the Senate floor (which is grounds for disbarment); a professional "Christian" who is currently being investigated for (surprise!) embezzling millions of dollars from his megachurch (when he's not playing drums with a couple of discards from the band Kansas); Ken Starr, a sanctimonious, hypocritcal scumbag who would be tarred and feathered in any decent society; the drunk frat girl who took $25k from Trump to not investigate his fraudulent "university" in America's Wang. Like something out of central casting in a fourth-rate Animal House knockoff.

(Side note:  I have honestly lost track of how many times in the last few years some weird instance or assemblage of goofballs has occurred, where I seriously thought, If you wrote this in a treatment or script and pitched it, they'd kick it back for being too on-the-nose.)

So it was all set to go down, in the most humiliating way possible, and here comes Bolton -- and with him, a set of flash polls all showing that even a majority of Republican voters want to hear witnesses and evidence now. Turns out that even people who disagree passionately about the nature of the thing currently occupying the office of chief executive, still agree on the basic principle of if he's innocent, he shouldn't have a problem with presenting testimony and evidence that show how perfect the call was and how he did nothing wrong.

People who are old enough to recall the O.J. Simpson trial from a quarter-century ago remember that moment immediately after the bodies were found, the LA media copters hovering over the white Bronco, futilely trying to escape to Mexico. Certainly innocent people get railroaded and unjustly convicted sometimes, but only guilty people immediately assume that everyone else will assume they're guilty. You follow me?

The innocent person's initial instinct is almost always, Hey, I know I'm innocent. I have the truth on my side, and nothing to hide. I'll just tell them what I know, and go on about my day. Again, sometimes things don't work out that way once investigations and procedures get their wheels set in motion, but that's the initial response.

And of course the guilty person has the opposite response just as reliably. Their first -- and usually only -- instincts are to conceal and/or to escape, if they can. Since Trump cannot escape, he has to conceal, which is what he's done at every possible turn. He's had a million opportunities to straighten this whole thing out; the Democrats have pleaded with him to present all this evidence of how perfect everything was, to refute the sworn testimony provided last month by his subordinates that directly implicated him and Mike Pompeo, among others.

And at every opportunity, he's refused the chance to do so, angrily, insultingly. He thinks his sub-Nelson Muntz taunts of "Shifty Schiff" and the like are going to do anything but make Adam Schiff -- a trained prosecutor who's dealt with organized crime figures and competes in triathlons -- more dogged and determined to stuff that burger-hoisting garbage pail into the nearest jail cell, and strip him of every dollar they can find.

(Incidentally, this is just one of many reasons why intelligence really does matter to some extent. You should at least be sharp enough not to poke the people who can actually harm you.)

So everyone knows he's guilty -- the public, his own supporters, and the Republican members of Congress. The last two groups have made their own calculations about how and why they keep supporting someone whom they know is corrupt, and again, this is something they get to live with for the duration. They've rationalized themselves this far, you can be sure they'll continue to do so.

But it's that third group's calculations that become interesting in the strategic sense. Baked into the cynicism of the McConnell gang is the assumption that the general public will forget because they're easily rolled dupes, their own supporters will get ginned up over whatever bullshit they concoct for them in the fall, and they can all cruise to re-election. But throughout, they know not only that he's guilty of the bare minimum that he's being impeached and tried for, but that there's almost certainly plenty more shit that just hasn't bubbled to the surface yet, and that any or all of it could start coming out all through the rest of the year.

It was the only move they had, really, sticking with him at this point. You're all in or all out, bottom line. "The "heads on a pike" line may or may not have actually occurred, but does anyone seriously doubt that that's really the case? It's what his supporters like about him. It's why dozens of Republican House members, even from safe districts, have abruptly quit, finding suddenly that they no longer possess the intestinal fortitude to continue betraying their country day after miserable fucking day.

So the GOP Senate assholes had no choice. It was a sizable gamble, and it may be starting to backfire on them now, thanks to Bolton (who, again, let's be clear, is not motivated by any illusions of "patriotism" so much as an overweening arrogance and sense of self-regard). Because it turns out that Trump knew Bolton had a manuscript ready to drop -- and didn't even warn McConnell. So now they know that not only is more of his fuckuppery going to trickle out and stain all the carpets in the coming months, but there isn't even any honor among thieves.

What they've always said about Trump and "loyalty" is true, and can be empirically observed over decades of him never shutting the fuck up about anything (other than his money laundering):  The loyalty only goes one way, from you to him. It is never mutual, except as a matter of convenience to him.

So it is immensely entertaining to watch these genuinely despicable people find all this out the hard way. They richly deserve to be tossed out on their asses as soon as electorally possible, and then shunned for the remainder of their lives, and then rendered destitute by lack of further prospects, karma, worsening health, etc.

It won't happen, of course -- this is, after all, the nation that still allows a glowering pustule like Newt Gingrich to not have to live in a needle-filled alley sucking diseased cocks to feed his drug habit, like he deserves -- but there is at least a chance for them to lose at the ballot box, and they're starting to realize that. Nothing ever gets better with this guy, none of the scandals ever turn out to be less than initially thought. Always worse; always more. They're starting to realize that as well. More and more incriminating, stupid stuff is going to come out, and they're all going to be up to their necks in it.

Because they're accomplices, in the end, and even some of their own constituents, the ones not chugging the kool-aid and asking for thirds, are getting that as well.

They decided to have a Jersey Shore cult rally last night, and the Hoarse Whisperer has a very entertaining live-take thread of the festivities. I didn't (and wouldn't) watch the rally, but like Hoarse, I did watch some of them back during the campaign, all the way through, mostly to get a sense of why people were falling for this ridiculous grifter so hard, and what sort of nonsense was resonating with them, that sort of thing. They were just what you think they were -- amazingly dumb, hopelessly repetitive, demoralizing in that you realize that no matter how cynical you've ever been about the stupidity of people, it wasn't nearly enough.

And what Hoarse observes from tonight's rally is what I'm seeing lately in general, this kind of low-octane, lukewarm support. Don't get me wrong, they'll still vote for him, but the passion is fading, the novelty is wearing off, the "vote for change" excuse from before is no longer valid. You know what he's about, so you can't talk about "change" anymore -- you're either with this spiteful idiocy, or you're not.

I saw a lot of links today crowing about how all the hotels in Wildwood sold out in anticipation of the rally, all the crowds, blah blah. So here's the deal about that:  Wildwood has a population of a little over 5,000. That's five thousand. It's a resort town, so they do have more and better accommodations than most towns that size, but it's still barely more than a village in size. And Trump's rally promoters have been infamous in recklessly overselling these events. The convention center has a capacity of 7,000, which means they probably gave out 30-40,000 tickets, maybe more.

It has been their deliberate attendance model to pack the parking lot as well as the venue, which for a small resort town means traffic nightmares for a couple days around the event, and probably the stretching of the town's police resources, and definitely a security bill that Cheapskate McFrightwig will refuse to pay. All for a relative handful of suckers who think they want to be used as stage props for a traveling medicine show, who think they're pwning libturds by driving for hours and waiting for more hours out in the January cold of a Jersey Shore seaside town.

And then they get up there and realize they're really just there to hear the greatest shits, to chant USA and Lock her up! when prompted, like the barely-trained farm animals they really are. To spend an entire day waiting around, hoping above all else to get into an arena with a bunch of strange, sweaty groper types, to listen to a demented old man rant about dishwashers and how he'll fix their health care, while never really explaining even the broad strokes of how.

Clearly these are not the sharpest tools in the shed -- all you have to do is listen to them rattle for thirty seconds in any random YouTube video to see that -- but it may be starting to dawn on them finally. They're not really rubbing anyone's noses in anything, if they still can't afford health care, if they still have to work two jobs to survive, if they still live in crappy, boarded-up towns where the smart kids have left, the others are stuck or dead, and all those boarded-up lots are squatted on by out-of-town owners who don't care if the property ever re-opens or helps the town turn a buck.

And fuckin' Jim Jones up there at the podium in the high-school gym, with all the colorful insult-comic lines they can sing along to by now, like some discount Don Rickles, after the jokes are done and the circus has left town and they're back to their opioids and fast food and boredom, he's not going to do anything about any of that. Because he doesn't really care, not even a little bit. Shit, his dick-waving just got four dozen military personnel hospitalized with traumatic brain injuries, and he laughs it off as headaches. Walk it off, you pussies!

The schtick wears thin after a while; like any drug, the user has to chase more and more of it just to get anything out of it, never quite approaching that original euphoria. I think there is a very real cultural thread from Duck Dynasty to Trump, and as popular as that show was, it was done in five years. I mean, they basically beat everyone over the head on a constant basis with 130 "episodes" (I once caught one to see what all the fuss was about, and seriously felt stupider by the end of that interminable half-hour) and an unholy barrage of promotion and advertising and Wal-Mart swag and all sorts of cheap shit like that, but it wore out its welcome.

The human brain, no matter how dull and desensitized, can take daily barrages of nonsense and cognitive dissonance for only so long. And then it's old. If Trump knew how to give it a rest, or if the media knew how to change up their coverage a bit, it might be different. But they are all one-trick ponies, and maybe the American public is starting to get a bit war-weary. People are exhausted, and the one-liners are long past their sell-by date.

And even the most die-hard cultist has to wonder at some point, if Crooked Hillary is so crooked, and Republicans are in charge right now, then why haven't we actually locked her up? What's the hold-up here? Even the cynic has to wonder to themselves why they continue to sing along, if they know it's bullshit.

I make no predictions; my observations on the messiness of human nature are what they've always been. But the patterns are clear from an operational perspective, and from a perspective of how a rational actor would craft a strategic response to save their job and reputation:  the boss is erratic and impulsive and dumb and cruel, and would incarcerate every loyal minion and nuke the entire Midwest if it would make him a buck or save his worthless hide. Everything that is politically bad for them now is only going to get worse, never better. What do you do?

Either they hang together, or they hang separately. They know that. All it takes is for a few key players to break, though, and the floodgates will open. It is enormously fun to watch these mendacious shits twist in the wind.

Shame Spiral

The collapse of empire continues unabated:  Li'l Nero's six-page manifesto, apparently copy-pasted directly from his Twitter feed. Hilarious. Exactly what this country deserves, a place where (among countless other daily signs of sheer wretchedness) kindergartners hold bake sales so their classmates can eat lunch. But hey, at least we can say Merry Christmas again, amirite? We all recall the dark years when people were dragged by the hair into the middle of the street and beaten severely for such things. It was on the internets, so it must be true.

Wait until the actual impeachment vote comes down tomorrow, or someone explains to him that during the impeachment process, the pardon power is suspended. Buckle in for the Christmas rage-tweet-palooza. A bottle of Jameson's would be good to have on hand.

Never let them forget, the politicians and the voters who continue to give their support to this thing:  this is what you support, this doddering, raving, preposterous old man who never earned an honest dollar nor gave a straight answer. Hang it around their necks for all time.

Going Down with the Ship

Navy Secretary Richard Spencer has been fired. Here is his resignation letter. It is pretty much what you would expect, boilerplate from an old hand whose first duties are to the false gods of protocol and decorum. He does ultimately mention that his orders from Trump to reinstate convicted war criminal Eddie Gallagher go against the oath Spencer took to defend and uphold the Constitution. (The same oath that Trump and Gallagher took, by the way.)

One sentence about halfway down stands out for me:  The rule of law is what sets us apart from our adversaries. This is untrue. Every country we have ever fought against had codified laws. What happens with dictators and despots and tyrants is that they bring in lackeys and minions to administer the law. They use henchmen to cow the channels of communication to the public, in order to poison the well from which the populace collectively drinks. And on and on. We all know how the fascist model works.

But the rule of law is there the entire time. The difference is that the despot simply declares that the law means what we say it means, much like a pelf-grubbing evangelist declaring their interpretation of the bible to be the only true reading. He appoints ministers to oversee the law to his preference; he installs judges who have pre-declared their fealty to him. He stacks the deck, and defies anyone to do anything about it.

A good con man understands his marks, knows what they think they need, knows how to diagnose their problems and sell them the snake oil to cure it. He also knows how to spot key players and use them, making them complicit in his crimes. These are Trump's skills, his only ones aside from losing other people's money and never being held accountable.

He knows that his base hate libtards far more than they give a shit about the well-being of the country. He knows that Republican politicians are hopelessly greedy and in thrall to the tax-free evangelical nutjobs. He knows that the pols that aren't on someone's payroll are constrained by "norms" and "rules" and that sort of worthless honor-code bullshit. He knows that military chiefs are bound by codes of duty and honor as well, and are also political players once they reach the ranks of general or admiral (even before then, really).

He knows that Rupert Murdoch's propaganda organs will say and do whatever he wants them to and keep the ignorant rabble in line, because Murdoch is a greedy scumbag who doesn't care about anything but hoarding precious money. He knows that he has an advantage over his opponents, because they insist on playing by the rules, while he is unconstrained by such nonsense.

These things are all assets to the con man. By making them all complicit, they can't turn against him without taking some heat themselves. Perhaps they tell themselves that concepts such as "nation" and "country" are mere abstractions, and therefore betraying is not real, like cheating on your spouse or something. The old saying about how it takes one to lie and one to believe it also holds true.

But the rule of law is there the entire time. Laws and norms and rules only matter when everyone agrees to abide by them, and when there are consequences for violating them.

No one should be surprised by any of this. Trump has been open and consistent in this area, as with all of the other areas where people (mostly idiot reporters and panel-show dickheads) profess to be "shocked" or "concerned" or some such.

But right from the start, on the subject of war, the draft-dodger has been on point from the start:  fuck their heathen religion, plunder their oil as the spoils of war. War crime? You and what army is gonna enforce that?

So of course he pardons a shameless murderer like Eddie Gallagher, whose own platoon, every one of them, turned him in for his crimes. When Trump claims to know more about ISIS than the generals, or have some special insight on warfare that apparently escapes lifetime military professionals, he's shitting on their service and commitment.

He's talked shit about wounded and tortured combat veterans, as well as Gold Star families who have lost their loved ones in combat. Nobody in his family has ever or will ever serve in the military, because that would require real sacrifice and some level of selflessness, two concepts that are utterly alien to him and his scummy, chiseling family.

Not to mention the other two enormous implications of dumping Spencer: the first is obviously that this sends yet another message to the nations we occupy now and in the future that we can do whatever the fuck we want to them, without repercussion; potentially even worse is that the military justice system and the operational chain of command has been openly subverted, sending a message to any miscreants in the service that all they need to do to get out their jam is to get to Pete Hegseth or whichever Foxtard can get on the morning show and make his case for Grampa Walnuts.

Old jokes about "military justice" oxymorons aside, there is a system in place, and if its functions are subverted by a senile autocrat, with no pushback or accountability, what's to stop him from unilaterally thwarting a directive from a federal court or the Supreme Court? Pointing at law books and reciting statutes doesn't work if no one is going to enforce them.

For the thousandth time, you are dealing with someone who has done wrong all his life, and never really faced any consequences for any of it. Someone else always pays his bills. He sure as fuck doesn't pay them, and no one ever makes him. Why should this be any different? All his life, the people who are in positions to tell him no refuse to do that simple thing.

So when military personnel claim to support him, you have to think about what they're really supporting. Same as the women who support him, even though he's an enthusiastic sexual assaulter and serial pervert. They know who and what he really is. People need to get honest with themselves, and stop warbling about how these rubes have been bamboozled by Russian trolls and memes on Fakebook. They know what they're doing. They know what they're supporting. They're good with it. They want more of it.

Fakebook Is Not Your Friend

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

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

I Can't Believe It's Not Butthole

Okay, I guess I have to admit it out loud for all to hear -- if you're not watching Tucker Carlson's show, you are missing out on some trenchant political analysis from some of the world's finest thinkers, the most accomplished people in the public policy sphere. I mean, Jesus Christ, was Meat Loaf busy or something? The unbuttoned shirt is a nice touch for a sixty-year-old man.

Let's face it, Fixed Noise reached Peak Moron years ago, but it's like the various hosts have some kind of weird bet with one another to see who can scrape the bottom of the barrel more and still keep a straight face. Half of Carlson's viewers are likely to reflexively scream at the teevee for Fabio to go back to where he came from if he doesn't like it here. Keep up the great work, Tucker!

Poll Smokers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trade Wars Are Good, and Easy to Win

So much goddamned winning:

U.S. farm bankruptcies in September surged 24% to the highest since 2011 amid strains from President Donald Trump’s trade war with China and a year of wild weather.

Growers are also becoming increasingly dependent on trade aid and other federal programs for income, figures showed in a report by the American Farm Bureau Federation, the nation’s largest general farm organization.

There are two main facts these folks should have learned over the last few years, if they inexplicably hadn't known by third grade:  1) stoves are hot; and 2) Donald Trump is a lying dipshit right to his rotten core. Anyone want to take odds on whether they'll vote for him again next year?

I've said it before, and I'll say it again -- if there's one thing to be thankful for, it's that at least Trump's "policies" have almost exclusively harmed the people who voted for him and still support him. The "coastal elite" states are not being "punished" at all.

(Increased wildfire frequency and intensity in California is excluded from this because that's an effect that's been building for the last thirty years, not the last three. In other words, Trump could have left us in the Paris accords and we'd still be having these wildfire issues.)

It's about time for another Cletus safari from the Times, isn't it? We learn so, so much from them checking back in with the same bitter clingers and Republicon operatives they talked to last year and the year before. Maybe most of them have learned their lesson by now, but you wouldn't put any real money on that. If that doesn't reinforce the principle that people really do get the government they deserve, I don't know what would.

Horror Show

This is what passes for humor with these numbskulls. I mean, I was thinking about going as Tomi Lahren for Halloween this year, but the costume shop was all out of blow-up-doll-with-fivehead costumes. Boom! You like apples?

Ahem. Look, I know I'm always talking about "the balls on these people," but they've been on this "AOC is an idiot" schtick since she got elected, and it takes some serious fucking balls to be in a party that includes borderline retards like Louie Gohmert and Donald Trump, and still talk shit about AOC.

Or they talk shit about her past experience as a bartender. Let me tell ya something -- as a former touring rock musician who played dozens of dive bars all over Northern California, Nevada, and Oregon, I can tell you right now that pound for pound, as an occupation, bartenders are some of the finest people you could hope to meet. And that's at a very high, consistent rate, much higher than most occupations.

They have to strike a fine balance between keeping asshole drunks from getting out of hand, while still moving the product that gets them drunk. They have to fend off horny, obnoxious bros who think their pickup lines aren't stale; they have to play dice with the regulars and listen to their pathetic drunken bullshit stories; they have to listen lies all the time, whether from the bar manager or cheeseball musicians or pretty much everyone who walks through the door.

In other words, it's a perfect training ground for going to Congress, and having to deal with privileged old white men who can't bring themselves to cede a square inch of turf to anyone else, but who always have an extra few ducats to throw at hacks like Tomi Lahren, ankle-biting morons who literally have no other skills and serve no real purpose. Lahren wouldn't last a single shift tending bar.

I've seen a few clips of AOC at work questioning witnesses over various issues, such as outrageous drug prices. She's prepared and knowledgeable, and asks good questions. She's obviously not an experienced procedural hand like Nancy Pelosi, but again, compared with grandstanding nose-pickers like Gohmert or Ted Yoho or Matt Gaetz or Kevin McCarthy or any number of Republicon house mutts and senaturds, she's Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt combined.

But it's the clear mission of the propagandists to paint that lie, over and over again, until the rubes that actually follow them take it to heart. As always, we look forward to the day when Tomi Lahren's real nightmare comes true -- when she actually has to make an honest buck by doing something productive.

Colon Cancel

You may have heard that out here in Cali, it's that time of the year -- wildfires roaring up and down the state, and the problem is now exacerbated by PG&E shutting down power to areas that might be in danger, or are experiencing high winds. (That is not a joke -- last Saturday night, it sounded like a fucking freight train running through my yard, all night.)

I'm very thankful to be out of the fire and shut-down zones (so far), but I have family and friends who are not so lucky, who are in their fourth day without power and counting, and/or have been evacuated multiple times, as the fires encroach evacuation sites.

So when I see these smug little fuckers cracking wise about how some mythical "woke" culture caused this, I want to cordially invite them to suck a fart out of my asshole. They can go fuck each other in the neck. You know who fights these fucking fires? Prisoners and professionals, period.

Dave Rubin doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about, and I sincerely look forward to the day when he and Fuckface Carlson have their homes and irreplaceables destroyed by an event that can clearly be connected to climate change and its effects.

The most overused phrase from this misbegotten year is "cancel culture." I fucking despise that phrase, and the whiny millionaires who deploy it as some sort of preemptive license to be an asshole. Look, if you like something, no matter how bad a rep it has, watch it. Fucking binge-watch Real Inbred Housewives from Honey Boo Boo's Dirt Road till your brain cells start leaking out your ears, if that's what brings your pecker to full sail.

But when a professional "provocateur" steps over lines -- 'cause that's just what he does, man, he's a free thinker and you can't contain him with your "correctness" -- with flat-out lies that belittle what tens of thousands of people are enduring right now, he can't be too surprised when a critical mass of people see it and say, fuck you, asshole.

The First Amendment is the most important right we have in this country. It means you can say whatever the fuck you wanna say, and the gubmint can't throw your ass in jail. It doesn't matter if it's in poor taste, or even if it's an obvious lie, slapped on the table like a stale dog turd, defying you to call it for what it is.

But it doesn't grant you a guaranteed audience, nor does it compel anyone to give you a soapbox to use to spew your bullshit. So when I see shit like that, I just make a point to remind myself of who sponsors Carlson's shitshow, so I don't accidentally buy any of their products. I support free speech, but not paid lies.

When CNN gives jobs to unqualified propagandists like Corey Lewandowski and Sean Duffy, the latter of whom earlier today denigrated a decorated combat veteran, I know that that network adds no value to my existence. I avoid that network like the fucking plague. It doesn't help that they have professional liars such as Kellyanne Conway and Rudy Giuliani on routinely, or "Big Dick Toilet" chump and former acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker. I'm not rooting through the shit pile looking for the occasional corn kernel or peanut. The whole thing is shit.

Their currency is devalued by the constant stream of hacks and liars, posing as avatars of false equivalency and intellectual probity. No, that dipshit Duffy trashed a guy who earned his Purple Heart at the same time Duffy spent his twenties screwing around on MTV's Real World. Fuckin' profile in courage right there. The people who put him in Congress oughta be ashamed of themselves.

This has nothing to do with individuals expressing opinions that I don't like, or disagree with. That's never a problem. That's where the fun happens in political discourse. It's when one of these self-styled "gatekeepers" decides to grant air time to liars and propagandists. It's a vile, destructive recursion of treachery -- we know the liars are liars, the network knows they're liars, the network knows that we know they're liars, the liars know that the audience and the networks know that they're liars, and so on.

It's not news, nor is it even entertainment. It's clickbait. Well, fuck them, and fuck the companies that buy ad time on those shows. You wanna know who hates America and is actively ruining it? Those assholes, all of them. Think of every awful thing that has transpired in the last three years from the antics of this administration, and know that the corporate media is responsible for it happening. Billions of dollars' worth of free air time, and a bloodless commitment to absolute both-siderism, no matter how false.

I wish I knew how to put them out of business. Nothing would thrill me more than to watch Tucker Carlson or Van Jones asking you if you want fries with that. All any of us can do is let our wallets speak for us at every possible opportunity. And if enough of us do that, they'll notice. Don't be fooled by their bullshit "cancel culture" plaints. That's just them scared shitless at the prospect of consumers exercising their free choice, choosing not to have their airwaves relentlessly poisoned by these soulless weasels. That's never a bad thing.