Anniversary and Consequences

It has been five years since Donald Trump tried to overthrow the government. He failed then, but we did not hold him accountable, and he is back in charge, and fucking things up as bad as ever.

Venezuela? This is naked aggression, serving no good purpose. What does the administration (one hesitates to say "Trump" in this case, because there is no there there anymore, and everyone knows it) think they will get out of this? Oil? I suppose there is a chance, but the chaos created is more likely to make it more expensive than less. The drug running gag was never real. An excuse to deport hispanics? I am sure this is Stephen Miller's dream, but they have been doing that for a year, this isn't likely to help that much. I don't know. All we are doing is risking the creation of a long, ugly, occupation, alienation from even more of the world - for no gain, and without even the flimsy make believe excuses we used to invade Iraq in 2003. 

That said - talking about Venezuela means there is less talk about the Epstein files. Less talk about Trump's dementia. Less talk about the sagging economy. Less talk about ICE. Less talk about Jack Smith and January 6, 2021. All this fills up the airwaves with noise about Venezuela, giving the press, especially TV news, the excitement of a war - so, yes, it is a distraction.

But it is not likely to be a very effective distraction. The Epstein files are too big a deal to stop being an issue. Trump's dementia is not getting better, and this just reminds everyone how old and feeble he is. He and his cronies can't help themselves from reminding everyone what idiots they are - using this as an excuse to threaten Cuba and Mexico and Denmark and god knows who else - everything about it reminds us that Trump and his boys are like petty gangsters beating up random citizens to get the rest to pay them off. They might say they are defending Democracy in Venezuela, but they immediately start talking about stealing Greenland - I guess Democracy isn't the issue. None of this can go well - the rest of the world suffers, but Trump's gang won't get any benefits. The economy is not going to get better. The situation in Venezuela is far more likely to descend into chaos and violence than not. 

Of course, what it really means, is likely that Madura's check hasn't cleared yet. Trump has pardoned plenty of monsters already, sometimes for ideology, but usually, for ransom. Kidnaping Madura makes most sense on those terms - snatch him, and wait for someone to pay Trump and company off. They probably think they will get the oil out of this, as a bribe to not kidnap anyone else - but this is only going to work as long as people keep paying. 

Enough. End by saying that obviously Trump should be impeached over this. At some point, congress is going to have to stop calculating their odds, and just fight against him, any way than can. Trump should have been in prison in 2021; he should have been frog-marched out of the White House on January 6, 2021. When we didn't that, we should have made a point of getting him into stir as quickly as was seemly afterwards. We did not, and are paying for it. This time - we will have to do better, or we are going to have to deal with some scumbag imitator every 4 years for perpetuity. Treat him like the traitor he is. 

Rebooting the Calendar

Happy new year, world. 

I am not sorry to see 2025 go. 2025 sucked. From beginning to end - dominated by Donald Trump, doing all he can to fuck this country up six ways to Sunday, in the most embarrassing, shameful, idiotic way imaginable - what a nightmare. Is there any way this gets better? Well, there will be mid-terms this year, presumably, and if Trump doesn't send in the army, he is likely to lose all the congressional support he has. Though for that to matter, congress and Democrats have to do something - not just fend off the worst, but find a way to break the son of a bitch. I don't know. They should have done that in 2021 - he should have been frog-marched from the White House, probably on January 7, but January 21 would have worked. Letting him and his minions get away with trying to overthrow the government brought us to the disaster we are in today.

That's Trump. My pessimism about Democrats might be a function of being in Maine, and watching the ancient and infuriating Susan Collins running against the equally ancient, but usually pretty respectable Janet Mills, though Mills is likely to slot in with all the other ancient and respectable Democrats in congress. Who wants that? Unfortunately the most prominent alternative to those two is Graham Plattner, a guy who thought it was a good idea to get the Third SS Panzer badge emblazoned on his chest. Sure, it was a long time ago and he was drunk in Croatia, where I imagine this happens all the time - still, man, still! It took him until this year to do anything about it, and he ran his mouth more than once in those years and - I don't know. If he had ever served in any elected office in his life, we would at least have a track record to look at, but no. He's an "outsider"! He talks a good game - Bernie bro stuff - but that's talk, and a particularly cheap kind of talk at that. To me, he comes off as a shameless opportunist whose only real value is his own personal advancement. It is convenient for him to play the outsider, and to his credit he's playing the lefty outsider, but in the extremely unlikely event he ended up in Washington, I'd put my money on him turning into, at best, John Fetterman, at worst, Tulsi Gabbard. Though apparently he plans to wear a suit. 

What a hell hole this country has become.

Well, there is more to life than politics. There is, for example, Sport. As it happened, 2025 was a pretty entertaining year for sport. A very cool baseball season, with the local nine doing well, producing one of the most exciting young players in years, in Roman Anthony - promising to hang around. But all of baseball was fun this year - a fun season, a fantastic post season, lots of good young players coming up - it promises to stay fun, at least until they shut it down for a strike or lockout in a couple years. But there's a couple years before that happens. Beyond baseball, it has been a pretty good year locally - the C's are respectable, even with their best player out for most of the year, the B's are competent again, and the Patsies are back on top as if the post Brady years never happened. How thrilling!

2026 is also when the World Cup comes back to the US. Normally, that would be thrilling, but this year - yikes. No. The tournament itself is ridiculous, bloated and confusing, covering three countries and way too many teams. I haven't followed soccer close enough to know what to expect, and there isn't a lot making me do so. That and the fact that this is three straight world cups help in dictatorships. FIFA, of course, paid their proper bribe to the grifter in chief, but that is to be expected. Still - when push comes to shove I am more likely than not to get caught up in the fun. Maybe.

And? There is tech. My tech year has been a shit show. IPad dead; TV receiver dead; Mac mini dead; laptop screen dead - the cat bit it. Thanks, cat! That was fixed at least. And last week, my coffee grinder died! maybe the most horrible failure of them all! Alas - the wide world of technology does not seem to be doing any better. Everything is AI this and AI that, and it all sucks. This might even be made worse by the ways generative AI poisons the very idea of AI - which, I am told, can do many good things in other uses. I don't know enough to judge. I do know that that there are not a lot of technologies in 2025 that aero better than the same techs were in 2015 or 2005 even. Yeah, faster, lighter, sometimes cheaper - but I have seen people drop laptops and shatter the screens completely and the machines keep on working for years - mine died because the cat bit it!

All right; that's enough. It is time for 2026, which has almost infinite room to get better, though has not lack of ways to get worse. Let's hope for the best and get on with it. This year, let me try to be a better person. Try to post more often, once again; eat better, get more exercise, read more, write more, see more movies, pat the cat, be nice to people, backup my work (oh god) and go Red Sox! Good luck, 2026, you're going to need it.

The Decline and Fall of the American Empire

Dick Cheney has died. I do not know how he lasted this long, with his bad heart, his transplanted heart, his sinful, evil life, but there you go. He didn't last as long as the even more horrific Henry Kissinger, an obituary I should have had the energy to write, cause there's a grave worth dancing on.

There is nothing good to say about Dick Cheney. He did nothing good in his life. Everything he touched made the world worst, until, maybe, the last couple years when he turned on Donal Trump. That is not enough to redeem him, though it is to his credit. The rest? from dodging the Vietnam war (which he obviously supported), to working for Nixon, to Haliburton, to his stint as VP to the lesser Bush, at absolutely the wrong time for authoritarian villains to be in charge, he made everything worse. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 probably sank this country - certainly did massive harm to everything good about it. Rule of law and international respect and not having secret torture prisons and - just awful. And ruining the economy almost as an afterthought. A nightmare that has only gotten worse since.

It makes you think of Trump's depredations. I remember what it was like in 2003 or 4 - people predicting that Bush and Cheney would cancel elections, send the troops into the street. They did not. But now in 2025, people are worried about the same things - and not theoretically, at least as far as the troops in the streets goes. Will we have elections next year? Probably - will they be fair? They haven't been fair in decades, but this one is likely to be worse than ever, with Republican states desperately scrambling to gerrymander the Democrats out of existence. It is bad - and it is, really, continuous with what Bush and Cheney did. Not as overtly, maybe, but they were hacking away at democracy wherever they could back in the day. Trump is just cruder about it.

And yet - Cheney did turn on Trump. So did Bush, and a lot of that gang. With Cheney, I more than half suspect it is because Trump turned on his family - it was personal. Cheney never cared a fig for the country - but he does care about his family. I guess that is something, and if it translates into something good for the country, we can take it. But it's not much, and doesn't change the fact that Cheney and company started us down this road. That's about all I have on that subject.

Other subjects? I do find it interesting to compare that period to the present. in some ways it is not that different - and we did worry that Bush/Cheney would do the things Trump is trying to do. But would they? There is a weird element to Trump I have noticed before, compared to the villains of the past - bad as Bush was, it is hard to say that he didn't, in his warped and ugly way, love his country. That bunch didn't want the same USA that I want - but they seemed to want the USA to exist. They respected - something about it. Maybe the sentimentality - but maybe more. This is a feeling I get more from Bush 2, and some of those around him - Powell, Rice, maybe even Rumsfield - a sense that they were proud to be Americans, and wanted to maintain something about that country. Maybe.

There is none of that with the Trump mob. Trump doesn't care about this country in the least. He doesn't care about the constitution or the laws or the ideals of the USA - he doesn't care about the country as a force for anything in the world, he doesn't care about its well being, he doesn't care about its power. He wants to burn it down and steal the parts. And the people around him - Miller and the rest - want the same thing. That - I never got that impression from Dick Cheney. He might not have cared much about the constitution or democracy or American ideals or anything like that, but he wanted the USA to survive and thrive, to be a source of power he could wield. He and his were Imperialists - and they wanted to preserve and strengthen the American Empire. Trump? wants to steal the copper from the white house.

That's not a lot to say good about Dick Cheney, but in the end, it is not nothing. For all his evil, he was unlikely to commit treason. He didn't - he and his lot did all they could to manipulate elections and suppress dissent and all the other bad things he did, but when he lost, he took it. Again - I can find a cynical explanation - he knew he wasn't really going to suffer, that he could make a buck no matter who won, that the system itself was designed to protect people like him, and they could do a lot better preserving it that destroying it. But even that - low a bar as it is, he got over it. Trump and company cannot get over that bar.

You have to be bad to be worse than Dick Cheney, but there are plenty of them around right now. 

How much of that is his fault? That might have to be the subject of another post (which I'm unlikely to write.) But - well - it is something. 

As the World Turns

Posting as infrequently as I do, there are sometimes some pretty wild developments between posts. There was 2020, when I posted in February and then in April - during which time Joe Biden wrapped up the Democratic nomination and the world was hit by a plague and shut down. Dizzying. I was not a Biden fan at the time, though I was happy to vote for him; and I think as president he has done a remarkable job, though he has gotten no credit. But that shift - the hopefulness of voting for Warren, to the grim acceptance of Biden - and the run of the world - yeah.

The last couple months have been almost as wild a ride, but in the opposite direction. When I posted in July, things were pretty bad. The Supreme Court had just disgraced itself, Trump was Trump, and Joe Biden was OLD. Then things got worse - someone took a shot at Trump, missed, but he rode it like a stallion - I almost got shot! Look! My Ear! The RNC happened, the GOP gloated, Peter Thiel's personal Renfield was picked to serve as Trump's VP - things were ugly in America. And just to top it off - Biden got COVID, again, somewhere in there. What could happen next?

What happened next was that Biden dropped out of the race, and he, and whoever else was in on the deal, orchestrated it like a Magic Johnson fast break. He endorsed Kamala Harris, everyone else endorsed Kamala Harris, and now she is the nominee, with Tim Walz, who gives all the signs of being an actual human being, as VP. It went like clockwork; and it changed everything. 

It came like a breath of fresh air - a sense of relief. Not that I think Biden can't do the job - but I don't know if he can convincingly run for the job, and more importantly, lots of people didn't think he could run for it effectively. Harris hit the ground running: lined up the support, got Biden's delegates in line, went to work, brought new energy and en edge to the campaign. Going after Trump - everyone is going after Trump, and not just, Lookout! He's going to try another coup! but - laying into him for what he is. Laying into his policies, his oppression of women, his threat to democracy; laying into how he acts - his insecurities, his whining, his weirdness. "Weird" is the watchword of the day - and well deserved. Trump is weird. Vance is weirder. Most of their supporters are weirdoes. They can't seem to stop doubling down on their weirdness - attacking Harris' and Walz' kids, trying to gin up imaginary AI crowds, trying to order donuts. Trump whining that he thought he was going to get to run against Joe Biden! no fair!

We've seen the DNC: with the Dems dropping the old "when they go low we go high" talk for cheap shots and digs about couches and crowd sizes and everything else. Though it's notable that the Dems still manage to go high - they have policies that might help people; they do treat other people as though they have the right to exist. They have been celebrating all the things that Americans get sentimental about - the flag, military service, football, freedom, dignity, everything. They're claiming everything good about the country, while Trump and company disdain everything good. The contrast is sharp.

So here we are. Into the proper race, with Trump accumulating even weirder supporters like little RFK - there's a guy who makes JD Vance look like a well adjusted normie! It is enough to give you reason to hope. Sure, things can go to shit - but right now, if everyone keeps doing what they are good at - Trump being a freak; Harris being a leader; Tim Walz being a good natured guy who managed to gets laws to feed kids through the barest of majorities in Minnesota - we might manage to bring the Trump nonsense to a final end. Let's hope.

Semi-Annual Lament

2024 is halfway done. I have not managed to post a thing since the new year. I even forgot to put together a baseball post. I have studiously avoided talking about politics because there is nothing more depressing on the planet. I can't really duck it, though, can I.

Today, the supreme court declared that a president is immune from prosecution for anything done in an official capacity. This is an absurd and plainly lawless decision. It is dangerous and ugly - an invitation for politicians to crack down on their political opponents without fear of accountability. I suppose they could still lose the next election - though that gets harder, when the president has unlimited power. And makes the "next election" that much more likely to turn into the "next coup." This is a reminder, by the way, that bad as Trump has been, it was Mitch McConnell who really overturned democracy in America. Refusing to allow hearings on the open court seat in 2016 was basically a coup itself - undoing the functions of government. His actions have borne fruit.

There is a lot to say about politics; but everyone is saying it. I don't know what I have to add. Vote for Joe Biden; vote for Democrats, in every election, in every context. What else is there? I mean, before the shit hits the fan. But winning elections lowers the odds of catastrophe. So try that first.

I could say something about Joe Biden - apparently, he is old. It is strange that this is such an issue, though - of course he is old, but he has done the job without any real hitches. Meanwhile, the guy he's running against is a convicted criminal, a traitor, who keeps threatening to lock people up for opposing him and - all this between rambling on about batteries and sharks. It is strange. Though maybe not that strange. I think the asymmetry between how the candidates are treated comes down to this: Democrats are expected to govern. We expect Joe Biden to govern. We want him to be up to the job. The media expects him to govern. Everyone does. So they assess him based on his perceived competence.

Donald Trump, on the other hand - no one takes him seriously. That doesn't make him less terrifying - but we all know that he is not there to govern, or even to rule. As president he will be after what he is always after: getting his fat mug on TV, blathering away on whatever platform he has access to; acting the fool; and looking for the next grift. He is still dangerous because his act requires him to attack people, to stir up his chumps, to create mobs to go after people. And - because he is a racist misogynist bully and likes to inflict pain. So he will fuck things up. But he will not be very good at it. He won't do anything that requires effort and discipline. He will rant and rave and hope the people around him carry out his ideas. This is known - it doesn't matter if he is a drug addled idiot; he will act the same no matter what. 

And behind the scenes, the Mitch McConnell types will continue to pack the courts and use them to plunder the country, to give corporations free rein to suck everything they can out of the world before it all crashes and burns. They have done this far more effectively than Trump - and will continue. Trump, in this case, serves as a face, a distraction, an excuse, to do what they want. They look at him with contempt - I think that's pretty obvious - a useful idiot who gives them cover to do real harm. 

Not that there's any comfort in any of that. They do real harm; and he can do real harm, even if he won't lift a finger. He'll push for evil policies, and the GOP will go along, to get what they want; and democracy will die on the vine - or force an open confrontation. Not good.

So vote for those Democrats, keep prosecuting the criminals, keep pushing for better policies, and do what you can to cut this trend off now. 

Yeah. We'll see.

As The World Turns

 Hello world. Happy new year.

This has been a lousy year at this blog. It's been bad for a while, but this year - yikes.

Well - 2023 was a pretty lousy year all around. For me, maybe not the worst - the worst thing to happen was my poor cat dying, which still hurts. I have to get a new cat. I need a cat. The rest of my life has been mostly just empty - I am lazy, bored and boring, stuck in a rut, etc. Bad habits abound, most of them related to sitting on the couch looking for YouTube videos to watch. Terrible.

That's me. The world has been a good deal worse. The Ukraine war has dragged on another year, with no end in sight. Hamas attacked Israel shamefully, touching off another war int he middle east. Israel has retaliated in almost almost inconceivably evil ways. There is no end in sigh there and not much likelihood of anything good coming out of it. 

The presidential election campaigns are already in full swing, with one party pretending to nominate a bunch of schmucks, but really intending to nominate a criminal, if he cam make it on the ballot. The Democrats on the other hand can't seem to manage to point out that they are in fact running the country pretty well - the economy continues to roll along, even last year's inflation panic mostly gone by the wayside - though there is more than enough to complain about. I don't know. Biden and company do seem far too pro-Israel to really do any good in the middle east. They are at least steadfastly pro-Ukraine, but the Republicans are just as resolutely pro-Putin, so things stall. Ugly.

Well - that's the world. Me? I will note one or two things, right? I did get a new couch, which made the poor cat very happy for the last month or so or her life. The Rangers won the world series - I did not see it coming, but maybe should have. It is cool when anyone wins their first, and I have had a soft spot for the Rangers for a while. And of course am delighted to see Nathan Eovaldi get ring number 2. What else? I managed to watch a fair number of movies, including a few new releases - Asteroid City, which is a great delight; the new Venture Brother's movie, sending me off to watch the rest of the VBs run; the D&D movie, which stunk, though it was almost redeemed by stealing a Coen brothers joke at the end; what's that - three new movies? No - four! Renfield! amusing, though a bit dumb. And so on. I also watched a couple movies I had never seen before - I hesitate to name them, as it will cause shock and consternation, but - I finally watched Star Wars and Conan the Barbarian. Whatever that is worth.

I tried to read this year, but didn't finish a lot. I currently am in the middle of reading The Heat's On (Chester Himes), Alice in Wonderland, Bulldog Drummond, Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas, and probably a couple others I have forgotten - I might even finish one of them eventually. 

And music? I don't listen to music very systematically - mostly surfing YouTube or picking something out on the iPhone - but I do get interested in things. The past few years have seen me get all excited about The Small Faces, the Kinks, the Brian Jonestown Massacre, Echo and theBunnymen - this year? I spent a lot of time surfing through Les Claypool videos and lately ghave grown obsessed over the Sensational Alex Harvey Band. Good stuff there. 

And so end it with a song in common between SAHB and Les Claypool: Jerry Reed's Amos Moses. Have a happy new year!

Ukraine

What interesting times we live in. I would rather not live in interesting times.

I need to write something about Russia and Ukraine. I don't know if I have anything special to contribute, but it feels like I should be on record. The situation has the advantage of being pretty morally unambiguous: one of the word's worst actors, Vladimir Putin, invaded Ukraine for nakedly imperialist purposes, and Ukraine has more than risen to the occasion. They continue to hold out; president Zelensky has been positively heroic, leading from the front, and the country has been united and strong behind him; the rest of the world has responded with almost universal condemnation of Russia, and with quick and powerful sanctions against them, and support for Ukraine. The Ukrainians have been winning the propaganda war, for certain, not so much by demonizing the Russians as by holding out, and demonstrating up and down the line, how united and brave and sometimes downright cool Ukrainians can be. Sunflower seeds in your pockets for sure!

That said - it is early days in the war, and Russia is a very big country and can bring its might to bear. And they have nukes and Putin seems almost desperate enough to use them. It is, frankly, still a terrifying situation, even if things now look they could work out. 

I don't have much wisdom to offer. I think, so far, Ukraine itself has been completely admirable in its resistance, in its courage, in its ability to remind the rest of the world that they are a more or less democratic country that deserves to be supported. I think the response of the rest of the world has been admirable: no one is talking about actually getting involved in the war on the ground, but they are supplying Ukraine, they are looking for ways to punish Russia, and the sanctions put on might actually work. There is a fine line here - you want to convince the Russians that this is going to ruin them, without convincing them they have to escalate to survive. That's the scary part. But so far, the world seems to be threading the needle as well as you could hope. And almost everyone is saying the right things.

Almost. The American right did not rise to the occasion. Dear old disgraced former president Donald Trump chimed in first by proclaiming Putin a genius for this - reminding everyone that he was impeached the first time by trying to blackmail Zerensky, and that he has always been Putin's lapdog. Well. And the lesser demons of the right, from Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon down to Candace Owens and random office seekers have come out to praise Russia and Putin and try to wedge some reference to the culture wars they love to wage into the issue. Most of this has aged poorly, and they have tried to walk it back - but it's out there. Lots of noise about pronouns, lots of references to woke millennials and the like, all of which serves, mainly, to remind us how much the American right admires Putin and his repression, authoritarianism, and two-bit tough guy act. They like Putin - they want to be like him. They might have to pretend otherwise for a week or so, but they can't really hide it. 

But truthfully, they don't matter all that much. They have been left behind. Most of Europe, the US, the rest of the world, has rallied around Ukraine, seeing this invasion for what it is. They've done it without, so far, really attacking the Russians as such - though Russia is a country that, throughout its history, has had as big a gap between how Russians as people are perceived and how their leaders are perceived as you will find. The people of Russia have been as badly served and used as a people anywhere - they deserve, someday, someone worthy of them. In the meanwhile, Putin deserves a particularly corner of hell, as long as he doesn't turn the whole world into hell.

Infamy

Today is another day to live in infamy. A year ago, a mob invaded the capitol building, urged on by, of all people, the sitting president. It is hard to fathom. It is hard to fathom how that former president is still a free man - it speaks poorly of us, as a country that he is not in prison.

This is an infamous day. It is comparable to December 7 or September 11 - or April 12, which doesn't always get the same attention the others do. It might be easier to focus on attacks from outside the country - attacks from inside? It's harder, sometimes, to see them for what they are. But this is an attack, as surely as any of those. Indeed, more of an attack, in some ways - it was (like April 12, 1861) an attack on the principal of the United States as such, on democracy as such, on the Republic as such. 

The fact that the people doing it were ridiculous nincompoops, with their QANON conspiracies and their imaginary voter fraud and their red hats and blue flags and whatnot, might hide some fo the seriousness of it. Were they going to overthrow the government? it is hard to see it. If they didm what would they do with it? But they were still attacking the country. And their leaders - while Trump himself is a clown, an incompetent boob, a failure at every single thing he ever did (including this) - he is still as explicitly anti-American as any American figure in an awful long while. He is a fascist, he wanted to overthrow the government, make himself dictator for life - he failed, and surely will fail again if he is still breaking in three years - but he meant it. And bot everyone around him is as stupid as he is, though - by god, there are some stupid people around him. But they are also evil. There is no stupid or evil problem with Trump and his followers - they are both. And the evil is real.

So: they need to be held accountable. Trump needs to be held accountable.s long as he walks around free, we are failing the country, we are encouraging him and worse people to try it again. And even if they fail again - a lot of people will suffer for it. The Confederates failed - but they caused unimaginable suffering before they did. I fear for the nation...

Me I'm All Smiles... Welcome 2022

And here we are. Happy New Year! No one is going to miss 2021 - the only thing it had going for it was not being 2020. But it rivals 2020. People kept dying, they kept dying unnecessarily, as vaccines came out and big chunks of the country refused to get them, and prominent political and media figures urged people not to get them, and people kept dying because of it, the disease hangs around and everything remains shitty. 

Speaking of things hanging around making the world shitty, Donald Trump, having gotten stomped in the election, tried to overthrow the government. He failed, but he's still walking the world free, to our national shame. He still talks like he is going to try it again, the Republicans are doing all they can to stop enough people from voting to make it so he can win without a coup, though they are all pretty much fine with a coup at this point. The supreme court, a completely illegitimate institution at this point, works on undoing the twentieth century and the Reconstruction amendments. Republicans, in general, have basically adopted Trump's fascism wholesale, running on a constant attack on intellectual freedom and truth. All of which is mostly aimed at running on a platform of putting Black people back in their place. And women, foreigners, gays and anyone else they can find to hate and abuse. 

In other words, we suck. 

I suppose I can take solace from the economy recovering, though who knows how long that will last with COVID still going strong. I would take more solace if the Democrats were all Democrats. Joe Manchin has decided to singlehandedly betray more or less everything he is supposed to represent - Build Back Better is good for the country, will be good for West Viginia, and is good for the Democratic party - isn't that what a Democratic Senator is supposed to care about? immediate constituents, the country as a whole, and his party? In his case, there is also himself and his donors - he has decided to represent them. Now true - I single out Manchin when the entire Republican party is acting the same way - but they are openly seditious and fascist - they are openly working against the country and their voters. Though to their credit (for what it's worth) they do work for the good (short term anyway) of the Republican Party, which now, is all about power, looting the country, and oppressing Blacks, women, gays, foreigners and so on.

Alas. 

Well, I will not belabor politics anymore. How goes it with me? Not great. I suppose things are going along well enough in the general sense - gainful employment that doesn't drive me too crazy, I'm healthy, smart enough to be vaccinated (though not lucky enough to get a booster - I was scheduled for this very day, but the local pharmacy is down a person so closed up at the last minute. Bloody hell.) That all could be worse. 

But I have become unspeakably lazy in the last couple years. Just look at the output on this blog! And that reflects general lack of motivation for anything. I don't watch movies anymore, not much anyway. I don't write much, not much of anything. I did Nanowrimo, as usual, and produced almost 70,000 words - though with almost nothing I could imagine being part of an actual novel, in the end. Weird stuff. I used to hope to finally finish something - these days, I hope not to go backwards. And outside of that? I mentioned a couple years ago surfing on YouTube - that's still a thing, but these days, I spend most fo that time scrolling through YouTube looking for something to watch. Sad. 

I did knock off a few books last year - most notably autobiographies of Richard Thompson and Will Sergeant - both very fine books by very fine guitar players. I have been worshipping Thompson for 30 odd years; I was reminded this year how much I liked Echo and the Bunnymen back in the 80s, and spent a lot of time this year listening to them. This happened with the Gang of Four a while back - I heard them, remembered how much I liked them for a while, and went back and dove in and have worshipped them since. The bunnymen have gotten the same treatment this year. Don't ask me why it took so long.

All of which does bring up one thing that went a bit better this year: I did listen to a lot more music than I have in a while. I tend to latch on to things - art forms - movies or music or books, or other things, like different sports or games or what have you - and ride them hard for a few years, then - stop. I stopped obsessing about music a while back, after obsessing about it hard for a long time. Strange. This year? I didn't pay m,uch attention to anything contemporary - but I paid attention to some old stuff. The last couple years, really. I will have to write about that some day. This year? Echo and the Bunnymen, the Kinks and Brian Jonestown Massacre got the weight of my attention. A lot of it from YouTube, though I bought records, and listened to them. Interesting. Maybe I will write about it again.

Anyway - there you have it. Something to mark the change of the calendar. I will even end with a resolution of sorts: I want to post once in a while on here. Something. Something besides obituaries and laments about the end of the republic, I hope. Maybe music.

September 11 Memorial

Today is the 20th Anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. I should say something about that. I have not posted anything about it since 2013 - this is strange, but I suppose I haven't posted much of anything here since 2013. I used to post every year about it - at least since 2006, fifth anniversary - but over time, there seemed to be less and less point. I said what I had to say - back in 2006, in fact, a long rant that, well - sounds right to this day... I could repeat it every year or - remember it, and let it go. Which is about what happened.

But 20 years: I have to say something. What? The event itself was horrifying, created a sense of fear and dread that lingered for quite a while. (A more concrete version of what it was like to grow up in the 70s and 80s under the fear of nuclear annihilation.) As for the day itself - I don't think I have written about my memories fo the day, here. Reading articles about false memories of 9/11 makes you think - how much do I remember wrong? The truth is, most of what I remember of the experience was banal. I was at work - I went to a meeting at 9AM. I think I remember someone saying that a plane hit the Trade Center tower before the meeting, but I don't think anyone seemed all that concerned. When I came out of the meeting, everything was different. Two planes hit - there was no doubt it was an attack - no one knew what was going to happen. I remember people watching news on their computers, a new trick in those days. And that's how we saw the towers fall: on a tiny QuickTime window.

They sent us home. I think I went into AOL when I got home and checked on a couple people I knew in NYC and the DC area - they were all right - so I turned off the news and watched Beavis and Butthead Do America. It seemed like a good time to watch it.

The next day I went back to work, though everyone was on edge. Sometime in the morning, the cops raided the Westin Hotel in Boston, a couple blocks from where I worked. People got paranoid and wanted to leave and I thought, where are we supposed to go? But I think later, most of the office just packed up and went home, not waiting for the company to close or the city to close or anything - we just weren't going to hang around. 

Not very interesting, in the end. But the day lived on in my head. Though I think it was the anthrax scare later that September that really set me off. But that might be a false memory. Walking home one day, beautiful perfect blue sky, thinking, holy shit we're all going to die! 

After that? Nostalgia about 9/12 doesn't impress me - partly because of the way we all abandoned our posts the next day, on a rumor; partly because it didn't take very long for everything to go to shit. Arguing over who was to blame, then what to do about it, ignorant things like "Freedom Fries", attacks on Moslems and anyone who looked like they might be middle eastern, increased surveillance across the board, the Patriot Act. We were divided immediately by 9/11, aAll right. Here we are, 20 years along. We have finally gotten out of Afghanistan - that's amazing ed the divisions were deeper and more aggressive, and are still there. 

We got into wars, which we could not win. We have just gotten out of Afghanistan after 20 years - a war that, at the time, made some sense (getting Al Qaeda and all) - but we didn't get Bin Laden, then we gimped that war to fight a very wrong war in Iraq and - well, we aren't the first Empire to fall apart over Afghanistan. 

And 9/11 has ruined us, politically. I mean, imagine a world where someone could say (however stupidly) that there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between the two parties - imagine that! It sounded shallowed and spoiled then - now, it's flat out mad. (Or flat out a lie; people still say it, but they are mad liars.) Whatever side you're on now, the political scene is much more fractured and dangerous than it was then. Conflicts are open and explicit, and more likely to be violent. Fascism is open and explicit and dreams of violence. We are disintegrating. And the world as a whole is just as bad: far less stable than in 2000 (when things were not ideal, don't get me wrong), but open fascism is on the rise all around the world, conflict and disintegration are taking place in areas that were basically stable in 2000. It has been a logn disaster for the world.

Which brings me to something strange to say about those times: the weird sense (but maybe not so weird) that that time - 2000-2001 - might have been the high point of human existence. How strange! But remember life as you lived it in 2000: there were bookstores! Records stores! video stores! more movie theaters! There were records to buy, movies to watch! It's easy to think that technology has been on an endless upward climb in those years - but wonderful as it can be, losing book stores, record stores, even video rental joints, is a cost. They make life more pleasant - there is no replacement for the joy of going into a bookstore or record store, browsing the shelves, looking at the objects as you decide what to buy.

But more than that - the technology was there in 2000. This choice between book stores and Amazon - in 2000, you had both. Amazon existed; Netflix existed. You could have everything - you could buy things cheap online if you wanted; you could rent movies through the mail, on a fantastic new medium, the DVD. At the same time, mind you, as you could go into a bookstore or record store or a video store and root through their stock. You could even watch movies and listen to music on your computer, even watch TV on your computer - even if the quality was not great, you could do it. All those things existed at the same time for a while. Could they have lasted forever? Is there a way to have Amazon and lots of bookstores? Streaming movies and Blockbusters? iPods and their descendents and HMV and TOwer records? I don't know. But we had them all in 2000-2001.

It's weird to think about, but that might have been it - as good as it was going to get. Maybe the end was coming one way or the other - even without 9/11, climate change was already well on its way, and that might end up swallowing all these other considerations - but things were still better than. For a middle class urban white guy, maybe - but go back to politics - it was better for a lot of people who weren't watching QuickTime videos and renting foreign DVDs and spending hundreds of dollars at a pop at Tower or HMV or Newbury Comix. 

And now? Every two days, as many people die in this country of COVID as died in the 9/11 attacks. This is months after a free, safe and effective vaccine was distributed, which stops most of those deaths. I wonder if we would have been smarter before 9/11 about something like that. We wouldn't have had people like Donald Trump who threw his political capital behind making the pandemic worse. I don't know.

We live in a very bad time.

The Sweet Tolling of the Bell

I think I shall post today in honor of the passing of Rush Limbaugh, a man who single handedly refutes John Donne: no one is diminished by his passing. He lived a rotten life, Rush Limbaugh. There was a time when it was hard to tell if he meant a word he said - he was a showman, always, and had the air of a charlatan about him, a salesman, someone who could, with a twist in the road here or there, have been announcing football games or selling used cars. Instead he played a right wing demagogue, but was any of it real? 

There was a time. But there comes a time when who cares? You can mean it or not, but if you are willing to say the things he said, push the positions and politics he pushed, sincerity is beside the point. You are evil, and playing evil is no different than being evil. And he was evil. He grounded right wing resentment and viciousness, for a long time, he promoted it, he shaped it, he kept it going. He was central in creating the fascism that has infested the right in this country for 30 odd years - voicing it, pushing it, making it worse and worse. He hurt the country, and consequently the world, immeasurably. 

He was also a loathsome character as a human being. A drug addict and sex tourist who raved about other people's drug use and sexual behavior. A money grubbing worm. A hateful, abusive creep. 

All right: if you can's say something nice about someone, you shouldn't say anything at all. Well - if you can say something nice about Rush Limbaugh, what the hell is wrong with you? I suppose one should feel sympathy for his family and loved ones - but who the hell would that be? No - he won't be missed, except by his fellow fascists. Fuck them all.

A Good Day

And so we are finally free of the worst man to ever hold the office of president of the United States. One of the worst men ever to run for the office, a man who earned his place next to Andrew Johnson and John Breckinridge, though unlike them, a man who never did anything else in his life worth noting. All the old villains and failures in American history - most of them did something to get there. Maybe a few of them were just born to money and power, like this one - but hell, little George Bush at least made a show of trying to be worth something, he joined the guard at least! He ran a sports team that didn't go bankrupt, unlike some people who bankrupted whole sports leagues. Even Ronald Reagan, mid-level actor - was a mid-level actor. This one? went bankrupt running a casino; pissed away his daddy's money; revived by a reality show and the Russian mob! his uselessness is almost unprecedented in American National politics.

He's gone now. I imagine he will have a few sleepless nights, as now his creditors and many an ambitious DA can cast their eyes his way. Once the Senate gets through with him. Yes indeed. I am grateful that he didn't decide to double down on his coup from a couple weeks back - though it's not surprising. He was always in it for the grift - he never seemed to take anything seriously except the grift. There is a strange surreal quality to the insane right in this country - they are LARPers, they are playing a game - they claim things that are so obviously false it is hard to imagine they take them seriously. The coup attempt - seems to have been dead serious, with people certainly talking about killing politicians and the like - but they still somehow come off as though they were always just playing a game. And - I can't say I am surprise they dissolved on the first touch. The whole affair felt like a Coen brothers movie. Their ranting and raving had a very Walter Sobchak vibe to it - but I couldn't help hearing Walter condemning them too. "These men are cowards, Donnie..." 

All right. I don't have to think about the former president any more! That is a great joy. I can think about Joe Biden. A strange sensation, right, to have Joe Biden as president. It is a massive relief, and he gives off an air of calm, reassurance, but also strength and resolve. He will undo the damage that's been done by 4 years of undemocratic and un-American rule. I take great pleasure in seeing him take office - that in spite of the fact that he might have been my 9th choice among last years Democrats. (Especially in retrospect, which might let me take people like Julian Castro more seriously than I would have at the time.) But then again - there might have been a dozen Democrats running for president last year who were better choices than anyone the Republicans put forward in 2016, and that's even trying to filter out political preferences. And that again who didn't run who I would like to see as president. The Democrats simply are the serious political party in this country. The serious political debate in this country is al within the Democratic party. I just hope they manage to agree on enough to make some real changes.

Still: the cautious parts of the Democratic party will massively improve the country, just as they did in Obama's day. I hope they have learned the lessons of those days: that the Republicans are not worth working with. Do what you want to do, and do not give them an inch. Use every advantage you have, pass what you think will do the most good, do not try to work around their propaganda machine. The Democrats will be accused of socialism whatever they do - so do what you can get through congress, do everything you can do. They have the congress at least - taking over the senate today as well. I hope they use it. 

All right. It is a good day. A good week, from MLK day to Biden's inauguration, to Ossoff and Warnock being sworn into the senate - it is good. We are going to make it after all, maybe.

Salvation and Sedition

What a time to be alive. Should I be thrilled that Georgia's senatorial races both went to the Democrats, giving the Democrats a majority in the Senate? (That's 51 votes, representing an extra 40 millions people.) We have a functioning government again. We might save the old republic yet!

Or be "concerned" (that's the word) that a sitting president incited a coup to overthrow the government? invading the capital, proudly waving their confederate flags? 

What a time to be alive.

There is not much to do or say about all of this. This is not a coup that can succeed. It is hard to see what Trump thinks he is doing at this point. I know Trump himself is a spoiled child, an ignorant, destructive, incompetent grifter who simply doesn't care what happens to anything else. He never has - obviously. He has never cared a fig about the United States. I find it hard to think he even cares about the power or winning or anything else - I don't know what he is doing. He is pissing on everything to piss on it. It's mind-blowing.

The people around him - his family, everyone in the White House, Mike Pence on down - are as shameful a lot of hooligans as this country has ever produced. Cowardly, weak, sycophantic, to someone who clearly cannot and will not help them in any way - why are they doing it? Why didn't some of them stop this shit months ago? They could have: he is not a dictator, he is a weak old man who can be easily controlled by anyone willing. Stories about Trump tearing into Mike Pence - why doesn't Pence just recite the 25th amendment (section 4) to him and tell him to sit down and shut up? But you should not have to go that far. Why are these people all so afraid of Donald Trump?

There is, and has been a great divide in this country - people who somehow think Trump is formidable, good or bad, a great businessman or an evil genius, something - and defer to him. And people who think he is a clown, a buffoon, a bully, who should be mocked and ignored. That he is someone who has no power - just daddy's money (or Putin's now, I guess) and daddy's lawyers (or maybe Mitch McConnell) to do things with. If anything, he has more power now, having stoked the mobs and sent them out to break stuff - they can do real harm. But they have no real power. 

But here we are. On one hand, the bullshit will end - Trump will be gone in two weeks, his mobs are not likely to have a lot of staying power. But they can break a lot of stuff before they go. It is crucial, in the aftermath of this - and this has been true since November of 2016, since nothing Trump has done is really surprising, it was obvious in 2016 he was a crook and would be a crook in office and might well sell out the country to anyone who'd pay him - when it is done, he has to pay. Trump needs to be arrested, he needs to be tried, he should be convicted, since he has done it all in public. And the people who helped him should be held accountable - the leaders. It is important to arrest the ones breaking into the capital, making sure none of them go unpunished - but it is more crucial to get the ringleaders.  

Trump should be arrested, now. He's a traitor. The senators and representatives who encouraged this by protesting the certification should be punished - it is one thing to dick around with symbolic protests and the like, but they had to know what would happen here. They participated in this sedition. They need to be held responsible. The criminals and traitors int he Trump white house have to pay for their crimes. If we sweep this under the rug, we will be putting ourselves on the road to destruction. 

There's nothing else to say.

2021 Is Here at Last!

And good riddance to 2020! 

Here we are, 2021, a new year, and one that is very welcome. 2020 has got a very strong claim to being the worst year in American history. 350,000 dead of Covid, over 3 million total deaths, a 15% increase from 2019, the largest increase in deaths since 1918. That is very bad. And around this, we can watch the government collapsing, one of our parties openly embracing treason - it's not a pretty picture. Now clearly, there have been bad times in the past - 1918, say! War, the flu and all; the Depression, WWII; the 60s had some horrible times as well. But this one - especially as so much of it feels like a self-inflicted wound. And the way there seems to be so little to take as compensation. Sure sure, 1968 was horrible - but you got the White Album! This year - this was so bad I somehow managed to miss the fact that Tommy Heinsohn died. A couple months ago. Somewhere between Sean Connery and Alex Trebek. That bad.

So here we are. The virus is still wreaking havoc (we keep hitting new daily highs in deaths, 3900 odd a couple days ago); there are vaccines, but they are slow to get implemented, so we are a long ways from normal life again. There's a new strain out there, more contagious than the last. Not good. Meanwhile, the economy is in a dangerous place. Maybe it's still functioning, but it feels like it could crash at any time. And though $600 checks will help a bit, you need more than that, especially if we were able to take the necessary step of closing things down again until the virus subsides and vaccines are common. There is hope, I suppose, if the Democrats win two senate seats in Georgia - otherwise, we remain at the mercy of Mitch McConnell, and that is not a good place to be.

There is no escaping the utter depravity of the modern Republican party. Donald Trump - he's less than three weeks from being out fo the white house, but is doing all he can to ruin the country while he is still there. He bears personal responsibility for a lot fo those COVID deaths - half of them? Probably about right. He had an easy job when this pandemic hit - nod along with the doctors, tell everyone to stay at home and wear their masks and wash their hands - but he did not do that. He did the opposite, He politicized the disease - he politicized the obvious measures one takes to battle infectious diseases. He did worse than that - he fostered conspiracy theories, he acted the fool, he inspired his followers to act the fool. If he had hit the bare minimum, doing what the doctors said, the Republicans likely would have gone along with it. You always have nuts - but Trump encouraged mainstream Republicans to defy obvious health measures. I don't think they would have done this without his lead. There is almost no one else he could have been in his place who would have acted the way Trump did on this. Mike Pence, bad as he is (and bad as he's been as Trump's VP) is very unlikely to have acted like Trump in the face of this disaster. And that little might have made it possible to keep the disease under some control. Not complete (unless you live in New Zealand) - but we are way worse than anyone else.

But Donald Trump is a pretty uniquely bad human being. He has managed to fulfill all the expectations for villainy and incompetence in the wake of the election. It's interesting to note that the election went more or less exactly as everyone expected it to go: Biden won the popular vote easily; a half dozen states were close enough to make the Electoral College outcome iffy, though there never seemed to be much chance of Trump repeating his 2016 luck. Because of absentee voting, and the politicizations of absentee voting, most observers thought that Trump would seem to be ahead on election day, but the lead would disappear as soon as the votes were counted. It's obvious that's what Trump expected to happen - thus his relentless campaign against absentee voting, his attempts to sabotage the post office, to stop counting votes after election day and so on. 

And that is how it happened. Trump was ahead at the end of November 3, and started clamoring to stop counting votes. People counted the votes. Trump's lead disappeared fast, and a day or so later, it was obvious Biden had won, and would win big. Here, a normal villain would back down, whine about whatever there was to whine about, and pout as the country prepared to change presidents. Not Trump! he kept doubling down on his fascism, challenging votes, trying to intimidate officials, raising up his followers for violence, and when everything else failed, speculating about a military coup. They are still at it! Weird notions still circulating about straight up rejecting the results when congress certifies them, with grandstanding morons in congress still carrying on. Astonishing. Well - not for Trump. More or less par for the course. For the other Republicans - somehow they seem to have missed that the rest of the party sort of made gains in this election - Trump is the only one who got smoked, regularly. 

And so. 2021 is here, Joe Biden will be president in a couple weeks, with luck, the Democrats will have the senate, and might pass some fo the lawws the house has been passing all year. Might make it possible to get through the next 3-6 months it will take to get vaccines to people - we might survive as a nation. For a while anyway.

I will not dwell on the bad, though. 2020 will represent the low point in the Republic, even if worse times come, as long as we do start to get back to something resembling respectability. It's hard to get too optimistic, though, even there - with several others countries slipping into fascism and stupidity at the same time. (Brexit anyone?) But - it feels good to get out of it. There could be light at the end of this tunnel; there hasn't been anything to be optimistic about in a while. So take what you can get.

Armistice Day 2020

 I haven't updated on November 11 in a couple years. The last time was the end of the war itself, ion fact, two years ago. I know I have not been blogging much lately. And the war is over.

I have been watching The Great War on youtube lately - a neat historical channel, hosted by Indie Neidell originally, that followed the war week by week, 100 years after the fact. I wish I had found that sooner, though I was doing a lot of reading, and taking actual classes, back when it started. Still - good stuff, and so is the World War Two channel Neidell hosts now.

Meanwhile, the word we live in is interesting enough. 100 years ago, the Spanish Flu was winding down, having killed millions, more than the whole war did. In 2020, COVID 19 is in full force still, killing 230,000 or more Americans already, many many more throughout the world, and still going strong. And the fool in the White house who has made this worse is still there - 

We did, in fact, vote his sorry ass out last week. Everything went about according to expectations - lots of votes cast, lots of absentee votes cast, Democrats much more likely to vote by mail than Republicans, so the election night results looked grim. But the places counting absentee ballots after the in person ballots saw Biden's numbers just rise and rise and rise, and by the time they were done, he had taken most co the contested states - Pennsylvania, Georgia, as well as Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nebraska, by fairly healthy margins. Biden took the popular vote by a very healthy margin. Basically, it was a butt kicking. 

But weepy Donnie is still hanging on, raving about election fraud, promising to fight it in the courts, and sabotaging everything he can reach rather than admit the obvious. This is what you get when someone fails at everything they touch and no one calls them on it. It is also what you get when you have a fascist in the white house, supported by a party that knows it can't win elections if people vote. They have to steal the election, they sure as hell can't win it. The Republicans have won one National election since 1988. They have to commit to minority rule.

So here we are. Self-imposed chaos here in the USA. Trump doing his best John Breckinridge - if he can't win the vote, he'll commit treason. I don't know how this gets that far, of course. Trump is terrible at it, his allies are terrible at it - there is no way for him to actually win the election, and I doubt anyone will have the stomach to turn to arms to overturn it. But it's ugly, none the less.

All right. End with the Great War again. This time, Metallica's One, a song, from a book and movie about the war, about all wars - and about the blacklist, while we're at it. Dalton Trumbo writing as much about his own time being silence as about the results of the war, I think. A good way to remember this remembrance day.

Dread

 Hello again, world. Not sure how much longer we are going to be here - but might as well check in.

I voted this week. It seems wise to have that done and dusted, not have to worry about anything interfering. Too much can go wrong. Well. If you are wondering how I voted - you have not read this blog before.

We are less than two weeks to the election. This is a pretty terrifying moment. If Trump wins - we are done, the USA. Strange to say. But that is the end. Partly because the only way he can win would be to cheat - which he's made no secret that he's going to try to steal the election. He's not real subtle about his intentions. Lately, I suppose, he's been trying to gin up some kind of scandal against Biden - it's not very effective. It seems to have something to do with Joe Biden not disowning his ne'er-do-well son, and some kind of ties to foreign countries. How that flies when Trump's ties to foreign countries - China, this week - are being revealed all the time is an open question.

I don't know. Going through Trump's sins is a hopeless proposition. They are legion. They are overwhelming. It is bad.

So: I dread election night. The anxiety, the fear that the Republicans will simply overthrow the government - it's terrifying. It's a strange feeling. It was fun to bandy about notions that Little Bush might call off elections or something like that - but he never did anything like that. Voter suppression, sure, like al Republicans (and plenty of Democrats), general dirty tricks - but the system chugged along. Now? The system is not chugging along. 

It is new: there is a sense about Trump that he does not care what happens to the country. That he has no interest in the US as the US. This is new. Bush, Cheney - I never felt they were fundamentally against the USA. They wanted to control it, make it what they wanted - but they were invested in the idea of the country. I don't see that in Trump. He's never cared about the US, never cared about anything in it. He cares about himself. His power, his ego. It's strange and horrible. Combine that with the ideologues around him, the fascist tendencies in the Republican party, its authoritarianism, racism, xenophobia - you get the recipe for the real thing. It is scary.

Still: this is Donald Trump we are talking about. A man who has failed at every single thing he has ever done. He's had such a strange career. In the 80s, he looked like he was genuinely rich - maybe he was, thanks to daddy's money and Roy Cohn - in the 90s, of course, they were gone and he lost most of it. He was saved in the 2000s by reality television and 80s nostalgia, the same kind of cynicism that brought back Flava Flav and Brigitte Nielsen. He was on the Apprentice because he was the image of the 80s mogul, and pretty explicitly because he was washed up - if he was running an actual company, he would not have been a game show host. That got him on TV again, and when that ran its course, he went to the next step down on the ladder of infamy, and started turning up on right wing TV and radio. And - so on.

Still: it's all failure. Failure in business, failure in all his personal life with all those ruined marriages and awful kids and affairs and utterly putrid behavior, in the end, he failed on television, he ran for president and failed, really, getting beaten fairly badly, though he was saved on a technicality. And as president, he has been an unbelievable failure, culminating in 230,000 Americans dead - about half of whom can be pretty convincingly blamed on Donald Trump personally. He could have supported the doctors - he could have said, wear a mask - he could have kept this from being a political football. Christ, if he had, he might have gotten re-elected (without stealing the election). What can you say? 

All right. Two more weeks. Vote, please, and vote for Democrats. What else is there to say?

Plague Journal

It looks so innocent, the end of February. I could still imagine a good candidate to vote for in the presidential election, though that hope was probably false. I could imagine a candidate I would not mind voting for, at least, in Sanders. Well. I could go to the Walmart and buy toilet paper, I could go out to eat, I could hang around the house and play games, I don't know. I was looking forward to spring training and baseball, watching Liverpool win the Premier League, watch8ing the C's now and then. Fun stuff! I could go to work, whatever that is worth!

Well, I can still go to work. I can't really complain about work, on balance: I'm doing video calls mostly, isolated from the world and even my coworkers - hey, cool by me! But there's not much else the recommend the last month or so.

Month: March 12-13 were the days when things seemed to click in, at least where I am. That was right after Italy locked down, about the time some of the harder hit American states started to ramp up controlling efforts. I had just put in for some vacation time, to do other things - I told my coworkers it looked like I was wasting my time off, since none of the events I wanted to attend were going to be open in a month, and maybe not even the job itself. They were not convinced, but within a week, yeah, all the events were canceled, most of the workplace's contact with the public was gone - yeah. I mean - a month ago.

It has been a hard month; the country locked down before the horror started to hit - the last week or so, the bill is coming due, and it is not good. I don't know where it will end - yesterday had something like 1800 deaths - horrible, and likely still on the climb. Famous people are dying, John Prine or Adam Schlesinger or Ellis Marsalis and Wallace Roney, others are sick, or at least infected, from Tom Hanks to Boris Johnson. I don't know. I don't know if this is going to rise and peak and fall abnd be gone; I don't know if this is going to rise and fall in little waves as we quarantine and break quarantine and quarantine again - I don't know. I don't know how it ends, how long we can stay locked down, what happens when we stop. Can the economy recover? will it, since what can happen and what will happen in the USA are not always the same.

That was a useless paragraph. Most of what I do is useless. It is a strange crisis in that the best thing you can do is wait for it to get better. It's a crisis that rewards patience and resilience - letting the disease run its course, find a vaccine or treatments, let a level of immunity build up that turns it into just another variety of the flu. That is hard to do, partly because it is so easy to do. You feel guilty. I certainly feel weird, reading about everyone's lock down travails, while I continue to go to work more or less on my regular schedule, never needing to find a way to stay sane alone for two weeks at a time. Which, I have to say, is not something I would have a lot of difficulty with, comparatively. I am fine being alone, at least as long as I am healthy. Though I wish I got more writing done.

All right. This is just to say that he re I am, and to prove to myself at least that I can force myself to do something like this, once in a while. Huzzah and all that.

And maybe dabble in politics? Bernie Sanders finally gave up. The Democrats are left with Biden - my god. But it is far more important to take the senate anyway - Biden and the senate is worth more than Sanders without, so, forward decent people! don't stop, for a moment, reminding the world that Trump is a monster, that Mitch McConnell is worse, and if they can win elections when they are a clear minority, we should be able to take one or two as the majority. Though we'd better ake this one, because we probably won't get another chance.

Though then again - nothing ever ends. So - yeah.

Vote, whatever it takes.

Primary Voting - Elizabeth Warren Voter here

I am bringing this blog out of hibernation to write about politics. Primary time is here - not Massachusetts this time, at least not since 1820, but next Tuesday anyway. Four years ago, I voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary. This time - I'm voting for Elizabeth Warren.

It's been a strange year, and it's turning into a strange primary season. A year ago, I was fairly optimistic about the Democratic side of the race. I liked the senators offering for the race - Warren and Gillibrand and Harris and maybe Sharrod Brown, Booker and Klobachar; I was willing to give a listen to O'Rourke and Buttigieg and the like. I took some shots at Bernie in that post, but have never had any complaints about Bernie's policies. Biden - well, Biden is Biden. It looked like we were going to have good choices.

Oh, fool that I was. Warren and Sanders are still around, but the others I thought I could support are all gone, leaving the likes of Biden, Klobuchar (who's the least of the senators running), Buttigieg (the year has not shown mayor Pete to be qualified for this gig, though somehow people preferred him to Julian Castro or Booker - I don't know.) And motherfucking Mike fucking Bloomberg? the fuck? As a Democrat? And worse, the raw stupidity of the American political system is on full display. We have had what, a primary and two caucuses and people are acting like it is a given that Sanders will have a plurality of delegates at the convention, and oh, what shall we do then? Caucuses need to be banned, and places like Iowa and New Hampshire need to be relegated to the afterthoughts they should be. Start with California or something, I don't know!

There is no sanity to be found in trying to make sense of American politics at all. So I won't anymore.

Why Warren? The truth is, i would have supported her last year - I would have supported her in 2016, if she'd ran. I wish she had - she would have been a far better representative of her brand of leftist politics than Sanders, she would have done a lot more to move the entire party left (though the Democrats continue to move left, a fact no opne seems to admit to). She probably wouldn't have won in 2016, but she'd be the front runner this time, and almost certainly far stronger than Sanders is now.

That's horse race stuff, though. The main reason I support her is that I support her politics. Bernie's too, for whatever that's worth - they'll both push for real health care systems, for higher taxes on the rich and corporations, for stronger labor, for higher wages, for regulation and oversight, for saner foreign policy, for better support for students, for child care, for civil rights and on and on. Where they break, they usually break in her favor: she is more insistent on political reform - ending the filibuster; packing the courts. Political reform, from protecting voting rights to breaking the power of minority parties to dictate politics, is necessary, or we will not have a country much more. At least not a democracy, and the republic is not exactly on the firmest footing. There is that.

I also think she would be much better at getting things passed than Sanders would be. She is more likely to have, and court, the support of the more conservative parts of the Democratic party, she is more likely to be able to build deals, she strikes me as having a better grasp of the nuts and bolts of politics and government. I think she will do a better job of strengthening the party up and down the line - and that might be the most important thing anyone can do. Party trumps personality, and if it doesn't entirely trump politics, it runs it close. You have to be able to pass things, and the Republicans have long since committed utterly to obstructionism and anything they can do to force real decision making onto the executive. They won't stop any time soon. (You can hate Trump as uniquely awful, as an open fascist, as all the things he is - but the fact is, he matters because the Republican party supports him all the way. Mitch McConnell is the one who has ruined this country. Trump serves at his pleasure; literally at this point, as he had a straightforward chance to remove him and did not.) It is a fact that whoever becomes president, winning the senate is far more important. Warren strikes me as a better bet to make that possible.

You will notice that I am only comparing Warren to Sanders here. It's a fact that there is not one else left in the race I would want to vote for. In the fall - obviously - you have to vote against Trump, no matter what the option is. They could bring back Hillary Clinton, and I'd vote for her in the fall. But I don't have to vote for crap now, and I don't have to pretend to want to. The rest of them are awful, frankly - Biden was a joke back in 1988, how is he still a thing? Blame the Onion, I guess. Klobuchar might not be terrible, just a bland, middle of the road, typical midwestern Democratic, dare I say it, establishment politician. Fine in the senate; a disappointment as president. Buttigieg? the same, only 20 years too young. Maybe he'll change, but right now, he's a middle fo the road hack with absolutely nothing going for him. And what have I forgotten?

I yeah - Mike fucking Bloomberg. Dear god. In the admittedly extremely unlikely event that he got the nomination, he would sorely try my conviction that I must vote for any Democrat on the ticket against Trump. I would - I mean, shit, if the only people on the ticket were Trump and Pence, I'd vote for Pence - but he would try it. At least the rest fo the contenders seem to agree with me, the way they have all been lighting into him. The more the better. Eat the rich indeed!

Enough! I am voting for Warren for the reasons above. I only compare her to Sanders because Sanders, whatever his faults, is the only other Democratic candidate I really want to be president. Beyond the reasons I listed above, I could add, though she is too old for the job, she is younger than Sanders - she is more likely to be alive in November 2020, let alone November 2024. And I won't deny I would like to see a woman elected to the office. Age and demographics are part of the qualifications of being president - it is a hard job, it will wear you down. And who and what you are matters - not as much as what you do and what you stand for, but they matter. And everything I find to choose between Sanders and Warren pushed me to her.

2020 Hindsight

Happy New Year!

This blog has become a ghost site - I thought it was bad last year, or the year before, but - 4 posts? Why bother at all? Well - if I could get back to posting, I suppose that would be the answer in itself. I won't promise it. As it is - it's as good a place as any to toss some thoughts out into the world, to let them float in the ether on a sea of forced metaphors. It's as good a place as any to welcome the new decade, to bid the last one farewell and all.

It was a strange decade. For me, personally, it began on something of an all time low: my mother died, the day after Christmas, in 2009; 2010 began with her funeral. There has been a lot of that this decade - I am of an age when the generations before me are starting to die. My father, a couple close friends, many uncles and aunts have passed, some of them very hard to process. But - I am of an age when that is going to happen. I am getting perilously close to the age when having my contemporaries die will seem less like a shock and more of the natural way of things. Another decade and I will be there, I am afraid.

But that said: the first half of the 2010s weren't a bad time for me. I moved to a place I liked, a good apartment, where I stayed for 7 years. I took classes, I wrote, I posted regularly, here, and sometimes on other blogs. I got out of the country a couple times, still played softball, sometimes well, I ate well, lived well. My job even seemed to reach a detente with me - though that got me accused of "complacency." That, of course, should have been a sign - was a sign - but - that's the second half of the decade. In all - I lived pretty well in the first half of the 10s. Even just using this blog as indication - I posted regularly; I started up a couple series that carried on a while, and gave me a chance to write some things I liked. History posts - following along with the Civil War, then WWI for a while; music posts, those band of the month posts; movies - screen shots and directors and things like that. It was good. I was, I think I would have to say, satisfied with my lot in life.

The second half fo the decade has been a bit different. Maybe not objectively - nothing really bad has happened to me, except of my own making (sort of) - but a lot of the things I was satisfied with had to go. And the world outside has gone straight to hell. For me - the job is what got me. Things changed. A generation of managers where I worked left, and a new generation came in - people who use words like "disruption" as a positive term; people who openly admitted to forming their management ideas by watching TED talks and reading online management consultants. The results were predictable. And I was not willing to take it, because I did not have to. I had resources to move, and did, though it meant I gave up living in the city - but I could live closer to my family, could support myself on a lot less money, and could engage in other past times - bowling and D&D in place of softball and education! So - not a bad tradeoff, over all. Though it changed me in strange ways. I went from being a fairly obsessive habitual movie goer to almost never going to movies, and barely even watching movies. I went from the blogging you see before 2017 to almost nothing since 2017. Some of this is me - some of this might be the world, the way the technology has evolved (as fewer and fewer blogs seem all that important - Twitter is where all the conversations seem to be happening. That is not a good thing.) BUt there is it.

And the world, of course, has gone to hell. It held on in the first half of the decade - but you could see the disaster coming. The mid-term elections in 2010 doomed us, giving the Republicans completely undeserved and unrepresentative control of the machinery of government that they have exploited to hold power as they sink into smaller and smaller minority status. The GOP, long having embraced white supremacy as a vital part of their politics, doubled down on it. They reacted shamefully to Obama's election, the worst of them used it to build the racist elements in the party. All this brought us to Trump, who has made all the racism, sexism, xenophobia and everything else the whole point of his existence. Was Trump a break from what the GOP had been? Maybe - there is a sense that earlier Republicans used racism as a way to get votes for their tax cuts. Trump and his closest supporters seem to be using tax cuts to keep support for their racism. The white supremacy seems to be their defining point. It sometimes seems like this is so.

And no? Trump himself is a plain fascist - he has all the makings: the racism, xenophobia, authoritarianism, use of violence for politics, corporatism, aestheticization of politics, turning it explicitly into spectacle, and working very hard to make only the spectacle seem to matter. (Though I think the most important element in the aesthetics of fascism is the idea of the dominance of Myth. It's the idea of a mythological justification - Make America Great Again. The red hats are part of it - but the idea of a lost golden age, an imaginary version fo the country that conforms to their political goals, etc, is what really defines fascism. This is an essay I am not going to write just now, though.) The country, of course, is something else - even now, he is only the president, one branch of government, he is a Republican, one party - if the other branches act, if the other parties resist, if his own party decides to try to not be fascists - he is not going to succeed in turning the country into something worse than it is. He has been impeached; there are elections coming; we will see how this goes.

But I don't want to write about the future. This is one last look back at the decade gone. So: the second half fo this decade - 2016 on at least - have gone from worse to worse. All the celebrity deaths in 2026 hit hard. My job went to hell in 2026. And Trump - getting elected came on top of a primary and election campaign that defied my ability to imagine the depths of stupidity possible int he American political system. Trump? The idiotic attacks on Hilary Clinton? Though the defenses of her were sometimes just as hard to take - I mean - how could any Democrat worth a damn vote for anyone who voted for the war in Iraq? why was that forgiven? I don't know. Now - 2020 - big chunks of the country, the Democrats in particular, seem determined to relive 2016. I don't get this. Why does so much of the discussion in the Democratic party revolve around Bernie Sanders (and by extension, Hilary Clinton?) That might be because I read Twitter and Facebook too much - that is a topic unto itself. The point is, 2016 was awful even before Trump got elected; his election just made sure the next 4 years would be even worse.

All right. That is enough. One more thing - just a hint. Technology - here is something I have been thinking about lately. There are major technological shifts going on - streaming, Disney's domination of the entertainment industry, the effects on discourse of Twitter and FAcebook, etc. But have there been any real technological changes in the last 10 years? Twitter and Fecebook existed in 2010; youtube did; streaming services existed. Digital film distribution. Almost everyhting that defines the technological world now existed, was even fairly significant, in 2010. Compare 2010 to 200 - that is not true. The 00s brought us youtube, Facebook and Twitter and MySpace and all the other dumber forms of online communication. It brought ius smart phones, tablets, iPods, it started streaming services. Or the 90s - from 1990 to 2000 we gaines DVDs, the world wide net and the popularization of the internet; computers changed fairly significantly; digital photography and video started to appear (though they became ubiquitous in the 00s). What has appeared int he 2010s that has changed things the way - any of a dozen things changed the world in the previous decades? This has been more about cultural shifts to accommodate technology - which have mostly felt bad: corporate control over all of it; the colonization of places like Facebook and Twitter by propagandists, who have made all of us amateur propagandists and ad writers. Another reason to worry, I guess.

But I won't end with pessimism. I like a lot of what the world offers. I can lose days browsing through YouTube - I don't know why videos have replaced blogs as the preferred method of amateur communication, but it seems they have. 10 years ago, I counted mostly blogs as the most interesting sources of information and discussion online. Now? it tends to be youtubers - Seth Skorkowsky! The History Guy! Scholagladatoria! (All reflecting my recent interest in games and history, no doubt.) Is this better than reading blogs? I won't say yes - but it's still a nice feature of the internet, the ease with which people with interesting things to say can communicate with the world, without a lot of extraneous resources.

And so - happy new year! Happy new decade! And here's hoping I manage to post something here before 2030...

It's A Cold World Outside

2019 is almost a month old without a post. So much for resolutions.

There is not a lot to write about, other than politics. Okay - the weather - cold! not so bad here on the coast, but bad in the mid-west. We keep getting promised snow, but keep getting little storms that end up leaving ice everywhere - that might be worse than getting a good 20 inches of powder, to be honest - it's certainly less entertaining.

I could say something about sports - being a New Englander, I know I am supposed to be all excited about the local brain damage and steroids club heading for the super bowl again, but I can't muster it. I can find the energy to wonder if the Sox can fill out their bullpen for the season, though; and Liverpool is winning the Premier League! I do like some football...

And there is politics. I'm not sure why I don't write more about politics: politics is engaging just now, and desperately important. I know I stopped writing about it all the time because it was just too depressing, back in the days of Bush the Less - I turned to movies and music and tried hard to avoid driving myself crazy. Now? It is easy to despair, but on one hand, there's not much room for the luxury of despair, and on the other - Trump and the Republicans hold power by the thinnest of margins, and any work to take that power away from them has the chance to do it. You can see that - the Democratic party has come back strong, and moved to the left doing it - we have responded well, over all. Fight the good fight and all that.

The other problem, though, is that there is so much to write about - and so much talk about it already. So far this month we have had the shut down, and all that entailed. Trump's baby and he got stuck with it and had to back off in the end. Labor! shut down the airports! and the Democrats not blinking: they were right, they always had the votes, etc...

Or the MAGA kids vs the Native American parade. Everyone has an opinion on that. The right wing loonies managed to twist the story enough that people began doubting their eyes and ears - they are a shameless and astonishing bunch. I don't know if it they would be better or worse if they just said what they meant from the beginning: "He's a white kid, the old guy is some kind of foreigner, and probably a liberal. People like that should be silenced." This week, Jussie Smollett, a black, gay actor, was attacked by (allegedly) racist homophobes - I imagine again, the right will find ways to attack the victim and defend the attackers, and never quite say what they mean: "He's black and gay - he should be lynched."

That's harsh. Sorry, MAGA hat wearing fascists; go fuck yourselves.

Or a series of mass shootings, by young white guys - including a man executing 5 women in a bank - yeah. We still don't address that as a country - the degree to which violence is still gendered, men against women. Racism is real and pervasive, but so is misogyny. There are signs, real signs, that the country as a whole is becoming less racism, less homophobic, less misogynist - but that very loss of white, male, power seems to be inspiring more aggressive open terrorism against blacks (and other ethic groups), women, gays. Encouraged by the fascists in the wWhite House. Fuck them all.

Sorry. That was harsh. Where was I? Venezuela seems to be getting worse (somehow), and now members of the Trump administration are floating the idea of getting involved, sending troops, that kind of thing. Good god. Though it is predictable enough - as Trump's hold on power gets more and more precarious, it is likely they will try more extreme ways of holding power. Flirting with a "national emergency" during the shut down was bad - starting a war somewhere is simpler, maybe, more traditional, among Americans. Their defenders saying openly a war with Venezuela will "unite" the country - not even trying to pretend, are they. Though of course they are also typically ignorant of history: wars do not unite much of anything, unless they are either widely popular before they start, or someone attacks you. Did war in Iraq unite the country? did war in Vietnam? invading Mexico in 1846 tore the country apart, was a major step toward the Civil War in this country. Even WWI created significant rifts. People look at WWII, and they say, war will bring us together - but wars don't do that. They are at least as likely to wreck the current administration as save it. (See Richard Nixon and Barack Obama. Hell - Ike got elected because of Truman and Korea.)

Thus current events. Future events? the 2020 presidential campaign is starting to get into gear. Acquaintances on the internet are starting to get stupid - someone said something about Democrats losing to Trump again - I'm not sure how that is going to happen. Trump won in 2016 because of James Comey, the Russians, the press pissing on itself, and the Electoral College - you can add in whatever degree of hatred you have for Hillary Clinton if you like - and even then, in the end, it was the Electoral college that did it. In 2020, we will still have the Electoral College, we will probably have Russians playing games, and the press (if there is any of it left), is as likely as ever to let itself get played by the right wing propagandists - but everything else is going the other direction. No one will be in Comey's position - who is going to trust anything coming from the Trump administration? The country will have had 4 years of Trump, and has been going as hard as they can in the other direction. What's better, as a Democrat, is that not only are people voting for Democrats, but the Democrats themselves are moving left - that has been true since the middle of the Bush administration at least, but it is getting more significant all the time.

And as far as the presidential campaign goes - I like the way the Democrats are shaping up. There were good choices in 2008 - but in 2016, no one had emerged to challenge Clinton, who, whatever her merits, was something of a relic from the days when the Democrats thought they had to move right to get more votes. Sanders came along, and he was all right, but he never had a chance to win the primary, and didn't always react to losing with the sense or grace one would like. But this time? Going on both the people who have declared for presidency and those flirting with it - I see four people I could be enthusiastic about: Gillibrand, Warren, Harris and Sharrod Brown. I see a number of others I either like with some reservations or don't know enough about - Klubuchar, Beto O'Rourke, Cory Booker - maybe even Pete Buttigieg, though he seems like the longest of shots. Any of them would be fine, even now. And beyond that are a couple people who I am not voting for in any primaries, and don't really want clogging up the race - Sanders again, and the inexplicable idea of Joe Biden running - but would happily support in any general election. (Hell, Clinton would fit into this, though I don't think she's fool enough to get involved this time.) That pretty much leaves Tulsi Gabbard - right wing crank in the wrong party? - on the outside.

That's a great set of choices. I suppose you can find faults in all of them, but grownups weigh pros and cons and make their choices - and though a lot of Democrats and liberals (especially the ones who call themselves "progressives" and complain about Democrats) don't sound like grownups a lot of the time, they usually end up acting the part. (Though less whining about whoever we do put forward would be nice.) If the republic can survive these next two years, we should have a pretty good president in place to start the 2020s, and we might have even better options in 10 or 12 years. Though surviving those two years might not be assured.

And of course, we might all be under 10 feet of water 10 years from now. There's always that....