Communication Is At Least One Operating Cost Of Being A Government

That is something that a Facebook friend told me a little while ago and it makes as much sense in describing America’s current government as anything else.

This month, Senate Democrats are still trying to hash out the “Build Back Better” act for President Biden (and speaking of communication, that name is some awfully lame branding) with various people putting delays in the process. And as we speak, Biden held a virtual meeting for the first-ever “Summit For Democracy” saying “Here in the United States, we know as well as anyone that renewing our democracy and strengthening our democratic institutions requires constant effort. American democracy is an ongoing struggle to live up to our highest ideals, to heal our divisions and to recommit ourselves to the founding idea of our nation.” But either for the sake of a global audience or just to be nice, he didn’t name names and point out what the real problem is with an American democracy that had been chugging along for over two centuries: The fact that one faction of the duopoly has rapidly regressed in intellect and now is not only against the Left’s vision for our nation, but is against the founding idea of our nation itself.
Go back to this November’s odd-year elections. Or as I describe it, further evidence that the Democratic Party couldn’t score in a bordello.

I mean, the previous off-year elections in Virginia, and the 2018 midterms and 2020 presidential election had me thinking that the Democrats might have learned the central lesson of 2016: that Americans can understand, full well in advance, just how criminal and irresponsible Donald Trump and his party of enablers are, and Democrats can STILL lose an election to them because simply being NotDonaldTrump is not the same as being good for anything. But then Virginia’s Democratic Governor was longtime Clinton hack Terry McAuliffe, so some people clearly didn’t learn. And a lot of conventional wisdom pundits thought that Republican Glenn Youngkin won by accusing Democrats of promoting “critical race theory” in schools even as Democrats insist that it’s only a collegiate-academic discussion.

What, you’re going to tell Republicans, you’re going to tell these people, who tell you with a straight face that “Let’s Go Brandon” is not code for “Fuck Joe Biden” and that there is no connection between Donald Trump and the neo-Confederate thugs who brought riot gear to the “peaceful protest” on January 6, you’re going to tell those people that antifa is not an organization and that critical race theory has no strict definition? Please. You can’t out-bullshit these people. Don’t even try.

Define your terms, liberals, or the enemy will define them for you.

The thing is, it wasn’t just Virginia, which was only starting to turn blue in recent elections. In New Jersey, which is almost as much a Democrat monoculture as New York state, incumbent Democratic Governor Phil Murphy was expected to coast against Republican Jack Ciatarelli, and ended up only winning by a slim margin, 24 hours after Election Day. One writer for New York magazine gave his analysis (and being on the New York Magazine staff, that makes him basically a Democratic Party insider right there): “Who could have predicted this? Well, anyone with a kid in public school during the pandemic paralysis of last year. I won’t pretend that my own experience is more meaningful than anyone else’s. But the singular of data is anecdote, so let me tell you what happened in my town.” Andrew Rice goes over some of the background: “There was a brief moment, in the summer of 2020, when it appeared as if Murphy might be edging toward a more proactive role. The scientific evidence was already pretty clear by this time: With masking and contact tracing, it would be possible to resume in-person learning. Other states were already doing so. But many teachers were understandably terrified. Over a few days in August, the state’s largest and most powerful teachers union, the New Jersey Education Association, declared that it was unsafe to return to classrooms, and Murphy immediately reversed himself, saying local districts could continue with remote learning if they provided a “good reason.” Oftentimes, that reason turned out to be the objection of the unionized workforce. It was hard to escape the suspicion that Murphy was removing himself because he was unwilling to cross NJEA, his most important political ally. Among other things, the union had secretly funneled millions into a super-PAC formed to advocate for Murphy’s policy objectives.”

(I mean, for all the Facebook leftists telling me how important it is that we get people unionized, they haven’t seemed to learn why unions outside the government sector aren’t that popular any more.)

And then Rice goes over how this played out with actual parents (you know, those suburban moms who went big for Democrats the last few years): “Many parents — women especially — found themselves acting as involuntary substitute teachers and full-time caregivers, continually on call to dig out crayons, serve snacks, and solve technical problems with the Zoom. It was only natural that many of these frustrated parents started to pay closer attention to what was happening in the classroom — it was right there in their home. In the run-up to the election in Virginia, which was considered the one to watch, the media mainly focused — probably too much, in retrospect — on Fox News–driven controversies over critical race theory that erupted in conservative suburbs in Virginia. These were only one culturally specific manifestation of a universal ramification of remote learning. Parents were watching. They were Zooming into school board meetings. They were bombarding principals with emails. They were livid; they wanted to know who was in charge.

“But where was the manager?”

As for all that talk about how Washington Democrats’ inability to get a budget deal passed before the election hurt their chances, it is difficult to see how much that hurt in retrospect, but it’s hard to see how that helped. Some guy on Facebook posted “Sign I saw yesterday said ‘I wanted a large pizza with mushrooms and voted for who I thought would deliver. What I got was a medium cheese instead. But the the other party wanted to feed me arsenic and nails.” I commented, “You forgot the part of the joke where Joe Manchin scraped off the cheese and tomato sauce cause it wasn’t paid for.”

But even so, certain people wanted to rationalize that the Democrats’ hammering was a good thing in the long run, since after all the president’s party tends to lose off-year elections, and maybe if there’s a typical changeover that will help get things back to “normal.” Andrew Sullivan, whose remaining point in common with the Right is a loathing of PC wokeness, said after the Virginia election, “I know it’s an incredibly low bar, and if the Dems had won, we might have returned to Bannonland, but still. A peaceful, sane transfer of power? At this point, I’ll take it. A GOP victory with Trump off-stage? Every one counts. You have to repair norms bit by bit. Part of what the American voters had wanted from Biden was congenial, bipartisan normalcy. But the left mugged him. Youngkin had a chance to fill that abandoned moderate space in our politics — and grasped it. … Youngkin seemed like an old school Republican, spoke in reasoned language, did not resort to vile insults, proposed massive spending on education; promised to end a grocery tax; and took the 2008 moderate Obama position on race and history.”

The Left refuses to trust that this is just politics as usual, because they can’t trust that the Republican opposition is coming back to normal. Nor should they.

Please do not forget, conservative apologists, that the Republican Party started its Orwellian “election integrity” foist after, not during, Trump’s whiny campaign to “Stop the Steal” (that is, stop the Electoral College). Do not forget that they changed the laws to take power away from local Secretaries of State after, not before, January 6. You can see what the deal is. These people want to appease the Trumpniks, but they’re doing it a bit too late to make a difference. This time. Having seen that a motivated coalition of NotRepublicans can take out even the most popular Republicans (such as they are), they want to gin the system to make sure that can’t happen again, but they’re doing it in the hopes of getting a competent demagogue, someone who can push the buttons of the gullible, angry mob but who doesn’t eat paste (or well-done steaks with ketchup). I say it’s a hope because if they had a competent authoritarian, they wouldn’t have gone all in on Trump. I’m sure they’re hoping that by now some politically-correct governor like Ron DeSantis will run for the presidential nomination in 2024 and be a Trump with (relative) brains, but if anybody in the party had even the balls of a mouse to confront Mister Mean Tweets, again, they wouldn’t have Trump. And it’s not like they’re challenging him even now. They’re just hoping that without the presidency and the exposure that the Mainstream Media and Twitter unwisely gave him, that he’ll fade away. But even then, their best case scenario just means that America is run like DeSantis’ Florida or Greg Abbott’s Texas, and you can ask people in Texas how well that’s working out. You probably shouldn’t ask over the internet, because their power may go out this Christmas, and you probably shouldn’t ask by mail, because Louis DeJoy is still Postmaster General.

A few weeks ago I saw a Medium column from Umair Haque and it was yet another of his despairing attacks on America in general and how he predicted how the Virginia race was going to go because his parents moved there when he was a child, and he went over how horrible it was for him as a dark-skinned boy of British Commonwealth origins to grow up in Redneckistan.

He said “So there white Americans are. Let me say it again. They’ve got the society they want. They. Nobody else wants that kind of society — a place denuded of public goods and social protections, where guns have more rights than women do. By and large, minorities don’t want to live in that kind of ultra-competitive, individualistic society — they want something more like Canada or Europe.” Ah yes, the countries that are LESS multi-racial and more white than we are. So clearly we’re operating on different definitions of “white.”

But again, Haque does make great points even in spite of himself. He also said, “What on earth are white Americans so angry about? If you think about it, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. They’ve got the society they want. The very one they keep on voting for. Sure, they don’t have healthcare and retirement and decent education and any kind of social systems or public goods. But that’s the society white America wants.”

That’s why I call this political movement “whiny fascism.” I mean, with Germany, they used to be this bad-ass Great Power that rivaled Russia and Britain and France, then they lost World War I, lost their colonies, got East Prussia split off from the rest of the country, got the Rhineland occupied, got inflation that jacked the price of goods into billions, and that was BEFORE the Great Depression. You can understand why they went for rage and hate. You can understand why Russia went for Stalin. Between the March Revolution and the consolidation of the Soviet Union, the country was in absolute chaos and civil war. Many more Russians died from the Russian Civil War than in World War I. You can understand why they wanted order. This country, people want to give the nuclear codes to Gary Busey’s idiot sidekick from The Apprentice cause they got sick of calling customer service and hearing “para espanol, oprime’ el numero dos.”

And in the wake of a Chinese virus that Trump did not cause (but did everything in his power to help Xi Jinping cover up) we entered 2021 with a new president in position to use what we’d learned about the pandemic, including the beginnings of a vaccination program. And that was working pretty well. Not like we don’t already require vaccines in schools for all kinds of diseases without panicking about them. But no, suddenly vaccines are the worst thing since Hitler. As opposed to say, getting a bunch of paramilitary thugs to carry flags and seize a seat of government in an attempt to overthrow the republic.

Many of our issues with supply chains and economic disruptions are at least partially due to the lingering coronavirus and its continuing mutation, and since a lot of that started outside the States, there’s a limited amount that individuals or this government can do about that. Even so, there are things individuals and the government can control. The fact is, going along with the vaccine regimen would help get things back to normal, and normal is the last thing Trumpniks want. Even when Trump himself asked people to get vaccinated in one speech, half the crowd booed him, because at this point that would mean giving Biden, and Fauci, and the Deep State a win, and we can’t have THAT. We already knew, when Trump was president, that governors like DeSantis and people in states like South Dakota weren’t going to enforce or even allow masking and social distancing, no matter how many of their fellow travelers died, and now that there’s a vaccine option, that’s just one more pretext for the cult to engage in performative defiance, just one more icky vegetable that they don’t wanna eat.

Republicans are in fact quite explicit about this, one of them saying that the Party needs “18 more months of chaos and the inability to get stuff done” to get the House back in 2022.

Part of communication is pointing out that the current malaise isn’t (just) because Democrats can’t get anything done, it’s because moderates like Joe Biden are largely in consensus with “progressives” but the entire Republican Party and at least two conservative Senate Democrats are deliberately standing in the way, and if the president has any influence with the public, and (allegedly) the gist of the Democrats’ agenda polls better than actual Democratic politicians do, then Biden and his people need to point out that not only does change not happen by itself, it is happening in the face of sabotage and opposition.

I mean, I’m not even sure why I’m rooting for tax-and-spend Democrats to win, but then I remember that the Libertarian Party, which has never been ready for prime time, is actually getting worse and following the Republicans’ Know-Nothing lead on COVID, and any vote for Republicans is a vote for the Party of Trump. And the last four years ought to demonstrate why that’s a terrible idea.

As I may have said once, a good idea beats a bad idea, but a bad idea beats no idea. In theory, Democrats have an idea: it’s expressed in the massive legislative package set up for the Biden Administration this year. But they didn’t get around to passing even half of it until it was too late for the off-year elections, and that because Democrats assume, as with the Affordable Care Act, that you have to pass the bill to actually see what’s in it, where in fact if they promoted the bill in such a way that voters could see what was in it, they might put more pressure on Congress to get it passed.

Meanwhile Republicans don’t really have any constructive ideas, but they do have rage and hate and discontentment, some of which they have ginned up from phantom buzzword slogans but some of which is due to real issues like inflation that the government either cannot or will not do anything about. And at this rate if you get more Republicans in charge (whether Trump is the specific leader or not) it’s only going to justify Trump’s position that massive death tolls from Trump Virus aren’t government responsibility. But when you have a Democratic Party which assumes that every personal or political concern IS government responsibility, and then doesn’t do anything about them, why not elect Republicans? Because at that point, substance is clearly meaningless and all that matters is one’s preference on culture war aesthetics, and that’s where Republicans always have Democrats beat.

I mean, the Democrats ought to see, or at least deduce, what’s going on. They ought to realize that Republicans aren’t just going to passively wait for liberals to sabotage their own agenda (though that’s usually a safe bet). They’re going to actively work to make things more difficult for Democrats, and they have been, just as they did with Obama. Democrats ought to see that whether “conservative” behavior is an ant-like organized policy or just the spiteful stubbornness of a group of individuals, it is having a collective effect and that is impacting their chances of political success. They ought to be able to pick up on this, react to it and create a counter-strategy. And yet November 2 showed that they’re totally surprised.

I was trying to figure out what this behavior reminded me of, but this October GEICO brought back that commercial they do every Halloween season spoofing slasher horror movies. The one where the small group of people is running through a darkened town in a panic, going, “Let’s go to the barn!” “No, let’s hide at the post office!” And one of the gals wails, “Why don’t we just get in the running car??” And one of the guys with her says “Are you crazy? Let’s go hide behind the chainsaws!” So of course, that’s what they do. And if that isn’t the Democratic Party, I don’t know what is.

Because if the Republicans and Libertarians are just variant intensities and flavors of chowderhead, the Democrats present as people who ACT like they got some sense but refuse to draw obvious conclusions from available data. So, given that the Libertarians actually won a large number of local offices in the off-year election, and the local offices are starting to be where the action is, you may want to reconsider them. I mean, yes, at the end of the day Libertarians may just be Republicans who like pot and support trans rights, but that’s more than you’re going to get from the actual Republican Party. And I’m starting to think it’s more than we’ll get out of the Democrats.

REVIEW: The Wheel Of Time

One of Amazon TV’s latest original productions is a long-awaited adaptation of Robert Jordan’s epic High Fantasy series, The Wheel Of Time. It is in some ways between the more famous fantasy epics, not as bloody and cynical as George RR Martin’s A Song Of Ice And Fire, but a little more political and complex than JRR Tolkien’s Middle-Earth cycle. It’s like Dune in that there is an all-female order of mystics trying to guide the destiny of human affairs, but there is a specific reason for the gender bias in magic. In a previous age, the Aes Sedai order was co-ed and led by a man named Lews Therin, called the Dragon. But when he and his allies confronted “the Dark One” and stopped him from conquering the world, the Dark One laid a final curse, corrupting the male side of the One Power that channelers use to perform magic. This taint corrupts male channelers in proportion to their power, and since Therin was the most powerful channeler of his age, he ended up going insane and killing his own family, and ended up doing far worse before finally dying. Since then the Aes Sedai has been an all-female group and one of their responsibilities in addition to finding female channelers to recruit is to isolate any male channeler and “gentle” him by cutting his access to the One Power. If this seems like a euphemism for gelding a stallion, that’s probably intentional.


The fact that this world’s Pandora/Eve equivalent is male instead of female creates an unusual influence for women in a fantasy setting; I sometimes think of The Wheel Of Time as the anti-Gor. It certainly has more pivotal female characters than Tolkien. In fact the series’ main Gandalf figure is Moiraine, a wandering Aes Sedai (played by Rosamund Pike, the closest thing to a name actor in this production), who at the start of the story enters a small village called Two Rivers because she has determined that the Dragon Reborn is one of five young townspeople: The hunter Rand al’Thor, his best friends, blacksmith Perrin Aybara and neer-do-well Mat Cauthon, along with Nynaeve the village wise woman and Egwene, her new apprentice, who happens to be Rand’s girlfriend.

There have already been a lot of changes made in the Amazon production compared to Jordan’s source material. For instance there’s a shocking character death in the first episode that wasn’t in the books. The main divergence as far as the plot goes is that in the books, Moiraine was originally seeking only the three male protagonists, but in the show, both Egwene and Nynaeve are potentially the Dragon Reborn. I had thought this didn’t make sense given that they wouldn’t be any more dangerous to the Aes Sedai than other female channelers, but someone on the Internet pointed out how this change resolves a plot problem with Jordan’s first novel: Moiraine has to take Rand, Mat and Perrin to her superiors but has no reason to bring Egwene, who basically tags along out of sheer stubbornness even though she still has a family in Two Rivers. The TV series takes the element of choice away: After the Dark One’s monsters attack Two Rivers, it’s clear that they’re hunting for the Dragon Reborn, and if the five youths don’t leave with Moiraine, their family and friends will be endangered again. Not only does this explain why Egwene would leave her parents, it also explains why Mat would leave his family, given that he seems to care about his little sisters more than their parents do.

Another change is that in the novels it was made clear no later than Book 3 that Rand al’Thor was the Dragon Reborn, but at this point in the TV series (four episodes in as of Thanksgiving) Rand has only performed one arguably superhuman feat, whereas Episode 4 ended with Nynaeve performing an epic channeling that saved the day.

My impression of the TV series is that it’s pretty decent but not spectacular, which is right because my impression of Jordan’s book series was that it was pretty decent but not spectacular. I, like a lot of folks, quit reading before it got to Book 10. (I liked one Internet comment that went ‘I plan to watch until Season 6 and then stop.’) I personally think of Robert Jordan as being akin to George Lucas: possessed of a great ability to create likeable heroes and a vast, enchanting background setting for them to adventure in, combined with an even greater inability to give those characters believable plots and dialogue. And so far, even George RR Martin doesn’t have Jordan’s problem with wrapping things up; Jordan died of heart disease in 2007, and the book series was only completed with notes given to his designated successor, fantasy author Brandon Sanderson (who is listed as a producer on the show along with Rosamund Pike).

Thus so far The Wheel Of Time does a pretty good job of conveying the setting, although like Amazon’s adaptation of The Boys comic, it reserves the right to change things around and keep the audience guessing. And while some purists are objecting to the changes already made to Jordan’s narrative, I’m sure there are at least as many who think that any change could only be an improvement.

REVIEW: Marvel’s Eternals

Marvel Studios’ Eternals is based on an idea Jack Kirby had, after he’d already left Marvel Comics to create The New Gods for DC Comics, only to have that and other titles cancelled by the company. The “elevator pitch” is that some Chariots Of The Gods-type aliens experimented on prehistoric humans, creating the evolved Eternals and warped Deviants, and charged them with stewardship of the Earth. Of course, the two groups had different ideas on how to do that, and the battles between the two allegedly led to the development of human myths like Odysseus vs. Circe, Herakles vs. The Hydra, and Thor vs. The Midgard Serpent.

The problem being that Marvel Comics already had Thor, and Hercules, and a bunch of other deities in the modern world playing superhero, and Thor’s pantheon at least has already been introduced in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Not only that, the MCU, huge and involved as it is, is only part of the huge realm of intellectual properties Marvel Comics developed over the years. With the possible exception of Sersi (the Circe of the Odyssey analog), the Eternals have never been as popular with Marvel Comics fans as the Inhumans, let alone the X-Men. So the existence of The Eternals poses a meta-fiction question: Why do we need them? As in, what purpose do they serve in the setting that isn’t already fulfilled by other characters? And in terms of the MCU’s recent narrative, you inevitably get to the question: If these guys were here all along, why didn’t they help the Avengers fight Thanos?

As it turns out, while a certain Eternal claims to be a brother of Thanos, and the disappearance and reappearance of half Earth’s population causes one Eternal to make a critical decision about the group’s mission on Earth, the matter of recent MCU history is mostly waved off. Eternals focuses mainly on the aforementioned Sersi (Gemma Chan, who actually played a Kree in the Captain Marvel movie). Sersi is currently living in London, with her boyfriend, professor Dane Whitman (Kit Harrington, whose character is just as out of his depth here as Jon Snow). However they soon deal with the return of Sersi’s former lover, the Eternals’ main warrior, Ikaris (Richard Madden, who’s not as cool here as he was playing Robb Stark). In flashbacks, Sersi and Ikaris are shown coming to Earth, guiding civilization, falling in love and even getting married, but the reason they broke up isn’t made clear at first. It turns out Ikaris left Sersi due to a major plot twist that I will not reveal to anyone who hasn’t already seen the movie, because it counts for such drama as Eternals has.

I haven’t fully decided what I think about this movie, or even if it’s a good movie. I also don’t know if it’s a bad movie. It is of course extremely long, partially because of the time scope and also because there are no less than ten principals. At the same time, Dane Whitman (who is a notable character in Marvel Comics) is introduced at the beginning and then hardly used at all until the last scenes. In the source material, Deviants were distinct individuals with their own love-hate relationships with Eternals, and in this movie most of them are just giant CGI effects. The Eternals use American-style slang when hanging around the Babylonians and Gupta Indians, and yet Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani) and his mortal valet are the only characters who have the sense of humor one comes to expect from Marvel heroes.

In fact, given the generally negative reviews for Eternals, it now seems to be fashionable for critics to bash Marvel Studios for a standard, mechanical approach to film making, but if anything the problem with Eternals is that it’s not enough like a standard Marvel movie. Deviants aside (and ultimately, they’re kind of a red herring) there is no real Good vs. Evil conflict. There is no easy resolution. Chloe Zhao (the award-winning director of Nomadland) has presented a story of genuinely cosmic scope, posing the question of whether individual human lives really matter against the greater cycle of universal creation and destruction. It isn’t a question with an obvious objective answer, and the Eternals ultimately do not all agree. Eternals intends to be deep, and sometimes succeeds. But all this means that, as with Black Widow, it’s basically a separate story that just happens to take place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and so the formula, mechanical approach to putting all the Marvel Comics Easter eggs into a continuing narrative are (like Dane) done as afterthoughts or saved for the now-standard after-credits scenes.

Although in that regard, Harry Styles is the greatest stunt casting since David Bowie playing Pontius Pilate.

Schrodinger’s Don

It was recently announced that Norm McDonald died after fighting cancer for years, which no one knew about cause he didn’t want to tell anybody. But don’t worry folks, I’m sure that’s just his idea of a joke.

Okay, that wasn’t very funny. Here’s a better joke. My best friend is dead.

It’s been about two months since September 14th. That’s when I found out. I am still trying to process it.

Don Garner has been a friend of mine since… I can’t even remember. More than 30 years. I was still hanging around UNLV and met him through one of the Dungeons & Dragons groups, along with at least one other close friend and a few other guys that I’ve run into a few times since then. And even more than most of those guys, I had a lot in common with him. He knew that much more about Star Trek, and about naval history, than I did, though I think a lot of that was precisely because he’d researched the military history of every US Navy ship named “Enterprise.” He had a great sense of humor. I’ve posted some of his stuff on Facebook. Like: “In the news this week… Richard Branson beat Jeff Bezos into outer space by nine days… and Richard Branson does NOT have over 56,000 people’s names on a petition to not allow him to return to Earth the way Jeff Bezos does”.

But Don had been in a decline for years. And years. Such that when I learned for sure that he had died, it was sort of like how my roommate’s cat passed away. He took him to the vet and they found out the little guy had lung cancer, and they told my roommate that the cat maybe had weeks to live and it turned out to be only a few days. So it was sad, but we knew it was going to happen at some point, we just didn’t know when. The difference being you expect your pet to be completely dependent on other human beings, and you don’t think there’s anything else you can do if the pet goes terminal. When you’ve got somebody who’s otherwise able to take care of himself and who doesn’t do so, it’s that much more perplexing.

When I said recently on a completely different subject, that I had told someone “you can’t expect other people to care about your life more than you do”, that was Don I was referring to.

For example, Don was the guy who invented the sixburger. That is, you go to Wendy’s, you order two Triple cheeseburgers, and you put them on one bun. I mean, I weigh over 300 pounds, and I couldn’t compete with this. The thing is, for whatever reason he didn’t even have the same work ethic I did. I don’t see why anybody actually wants to work, but this was different. Like, years later when he was on SSI, he frequently seemed surprised that I couldn’t put him into my schedule cause I had a job. It was like, Don was intellectually aware that other people had to work for a living, but that wasn’t really part of his reality. It would have gotten in the way of his hobbies.

And as he aged, his metabolism slowed and he was less able to absorb the results of eating like Dagwood Bumstead. And if you, like me and Don, are on the Standard American Diet (or what Penn Jillette calls ‘SAD’) it’s that much more likely that you’re going to end up with heart disease or Type 2 diabetes and then you’re that much more likely to need consistent long-term medical coverage. And in this country, if you don’t get that coverage through your employer, you need to rely on the generosity of the state – or lack thereof.

If I can think of a point of real divergence, it was around 2006 or so. Prior to that Don had been going from job to job and eventually wound up living with me and my Mom, and we eventually had to kick him out cause he was unemployed and we needed a roommate who could support the household. Don ended up moving in with Jason, a gamer friend of ours down in Henderson. In the summer Jason referred us to jobs with the call center where he worked. It sucked, frankly, but I stuck with it, because it paid for medical insurance and I could see where I was going downhill and how Mom was going downhill with old age. This is how I got to see a regular doctor and how I got diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. That sucks, and I can’t tell you I have been good with my diet, but I have been eating less sugar than I did before then, and smaller portions. I have also been given prescriptions that have kept my blood sugar under control.

Don meanwhile quit the call center job after only a few weeks cause he couldn’t handle the work. He stayed at Jason’s and gamed with us, but spent a lot of his time asleep. He wasn’t looking for work, or looking into the issues with his health. And when I talked to him about Jason’s place, he would always grumble and complain about his living circumstances (living not only with Jason but his mom and other relatives), but would always move to whatever room they put him up in, as long as they gave him a place to stay, and food to eat, and they didn’t ask questions and they didn’t make him get up and look for a job. His illness was getting to the point where he had band-aids on his toes all the time, and one of his legs looked like a rabid wolf had ripped it up then pissed on it. And because Jason was at that point living with his sister and her two young children, she started to object. His other sister was a social worker who had tried to get Don to get some kind of public assistance and help with his issues, but he had refused. Eventually they forced the situation, and by that time, my roommate had moved out, and then my older brother, so I was once again asked to move Don in. I told him at that time, “Don, the only reason that I am taking you in now is because this is your LAST CHANCE to not die on the street homeless.”

In fact now that I recall, it was my mother of sainted memory who really saved Don’s life, or least gave him more years than he would have had. A couple days after he came back in the house, it was about 2 am or so and Mom had gotten up and noticed Don on the couch and saw that he was unresponsive. She eventually got him up, but from her own experience with Type 2 diabetes realized he was going into a coma. She immediately got me up (even though I had to work in the morning) and take him over to Sunrise Hospital to be checked in. I dropped him off for the ER overnight and they decided his condition was bad enough that they were going to take him in with no questions even though he had no insurance. That’s when Don was first diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. But that was the good news. It was good news in that at least we knew what was going on. But then he had to proceed from there.

After being at Sunrise about 5 days, he got a veritable grocery list of prescriptions and other scripts he had to take to the UMC (University Medical Center) hospital, because that was the only place where he could get those prescriptions filled with no insurance and only state support. So one day I took him over at 11 in the morning, thinking it would be a couple of hours. They told him that in order to fill the prescriptions from Sunrise, he would have to go through the whole admissions process again at UMC. So I dropped him off. He was there til about 9 pm.
This involved going through several hours of admissions procedures at the ER, going into the Pharmacy line several times- where they had only ONE teller processing orders for a line that (not coincidentally) averaged over 20 people deep, finding out that the doctor at Sunrise who made the prescriptions was not listed in the UMC roster of doctors authorized to prescribe, and in any case they had to change at least one of the prescriptions because they didn’t actually have the brand of pain medication the doctor wrote. While waiting, my friend also went through blood sugar crash at least once BECAUSE he was waiting for the prescription to regulate it, and in direct contrast to the Sunrise staff, no one really bothered to do anything for him at the time.

Compare this to my barely-adequate insurance from work where at most of my jobs I’ve been able to schedule an appointment with a doctor, get regular checkups, the doctor will fill out a prescription with a pharmacy I specify and I can go to the drive-thru and pick it up less than an hour after the fact.

But we eventually managed to get that prescription regimen, and Mom and I both told Don that one of the conditions of him staying with us was that he had to do SOMEthing to support himself. And in a couple weeks we got him to go to the welfare office down the street and got him on food stamps/EBT. And that’s ALL he did. Even after Mom died from her own various co-morbidities he did not do anything to support the household other than get the EBT, which was often not enough to cover his usual diet (which hadn’t changed all that much). So I had him living in the house, I was still paying rent to my sister who has been managing the house ever since, but I was the only person making money and Mom’s Social Security was gone. (If I made enough money to live by myself, I wouldn’t have been in my Mom’s house.) I knew by now that Don was really not able to hold down a job even if he’d wanted to (which he didn’t), but he should have at least been able to call someone to arrange social services and expanded coverage. He did not do that. There was no way I could babysit him or get him to do what he needed to do if I had to work full time during the day. Meanwhile I still had to cover bills by myself on ten dollars an hour even as he jacked the air conditioning up and pushed the power bill past $200 a month because his circulation had made him intolerant to heat. After a few months of this, I told him, flat-out, ‘I don’t care if you get a job, get on welfare, or suck cocks on Boulder Highway, you are GOING to do something to pay your way here.’ He did not. He didn’t want to admit that he needed to be on government dole, but at the same time he had absolutely no problem with couch-surfing at my place, or Jason’s or anyone else and expecting us to cover his upkeep on our budget while he did the absolute bare minimum to maintain his own life. So again, a few months after the ultimatum I had him move out.

And at that point, he really was homeless. He’d been at Catholic shelters for a few weeks and that basically convinced him that he needed to actually get some professional assistance and support. He was in this flophouse downtown at Ogden for a little while but eventually after getting SSI the state moved him to the apartment in Henderson where he stayed for the rest of his life. Once he’d gotten that much stability, we were able to resume social activities again, see movies and play role-playing games with our friends again. And it mattered a lot to me that we just managed to get together, tell jokes and have fun, even if it was just the two of us and a couple other guys. He wasn’t in the same game group with Jason, even though Jason and his sisters did ask if he wanted to come back. I guess in retrospect Don didn’t want them to see what happened to him. Among other things, he lost both legs over the years, mostly due to diabetes but partly because the people tending to his various infections were no more attentive than the people at UMC.

My current job obliges me to work graveyard (just about dusk to dawn) and September 12, I got a call from our mutual gamer friend Hugh just before I was about to get ready for work. He normally helped Don with rides to games (since he lives on the other side of town) but his truck broke down and he hadn’t heard from Don in about a week and he feared the worst. Unfortunately I had to work Sunday and Monday and I had no time to get out to Don’s place, which is over 13 miles away. Not only that, on my next day off (Tuesday the 14th) I had two doctors’ appointments set up back to back starting before noon when I only left work Tuesday at 4 am. So I was already on the other side of town from where I live, that much further away from Don’s, and had barely gotten any sleep.

At this point I had every expectation that Don was dead, but I didn’t know. I also knew from experience that he could sleep for over 24 hours and not respond to the phone or even to a knock at the door. So as I drove across town, needing to move yet getting caught behind every construction cone, red light and dumbass driver in Vegas, Don’s status was unknown. He could have been dead. He could have been alive. Schrodinger’s Don.

I was on the road stuck between lights and I was scanning rock radio. It started with AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell.” I thought not. I turned to another album rock station and got Alice in Chains:

I believe

Them bones are me

Some say

We’re born into the grave

I feel so alone

Gonna end up a big ol’ pile of them bones

I got to the apartment complex after 3 pm or so, went upstairs and the first thing I noticed was all the empty paper bags left out from Amazon’s delivery service. So clearly Don hadn’t left the apartment, or he would’ve taken them to the garbage. I hit the door several times, and called on the phone, and when I got no answer either way, I warned him I was calling 911. So I did. The Henderson Police came out 20 minutes or so later and interviewed me for what little I knew, then they had me go to the ground floor to talk with one of the cops while another one got the superintendent from the office. Then they opened the door, and as I was talking about the situation with the cop and Don’s downstairs neighbor, we smelled it. All the way from upstairs.

You know that weird combination of stale locker and festering wound? That’s the first time I’d ever smelled that.

The neighbor told us that he’d smelled something odd in the pipes in his bathroom for a few days, which supported my suspicion that Don was dead even before Hugh called me.

My friend Hugh is one of those Trump guys who considers Don’s treatment to be an example of state “death panels” deciding who gets to live or not, and I kind of agree that this is what happens if you rely too much on the government, or on anybody. But that just raises two points: One, the alternative to Nevada’s indigent health care system would be to sink more money into the state government to establish reliable care for everyone, including the indigent. But that would be socialism. The only other option is to go back to the previous American standard which is that everybody only gets health care depending on the plan given by their employer, and Don was already psychologically unable to hold down a job even before he was physically too sick to hold a job.

Two, if there is no collective system of care, that just brings the issue back to individual responsibility. If there is no socialized system, that means you are solely responsible for your own upkeep, and that means holding down a job to get medical benefits whether you like working or not. Because again, no one is going to care about your own life more than you do. Even if they’re paid to care.

Don was not of subnormal intellect. He knew what day it was, at least when he wasn’t zonked out on painkillers. He, like me, and many of our gaming friends, started off as politically right-of-center, and like me but unlike most of those friends came to realize that voting Republican these days is like sticking your dick in a drum of radioactive waste. I’m saying, he wasn’t an idiot. On some levels, he was one of the smarter people I knew. But even more than those guys who want to court Trump Virus to own the libs, it felt to me that there was some broken gear in his system that I didn’t know how to fix.

A few days after the event, my sister suggested I post on Don’s Facebook page to find his next of kin, and his cousin in town managed to reach his sister and brother who both live out of state. The next week I had a long talk over the phone with his sister, who confirmed that all of the issues that my friends and I had noticed with Don’s behavior were no news to her.

This Monday, November 8, would have been Don’s birthday, which is just a week off from mine. And every time that holiday season rolled around I was always wondering if Don would survive for another Thanksgiving or Christmas, and I was always kind of impressed that he did. And that won’t be the case anymore.

There will be no real funeral. There will be no formal obituary. It took over a month for Don’s sister to get a cause of death from the Henderson office. After all this, I have taken it upon myself to summarize another person’s life, and as before I ask myself what more I can do, and again reach the conclusion that no matter how much it is, it will never be enough.

Don had a lot to offer. And like a lot of people I’ve known, he deserved a lot more out of life than he got.

If I can’t do anything else, I can at least speak here. So, Goodbye, Don Garner. You were my best friend for over half of my life. Your life mattered. To me and to those of us who saw the best of you.

You are still remembered.

You are still loved.

REVIEW: Dune

One of the big movie premieres in October was the new adaptation of Dune, the far-future sci-fi epic novel by Frank Herbert, directed by Denis Villeneuve, probably best known in the States for Arrival and Blade Runner 2049. There is not much point in discussing the movie without spoilers. After all, the story actually pre-dates Star Wars, and while it is not nearly so well publicized, it has been publicized well enough to where people have heard terms like “gom jabbar” and “wormsign.” It has been said by critics that Villeneuve immerses the viewer immediately and doesn’t really bother telling the audience much about the background, but I thought the exposition in the movie did a perfectly good job of setting things up for the audience. If one still needs it, here’s a brief primer:

The various electronics and media that were revolutionary in Herbert’s day and ubiquitous today are in this history banned under a “Butlerian Jihad” that occurred after a revolt of artificial intelligences. As a result much of the technical work of civilization is done by “mentats” who use mental disciplines and a few drugs to attain the heightened memorization and thinking abilities to allow them to serve in the role of computers.

The main drug used in the civilization is melange, or “the spice”, which is psychoactive, physically addictive and absolutely necessary to the galactic society, because the altered states it produces are what allow navigators to “fold space” and achieve interstellar travel, which would otherwise require computers. However the spice is only produced on one planet, Arrakis (or Dune), which is so hot and dry that a human body would desiccate simply from exposure to the atmosphere. To survive, colonists and local humans (the Fremen) invented stillsuits, which are full-body jumpsuits that contain the body’s moisture and recycle all its excretions – yes, including shit – into water to rehydrate the user.

Psionic powers are real, and most mystics focus on clairvoyance or “prescience.” The main mystic order is an all-female group called the Bene Gesserit, who are embarked on a subtle breeding program with male nobility to create a male offspring called the Kwisatz Haderach – the one whose prescience will allow him to “bridge space and time.”

Despite the advanced features of this society, it is basically a combination of corporatism and feudalism where noble families under an Imperial dynasty rule the galaxy in order to preserve the trade routes and the flow of spice to the planets. As the story starts, Arrakis is ruled by the House Harkonnen, the most corrupt, dysfunctional and perverted family to hold a position of authority prior to the Trump Organization. But the Emperor has recently handed their fief over to the House Atreides, which centers on the foresighted Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac), his Bene Gesserit consort Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), and their only son, Paul (Timothee Chalamet). Paul is developing prescient abilities from a young age, which are periodically tested by the Bene Gesserit on suspicion that he is their prophesied leader. As the family moves to Dune, Paul is also haunted by visions of a young girl who turns out to be a Fremen named Chani (Zendaya). Chani and Paul seem to have a psychic bond, or perhaps Paul is seeking out Chani because she is the only being in the galaxy who is more ethereally pretty than he is. Meanwhile, it is unclear exactly why the Atreides were granted control of the planet, and Leto (rightly) suspects a courtly trap.

The Dune franchise expanded considerably from the original novel, but Dune itself, with its extremely long and involved storyline, has long been considered an unfilmable property. This is best demonstrated by the fact that the most famous adaptation before now was directed by David Lynch, who has produced more unfilmable narratives than any other director in America, yet everyone (including Lynch) thinks he got it wrong. So everyone was asking how Denis Villeneuve was going to fit it all in to one movie. The obvious choice he made was: not to. The other more successful adaptation prior to now was a SciFi Channel production from 2000, which was done as a miniseries. This film ends at about the point in the original story when things start to get interesting. The sequel (which is now planned) is supposed to be the second part of the novel after Paul begins to live among the Fremen and plans a confrontation with the Emperor. So while the movie is marketed as Dune, the title credit clearly shows it as “Dune – Part One”.

As it is, Villeneuve’s Dune basically impresses on sheer scale. Like, everyone remembers the first scene of the original Star Wars where Leia’s ship is pursued by an Imperial Star Destroyer that sweeps over the movie screen. Well, the people in Dune use ships that make a Star Destroyer look like a Winnebago. It’s a pretty good action movie, when it gets to that point. It has good to great acting, with Josh Brolin and Jason Momoa being their usual badass selves as Gurney Halleck and Duncan Idaho respectively, and Chalamet giving an intense performance as the “little boy” who is starting to realize his true potential, even as it terrifies him. This movie doesn’t capture the exotic, decadent weirdness of the setting like Lynch’s movie, but then the only director who could beat Lynch for exotic decadent weirdness actually decided he couldn’t film Dune. Villeneuve takes the project seriously, and that sense of scale goes from the sweeping visuals to the often overwhelming sound effects. Meaning, that while Dune is streaming on HBO Max, this is a movie that must be seen in a theater.

Just don’t buy anything else while you’re there. I mean really, they can drop a matinee ticket down to five bucks, but they charge $5.99 for a bottled water or small soda?

I’m Not A Liberal

The big news ending last week was that the big vote that Speaker Nancy Pelosi set up in the House for Democrats’ reconciliation bill had to be postponed because the left wing of the party balked at the current state of negotiations. Basically there was a “bipartisan” bill, so called because even Republicans said they would agree with it on paper, for $1.2 trillion to cover infrastructure, versus the bill that both President Biden and Democratic “progressives” want, which was over $3.5 trillion dollars for a whole bunch of “progressive” stuff that that wing of the party wants and thinks they can load on while we’re spending over a trillion dollars regardless. And as with a lot of these bills that absolutely have to be passed to avoid the collapse of Western Civilization, the current ruling faction wants to sneak in a lot of stuff without analysis.

For example, I am not as much a fan of the Libertarian Party as I used to be, but I caught one post on their Facebook page where they discussed a “mileage tax” buried in the bill. If you take a deeper dive, you will find articles clarifying that it is officially a “National motor vehicle per-mile user fee pilot”, and it is not a tax. What it is, however, is a proposal to fund a study on how to implement a per-mile fee on vehicles in this country, supposedly as a replacement for gas taxes. So on that score, I’d agree with the LP’s rebuttal: “If they support a program to study a tax, they 100% support that tax. And 19 Senate Republicans already voted yes on it.” Before that, they said: “Imagine supporting that and still looking poor people in the eye and say that you want the rich to pay their fair share.”

The fact of the matter is, we have the government revenue system that we do because the politicians who are already in charge have already decided they’re not going to “make the rich pay their fair share” and even if they did, government is going to spend as much money as it wants regardless of how much it makes. I said this earlier: It doesn’t matter whether Jeff Bezos pays his “fair share”, you would need to multiply Jeff Bezos’ total assets by a factor over almost 25 to get this government’s budget for 2020. And if we all agree it’s unfair that the rest of us have to pay taxes when Jeff Bezos effectively pays none at all, that’s the decision of the people who are actually running the government. After all they only deal with voters once every two years at most and they deal with their contributors almost every day.

In similar terms, liberal Judd Legum posted on Facebook: “This isn’t tough. Let’s say you are paying $1000 a month for health insurance. Then America shifts to Medicare for All and you are paying nothing but your taxes go up by $750. Calling that a ‘tax increase’ is a dishonest Republican talking point.” Yes, except: it’s dishonest to say that’s NOT a tax. It IS a net decrease in the amount of money you need to pay out, and that’s what liberals ought to be emphasizing. But the end result is accomplished VIA a tax. And this is why liberals are losing the public debate, because their best advocates are on Facebook, Twitter and MSDNC, and they’re being disingenuous about how their agenda really works, and even in that disingenuousness they’re still more articulate and effective than the Biden Administration or most Democrats in government.

Remember in the early 20th Century, they told the public that when they changed the Constitution to allow for a direct income tax, it was only 1 percent for income of up to $20,000 a year (which back then was real money). And now look. This is why Republicans can get away with opposing all taxes no matter what, cause the average person doesn’t care if Jeff Bezos gets soaked, he cares that some guy named FICA is taking over one-sixth of his paycheck.

So maybe that’s why not everyone in this country or even everyone in Congress is as exercised about this negotiation as the Left and the Mainstream Media are. Or maybe it’s something else. Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema held a Capitol Hill wine fundraiser on September 28, during budget negotiations. Or as I say, “Priorities.”

And the other Democratic Senator who usually gets blamed for Congress not getting anything done, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, told reporters who questioned his position on his Party’s bills, “I’ve never been a liberal in any way, shape or form. There’s no one that’s ever thought I was.”

Well, thanks for saying it, Joe. Even if you ARE a Democrat, that doesn’t make you a liberal even if that’s where binary American political logic is these days. I’M not a liberal. And it seems to amaze “progressives”, but just because the nominally progressive (or at least not regressive) party they belong to is technically in control of the government, that doesn’t mean they are a majority in this country, just as they aren’t really in control of the government.

If the duopoly system deceives Republicans into thinking their theocrat-corporatist dogma is a lot more popular than it actually is, “progressives” have deceived themselves into thinking their agenda is more popular than it is just because they’re the movers and shakers in one of the two parties that Americans have deceived themselves into thinking are the only ones we can vote for.

That setup ultimately hurts Republicans in a lot of ways, which is why they’re now trying to compensate with their state laws for “election integrity” because they’re losing even some of the people who have voted for them. But in the meantime, duopoly and binary thinking hurt Democrats and “progressives” more because for one thing, they’re actually trying to get stuff done against the premises of a system that has all kinds of safeguards against swift and radical change, and all the Republicans need to do is game that system.

But it also hurts the Left because the need to glop everyone together in two broad coalitions means that their focus is diluted. Many times, I have gone over how America’s alleged polarization is really a case of one party polarizing itself to purge everyone but the True Believers and the other party taking everyone else by default. What calls itself conservatism today basically sums up as “We hate abortion and gays.” Not that previous conservatives didn’t oppose abortion and homosexuality, but they had a little more philosophical grounding. So on just those two subjects, which are both more complex than blanket approval or opposition, anybody who acknowledges that complexity is necessarily outside the party of “We hate abortion and gays.” But that means that the Democratic Party has to include a whole bunch of people who support abortion rights and queer rights, and also a bunch of people whose opinion is more like “I oppose abortion, but I don’t think it should be prevented in cases of rape or incest” or “I don’t like gays and trans people, but I don’t think they should be sent into camps.”

In other words, because some of us are in the Democratic Party simply because we don’t want this government to be returned to the business portfolio of the Trump Organization, doesn’t mean we’re equally enthusiastic about all aspects of the “progressive” agenda. And that group includes the Democrats in Congress.

Assuming of course that Manchin and Sinema are the only two holdouts against the reconciliation bill.

As for the president, Joe Biden is a leftist only in the minds of “conservatives” who think that anybody to the left of Mitt Romney is a leftist. And given that Biden is the one pushing the $3.5 trillion bill (at least I think he is), the question of whether you are or are not a progressive isn’t the issue in getting a bill passed. If it was, you could negotiate. It shouldn’t be too much to say that the “progressive” figure is too high and spends too much money when we don’t know where it’s going, and it shouldn’t be unthinkable to haggle it down. The main reason I’d agree to even $1.2 trillion is because our country’s infrastructure, including medical infrastructure, has been neglected for so long that America threatens to be a Third World banana republic with nuclear weapons. (Much like Russia, which is another goal that Vladimir Putin and the Republicans have in common.) It is something else to deliberately hold up any progress just for the sake of doing so, because that’s what your donors want, or just because your party’s hair-thin majority means you get to make everybody dance for you.

I mean, this is where Republicans want the Democrats. They know that if they just hang together as a party and not agree to a single thing the governing party wants then the Democrats will have to conduct all bill negotiations amongst themselves. And that will end up having “progressive” bills watered down or even stopped. This is what happened with the Affordable Care Act. And the public disappointment from that made it that much easier for Republicans to retake Congress in 2010. And that undermined everything President Obama wanted to do from then on, even though he got re-elected. And that was BEFORE Trump. And Democrats know all of this too, they know this is the Republican strategy, and yet they keep playing into it.

Right now, the Democratic Party reminds me of that recurring gag in Peanuts with Charlie, Lucy and the football, except that Charlie Brown is the one yanking the football away from himself.

And that is because the Republicans are thinking strategically and the Democrats aren’t.

And that is because paradoxically, the party of altruism, collectivism and (democratic) socialism is incapable of getting everyone united on the same goal, whereas the party (that claims to be) of selfishness, individualism and capitalism can get all of its members to subordinate their personal consciences to the will of one leader, whether that leader is a paragon of Machiavellian cunning like Mitch McConnell or a pumpkin-colored inbred who is so lazy he thinks Manual Labor is the President of Mexico.

And THAT is because the party of selfishness and individualism has everyone pretty much on the same page. However much they may talk about the virtues of hard work and the free market, they know they’ve got it made as members of Congress, they have benefits that they would not get even in the private sector (if you’re already rich, like Mitt Romney, so much the better) and the best way to maintain what are effectively lifelong privileges is to cater to the donor class and run the country for their benefit.

Whereas with the Democrats, you can’t get “progressives” and centrists to agree, but while some progressives realize the consequences of letting Republicans win (namely, that the January 6 mentality takes over government), centrists don’t seem to think that’s such a big deal. Cause in the end, the main thing they have in common with the Republicans is that they want to keep their lifelong privileges and do to that, they have to do what the donors want. The fact that America might become a fascist state without the intellectual depth isn’t something that concerns either the donors or them.

That being the case, the old Washington system of negotiating with senators for quid pro quo isn’t going to work on the likes of Kyrsten Sinema, cause her donors are clearly giving her more than Joe Biden can.

So assuming he hasn’t already done so, I would counsel Joe Biden to be a bit less Barack Obama and a little more LBJ. If I was Biden, this is what I would be telling Sinema, Manchin, and anybody else who needs it:

“You’re representing your states and your country, even if your donors think that you’re just running the government for their benefit. Cause they don’t care if America becomes a Third World banana republic.”

(And they really should. As former Senator Al Franken said recently, ‘if your local bridge collapses when you’re trying to cross, your Mercedes will sink in the river just as fast as a Hyundai.’)

“So here’s the deal. This is the budget bill I agreed to. In Washington terms that means the Party agreed to it. That means YOU agree to it. If you expect to have the benefits of Democratic Party affiliation you need to work with the Party. If you work against it, you’re not getting one red cent for your re-election campaigns. You’re not getting any other Democrat to endorse you and if you get primaried, I’m endorsing that person.

“If that seems all or nothing, you’re the ones giving me nothing. Give me something to negotiate with. If you won’t, you kill my Party’s agenda and my chances of getting re-elected and that doesn’t seem to bug you, but you can’t screw with me and expect me to just smile.

“Your other choice is to do what you’re doing indirectly and do it out in the open and join the Republican Party. Because in this system we’ve created, if you’re not on my side, you’re on theirs. After all what’s the point in saying we have a majority if we’re not going to act like it? I know that’s a big bluff on my part, but hey, if you call it, I’m sure Mitch and the Republicans will treat you just as generously as you’ve treated us.

“Look at it another way. Do you know Roman history? Well- imagine I’m Caesar. So you can stab me in the back, just remember how that worked out for Brutus.”

Liberty Vs. “Liberty”

“You have become the very thing you swore to destroy.”

-Obi-Wan Kenobi, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

Well, it’s been over a year since Trump Virus (TM) made it big in the States, and as the cartoon goes, it would like to dedicate this next song to all the people who never believed in it when it was coming up.
Cause if it wasn’t for all those people, it wouldn’t be as big as it is today.

Even after we developed a workable vaccine distribution program, there’s still at least 25 percent of the population nationwide that refuses to take it, and that’s an average. In some Republican states the numbers are a lot higher, as are coronavirus cases.

Again, Trump himself tried to get his cult to get vaccinated, and that’s one direction from their Leader that they just won’t take.

I saw something recently at the store that explained everything. It was on a box of Pop Tarts. If you are a connoisseur, you would know that while Pop Tarts can be eaten raw, they are supposed to be heated in a toaster, or in extremis, in a microwave. So consider that. I looked at the back of the box, and in large capital letters, it said: “REMOVE FROM FOIL BEFORE HEATING”.

When you have fully pondered the implications of this directive, namely the fact that the food company deemed it necessary in the first place, you will understand why we haven’t beat COVID.

Meanwhile, I don’t know if this is a case of being on brand or just trying to jump on the culture war, but the national Libertarian Party is putting up social media posts and ads saying “Already Against the Next Mandate.”

I have come to the distressing realization that the word libertarian is one of those words that should only be used in air quotes, much like “conservative” or “progressive.”

I mean, last weekend we had to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the 9-11 attack – and you know, it’s distressingly commercial how 9-11 Season seems to keep coming up earlier every year – and it really amazes me how the people who scream and howl and threaten civil war over wearing a mask or getting a vaccine for a temporary situation don’t care so much about the fact 20 years after 9-11, we STILL have a TSA and it’s STILL making us take off our shoes at the airport over airplane hijackings that we learned how to counter maybe a week after the event, when largely thanks to these “patriots”, we are losing a third of the people we lost in the 9-11 hijackings to COVID EVERY DAMN DAY.

You know, the same people losing their minds over Joe Biden mandating employer vaccines through OSHA, saying “he doesn’t have that power!” and all the Liberal Media going, “well, yes he does, cause this is part of OSHA’s charter and it’s been that way for years.” Now, all the actual Libertarians, who don’t assume government’s powers as existing a priori, would be telling you, “uh YEAH, that’s what we’ve been warning about” but apparently this is a huge shock to everybody whose first definition of “libertarian” is “not being a Demonrat.”

I mean, good for you if you’ve finally realized that government doesn’t always (if ever) have your best interest at heart, but strange that you only feel this way about the one mass initiative that is doing something right, and just happens to be the one that the grievance media wants to use to gin up the next round of the culture war.

In the last few decades the libertarian movement was greatly associated with the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand, but Rand herself despised the original libertarians, calling them “hippies of the right”. This is why. As I say, Rand as a person had more issues than TIME Magazine, but those personal issues were largely due to her disregarding her own statement: That reality exists objectively (thus the name), independent of emotion and perception and it can only be properly apprehended through reason and examination, not “whim-worship” and emotion. And nobody seems to get that these days, because the only opponents of the normie Democrat system are a Libertarian political party that is not very organized at all and an organized political party that must rely on emotion and whim-worship because its “conservatism” is that much less coherent than it was in previous years. And when, as a natural result of that trend, the movement experiences identity fusion with the most emotional and whim worshiping politician in our history, you can’t just turn on a dime and ask them to suddenly start thinking. When said figure (in his own long term self interest) asks people to get vaccinated, the cognitive dissonance is too great. It’s like Uncle Festus saying you CAN’T get drunk and fuck your cousin.

I don’t think we should need a mandate or government action to take the vaccine. I also don’t think we need a law banning people from sticking forks into wall sockets, but if enough “freedom lovers” decide that’s the best way to own the libs, that might happen.

But then, I told people that joke on a Libertarian Party Facebook page and got pushback on that. I was told, “do you want government to have the power to tell you what you can put in your body?” I said, “there’s this thing called The Law of the Excluded Middle you might want to look up. Also the word ‘sarcasm’.”

Let me see if I can break it down for you, people.

To begin with, viruses are real. Like God, they cannot be perceived with the naked eye. Unlike God, they can be perceived with advanced microscopes, so if you can believe in God, you can believe that viruses are real. Moving on. On a related subject, science is real. And as Neil DeGrasse Tyson was quoted as saying, “the beautiful thing about science is that it exists whether you believe in it or not.”

One aspect of viruses is that they mutate. This is only a matter of time. It is the reason new viruses pop up despite our immunization procedures. It is that much more likely that a virus will mutate if there is no immunization procedure, which we did not have until Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” program, and even then the benefits did not really manifest until after Biden’s inauguration. (Oh, that reminds me of another fact you might not have been aware of: Biden is President.)

This would be happening whether government was restricting public action at all. It is in fact, happening for largely the reason that it hasn’t restricted public action much during the last year of the Trump Organization or the first few months of the Biden Administration. Part of that is because the US actually is a federal system where states have power, as opposed to a ‘unitary’ government like Britain or France, and virus containment policy was not a matter of scientific consensus but a governor’s decision on what would benefit them with their pet voter demographic. Neil DeGrasse Tyson also said in regard to the coronavirus that because virii do not acknowledge state boundaries, this means that not having a national mask mandate or expecting mandates to only be enforced by some governors and not others is “like designating a peeing section of a swimming pool.”

A virus spread can only be contained and reduced if the virus is not given the opportunity to go to new hosts, because since a virus is not actually a life form, it needs the cells of a biological host to infect so that it can replicate itself. Social distancing before the vaccination program was a very imperfect method of preventing the spread, and so is masking, but they are better than nothing, which was what we had last year. Because we had vaccination proceeding nationally we were having state and local governments remove mask and distancing restrictions and were on track to making things controllable, but then people decided to make disease treatment into a political football again at the same time the coronavirus achieved its Delta mutation. (This is from the Greek alphabet where ‘Delta’ is the fourth letter in sequence. We now have scientists warning of Lambda and Mu variants, which are the eleventh and twelfth letters. THAT’s the timetable of mutation and spread we’re dealing with here.) Delta is more effective than base COVID-19 at infecting people even when they are vaccinated, so yes, kids, vaccines are not a cure-all. They are however still better than nothing. In fact, according to the CDC (if you’re one of those gullible sheep who believes experts) ‘breakthrough’ cases among people who have been vaccinated are still a lot less likely to lead to hospitalization. But because the virus continues to spread and mutate, restrictions are coming back, and if you are not vaccinated you do not even have the imperfect defense that the vaccines give you.

In other words:

THE ONLY ENTITY WHOSE FREEDOM YOU ARE EXPANDING IS THE FREEDOM OF THE VIRUS TO SPREAD AND MUTATE, AND BECAUSE OF THAT EVERYONE ELSE STILL HAS TO WEAR A MASK AND WAIT FOR BOOSTER SHOTS, BECAUSE YOU DECIDED NOT TO FOLLOW DIRECTIONS. EVERYONE ELSE IS LESS FREE BECAUSE OF YOUR “FREEDOM”, INCLUDING YOU, BECAUSE YOU ARE THAT MUCH MORE LIKELY TO GET STUCK ON A VENTILATOR IF YOU NEVER GOT THE SHOT. AND I AM PRINTING ALL THIS IN ALL CAPS ON THE OFF CHANCE THAT YOU WILL FIND BIG LETTERS EASIER TO READ.

The 2016 election, in which the two most unpopular and incompetent candidates the duopoly ever presented faced each other, should have demonstrated the bankruptcy of the system and given the Libertarian Party the perfect opportunity to capitalize.

And yet you have somehow managed to combine the feckless incompetence of the Democrats with the childish ideology of the Republicans. Now, if you could combine the popular civil libertarianism of Democrats with the Republicans’ skill at winning the game no matter what, you’d actually be dangerous.

The Libertarian Party still has the best chance to challenge the Republicans if only because the Democrats are the only other popular alternative, but you can’t challenge them by being that much more emotional and stupid than they are. You can’t challenge them by being more “punk rock” than they are. Once you might have been able to present yourself as being anti-establishment, but after Trump, the Republicans pretty much stole that act. The problem there is that too many people define “the establishment” not as the Democratic Party but as the whole concept of a constitutional republic. And given the backlash against Republican childishness, it does not help a smaller fringe party to be even MORE childish and unpopular just to prove how Xtreeem and Edgee we are. At this point you are no longer challenging the Republicans, you are following them. And that’s not going to work.

As I said recently:

“There has been a lot of talk about ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ being thrown around, not only by right-wingers but by leftists who look at them and see ‘liberty’ as a joke. In fact the coronavirus crisis (the crisis being not the virus itself but our response to it) does a lot to demonstrate why we don’t have a more libertarian world or in particular a more libertarian America. In a perfect libertarian world (itself a subjective hypothetical) we would need less laws because people would be educated enough to make decisions for themselves and exercise common sense. We have all the laws we do because people do not have education and common sense. And every time there’s a crisis, government uses that as a pretext to take more and more liberties, and they can do so because people do not exercise common sense.

“Liberty doesn’t just mean rights, it means responsibility. And contra libertarians, it used to be conservatives making that assertion. Liberty means not only taking responsibility for one’s free will but accepting that we need to protect others’ rights. But some people define ‘rights’ as belonging only to them, not even to ‘white people’ but only to white people of a certain tribe and political alignment. And these rights do not imply taking responsibility for one’s own decisions or extending the same right to others.

“Just as their role model demands all the power and none of the responsibility, the cult demands the freedom to do as they please without acknowledging the consequences.”

Libertarianism at base is nothing less than what liberals have been calling “the American experiment” – the idea that We, the People of the former colonies are fit to manage our own affairs without the Parliament in London or the King in his court overriding our priorities. But that assumes we are in fact fit to manage our own affairs. If you want a more libertarian world, you need to demonstrate that you DON’T need a whole bunch of new intrusive laws because you acknowledge common sense ways of living. Coronavirus has made it that much more clear that the reason we have all the laws we do is because common sense ain’t all that common, at least in this country.

That is, if you want to be treated as a rational adult, you first need to start acting like a rational adult. If you want to act like a child who wants everything except responsibility, you should expect to treated like a child: That is, to be pushed around by grownups and told what to do because you are clearly incontinent to make your own decisions. There is a reason that adults don’t let children run around naked and throw their own shit, and it’s that much more obvious when the “shit” in question is a deadly contagious disease.

And I can hear the response even now: “Why CAN’T I run around naked? What do you mean THERE ARE ALREADY LAWS against public nudity? Who says?? That’s just another step towards The Holocaust! Do you want the Democrats to turn this country into SOCIALIST NORTH KOREA?!?!?”

No, I don’t, “freedom lovers”, but if anything is going to make that more likely, it’s you. You are exactly the sort of libertarian that the Left points at to say how useless the movement is and now you’ve made it that much easier for them to brand any dissenters as a public health danger. It would be a lot harder for them if you were not in fact a public health danger. Again, this is exactly how government grows and spreads, because not only are there opportunists in authority taking advantage of a real crisis, other people react to that crisis by making things worse for themselves and others, and that makes the heavy hand of authority that much more popular.

In fact there are a couple of recent articles (both in New York Magazine) indicating that this anti-Democrat virtue signaling might actually be helping the Democrats. One September 10 article quoted a previous article in The Atlantic on the California recall effort, and then says more generally, “Democrats also are aware that the ranks of the fearful and possibly angry vaccinated include a disproportionate percentage of seniors and college-educated people, who are the most likely to vote in non-presidential elections like the California recall or next year’s national midterms. It’s not safe to assume that all vaccinated people will embrace mandates (which is where these predictions of this being a 75-25 winning proposition for Biden come from), but it’s not unreasonable to think that on balance it represents smart politics for a president who’d rather be talking about fighting COVID-19 than about not fighting the Taliban or about Democrats fighting with each other over his domestic agenda.”

This leads to a Sunday article reviewing the current status of California’s ballot initiative to recall Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, who was never all that popular to begin with, but the recall effort didn’t really get serious until what the article describes as “a series of slapstick-quality self-owns” like Newsom appearing maskless at a fancy restaurant when mask restrictions were still on. Once the petition for recall got enough votes, the referendum started to gain more attention as right-wing talk show host Larry Elder entered the race as a Republican. Elder is fairly famous in talk radio, but if you didn’t already know who he was, don’t worry, liberal outlets like New York Magazine will be happy to tell you. “Shortly after Elder got in the race this summer, Newsom’s political consultants sat the governor down with a highlight reel of the radio host’s most offensive claims. A sampling: Systemic racism is “a lie”; employers should be able to fire women who get pregnant; the women who marched against Trump in 2017 were too unattractive to be sexually assaulted. “What the fuck?” Newsom said, according to someone who was there. “Is this serious?” Soon Politico reported that Elder’s ex-fiancée had accused him of waving a gun at her while high. “I say he’s even more extreme than Trump,” Newsom now routinely tells supporters. It’s worked. By the end of August, Newsom had reeled in huge donations from unions, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood. Netflix’s Reed Hastings has donated more to Newsom than most of his opponents have raised in total, while producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, Laurene Powell Jobs, Eric Schmidt, Priscilla Chan, and Connie Ballmer aren’t far behind.”

The result: “Polls that showed “keep” and “remove” voters almost evenly split in August, thanks to liberal apathy and right-wing fury, have now widened to a comfortable 13-point margin in Newsom’s favor, according to FiveThirtyEight’s average.” The article implies that a lot of the turnaround is because of the two different factions’ approach to the virus, not to mention other things: “And yet Newsom, in the final stretch, has now allowed that there’s something to the idea with the politics of COVID blending into Republican power grabs blending into a wave of anti-incumbent sentiment around the country. “You see what’s happening in Florida! You see what’s happening in Texas! We have to give those ballots back in!” he said on an early-September Zoom call with LGBTQ+ activists. “Forgive me for being intense about this, but, man, this is real! This recall is real!”

If there is anyone who epitomizes limousine liberalism and its clueless, statist approach to the virus more than Nancy Pelosi, it would be Newsom. And he might win this recall because the presented alternative, one of the most prominent “small l libertarian” right-wingers out there, is perceived as being even worse.

In this Cold Civil War between left-wing faith in government and right-wing “liberty”, each side is handicapped by its own disadvantages, namely deserved unpopularity that will only increase as everyone becomes more polarized. Thus the fight will end up being won not on a positive level, with one side proving the worth of its arguments, but on a totally negative level with one side losing because its malice, incompetence and compulsion to alienate the general public ends up pissing off more voters than the other team. Well, I guess we know who’s winning that fight.

On Afghanistan

Well, I suppose the fall of Kabul requires some sort of commentary, although I think the reason Joe Biden could get away with letting things collapse as quickly as they did and blame the Afghanistan government because they “gave up” is because the average American doesn’t care what happens there any more than he does.

I can give Biden a certain amount of credit in acknowledging, better than his President Barack Obama ever did, that the Afghanistan occupation was a Bush boondoggle that wasn’t doing us any good, especially after Bush divided our focus by taking Iraq. And as much as I hate Donald Trump, even he had the sense to want to get out. I could only blame Trump for two things: Not actually getting out, and then blaming Biden for actually carrying out the withdrawal plan that he initiated.

And of course all the liberal partisans like MSDNC are playing up the point that Viceroy Trump was the guy who first had the idea to negotiate with the Taliban directly AT Camp David (which his advisers got him to fall back on) and did make an agreement, bypassing the Kabul government, that released 5000 prisoners who ended up going back to fight for the Taliban. But what do you expect? Blaming other people for what he did and taking credit for what he didn’t do is Trump’s thing. I’m just wondering why Trump was so desperate to stay in the White House knowing that he had already planned to pull out of Afghanistan and would therefore get blamed if Kabul fell while he was in charge. But then again, he IS senile.

But that’s what happens when you’re the president. You get blamed for anything that goes wrong on your watch, just as you get the credit for what goes right even if you really had nothing to do with it. And of course, Biden knows this. Neither Trump nor (frankly) Obama wanted to make a difficult decision, because they knew they would get blamed for exactly what’s happening now: the country falling apart without American forces because Afghans would not fight back no matter how much hardware we gave them, and religious fundamentalists marching into towns, rounding up dissidents and telling women they can’t go outside the home. (Republicans only object to religious fundamentalists rounding up dissidents and oppressing women when said fundamentalists wear beards and don’t worship Jesus.)

Again I can at least give Biden respect for knowing to cut bait even knowing that he’d be the one to get blamed for something that everyone knew had to happen anyway. But then I think he’s willing to take the lumps because everyone, including the superficially pro-military Republican Party, knows this had to happen anyway.

And it comes down to one point Biden made in his Monday speech: “American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.”

It reminded me of a time when, after getting taken advantage of too many times by professional drug addicts, I dealt with another friend who was not a narcotics addict but was still doing everything he could to destroy his own life while still relying on me for material support and the enabling of his bad habits. At one point, I told him, “you can’t expect other people to care about your life more than you do.”

The Afghanistan, uh, project was something that Americans, or rather the foreign-policy “blob” always cared about more than the Afghan population at large. However much benefit Westernizing the cities had and however much it helped to give girls opportunity for education, this was really more a side benefit for the occupation and not really of benefit to the population at large, at least not enough to get them to support the Western-backed government.

If you’ve ever worked in a call center and have ever tried to show a senior citizen how to sign up for an Internet account over the phone, then you know why we needed 20 years to get Afghanistan out of the Dark Ages and it still didn’t work.

Plus which, it’s not like that’s necessarily a good idea. Both conservative imperialists and liberal technocrats thought they could take an ancient culture and fit it into our way of doing things as if that was the only valid system. It by and large bypassed the way people had been doing things for ages and so all those technical and financial advantages didn’t help against an enemy that knew the terrain.

In an article just out for The Atlantic, a former Pentagon official recounts how he visited Kabul in 2017 and the delegation had to travel by helicopter instead of by road: “As we flew over Kabul, I realized that the Afghan security forces, backed by thousands of U.S. personnel, could not even secure the heart of Afghanistan’s capital.” Monday on The Rachel Maddow Show, Maddow played the tape of when she and Richard Engel were touring Kabul 11 years ago – so, only halfway into the occupation – and observed a walled neighborhood built from scratch that wasn’t there before 9-11, and noted how the locals derided the architecture as “narcopalaces”, “gangster chic, big, garish, gigantic, rococo” places designed to look very, very rich. And she said: “I feel like it taught me something that you can only sort of experience by being there… if you do churn billions of dollars a month, every month, into the economy of one of the world’s poorest countries, and you do that month in and month out for a whole year, and you do that month in and month out for a second year… ultimately you do billions of dollars a month, for 20 solid years, if you do that and at the end of 20 solid years of investment, it’s still one of the poorest countries on Earth? There’s a problem.”

In one of the more glaring examples of US incompetence and carelessness during the “planned” withdrawal, we pulled out of the Bagram air base without telling the locals. “The U.S. left Afghanistan’s Bagram Airfield after nearly 20 years by shutting off the electricity and slipping away in the night without notifying the base’s new Afghan commander, who discovered the Americans’ departure more than two hours after they left, Afghan military officials said. … Before the Afghan army could take control of the airfield about an hour’s drive from the Afghan capital Kabul, it was invaded by a small army of looters, who ransacked barrack after barrack and rummaged through giant storage tents before being evicted, according to Afghan military officials.

“… The big ticket items left behind include thousands of civilian vehicles, many of them without keys to start them, and hundreds of armored vehicles. Kohistani said the U.S. also left behind small weapons and the ammunition for them, but the departing troops took heavy weapons with them. Ammunition for weapons not being left behind for the Afghan military was blown up before they left.

“Afghan soldiers who wandered Monday throughout the base that had once seen as many as 100,000 U.S. troops were deeply critical of how the U.S. left Bagram, leaving in the night without telling the Afghan soldiers tasked with patrolling the perimeter.

“In one night, they lost all the goodwill of 20 years by leaving the way they did, in the night, without telling the Afghan soldiers who were outside patrolling the area,” said Afghan soldier Naematullah, who asked that only his one name be used.”

It’s of a piece with our whole approach to the military in a foreign base, where everything is set up to the benefit of an outside infrastructure without any coordination with the locals, based on the ultratech that the US military has become addicted to, and therefore unusable by the local military that doesn’t have access to our support structure, to the extent that we gave a damn about that in the first place. Which meant that once deprived of that outside technical support system the Afghan military had no resources, because there was no thought in asking the locals how they would fight the war, and therefore no advantage to having greater numbers than the Taliban (in theory) and the same knowledge of the terrain. This was not a great arrangement for the Afghans or the Americans on the ground, but it was great for our military-industrial complex, and that’s all that matters.

You would think – you would think – that after so many historical examples like Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh using a poor but highly motivated army to deliver a strategic defeat to forces that figuratively had all the money in the world but weren’t having any of that trickling down to them, that the United States would have learned that the top-down approach doesn’t work. But if we cared about anything other than the top, things wouldn’t be like this.

Nobody learns anything because nobody has to. The US isn’t going to do either the moral nor the practical thing. That’s not what this government does. The government just sets up a gravy train for connected people and keeps it going regardless of whether it fulfills the alleged goal, and no matter how many times we find that it isn’t working out, we keep it going as long as there’s enough money to do so. But then one day you may not have enough money to do so, as both the British and the Russians found out.

I am mainly reminded of the lesson learned by the computer at the end of Wargames: “The only way to win is not to play.”

REVIEW: The Suicide Squad

For various reasons I don’t have the opportunity to see The Suicide Squad in a theater but it’s being heavily promoted on HBO Max. The fact that this movie is distinguished from its predecessor only by a The article means that DC Comics is clearly intending this to be a reboot from David Ayer’s Suicide Squad film, even though Viola Davis and Joel Kinneman are reprising their characters. Thing is, the premise from the comics is that the Suicide Squad stories are an inherent reboot: Other than government agents Amanda Waller and Rick Flag (Davis and Kinneman) the Suicide Squad is a reset every mission because all the other characters are hardened super-criminals who volunteer for missions that they may not come back from on the assumption that time will get taken off their sentences. I liked the David Ayer movie a lot more than some people did, apparently. It was a murky, dimly-lit affair clearly designed to fit in with the “DC EU” (aka the Snyderverse) but for some reason it actually worked. Maybe that’s because when you want your characters to act like hardened criminals in a grey prison environment, it works better when the characters actually ARE hardened criminals in a grey prison environment as opposed to four-color superheroes in Metropolis.

But in addition to the aforementioned actors, Suicide Squad also featured a true breakout performance by Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, former sidekick of The Joker, and while Jared Leto’s Joker was way too Juggalo to be tolerable, Robbie was so great that her performance immediately guaranteed a sequel to the movie as well as a solo project that’s already come out. That meant DC just needed to repeat the formula of the core characters doing another violent mission with a bunch of misfits who would never be mistaken for superheroes. So they got James Gunn (temporarily canned from Marvel Studios) who made a successful franchise out of the Guardians of the Galaxy, a team composed of a grim assassin, an even more grim and not-too-bright warrior, a walking tree, a cyborg raccoon and a guy played by Chris Pratt, which automatically made the tree and the raccoon look more serious.

So with this movie, Gunn starts off with a covert mission in a faraway island including Flag, Quinn, survivor of the first movie Captain Boomerang, Pete Davidson and a giant weasel (these last two are not the same character). However none of them knows that Waller has assembled them to be Team Fuckup and distract the beach garrison so that a far more competent team can infiltrate the island. This team is led by Bloodsport (Idris Elba) a ruthless killer who becomes the focus of the story, at least until the team rescues Flag and Quinn (neither one of whom needs rescuing). And things proceed from there, and the number of exploding bodies is probably equal to or more than the number of F-words in the dialogue.

And given the whacko nature of the final boss, The Suicide Squad fulfills its promise of “What if James Gunn got to do Guardians of the Galaxy with an R rating?” Including putting Michael Rooker and Sylvester Stallone in for no particular reason. I’m pretty sure you’ve already seen this by now, but if not, please: Go see The Suicide Squad.

You will believe a shark can talk.

The Opposite of Congress

“I bear true and an existing witness to this barrel of monkeys.

A self proclaimed immoral success, Perfected by each whereof

Individually deadly and equally so

And spread about the surrendered troops,

For even thousands of miles will not tear apart their communication, or the lack thereof.

Vultures, liars, thieves, each proclaim their innocence

In no suggestion or rhyme, your weapon is contained in the wrecking of the keeping the desired effect.

The breaking of the spirit thwarts the whole being.

Your weapon is guilt, your weapon is guilt, your weapon is guilt.

Guilt.”

-Alice in Chains, “Sludge Factory”

It’s almost time for Congress to go into its annual August recess. If you need to ask why Washington must have a recess in August, you have obviously never visited Washington in August.

Before that can happen, there’s a couple of bits they have to get out of the way. Tuesday they finally started the “1-6” investigation in the House of Representatives, which in its first day gave us the surprising news that the people who attempted to kill black police officers while storming the Capitol were racist, giving MSNBC the opportunity to play the N-Word more times than an episode of The Dave Chappelle Show. The investigation started no thanks to House Republican “leader” Kevin McCarthy, who last week attempted to throw House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a curve by announcing his Party’s picks for the investigation panel would include Gentleman Gym Jordan (BR-Ohio) and a couple others who voted not to certify the 2020 Electoral College results, in effect endorsing the January 6 attack on the process. When Pelosi said she wouldn’t let the election-deniers on the panel, McCarthy said he was withdrawing all Republicans from consideration, including the ones who did vote to certify the election. Basically McCarthy’s posture was that if he can’t get his way and troll the committee with joke picks, then he’s going to take his ball and go home. The joke’s on him, cause he has no ball.

The Democrats, as the party in charge this Congress, offered a “9-11 style” bipartisan commission on January 6, but this was under the impression immediately after the event that Republicans, who were threatened by the attack too, would be willing to investigate it. They are not, for the same reason that Osama bin Laden would not have cooperated with the 9-11 commission, because he knew what they would find. The only threat McCarthy could make was to withdraw his party’s endorsement and thus the appearance of bipartisanship. But having already given up on bipartisanship, and conceding his Party’s identification with the rioters, McCarthy had only the pretense of legitimacy in the debate, and since everyone knew it was not sincere, he gained nothing by refusing to cooperate.

And in what is allegedly not a related event, Democrats in the Senate are having trouble passing a $600 billion dollar infrastructure bill, which apparently cannot be passed as a simple-majority budget bill because West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin (of course) wanted it done on a bipartisan basis. Which of course requires negotiating with Republicans, who since Bill Clinton have decided that giving Democrats any help doesn’t help them.

It also didn’t help that Donald Trump, He Be King Dick Who Got Biggest Of All Dicks, ordered his subordinate microdicks in what used to be a political party to not cooperate with the Democrats.

Trump Calls Republicans “Weak Fools and Losers” for Negotiating Infrastructure

I am not so sure that this is a brilliant Machiavellian strategy so much as Trump’s usual reactive emotion when the grownups are doing something serious without him in the room: “WAAAAAAAAAAAAAA nobody’s payin’ ATTENTION t’ MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE”

But as I keep saying, not like it really matters, cause even when the Crybaby Caudillo does the right thing – like getting the COVID vaccine and telling other people to do so – it’s with a lot less emphasis than when he tells people to do the wrong thing, cause he is at least as much follower as leader. Trump is the leader of the former Party of Lincoln because he is what they want. He personifies the attitude they already had even before he became a presidential candidate.

To a very limited extent, very far back in time, this intransigence was understandable. If you saw much of American history after FDR (after Wilson, really) as less “progress” and more an entropic slide towards more and more statism and unnecessary government controls, even compromise that gained some of your goals was a defeat in that the other side got further toward what they wanted, especially since victory by gradualism is an explicit strategy of democratic socialists.

But even if you favor socialism over evil “selfishness”, the real problem with the Right these days (including a lot of libertarianism, sadly) is that reliance on talk show hosts as intellectual role models has rotted their former reputation in philosophy. This was made that much worse by the fact that radio hosts and their descendants on basic cable were able to monetize politics, and that meant telling people what they wanted to hear, not the hard facts. They never put their ideas up for test and debate; rather Republicans used “safe” districts to maintain their place in national government, and since certain seats were safe, primaries were really a contest of the biggest whacko ideologue. This created a party where appraisal of facts was not only not a priority, it was actually unwelcome. This was BEFORE Trump. The Right got lazy, basically. So Trump is just the logical extension of that. He can tell the redcaps to hate science and hate eggheads and not cooperate with the Beltway establishment. That’s what they want to do. If he tried to push people towards vaccinating to stop the Delta virus, that wouldn’t be popular, and you can’t be a leader if you don’t follow the crowd.

The stubbornness of the NotDemocrats is not a Randian refusal to compromise with evil. It is a five-year-old who refuses to have peas for dinner. (And yes, liberals, there IS a difference, not that Republicans care to acknowledge it.)

Regarding the infrastructure bill, Jonathan Chait wrote in New York Magazine, “As it turns out, the (bill’s) sheer size creates a kind of protection by reducing Biden’s agenda to a single vote. Some moderate Democrats from conservative states or districts might wish to position themselves to the administration’s right, but none of them can afford to let Biden’s presidency come crashing down in Congress. Perhaps the most important clue to the president’s fate came from Joe Manchin, the most conservative Democrat in Congress, who said in January, “We’re going to make Joe Biden successful.” The worst possible outcome for any Democrat — the opening that will let the Republican Party back into power — would be for their party to be seen as having failed at governing. They can and will negotiate the parameters, but the only leverage they hold is mutually assured destruction.”
Which is of course the same reason Republicans have to stick together: to make Joe Biden unsuccessful. Which is basically the same motive as making Barack Obama unsuccessful. Blame the other party for not being able to keep its promises (eliding the role you had in that result) and say that you’ll do a better job if you get elected to Congress. The problem of course is that they did that with Obama, it didn’t work, they tried it again and that time it did work (cause Obama’s successor was Hillary Clinton) but then Republicans had to spend the next four years proving they would do a better job than Obama Democrats, and absolutely failed. Not that Trump’s (sorta) fiscal conservative policy didn’t have real benefits for the economy, which was the main reason he had as much popularity with serious people as he did, but the crash in face-to-face business thanks to Trump Virus (TM) followed by the rapid recovery of the Wall Street sector made it clear to a lot of people that Wall Street is not the entire economy and should not be treated as such. This also means that middle class Americans are becoming less sympathetic to the idea that whatever is good for Big Business is automatically good for them and should be promoted at their expense.

What is happening is that each party is doing what makes sense for them, and many Democrats (namely Joe Manchin) can’t understand that what makes sense for Republicans is not what Democrats think makes sense for the country, and they ought to give up assuming good faith from them, since Republicans have already decided to assume the worst about Democrats. The two ruling factions have been a state of cold war (not competition) for a while, and Democrats are finally starting to realize it.

The architects of duopoly are now becoming victims of the system they sought to create. Democrats have painted themselves in a corner with duopoly – however much they claim they need two parties to have a political debate, it’s not something they really seem to believe. Well, now they’ve gotten their wish because now all of the centrist non-progressives are basically on their side, but that means, as with the Affordable Care Act, that all political debate is within the Democratic Party, because Republicans refuse to offer any ideas. And that means that despite their technical majority in numbers, Democrats can’t get anything done because they aren’t one movement, they’re just a coalition of NotRepublicans. The altruist-socialist Left that claims to be the real Democratic Party has never really been a majority of public opinion, and if I do find myself voting with the “progressives” more, that’s only because the last two years of Trump Virus (TM) has made it clear that this country’s lack of support systems is an outright national security issue that has killed hundreds of thousands of people. (And if those leftists sneer that the virus proves people can’t be trusted to do the right thing without being forced, it also proves that government can’t make them do the right thing, either.)

Meanwhile, if it seems odd that Republicans are only enacting the Trump agenda of voter suppression and vote nullification after he lost (as opposed to succumbing to his demands in the moment, like he wanted) it’s because the aftermath of January 6 has made two things clear: However much the sensible Republicans wished Trump would go away after Biden’s inauguration, the “base” will not give up Trump no matter what, and the factors that caused Republicans to lose the suburbs and critical Electoral College battles will only get worse as sane people realize that electing Republicans would mean electing Trump and electing Trump would mean January 6 every damn day. It was all the Party could do to get swing states with white people and Hispanics and now they have to worry that not even a majority of white people are on board anymore.

Republicans have basically painted themselves in a corner with duopoly: they survived mainly by suppressing any competition for the not-Democrat vote, just as Democrats suppress any competition for the not-Republican vote. And just as Democrats scare their people into voting for them on the premise that if they don’t, America is going to become a fascist hellhole, Republicans scare their people into thinking if Democrats win, America will become a socialist hellhole. But Republicans were starting to gain the advantage in that, one, Republican presidencies may have been disagreeable to liberals but were not Hell on Earth to the rest of us, and two, the Democrats’ main constituencies were sick of waiting for that party to keep their promises, and despite outnumbering Republicans on paper, didn’t vote in enough numbers to throw Republican governments out. Meanwhile Republicans did have voter loyalty because their main constituencies were convinced that the evil Demonrats were going to have all the white babies aborted and then turn them gay. The difference is that Democrats are starting to listen to people outside their inner circle and are trying to get a majority of votes, and however haphazardly, are starting to do so. Republicans however are only listening to their biggest fanatics, which is how we got Trump, who may not have believed in all the birther-Tea Party-Q nonsense at first, but told the suckers what they wanted to hear, to such an extent that he bought into it. Basically, Trump is to lying what Al Pacino in Scarface was to cocaine: He used to just be a dealer then he became his own biggest customer.

And just as Trump single-handedly killed Atlantic City by putting his casinos in competition with each other so that they cannibalized each others’ business, he eventually created a situation where his continued lying and incompetence meant that his fortunes as president were at odds with his Party’s generally strong performance in the 2020 elections. The short term results of that became clear as Trump sabotaged his own Party in the Georgia US Senate runoffs by saying that his loss could only happen cause the system was rigged, therefore the whole thing was rigged, by implication meaning the same system by which other Republicans won. In that runoff, the dynamic started to reverse: Now that people besides leftists saw America as turning into a fascist hellhole, it was the Democrats who were turning out to vote no matter what, and it was Republican constituencies who stayed home cause they felt like they were being lied to. And then the day after Kelly Loeffler lost her Georgia Senate seat, the Congress had to certify the Electoral College result, so Trump, his family and his stooges came out to the mob of thugs who’d been organizing for weeks and implied that it sure would be a shame if Mike Pence and the other Republicans didn’t throw out that whole “Electoral College” thing and declare God-Emperor Trump our immortal Lord and Savior. And for some reason the guys who had been bitching about the election online for two months, coordinated over social media, and came to DC with zip ties, riot gear and scaffolding for a hanging suddenly decided to get violent.

And as amazing as Democrats find it that the senior Republicans haven’t run Trump out of their Party by now, if not voting with them on impeachment (given that he tried to KILL them and all), you have to look at it from their side. I’m sure Mitch McConnell would want to make sure Trump can’t run for President again, even if he wasn’t going to let his perfect little boy get convicted on impeachment, but Mitch knows that if the Party did what it should have done a while ago – kicked out Trump and any other politician who supports his lies – then all the registered Republicans who believe those lies will quit voting Republican and either stay home or vote for whatever clown car of a political organization Trump wants to put together. At that point, Republicans might still have a few places where they could win, but most of the places where their seats are safe are only safe because of Trumpniks. Kicking out Trump would mean the end of the Republicans as a competitive national party, and if Republicans won’t openly admit this, Democrats are too polite to bring it up. In any case, Republicans are clearly less afraid of a permanent dictatorship of Trumpism than a permanent dictatorship of the Democratic Party, because in effect, that is what abandoning Trump would accomplish.

However much I might not want a one-party state, even under the Democrats, I still have to ask Republicans: whose fault is that? Your whole attitude is “You HAVE to vote for us, no matter how horrible we are, cause you don’t want those OTHER people taking over, do you??” Dudes, ask yourselves: How well did that work for Hillary Clinton?

Because going into the 2022 elections, the question is not whether Republican strategy makes sense for their priorities but whether their priorities are good strategy. In his orders to the troops, Trump said, “Don’t do the infrastructure deal, wait until after we get proper election results in 2022 or otherwise (Hmm?), and regain a strong negotiating stance”. Now, given the strength of Republican performance in November 2020, and the usual weakness of the president’s party in a midterm elections, Republicans would have reason to believe that they can just hold out and be “strong” and end up getting what they want if they just wait out the election cycle. It’s what they’re inclined to do anyway. But then again there was every reason to believe the incumbent US Senators of Georgia would win their runoffs and keep Mitch McConnell as Majority Leader. And then somebody had to open his mouth and cause problems. And THEN January 6 happened.

To say that this “conservative” movement is evil would be true, but it avoids the point. Because whether you want to admit this or not, Americans like evil. We like Nazis. We like Confederates. We like rooting for the Empire in Star Wars and the Klingons in Star Trek.

But to paraphrase General Patton, one thing Americans absolutely will not tolerate is a loser.

And while real Christians might have been waiting over 2000 years for Christ to come back to life and regain dominion over the universe, I don’t think even Republicans can afford to give Cheeto Jesus that much benefit of the doubt.

REVIEW: Black Widow

Given that we all know what happened to Natasha Romanoff in Avengers: Endgame, and (SPOILER ALERT)

nothing happens in the Black Widow movie that changes that fate, Black Widow is just as it was presented: a solo story taking place between Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War. It’s sort of like Marvel’s version of Rogue One: a side story that fills in the existing background but doesn’t actually change the timeline. Which is kind of interesting for the Marvel Cinematic Universe given that they’ve created a whole machine out of having a series of stories that add on to each other one by one, although ultimately the after-credits scene of this movie does do that.

One thing about Black Widow is that she has something in common with Hawkeye, which may be why they were such close partners. Both Scarlett Johansson and Jeremy Renner have natural charisma (Johansson’s being more obvious than Renner’s) but neither Black Widow or Hawkeye really seeks the spotlight the way Tony Stark does, or naturally attracts it like Steve Rogers does. Both of them are sort of like the super-world’s version of Jason Bourne: basically human operatives who just perform at a higher level than everybody else and whose general behavior is just ‘do the mission and move on.’ So even though there are movies like Jojo Rabbit where Johansson dominates the scene without being the lead character, Black Widow has usually been a support character in other heroes’ movies, and that seems to be the case even in her own film.

Here, Natasha, on the run after helping Captain America escape from General Ross, gets hunted by a masked super-agent who seems to have all the Avengers’ combat skills, and then is contacted by her “little sister” Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) who has broken her own conditioning and needs Natasha’s help to liberate a whole host of widows that the director of the “Red Room” kept kidnapping and brainwashing even after the fall of the Soviet Union. To do this they decide they need the help of their foster parents who raised them in a Soviet sleeper cell in Ohio, senior Widow Melina (Rachel Weisz) and ex-superhero “Red Guardian,” (David Harbour) who nearly steals the movie.

I agree with the one Pajiba reviewer who said that Black Widow is kinda like ordering a meal at a Michelin restaurant and taking it home in a doggie bag: the ingredients and preparation are first class, but the result tasted like reheated leftovers. I think this is actually because it’s “out of order” in the chronology. It’s clear that Yelena is being set up to take Natasha’s role, but nobody in the setting knows that yet, of course. Pugh has a good acting scene at the family reunion dinner but otherwise we don’t get much insight into her character. The whole movie is basically a blow-shit-up fest, although it is pretty good at that. But the fact that there is a real resolution to some critical aspects of Natasha’s past just makes it that much more of a bummer that she died.

My friend Don pointed out there’s really no reason they can’t bring Natasha back. I mean, Thanos sacrificed Gamora to get the original Soul Stone in Infinity War, and in the next film the Guardians of the Galaxy encountered the alternate-past Gamora before the final battle and are currently chasing her into a yet-to-be-released movie. Maybe Johansson, like Chris Evans, just decided it was time to move on. Or maybe Johansson, as an executive producer on this movie, got sick of Marvel Studios yanking her chain with delaying the release date several times. Which considering this movie’s female empowerment theme would be a bit ironic.

Which gets to that after-credits scene. Confirming that Florence Pugh’s character is supposed to be taking the place of Johansson in the MCU, Yelena goes to visit a gravestone someone placed for Natasha and is visited by Julia-Louis Dreyfus’ character, who seems to know her already. Fans of course know that Louis-Dreyfus previously appeared in Disney Plus’ The Falcon and the Winter Soldier as the mysterious benefactor of John Walker after he disgraced himself, eventually giving him new equipment under the ID of “the USAgent”. So clearly she’s being presented as this sort of anti-Nick Fury who is assembling her own group of operatives for a sinister project. Personally I’m thinking that “the Contessa” is an alias and this is really just Selina Meyer plotting her revenge against the Washington DC establishment for that one election she lost.

Capitalist Pigs… In… SPACE!!!

So the latest uproar being generated on social media is the left-wing attempt to cancel the capitalist space race in which Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Virgin’s Richard Branson and Elon Musk seem to be in some kind of competition to get themselves in orbit with various private space programs. The Left’s opposition to this is almost as superficial and useless as the billionaires’ own publicity efforts, though to be sure, bitching about them on Twitter costs a lot less. And that is kind of the point. Robert Reich on Twitter: “With just their increased wealth during the pandemic, America’s billionaires could pay for 10 years of the Child Tax Credit that goes into effect today for one year, cutting child poverty by half. And they’d still be as wealthy as they were before the pandemic. “

Ha Ha Ha. Right.

The budget bill for fiscal year 2021 – passed under a Republican president, mind you – was 4.829 trillion dollars. Now never mind the deficit this causes, because deficits clearly don’t matter to either ruling faction. A trillion is a million million. As in, one trillion of a quantity is one followed by twelve zeroes. A billion is a thousand million. As in, one billion is one followed by nine zeroes. A trillion is a thousand billion. As Nathan Lane might say, “do the math.”

The level of money that government, specifically the US federal government, operates with is an actual exponent of what most billionaires get to work with. Even the richest guy on earth, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, is worth $214 billion, at least according to USA Today. Forbes puts it at “only” $193.5 billion. Let’s say we round to $200 billion. Jeff Bezos, who has more money than God (and probably more than the Catholic Church) would need to multiply his wealth almost by 25 to get as much as Washington already has.

So if we’re not feeding the hungry and housing the homeless and solving climate change and all the other stuff, it’s because of the government we have now, because that government could be doing all those things right now cause it already has more money than Jeff Bezos will ever have, and if for some reason it actually needs more it can just rocket the deficit farther past the stratosphere than Richard Branson will ever get. And that would be the case whether we had a 90 percent tax rate on the upper class or not.

I had mentioned a while ago that there was one event in my life that had as much to do with me becoming a right-libertarian as anything Ayn Rand ever wrote. Believe it or not, it was Live Aid. To briefly recap: I like a lot of young adults at that time contributed to the Live Aid fundraising campaign to get food and support to the starving in Ethiopia, because Bob Geldof and the other organizers of the Live Aid campaign did make a convincing case that enough people working together could solve the world’s problems. But then after the money was raised and the food was delivered to the Horn of Africa, Geldof and his people found that a lot of it was left to rot on the docks while some of it was actually confiscated by the Ethiopian government to use as leverage against its own people.

The lesson I got is that even when there is collective action from private actors, and even when that is backed up by some governments, the government on the ground can burn all that altruism and effort to dust. Because if government has far more scale to do good than any one philanthropist, it has far more scale to do evil than any individual criminal.

In the case I mentioned, the people getting in the way of feeding the world were the Communists running Ethiopia, but in the modern day the obstacle is a faction that is even more vicious, collectivist and devoted to Russian ideology: The Republican Party.

This is especially obvious in regard to their state voter suppression efforts, but I have already touched on those to some extent. With regard to the subject at hand, it was indeed a liberal (Jack Kennedy) initiative that got America first to the moon. It was the government, under NASA, that first had to get us to space. According to Wikipedia, NASA’s share of the total federal budget peaked at around 4.41 percent during the Apollo project, but by 1975 (after we’d reached the moon more than once) it declined to 1 percent and actually decreased from there. “Despite this, public perception of NASA’s budget differs significantly: a 1997 poll indicated that most Americans believed that 20% of the federal budget went to NASA.” In a March 2012 hearing of the United States Senate Science Committee, science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson testified that “Right now, NASA’s annual budget is half a penny on your tax dollar. For twice that—a penny on a dollar—we can transform the country from a sullen, dispirited nation, weary of economic struggle, to one where it has reclaimed its 20th century birthright to dream of tomorrow.”

But for practical purposes, our government doesn’t really have a space program.

Oh, but it has Space Force. Yes. Cheeto Jesus himself, our small-government, tax cutting, regulation cutting Greatest President Capitalism Ever Had decided to add a bureaucracy to our already bloated government for reasons I still cannot explain. It’s not like Trump seems to grasp Gene Roddenberry’s message of peace, reason and infinite diversity, much less George Lucas’ moral that maybe turning a flawed Republic into a blatantly evil Empire isn’t such a good move in the long run. But in any event, we now have a Space Force, even though in five years no one has told me what the fuck it does.

What, are we handing out parking tickets to Martians? Are we busting the illegal smuggling trade in Green Orion Slave Women? What is this?

Now given that there is a real national security interest in protecting our satellite network and responding to any Russian or Chinese attempts to weaponize space, you would think this alleged branch of our military would have some kind of military shuttle program. A monitoring system. But have they explained what we’re actually spending the money on? As far as I can tell the US Space Force’s only official expenditure is for the field uniforms that are done in standard BDU/desert camo, y’know, cause apparently that’s the color pattern you need to camouflage yourself IN FUCKING SPACE.

If you wonder why these nose-in-the-air billionaires are investing their wherewithal in space exploration, well, it’s because we used to have a government that did that for the country, and we don’t any more. So why not them?

Now, there is one aspect to this leftist complaining that is completely legitimate. To such extent as NASA actually exists, it seems to exist to outsource its former charter to these guys for their space side projects. NASA provided $2.9 billion to Musk’s Space X to build a moon lander. New Mexico, “one of the poorest states in the US”, paid $220 million to build “Spaceport America” for Branson.

However, I don’t see government spending taxpayer money for billionaires who could pay their own way as a big endorsement for more government spending. It does however help explain why things are the way they are. Libertarians have been pointing out for years that the problem with our government being as big as it is is that its power and money makes it a more attractive target for business to manipulate. But the other side of the matter is that government would rather hand out money to billionaires and corporations than homeless and powerless people because the corporations and rich guys can actually do something for them. In the Business Insider article, they focus on the small town of Truth or Consequences (which, ironically, took its name to attract publicity from the audience of a then-famous game show that has long ago left the air) which has yet to see much trickle-down from Virgin’s use of the area, even as the town’s mayor assumes that the town will get more business once Virgin’s commercial space travel service becomes fully operational.

Personally, I would think that a real laissez-faire policy wouldn’t punish businesses and rich people just for being rich, but neither should it give them unearned rewards when they already have natural advantages and the resources to develop their companies without government help.

It’s not that there aren’t infrastructure and other projects that need a government to execute, and it’s not as though those shouldn’t be under a public authority as opposed to an individual, otherwise Elon Musk could just buy I-95, call it private property and then charge a subscription fee to drive on it. But on the other hand, if he did that, there might actually be road maintenance.

If you want to avoid that state of affairs and actually have an activist government, you need to get involved and be an active watchdog on that government. Billionaires or no billionaires (which is what most socialists want), you’re not going to have that activist government unless you consider that the Democratic Party is failing to apply even the technical majority in the Senate that they currently have, and maybe you should start investigating exactly why that is.

Not like any of these billionaires need me to defend them, and not like they’re really going to be hurting if we rolled back most of the Trump-Ryan tax laws. But if you really think we can solve all our problems by soaking the rich, first you’re going to have to convince me that government at all levels is not lazier and piggier than any zillionaire in this week’s Two Minutes Hate. And when the government includes people like Matt Gaetz and Louie Gohmert, that’s gonna be pretty hard.