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.

Rush to Judgment

Not going to waste much time or effort on this, because he really isn't worth it, but it is a fine larf to see some of the usual dopes entreating us to "be best" or whatever, with Rush Limbaugh's supposedly terminal diagnosis. (I thought he was stage four -- which, in my understanding, generally means "there's nothing more we can do" -- back at the beginning of the year.)

I could say something shitty, like hoping that every breath he continues to draw is more agonizing than the previous one, something like that. But the fact is that you have to care about something or someone in order to hate it (them) sufficiently. And I just don't care, at all.

I assume that most people, once they hit a certain age, begin having those little existential conversations with themselves. What kind of mark will I make? How will people remember me? What part of me will live on, and for how long?

Obviously, for 99.9999% of us (not an empirically proven number), the answers are, in order:  Little to none; fondly (at best) for a while, then less and less; very little, and not for very long. Even for people with large families and/or large groups of friends, they all move on at some point.

Limbaugh has made hundreds of millions of dollars over the past several decades by poisoning the well of what passes for American political discourse. People reflexively point to him calling then thirteen-year-old Chelsea Clinton "the White House dog" early in his career, but the fact is that that's one of his more harmless bits.

He's always been a cheerful prevaricator, a passer of rumors and innuendo, the orchestrator of an endless campaign of calumny and fear. Basically his show and his schtick have been an ongoing false-flag operation, distracting his rube audience with fake misdeeds from the Democratic villains of his passion play, while his Republicon saints robbed the country blind and stupid.

Here's what he had to say about Ruth Bader Ginsburg a couple years ago -- or has he memorably dubs her, Ruth "Buzzi" Ginsburg. [Ed:  Hi-yooooo!] You can see where Genius Q. Dealmaker swiped his splendiferous gift for nicknamification. Truly, this is inspired stuff. And he couldn't even wait for the body to get cold before he was clamoring for a (fascist) replacement to be installed in the seat.

It goes without saying that the people who will have anything positive to say about Limbaugh are the same sort of arm-dragging troglodytes who will miss Trump when that final Double Whopper finally takes him to hell. Limbaugh's impact is arguably larger than Trump's, and in fact, it's clear that the life's work of the former was to set the stage for the latter, to keep people dumb and angry and eager for the next day's outrage pill, like the Skinner-box rodents they really are.

Like I say, I don't really give two shits whether Limbaugh keels over tomorrow or ten years from now, because his legacy and operational principles will be the same either way:

1. The herrenvolk are entitled to their own set of rules and customs, which (as Frank Wilhoit so memorably put it) protect but don't bind them, while simultaneously binding but not protecting everyone else.
2. Hate and bullshit are easier to digest -- and more profitable! -- if you stuff those turds into a handful of cheesy "jokes" and nicknames, all of which are meant to be taken with utmost seriousness, while also being used as a shield to deflect the opposition's "humorless" rebuttals.
   
3. The bigger the lie, the more they believe it.

The one thing I actually do hope for Limbaugh is that, in his quiet, more reflective moments, when the microphone and lights are off, when he sits in his vast, empty mansion with his cat and his current wife, that he really thinks to himself about whether the life he chose to lead was the life he had dreamed of when he was younger, and if not, what might have gone differently.

The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike, and it sure doesn't hurt for everyone to take note that Limbaugh got a much fairer shake out of life than most decent people, and that whether we're "good" or "bad", we all end up the same.

So you might as well do something you can actually talk about in polite company, something that you don't have to be ashamed of. Carrying water for monstrous billionaires pays well, but the fact of the matter is that after a few weeks of grief kayfabe, they'll shove Charlie Kirk or some equally useless sack of shit in the chair to carry the water and poison the well, and Limbaugh will be completely forgotten within five or ten years, except for those who spit when they say his name, like Father Coughlin or Lord Haw Haw. Some legacy.

The main thing for liberals and Democrats is not to let themselves be gulled into this "let's be nice" high-road sucker's game. You have no obligation to forgive your abusers or their enablers, nor to mourn their demises. The fact is that they seek this absolution only as a way of minimizing the abuse and its effects. They don't actually care if you "forgive" them or are "civil" to them; it's just a cynical ploy to keep you on your back foot, to remind you that they will never give you the courtesies they demand from you at every turn.

Keep that in mind in the weeks and months (and even years) to come, because the bigger the landslide, the more you're gonna hear this "reconciliation" bullshit, this Rodney King can't-we-all-just-get-along rhetoric, as a hasty attempt to cover their real-world efforts to undermine the Democrats -- and more importantly, democracy itself.

Never forget what the true endgame is here -- making sure only the right people get to have a say in how their world runs. Limbaugh was an important voice in distilling that toxic brew down to a level where the average Keystone Light swiller could latch on to some talking points, and never have to worry about whether they were accurate in the least.

It Is What It Is; Or, Weekend At Donnie's

Since we love to live in nostalgia -- that is, the fond misrecollections of an exaggerated past -- this whole year has been a fine reminder of the protracted collapse of the Soviet Union during the 1980s. The heightened inequalities; the government-controlled (and -caused) shortages of PPE during a crisis; running out of toilet paper for weeks. Hell, try to find free weights or dumbbell plates for your home gym, seven months later. Mundane shit like that, things that never used to be an issue.

Oh yeah, and a quarter-million dead in less than a year; the tens of millions of jobs lost, many still not regained; the blatant lying and gaslighting from the government; the violent crackdowns in the streets; the looting of the national treasury by all the sycophants and hangers-on to the inner party elites.

And now, the uncertainty of Dear Leader's precious health, so reminiscent of the old days when American intel agents would micro-analyze appearances by Brezhnev or Andropov or Chernenko, how many days between public sightings, which individuals were accompanying them, their mood and coloration.

The Soviet leaders, it was commonly understood even by many 'murkin schoolchildren, were ancient, doddering alcoholics being propped up by a coterie of faithful lackeys, whose duties were not to Матушка Россия, but to whichever figurehead the military and the few people with real money and power chose to install for the time being.

Whatever the case, their true loyalties were clear -- not to the country or its people, but to its figurehead. And the disposition of that figurehead was always worse than portrayed to the willing dupes at Pravda or Izvestiya.

It's also a condition passed along from the old Союз Советских that whatever impotent opposition exists must always be kept in a permanent state of suspended veracity -- that is, for each instance or event presented to them, they are forced to go through the hapless ritual of trying to parse what is "true" and what is the game being played. Is this really a masterful jujitsu move, an eleventh-dimensional chess play designed to make the strongman appear invulnerable when he single-handedly defeats the implacable foe that has ravaged the countryside?

It's not the usual clichéd well, yes -- and no, so much as it is well, sort of -- and, seriously? I mean Jesus Christ, have you really observed how these clowns operate? Come on, they couldn't play regular chess if you made the pieces out of gold and diamonds. There is no subtlety, no strategy. There is only id and impulse and appetite.

You can be sure that if he is able to be made to seem more or less ambulatory by, say, October 13th, they will frame it as proof of the strongman's innate personal might, his good genes once again thwarting the pernicious, sneaky kung flu. But for now, one thing you can be dead certain about is that he has it, and the symptoms are probably bad enough to have them worried.

One subset of common taters and panel-show chat-monkeys that are welcome to fuck off all the way into the burning core of the sun, are the ones piously insisting that we must all set aside our grievances and wish him and his infected minions well. This captures my feelings about that adequately.

Let's gets something straight, and this is just in the past week -- it appears highly likely that the "ground zero" event for all these "leading" Republicons getting infected was their smarmy little end-zone dance last weekend for their fucking SCOTUS pick -- who herself reportedly had the bug "over the summer." But pretty much everyone who has come down with it all of a sudden was at that super-spreader event.

I've seen quite a few photos and videos from that event; some sites are going over it like the fuckin' Zapruder film. You know who I haven't seen in any of the photos or videos so far? Mitch McConnell. If he was there, he kept a low profile.

Regardless, I think you can count on it that Trump gave it to Hope Hicks, and not the other way around; that he almost certainly knew he had it before Tuesday night's debate debacle (for which Chris Christie reportedly coached Trump to be a blustery asshole in order to deliberately goad Biden into stuttering); that he definitely knew he had the bug by Wednesday when he went to Duluth, and Thursday when he held a fundraiser at his rat-infested club in New Jersey.

He knew, and he didn't give a shit. Now we're supposed to give a shit. Fuck -- and I cannot emphasize this nearly enough -- all the way off. Anyone badgering or lecturing you to be a good Christian and think of these animals as fellow human beings in need, they are cordially invited to take that proverbial bag of salted dicks, and shove them sideways into their sigmoid colons.

That's one shred of actual freedom you are still allowed to retain, това́рищ, that they haven't taken from you just yet -- the freedom to not pretend that your abusers are your fucking friends, or that you owe them any sort of grace or fealty.

Ask yourself how they would be acting, how he would be acting, if it had been Biden and Pelosi and Schumer and all them, who had tested positive. Try to conceive of the vile shit they would come up with in their gloating, and then realize that your worst assumptions are not even in the ballpark. These people are fucking scum, period. All of them.

They hate you -- I mean really, truly fucking hate you. They stole a year, probably two, from your lives. Your kids and grandkids will be paying for all the looting they've done just in the last six months, trillions of dollars spewed to the worst fucking people in the world, not to save shitty jobs but so millionaires could give each other fat bonuses and then lay off the peons.

And they lie about all of it to you every second of every day -- and then insist that you thank them for it? That you express sympathy for them when the natural consequences of their sociopathic indifference comes back to bite them?

Seems the best response to all these inner party shitheads coming down with the karmavirus is the same response they've given the entire country:  I really don't care, do you?

October Surprise

Paul Campos at LGM has a post about the prospects of an actual slide into authoritarianism post-election, and despite my vacillations over the past few months, I actually tend to share that cautious optimism.

Part of that cautious optimism is more recent, though, and due directly as a result of Orange Foolius' catastrophic debate performance the other night. Obviously, as we found out the hard way in 2016, debate "wins" or "losses" don't matter all that much; it is universally agreed that HFC "won" all three of her debates with #Brokeahontas, and lotta good it did her, right?

But that was then, as they say, and this is now. The people who decided to "take a chance" or "vote for change" now know what that entails. He is no longer an unknown quantity. There is zero chance he will "learn" or "grow into" the rigors of the job. He's done everything he can to cater not just to his base, but to the basest elements of that base, the worst fucking people.

Obviously this doesn't mean anything should be taken for granted, either -- just as he's never made a single honest dollar in his rotten excuse for a life, Trump has never been in a fair fight. The office he defiles daily also confers an array of powers he can deploy, and already he is trying every trick in the book, and some that aren't even in the library.

But the fact is that after months of trying to delegitimize the vote (unless he wins, of course), no one outside the cult is buying it -- in fact, no one outside the cult is buying anything he's selling at this point. People have had enough, they're exhausted, and it shows. They don't want another four years of this bullshit, accelerating into decline and incoherent fury.

And that's really what you saw in full bloom in that debate -- the heedless cruelty, the indifferent mendacity, the raging incompetence. It's been there the whole time, you know. I saw these things in him back in the 1980s, when I barely paid attention to the news. But I know a fucking asshole when I see and hear and smell one.

I honestly cannot believe anyone ever sat through five fucking minutes of his stupid show. There's a part of me -- the part that despises stupidity, that sincerely wishes for the worst things to happen to willfully dumb people -- that unfortunately believes that to some degree, this nation deserved Trump, if only to see that there is a difference, that these things do matter, and that you have to pay attention and stay engaged and take action once in a while.

I have for some months considered this election basically as a choice between Terminator 2 (where Schwarzenegger is the good Terminator) and Ike Turner. Trump goes off the rails, raging incoherently like the fundamentally abusive male that he really is at heart, saying, bitch, look what you made me do, while Biden looks out at a bemused, enervated citizenry and says, Come with me if you want to live.

That is what the choice really comes down to, and it's true all the way down-ticket. Either you support these monsters or you don't. It is that simple. Anything else is just empty, self-serving rationalization.

Two hundred thousand dead in six months is an atrocity, a grim milestone that speaks volumes about the players in question. In a nation of 330 million people, it is proportionally few, so the majority of 'murkins have had the luxury of not having had it personally affect them. I know of people second- and third-hand who have contracted the bug, maybe one person (who was nearly ninety years of age) who may have died from complications (details were not clear as they were relayed to me indirectly). I suspect many, many others are in a similar boat.

But everyone has been affected by this, regardless. At best, each and every one of us lost an entire year from our lives from this shit -- and it ain't over, not by a long shot. It is resurgent in many areas, it will gain more traction during flu season, and actual doctors are saying it could be another full year before they really have a handle on it.

So even a die-hard supporter of this raging clown has to acknowledge, if only to themselves, that their blind, stupid devotion has directly cost them a year and probably two of their actual, literal life. And it was completely preventable. All that was required was leaders who cared about their country. Instead we had a feckless dope and his scumbag enablers, people whose first and only thoughts were how to monetize the disaster.

That may not cost him the cultists -- if anything, they've shown conclusively that literally nothing will sway them, and they can go straight to hell with him -- but it doesn't gain him any converts. And the math says that the hardcore base simply isn't enough, even with the EC advantages in those states.

(I would also assume a fair-to-high probability that Brad Parscale's weekend meltdown is directly related to some serious criminality in Dear Leader's money-grab of a campaign, and that Parscale can easily be leveraged to flip on his bosses, who are already dumping him under the proverbial bus. The real question is how soon all that takes place. The guy is clearly unbalanced and stressed out. There's nothing stopping him from going straight to the media the second his 5150 hold is up.)

The other thing is that despite the constant dog-whistles and calls-to-arms for the various fascist gangs out there, there has been relatively little actual violence perpetrated by those elements, considering the scope and scale and sheer volume of the protests, and the ample opportunities for them to commit real mayhem, were they so inclined. The daily displays of vigilante theater have amounted to very little.

I don't think anyone would miss the Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers if they disappeared tomorrow, but the fact is that nearly all of their activity has been the usual social-media woofing. It's disturbing that so many active LEO are affiliated with these creeps, but I bet most of them aren't willing to throw away their ability to get pensioned at forty-five or fifty years of age and start up their security consultancy or whatever. They cannot just show up and "poll watch" wherever they feel like, and the precincts that do let them get away with it are likely to be blood-red (politically, of course) anyway.

I mean, do they think we don't all notice that they never seem to show up in any, ah, black areas? You see any of these Meal Team Six boogalosers in fuckin' Compton or Milwaukee or Atlanta? There's a reason you don't, just as there's a reason that aside from a disaffected teenager who went looking for trouble in Kenosha and found it, there has been very little major violence.

Think about that for a second -- they've been encouraged for the past month from law enforcement and the highest levels of government, that there are no consequences for murdering "leftist" protesters in the middle of the street. We all assumed that they would take the wink-and-a-nod as official assent, or at least a promise to look the other way.

And yet they haven't done much of anything except get all their pieces of flair together in their gaping-asshole suburban-commando gas-guzzlers, yee-haw and stroke each other in the nearest Wal-Mart parking lot for an afternoon, and maybe cruise a few blocks in Portland with paintball guns and pepper spray. This is not to say that none of them will ever do anything, but the threat of actual, systematic political violence has not occurred, despite official approval.

(The BLM street martyrs seem to have gotten wiser about their good trouble as well. If you're not going to arm yourselves and come ready to scrap, then it's best practice to do your thing in daylight, and get home before dark. It should be clear by now that your sacrifice will change nothing, and there's nothing in this hollowed-out husk of a nation worth getting maimed or murdered for. Everyone knows Kyle Rittenhouse's name; very few people still recall the names of the people he killed and wounded.)

It may turn out to be wishful thinking, but if we get an actual landslide, the surprise might be that he and his shitbird minions will have to stand down and go away. I wouldn't be too surprised if there is at least one really ugly incident between now and, say, Thanksgiving. There's a decent chance that the mutants are keeping their powder dry for a close aftermath.

So it's up to all of us to show up and make that happen, to make the margins wide and clear enough so that the shenanigans can't work.

The Most Tedious Game

Interesting take on the the Q-ball "phenomenon." Like just about everything else, it makes sense in a weird way that this dopey, disjointed viral narrative -- which really doesn't even qualify as a conspiracy theory, since such things generally are used to explain things that have already occurred -- might really be the result of gamifying garden-variety internet pranksterism.

If there aren't already, there will likely be plenty of behavioral psychology studies and books regarding this sort of thing. This transcends the "is the dress blue or white" / "Laurel-Yanni" types of pop-culture takes from a few years ago. Nor is it quite the "epistemic closure" phenomenon that's immolated the political culture, such as it is, of this sweltering husk of a nation.

It's not even about the nature of "belief," since even cults are more or less consistent in the general arcs of their tenets, where the Q-balls just pile things up higher, as the last layer of revelations gradually prove to be untrue. Some of it may be the "inside knowledge" that conspiracy theories generally claim to impart, but even that doesn't adequately explain how people get tethered to shifting, increasingly loopy narratives.

It's really about how people get disenfranchised and disconnected from their corrupt political system, and so they construct a parallel system that operates in an alternate reality with its own peculiar mythos. Some of this is understandable -- the established system is such a transparent racket, so shamelessly awash in dark money from the sociopathic billionaires who really run this popsicle stand, it only bothers to be slightly responsive on whatever hot-button issue is currently distracting the rubes from their pockets being emptied. That is by design.

So which is really the more harmful -- in terms of actual, practical, real-world effects on ordinary people -- conspiracy theory:  the fanciful troll-narrative of Hitlery and her assorted minions running a cannibal pedophile ring from one of Uncle Jeff's secret islands in the Bahamas; or the idea that severe, ongoing wealth inequality can be comprehensively addressed by, say, modest tax breaks and loan prioritization for minority-owned small businesses?

Ruthless

We all knew the day was coming, we just didn't know when. The only surprise is that it wasn't, you know, on Election Day or something like that.

Hell, it could have been a week after Election Day, and Moscow Mitch and his little dog Leningrad Lindsey would have bulled through a lame-duck appointment of whatever forty-year-old FedSoc shithead they were instructed to.

The nihilist side of me wants it to happen, wants this whole rotted husk of a nation to find out the hard way what happens not just when Roe is repealed, but voting rights, employee rights, fucking Griswold gets overturned.

As repulsive as the pelf-grubbing Republicons and their moron base and the psychotic billionaires who rent them are, I reserve the greater measure of my contempt for the Democratic voters who couldn't be bothered to show up for the 2010 and 2014 midterms. Forty-one percent turnout in 2010, just over thirty-six percent in 2014.

If you are one of the folks that couldn't be bothered to show up for those votes, but now, now you're concerned, I cordially invite you to go fuck yourself in the neck with a rusty chainsaw. Because you're one of the ones to blame.

Liberals and Democrats talk a good game about "taking action" and all, and inevitably it becomes some lame, meaningless, purely performative street-protest bullshit. People have been protesting all over the country, all summer long, and they have nothing to show for it. Feel free to prove me wrong, show me some tangible outcomes from all that good trouble.

Now, if you want to take some real action and maybe have a sliver of hope to accomplish something, figure out how much money you have to spare, and go here and donate to as many Senate campaigns as you can. I'm going to donate $25-100 to each of the following:

• Sara Gideon (ME)
• Jaime Harrison (SC)
• Mark Kelly (AZ)
• Cal Cunningham (NC)
• Theresa Greenfield (IA)
  
• Steve Bullock (MT)
• Jon Ossoff (GA-1)
  
• Barbara Bollier (KS)
  
• Al Scott (AK)
• Amy McGrath (KY)

I wish I had more to donate. I wish candidates like Abby Broyles (OK) and M.J. Hegar (TX) had more of a fighting chance, because Jim Inhofe and John Cornyn are two of the biggest gaping assholes on the planet, not just in the Senate. But it is, as they say far too often, what it is, and unfortunately it becomes a self-reinforcing dynamic of putting the money where it's going to be most effective -- races that are closer precisely because people have been donating more money to them.

But I think seven or maybe eight of the ten candidates listed above have decent-to-strong chances of winning their respective races, and that's enough to flip the Senate back to a solid Democratic majority. Even five would be enough to do the trick.

And then they have to act, decisively and aggressively, with the fundamental understanding that even in the instance of a blowout victory, this is their last best chance to punish the traitors across the aisle, people who sold out their country for a bag of nickels. No more "norms" or "rules" or polite suggestions about how things should be, but a cold recognition of how they are, what they've become.

Pack the court, blow up the filibuster, ram through as many judges as possible, dig up every punitive procedure you can muster and ram them straight up the GOP's collective poop-chute, no lube, no mercy, no pretenses of collegiality. This is war, and if Democratic leadership is not prepared to lead it and fight it as such, they too can find honest work. Enough dithering and hand-wringing. Fight hard or fuck off already.

Churchill famously said that when you're going through hell, keep going, and so we should and must, if we want to leave anything of value behind for our children and grandchildren. But with that comes, once again, the need to see things for how they really are, rather than how we think they should be. It might be a blowout in the other direction. It might end up close enough to cheat and steal and weasel their way through to an illegitimate victory, but one that nonetheless carries with it the very real trappings of power.

And then you know, without any doubt or uncertainty, how things really are. If there really are enough people who don't care, or can't be bothered to show up -- or there really are as many or more of them than there are of us -- well, now you know.

And you should plan accordingly. Until then, you should expect more of yourselves, more of your fellow citizens, more of the people you send to DC to represent you. No more bullshit, no more excuses.

Give till it hurts. Make sure you can vote, and then show up and do so. Don't worry about the goons and closet-cases with their Dear Leader swag and flapping gums. They can yammer all they want, but they can't physically prevent you from walking through that door and casting your lot.

And then you can at least say you did what you could. And get your documentation in order, because you might find yourself with a sudden need to vacate the Republic of Gilead. Look around you, and see if you can tell yourself that I'm exaggerating even a little bit.

Joke on the Water

Worth a thousand words.

Accelerated Decline

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suckers and Losers

Everybody has read the article by now, and absolutely nobody is surprised. Maybe it will move the needle a touch, but probably not, which is the real story.

Maybe he's right -- maybe people who are willing to serve and sacrifice for The State, a faceless leviathan that may or may not be there for them in their time of need, have been bamboozled. Maybe the people who continue to support this fucking monster, whose defining trait is open contempt of the very concepts of charity and grace, are also suckers and losers. Maybe the liberals and Democrats, waiting for their elected leaders to do something even performatively and making excuses for why they refuse to, are also suckers.

[Case in point:  Impeach Bill Barr now. He is openly discussing the ways in which he will sow distrust in the election results, and foment civil unrest. He has already lied to Congress multiple times, including at his job interview. It doesn't matter that the Republicon senators are traitors and will acquit him. The investigative process will generate enough evidence that can be use to prosecute Barr if Biden wins. And if Biden loses -- or "loses"? Hope your passport's in good shape.]

Maybe my dad, who fought the Nazis in the Atlantic and the Imperial Japanese in the Pacific, who was literally en route to Japan on a fucking minesweeper when we dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was a sucker for believing that his efforts then were necessary to keep the country he loved from turning into a mass of sweaty, ignorant slobs. Maybe my uncle, who served two tours in Vietnam as a Marine platoon leader and got soaked in Agent Orange, and died hard just a few weeks after his fifty-first birthday twenty years ago, was a sucker for jumping into a fight he was told was right and just. He got there and saw the truth and came back changed, and spent the rest of his life trying to get back what he'd lost. I have a younger cousin who joined the Marines earlier this year, for a CINC who's made it clear that he couldn't care less that the Russians are paying Islamic militants bounties on American military corpses. Sucker!

And on and on. It's a giant, all-encompassing scam, and we've all bought into some aspect or other of it. Remember when a couple of feckless billionaires inserted themselves into the Democratic primary, just long enough to knock Elizabeth Warren outta there? Where's OK Bloomer now that we could use his precious money, not just for Biden but for at least six or eight Senate seats? Where's Tom Steyer and all his bro-gressive happy talk? Yeah, they really care about "their country," but it's a different country than the rest of us live in.

Maybe the folks out in the streets protesting, as well-meaning as they are, might be suckers as well. They think something will "change" from their efforts. Well, you've been doing it all summer, and the only thing that's changed is that the police forces of Portland, Minneapolis, Kenosha, and NYC -- all cities run by liberal Democratic mayors in states run by liberal Democratic governors -- are much more comfortable openly displaying their true sympathies.

They stand aside while roving white supremacist gangs barrel through crowds in their $70k trucks and attack unarmed protesters. They let assault-rifle-toting kids who have just murdered people in the street with a weapon they were not legally allowed to possess just walk on by. They have not stopped killing, beating, kidnapping. They have made their position entirely clear, and no one is even pretending to try to stop them.

Black Lives Matter? Are you fucking kidding? Your life doesn't matter, liberal white protester. As far as the redneck death squads and their good buddies on the PD are concerned, you're not white. They probably won't shoot you seven times in the back, but you never know. They sure as hell won't stop the bearded goon with the riot helmet and the Kevlar Pepe the Frog vest from stomping the shit out of you.

Now that we're in the final sixty days of the electoral race, people are starting to look at the clock, because they're exhausted, demoralized, disheartened. They want it to "be over," but it will never be over. This is just beginning, sorry to say, but as we near the homestretch in this here blog, I am convinced that that will be the crushing minor chord I will end with in a few months.

Getting rid of Trump is -- and really, always was -- only the symbolic part of it. It's real, and it's vital to any semblance of continuity in what passes for elected representation in this flawed experiment. The real challenge, as the Atlantic article lays out so clearly, is in figuring out just how to deal with individuals who are fine with all of it. They have constructed an alternate reality for themselves, one that gives them permission -- hell, makes it their patriotic duty -- to support this thug who so openly disparages military service and sacrifice.

And putatively liberal media outlets make painstakingly multiple efforts over and over again to construct their own alternate reality, one where these people are Real 'murkins, who support monsters out of some well-meaning intent and love for their country. Such articles are not only worthy of every bit of scorn and derision we can muster, they also represent a profound dereliction of journalistic duty.

These people should be portrayed as they truly are -- as people who gladly support all of this, every bit of it. They are lying when they mutter something about "wish he would tweet less" or whatever. They love the tweets. After all, he's doing what they wish they had the platform to do -- tell all them fags and libruls and race-traitors to go fuck themselves. They wish he'd tweet more, that he'd crack down more on all the people they've been taught to hate, conditioned like hamsters in Fox News' Skinner box to pat the metal plate for the daily outrage pellet. I don't know if it's possible to deprogram most of them at this point. I do know that there is no point in trying to engage with them anymore.

It's easy for him, because he's never served anyone or sacrificed anything. He's never had to learn or understand or know anything, because he's rented minions to wipe his ass for him his entire miserable life. But the working-class schmuck that still rolls with all this? That's a harder nut to crack, and I don't know if you even want to waste your time on it. Remember that the largest number of voters is non-voters, and ask yourself why, and if there's a way to reach them.

Are they really lazy and stupid, or do they see the lack of leadership and conviction (to varying degrees, of course) on both sides, and simply say no? There's no excuse for doing that this time around, but again, if the opposition party started playing with a real sense of urgency, instead of always just playing not to lose, they might motivate some of those sideline spectators for once. What's the harm in trying?

Opportunity Costs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

True Believer

I love great comedy and comedians almost as much as I love great music and musicians. Growing up on a steady diet of (mostly) black comedians who would say literally anything to make people laugh, it's never mattered whether they were "dirty" or not. Sometimes it made it funnier, mostly on the holy shit, did he really just say that? sense.

In recent years, "clean" comedians such as Jim Gaffigan and Pete Holmes, both of whom are also to some degree persons of faith, have attracted notice, proving that funny is funny, no matter whether you're raunchy or not. Gaffigan especially, happily married with five kids, so Catholic he's actually performed for the pope, makes his family the centerpiece of his humor, somehow bringing it above the usual realm of "dad jokes".

So when Gaffigan lost his shit on Twitter last Thursday, having seen and heard enough lies and bullshit from this gang of shameless criminals, it was noteworthy. Unfortunately, so far it's mostly been noted either for the man-bites-dog nature of a guy who famously never swears being pushed into telling everyone to go fuck themselves, or for the usual shut-up-and-sing sentiments that get lobbed at (liberal) performers and athletes who upset their (conservative) fans by speaking their mind.

But what's really noteworthy about Gaffigan's tirade is the fact that it's an excellent example of someone taking their faith seriously, and not just as a cheap, convenient political posture. Atheists and believers alike have become desensitized to the public hypocrisies and greed of the most vocal professional god-botherers. It's a tacky public grift and we all know it, and we've just become used to it.

Which makes it all the more startling when someone demonstrates an actual understanding and appreciation of the teachings of Christ, empowering them as -- get this -- Christians. Even as a stone atheist, I can appreciate the fact that the central operational tenet of Christianity is empathy, a necessary element in any group endeavor, whether it's governance or business or love or compassion.

And it in fact underscores the primary reason why I have been an atheist since [checks notes] about seventh or eighth grade -- not because the stories of the bible can't be proven as empirically true or even possible in many cases, and not because god lets "bad things happen to good people" or whatever.

It's mostly because a critical mass of people who profess to believe refuse to walk the talk. They just talk and talk about it, and lecture everyone else about it, but they don't live it at all. Faith without works is dead, and people who just use their professed belief as an excuse to push other people around are not the sort of people I would want to share even fake ontological turf with.

And Trump's endless lies and violations of the nation's laws, as well as several biblical commandments on any given day, have simply brought these people's shameless hypocrisies to an impasse. They can no longer be taken seriously -- as Americans, as Christians, or even as decent people.

This fantastic Twitter thread by "Design Mom" Gabrielle Blair really drives that point home. She calls out the Trumpkins among her Instagram followers in no uncertain terms, the people who want her to shut up and talk about paint and floor tiles and home design shit.

And Blair, who is a practicing Mormon, is having none of it. She understands that the gap is irreconcilable, that she cannot continue to call herself a Christian and ignore the support of violent monsters as a simple agree-to-disagree moment. It is a clear matter of conscience, and silence is assent. And so she makes it clear to these people coming to her for design tips and mom group chats that she doesn't want to make content for people who endorse white supremacy, period.

As the self-deputizing brownshirts out there are now upping the counter-protest violence at the BLM protests, it is now more important than ever to point out to the street protesters -- you are wasting your time, and risking your health and life for nothing. Either arm yourselves -- Oregon, for example, is an open-carry state -- so you can at least defend when a truck full of douchebags rolls up with (if you're lucky) bear mace and paintball guns, or just stay home. It's been going on since May, and nothing has changed, nothing will change until the election clarifies it one way or the other.

Well, it might change one thing -- polls are showing a slight but perceptible nudge among squirrelly suburban swing-state whites toward the [rolls eyes] "law and order" vote. Just like '68. Feel better about all that "good trouble"? Yeah. Might want to start thinking real carefully about outcomes -- the lack of outcomes so far, besides an increase in violence, and what near-future outcomes are more likely. None of them are good.

In the meantime, shunning works, not just boycotting Fox News sponsors or what-have-you, but making it clear to the people in your life who value you that this is a dealbreaker for you, that you may still be their friend or relative, but they no longer have your respect, which at the very least means that political discussions are a no-go, since by definition they cannot be trusted to be honest interlocutors.

It's that simple. They have made themselves clear, time and again, with a consistency that becomes more unconscionable by the day. They are being understood for what they are, and the heinous acts they support, and they can't stand it.

And it really seems that, in a country where a majority of the citizens still at least profess some religious belief, it makes a difference to them when people of faith, such as Jim Gaffigan and Gabrielle Blair, are able to step up and articulate an argument directly derived from a faith that stems accurately from the messages of the New Testament, rather than the co-opted screeds of interchangeable face-lifted tax-dodgers. They understand correctly that there is no way to honor the actual tenets of their faith, and especially that central principle of empathy, and abide the daily cardinal sins of these people.

Ultimately, this is no longer an argument about politics. Hell, I disagree on political things with Democrats and liberals all the time, not just with conservatives and Republicans. This is an argument about ethics and morals and values as real, tangible things worth keeping, not just buzzwords to be cynically launched on some Sunday follies show hosted by whatever credulous dupe gets paid to do that shit.

Either you're okay with a thieving, lying, rapist pervert and his criminal family killing this country, or you're not. Either you're fine with 300k dead by the end of the year from a preventable pandemic, and the lies and economic destruction that have come with it, or you think it's a problem. Either you're good with people taking the law into their own hands and murdering unarmed protesters, or you recognize that as a dangerous step in the direction of brownshirts and death squads.

I think we'd all like to go back to living real lives and not spending every fucking day worrying about whatever new hellish atrocity is being visited on us by these monstrous people. But like with all those unnecessary COVID deaths, it is what it is, and every decision you make in the course of a day -- where you spend your money, who you choose to interact with and how -- counts in the aggregate.

We didn't ask for any of this, but after five years of bullshit from the Go Fuck Yourself cult, all we can say to them in response is, you have made yourselves understood, and this is what that looks like. That doesn't change as long as you continue to align yourself with these things and these people.

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.

Uncle Tim's Cabin

You know, it's sad and annoying that a black Democrat would shill for Trump, but you know, Vernon Jones has been a known shithead for quite some time, a true DINO. Clean your fucking barn out once in a while, people, or accept the fact that you're going to get "surprises" like this from time to time.

But really, if that's the best they can pull over to the dork side, some state lege asshole who appears to be feathering his nest for a post-house run on K Street, that's pretty small potatoes, until Jeff Van Camp gets up there Thursday. Now it's up to Vern's constituents to run his ass out of office, and then depending on who wins, up to the party leaders whether he ever holds a job in the arena again.

If the Dems win, Jones should spend the rest of his days asking if we want fries with that; if Kim Don Un steals one out, it's even odds whether Big Daddy will even remember Vern's name when he needs something. Favors and loyalty only run one way in this swamp, son.

As for real Republicons like Tim Scott and Ben Carson, who knows what the hell their deal is? They're not entirely wrong that the Democrats have frequently taken blacks for granted as a voting bloc, but, you know, if you can't see the contrast between enthusiastic skull-busters and half-hearted incrementalism, I don't know what to say. Neither is good, but one is far worse.

And guys like Scott and Carson can bullshit themselves all they want about how they're in a party that let them succeed on their own merits rather than the color of their skin, but if they don't realize that the GOP has its own "we gotta get one of those too" protocols, it's because they've chosen not to see it.

She Seems Fun

You think Gavin Newsom ever looks back on when he was hitched to this goofy broad and thinks, Jesus, I dodged a fuckin' bullet?

Back in those days, it was our Sunday morning ritual to pick up a nice thick copy of the SF Chronicle, and spend the entire morning reading through it, sipping coffee, trading sections. I recall one time when they ran a puff piece on Guilfoyle in their society pages (which are always off-putting in principle anyway), and it's been too long for me to put it into specific detail, but I do distinctly recall coming away from the article thinking I really don't like her.

There was something weird and overly calculated and "ambitious" -- not in the gritty Working Girl way, but in the ugly Sunset Boulevard or Showgirls way -- that really gave me a bad vibe about her. Newsom was mayor at the time, of course, and has had higher ambitions from the start, but manages to carry himself without being a leg-humping, social-climbing asshole.

So it's no surprise at all to see how Kim Guilfoyle has turned out -- smug, obnoxious, annoying, coked out of her skull like her douchebag boyfriend. Together they always look like they're about to shoot some weird stepmom-fetish porn, then go to a restaurant and abuse the waitstaff, nurse a couple of drinks while the shit wears off.

As far as the conventions themselves go, I watched a few bits from the Democratic convention, and while I don't plan to hate-watch the Republicon convention, I will read some hate-recaps here and there.

So after the opening night of the GOP festivities, I'll say that the one main difference I would have assumed beforehand is true in spades so far, and will no doubt worsen:  the Democratic convention was designed to enthuse the base, and encourage moderates and independents to come to sanity, while the Republicons will do nothing other than beat the one drum they have and simply badger the shitheads that comprise their base to show up.

These are awful, profoundly indecent people, appealing only to like-minded souls, telling them that it's worth all the death and destruction so far, and to come, if only to keep those people in their rightful places. That's all they've got anymore, and they're happy to use a big mouth and a fat set of jugs to make the pitch to the pot-bellied, fist-shaking codgers who still jerk off to this shit.

Conversion Funnel

When you get out of high school and start experiencing the real world -- jobs, vehicles, girlfriends, responsibilities, ambitions, ideas about who you are and who you want to be -- you start formulating concepts that help you orient to the world as it is. In my second semester as a college freshman back in 1986, I took a Marketing 101 class. Within a week, I had cynically boiled down the principles of marketing to this:  getting people to spend money they don't really have on things they don't really want.

Feel free to take that as the angry pretension of a Holden Caulfield type, decrying the inauthenticity of the corrupt world he has been thrust into, but it's not wrong. As we grow up, we consciously or subconsciously modify these little maxims, adding and refining with the experiential knowledge we pick up along the way. Or we develop corollaries to them.

So another way to look at marketing is this:  convincing people either to try a product they do not use, or to keep using a product they have been using. That takes the sneering moralism out of the original, and enables us to focus on the practical nature of marketing. What are the features and benefits of the product? Why is it better than the product I am currently using, or have always used? I don't use this product at all, why should I start, and why should I use your brand?

Now, let's apply that two-pronged corollary [giggity] to the current political marketing schema of the Republicon party. Name a single thing any of them -- not just Trump himself, but any leading member of the party -- has said or done that would convince someone who voted Democratic in 2016 to jump over. You can't because they haven't. They've doubled -- tripled -- down on the lies and cheap shots and shitty rhetoric. They refuse to stop fucking that chicken.

That is a practical calculation on their part. Even if they were inclined to "reach out," they would lose the cult that keeps them there. And there is literally nothing they could do or say to change my mind at this point, and I suspect that is the median point for most people who did not vote for these scumbags in the first place.

So now the second part of the corollary:  keep using the product they have been using. White suburban women were the hidden demographic that helped Trump draw the proverbial inside straight last go-round. The midterms showed that they hemorrhaged that demographic, and the bleeding hasn't stopped.

What are they doing to win those women back? Not a goddamned thing. In fact, with Biden's selection of Kamala Harris as a running mate, the party's great idea is simply to point out that Mitt Romney's dipshit niece is the party chair. Big fucking deal. The only thing people like Ronna Romney McDaniel and Nikki Haley prove is that women can be just as awful and cynical as men.

And the cult base, not to be outdone in the all-important "humor" and pwning libturds departments, have already responded with "Joe and the Ho" tee-shirts, and a bumper sticker that shows the "A" in Harris" inverted, like a pair of spread legs, with the pulled-off panties as the crossbar in the letter.

Say what you will, they've got the market cornered on klass, y'all.

I can imagine what a woman, especially a professional woman but really any working woman, thinks when she sees that shit. Many of them already have to deal routinely with the snickering assumptions that they traded their way up the food chain with sex, and to have it dumped in their laps in such terms cannot be, let's say, a very convincing pitch to bring them back.

If anything, it's just a reminder to them of what they really did trade back in 2016, when they voted for a pig who literally bragged about his habit of sexual assault. Yeah, they told themselves it was just "locker room talk," but they know better. They know it wasn't bullshit, because they've dealt with assholes like that their entire lives, in school, at work, at home.

It is presumed that women generally vote on "safety and security" issues more than men. Since Trump has always talked a fake-tough-guy lawn-order game, that was part of the trade-off they bought into in 2016. Now all they have to do is look around -- they are neither safe nor secure. They get the kids ready for school, they go out and do all the shopping, they deal with the baroque clusterfuck that passes for a health-care insurance system, they frequently pay the bills. They know exactly what time it is now, and who ran the clock on them last time around.

It's very odd, not just from the usual political standpoint, but from the marketing standpoint, showing pictures from American cities aflame with violence all summer, declaring it to be "Joe Biden's America." Well, no, asshole, it's Trump's America, happening right now, and the women know it as well as anyone else.

For every cult Qaren or whatever female shithead gets dredged up for the latest viral video, you can bet that there are ten or twenty other women who are looking around them, and wondering how the hell they're going to get their families through the end of the year. Some of them fell for Trump's bullshit, and they know they got stung.

Back in 2016, the knock on Hillary getting the votes of men was that she reminded them of their ex-wives, or their divorce lawyers. The converse is true of women and Trump -- he reminds them of their first husbands, the bullshit artist who ended up banging their best friend and cleaning out their joint bank account. People make mistakes; the point is to learn from them. They gave him a shot, and now they know.

The Democrats have made the Terminator pitch:  Come with me if you want to live. The Republicons, because this really is all just a big fucking game to them, are content to stick with their tried-and-true Ike Turner pitch:  Bitch, why you make me do that?

We're about to see what kind of nation we really are, once and for all.

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.

Yes Please

Get a load of this fuckin' maroon:

So, I don't know who gets to break the bad news to the Commander o' Books, but even in a severe economic contraction, the People's Republic still accounts for almost fifteen percent of US GDP (last page of PDF in the link).

One in eight Americans live here in Cali, and we all get to sit back and watch, year after blessed year, as our tax dollars get siphoned away to keep the lights on in the parasite taker states, out there in Real 'murka.

Meanwhile, every year in the Golden State becomes more and more precarious, as more people keep coming in and our crumbling infrastructure gives way, in the face of climate change. Heat waves, wildfires, and rolling power outages all summer, followed by torrential rains and flash floods in the winter, and clean-up in the spring.

I wonder if some of that money we never get back from those fat cats in DC, our tax dollars that they use to keep the countless versions of Opioid Flats barely afloat, could be used here to shore up our own issues? I sure wouldn't mind finding out, and then Doctor Prepper there could take up the slack by showing the yokels how to build a smokehouse for curing roadkill, and filtering urine for drinking water. You know? Maybe if we weren't forced to prop up most of the south and midwest, we godless hedonistic sybarites might be able to keep our lights on and our heads above the rising water.

I've always had a bit of a grudging fascination with prepper culture, seriously. Perhaps it's the romanticized notion of living that rugged, contemplative, Grizzly-Adams-meets-Thoreau lifestyle of self-reliance that appeals to the Stoic gene. To be in the world but not of it, to watch the corrupt "civilized" world burn itself down while remaining safely out of the radius of effects is something that obviously appeals to people across a wide political and philosophical spectrum.

It's interesting, though, to note just how quickly all that went right out the window when the plague hit. These guys spend their whole lives supposedly training and preparing for that dystopian SHTF moment that fuels their lifestyle, and within weeks, boy, they were out in full force wailing about haircuts.

Where the hell do these people think all the toys they take for granted came from? The internet where they trade their dopey conspiracy theories and stupid ideas, the Twitter app where they heckle and jeer, the computers that they use to write and market their prepper books? That shit wasn't invented and developed out in Cooter's Huntin' Lodge, friendo, between rounds of moonshinin' and cousin-fuckin'. That was all college-edumacated elite types out here in the wild west.

I mean, is this guy kidding or what? I couldn't put a number on it with any precision, but I personally know more than a few native Californians who would be fine with breaking away. I sure as hell wouldn't mind. I resent being forced to support people who do nothing but talk shit about my state and the people in it. I would prefer if they just took their fucking welfare check, said "thank you," and went on about their goddamned way. But they won't. They never shut the hell up.

We grow every kind of crop here. We make every kind of product here. We're the fifth- or sixth-largest economy on the fuckin' planet, hoss. You need us, not the other way around. Don't kid yourself.

You want to pay off the national debt, start by demanding reparations from the Republicon Party and their billionaire tax cuts. Check the pockets on Grampa Walnuts' suit, and his family of grifters and ghouls. The fucking balls on these chumps, I swear to Christ.

They couldn't care less about the debt or deficit or any of it, until the Democrats control the gubmint, then they're all about the fiscal prudence. The sooner we just write these idiots off, omit them entirely from all serious policy discussions, and leave them to their masturbatory Red Dawn fantasies, the better off we'll all be -- even them.

Slope of Enlightenment

It would be difficult to put a number on just how many collective hours and column inches have been dedicated to assessing the various and sundry cognitive failings of one Jenius Q. Dealmaker, Fuckface in Charge, and Caudillo of Bedminster, First of His Name.

Clinical diagnoses abound:  the narcissistic personality disorder; oppositional defiance disorder; sociopathy; psychopathy; and on and on. And of course the ever-popular Dunning-Kruger effect, where stupid people are unaware of just how stupid they really are.

Certainly all of those ugly pathologies and more explain the smooth, diseased wad of oatmeal between his ears. But the armchair diagnoses give short shrift to the more immediate pathology at hand:

You, America. Fuck you.

Well, maybe not you personally, maybe not me personally. But take a week or several and make a partial list of all the fucked-up things El Caudillo has done and said over the past five years, and then remind yourself that once again, over forty percent of your fellow 'murkins are fine with it. They want more of it. They want you to have more of it.

Do they sound like the sort of people who can be reasoned with, who can be "met" in some proverbial "middle"? What is the middle on, say, Russia paying bounties to Islamic terrorists for American scalps? What would be the middle on defunding Social Security and Medicare? What is this middle people speak of, as applied to gassing suburban moms and kicking unarmed teenagers in the face, blinding journalists, extrajudicial domestic renditioning for civil disobedience?

That's just a few random items from the past six weeks or so. You know? A full reckoning would be damn near impossible.

The "middle" of a hog-shit lagoon still stinks of filth and disease. The "middle" of hell is still pretty fucking warm. Meeting Jeffrey Dahmer "in the middle" still results in someone ending up in the cooking pot.

Maybe I'm not being clear about this.

Every elected politician, no matter how "good" or "terrible," no matter how "smart" or "stupid," is a reasonably accurate reflection of their constituency. This is a truism that gets ignored all too often, especially by "moderate" or "conservative" Democratic politicians, who are forever trying to convince themselves, each other, and their donors, that "tacking right" on this or that petty social issue is better and more effective than, say, coming down unequivocally for something approaching economic justice for the rabble.

The reason Moscow Mitch and Leningrad Lindsey keep winning, even as they gleefully cut their constituents' throats and sell them down the river at every opportunity, is not because they're great guys doing a great job. It's because there are enough assholes who would rather undermine themselves and their families and communities, watching the exercise of raw power, than risk the chance of giving even one dollar to someone who they deemed undeserving. They would rather spend the rest of their lives wallowing in a pit of impotent bitterness and rage, than come to their senses and admit -- even just to themselves -- that they got rooked by a cheap, obvious con.

So El Caudillo's various cognitive pathologies and biases are also theirs, most acutely the aforementioned Dunning-Kruger effect. In an era where information is free and everywhere, if you are reasonably literate, then being an ignorant dupe is a choice.

You choose to watch the white-power rage-monkeys on Fox News, instead of reading an article -- or god forbid, a fucking book. You choose to forward the nonsense your idiot Facebook uncle sends you, without fact-checking a lick of it. You choose to chortle and snicker at His Travesty's increasingly desperate tweaks of an increasingly useless White House journamalists' pool, knowing that he's full of shit, knowing that you would never buy so much as a canned ham from this grotesque charlatan, much less a car or a house or health insurance coverage.

It's not just that "he's a dumb guy's idea of a smart guy," or "a poor person's idea of a rich person." His fans have that exact same vision of themselves. They decided long ago that they were much smarter than the average bear, so much so that they could decide for themselves what was "real" and what wasn't, who was telling the "truth" and who wasn't. They decided that the only person they could believe was a guy who's been telling provable lies his entire life, defying everyone to call him a fucking liar.

And now that we're chugging into a full-blown economic depression, a quarter-million dead by the end of the year, forty million already out of work, people waiting in line and online for basic goods, they're now distracting each other with some harebrained conspiracy theory about how everyone in Hollyweird is a SEX PREEVERT YOU GUYS WON'T YOU LISTEN?!

In their bizarro universe, celebrities such as Chris Cornell and Anthony Bourdain were "suicided" because they were on the verge of revealing this hidden truth. In that universe the Democrats, partly to protect their fellow child molesters but also just because they're assholes, have rigged this whole "plandemic," which will magically end on November 4th when Joseph "Satan" Biden is installed as the new antichrist. [cue Omen music]

It doesn't matter to them that there is far more photo and video evidence of Dear Leader palling around with Jeffrey Epstein (who was suicided) and Ghislaine Maxwell, or that Epstein literally lived next door to the rat-infested CoronaLago estate for years. They would rather believe that a pizza place that has no basement was running a child-trafficking ring out of its basement.

It takes a peculiar magnitude of cognitive bias to believe that on the one hand, the Dummycrats are too weak and impotent to electorally beat an obnoxious moron, while being simultaneously so omnipotent that they have forced the entire corporate media system and every other world leader to bend to their plandemic hoax. These idiots make 9/11 truthers look like the model of sanity and empirical probity.

They manage to get by in their little bubble, aided by an endless parade of self-loathing journos and politicians who cater to their "real 'murkin" pretensions. They're just as naked as their emperor has always been, long before he got into politics, and they're about to find out that there is an empirical reality, that this is not a simulation, that whether or not their monster manages to cheat and steal its way back in, a hard rain is gonna fall, and they better learn to swim.