No, it's not radio silence...

 ...it's the damn Frontiers post.

How this joint - blog and country - feels at the moment.

I've finally got to the crux of the biscuit - the collision between the German "strong right wing" (the three right wing feldarmee) and the Allied left (principally the French 5re Armee and the British Expeditionary Force).

The thing is (to give away the plot) that there were several critical reconnaissance problems that affected the way both sides maneuver forces assembled, moved, and fought, and to analyze them I had to break the last half of August 1914 into a ridiculously granular level - literally day-by-day - of detail, and that's taking forever.

While I'm doing all this my country is going completely to a madman's Hell in a handbasket, and I'm not sure what else there is to say about it.

Put aside the usual GOP MAGAt bullshit - the basso continuo of stupidity, greed, racism, sexism, xenophobia, half a dozen other fucking toxic -isms - and it's the jaw-dropping stupidity of the Second Fraudulency Administration's cunning plans that hits so hard.

Seriously.

It's not the greed. It's not the criming. It's not the fascism.

Those were baked in from the moment this fucking country re-elected Felony Fats.

It's the utterly pointless, pinheaded, stop-me-before-I-shoot-myself-in-the-dick moron-grade dumbfuckery.

Let's gloss over the whole insane "Get Greenland!!!" side arc and focus on the real Krown Jool of Boneheadedness that these fucksticks are chasing;

"Mass Deportation Now".

Stop and think for a moment.

Who does this whole lets-chase-down-brown-folks-and-disappear-them benefit?

More to the point...how in Beelzebub's Fucking Hell does deporting random geezers, bodega grannies, drywallers, tomato pickers, and busboys even benefit you and me, Joe and Molly Lunchpail, Mister and Missus Average American? 

Are these people "criminals" in the "roll you for a nickel and stab you for the extra dime" sense?

Ohhellno. We've been over and over this. It makes no sense for 99.9% of anyone in this country illegally to go around criming and getting a police spotlight shining on them. Most undocumented people are the opposite; trying to keep on the downlow and below the cops' radar so they can make a living.

Are they "taking your..." fill in the blank here; job, house, tax dollars?

Pretty much no. The jobs most of these people are doing are those that legal citizens are largely loth to do; farmwork, meat processing, construction, "hospitality" (read hotel maids and waitstaff). They can't collect entitlements without, again, popping up on radars they don't want to attract. They're not manipulating the rental and housing markets. How? They rent houses or apartments just like citizens, and the cost of those rentals is determined by the owners and landlords, the availability by developers and zoning rules.

So how does 86ing them in job lots help you and me..?

 .

 .

. 

Take your time. I'll wait.

Okay, now. Here's the one place I'll agree with the fucking idiot Trumpkins: having a mass of people in a country who lack citizenship is troubling.

I've written about this over and over, and can't express it better than I did in 2017:

"...to be a stateless person, a non-citizen, in a foreign nation is not a good thing.

It's not good for the person, who has no civil rights, who is outside the protection of the civil law, and who is, therefore, hideously vulnerable to all sorts of malefactors.

And it's not good for the nation, that has this indigestible mass of non-citizens within it prey to crime and violence, exploited by employers and living in fear of taking part in the civil life of the community.

So. The bottom line really is; if you are a citizen of Mexico, or Ireland, or Bali...you belong in Mexico, Ireland, or Bali unless you are a legal resident or visitor of where-ever-it-is-you-are; in this case, the United States."

Yep. Still true. 

In a sane polity We the People would have a simple, orderly process for people who want to come to this nation, regardless of who or what they are, to get on the track to citizenship. Learn the Common Tongue (English) speedily, become conversant with the conventions of citizenship...

(and as a note here, the appallingly low level of civics knowledge of the supposed citizenry in this country is, or should be, a scandal. Way too many MAGAts get away with talking the shit they do because Joe and Molly don't have the fundamental understanding of the principles contained in the founding documents or a knowledge of this nation's history to refute the traitors' bullshit.)

...and become part of the quilt of people and culture and ideas that are the promise of this nation; equal justice under law. Liberty and justice for all.

The surface trappings of all this Trumpian lunacy - masked ICEstapo goons in the street, ridiculous lies about eating pets, secret prisons - is just the foam on the Latte' of Mindless Racist Xenophobic Stupidity of the MAGAt horde. Meaning that we could arrest, convict, and jail Felony Fats and his entire coterie of fools, assholes, and Nazi pals, and we'd still have this problem...because of the millions of the fucksticks around us who luuuurve them this nonsense.

So, nope.

We're not getting out of this with One Weird DeTrumpification Trick.

ICE.

Tariffs.

Antivaxx loonies.

"Entitlement" cuts to finance tax gimmees for fatcats. 

"antifa".

Greenland, Venezuela, Panama, Gaza, Iran...

They're all going to be problems for decades. The plutocrats who are the force that gives MAGA meaning are getting their tax giveaways and deregulation. The Christopaths are getting the Bible-banging. The MAGAts are getting the "I love eating shit so long as the people I hate have to eat more shit" they crave.

Between them the rest of us are fucked.

And, like I've been saying over and over; it's not just that we're caught in the MAGA dystopia.

It's that this is Stupid Dystopia. This is getting handed your ass because you let the world's most ignorant hillbilly chucklefucks into the control room of the nuke plant because you were pissed off that your email signature could include pronouns.

Christ on a fucking crutch.

 

On tonight's episode of "Our Idiot President": "HVPI"

When I was a grunt medic we had a cynical nickname for ourselves: "high-velocity projectile interceptors".

Because we knew that in a real shooting war - a war against a peer enemy - that was very likely what was going down on our Field Medical Cards.

GIs, specially grunts, get shot. Or fragged by random artillery rounds. Or step on mines. Or get blown up by command-detonated boobytraps (now we call them "IEDs" like they were something new, but they're as old as gunpowder). 

So when Our Idiot President demanded that GIs be deployed to our own cities (at least the ones he hates, like Chicago and Portland and D.C.) I had two genuine fears.

The first, and most obvious, was the reason for 18 U.S.C. § 1385; that using soldiers against your own people is bad for the soldiers and bad for the people. Bad for the people because, duh, military dictatorship. But bad for the soldiers because they become associated in the public mind with military dictatorship.

Soldiers are poor "peacekeepers", at best, and the worst examples of military occupation have always been fraught with the danger that the soldiers, trained to respond to threat with immediate, lethal, as-overwhelming-as-possible force, will go ballistic on the civilians around them.

That's bad enough when those civilians are "foreigners". When they're your own people?

Fuck that noise.

(As an aside, when I heard that the Nitwit-in-Chief was kicking around the idea of sending one of the battalions of the 82nd Airborne Division I facepalmed so hard I knocked my cap off. Infantry in general and paratroops in particular are reeeeally bad domestic occupiers; they're among the most kinetic of infantry soldiers by both training and inclination. It comes as no surprise that among the most lethally idiotic moments in recent Western occupation operations - the 1972 "Bloody Sunday" shooting in Derry, and April 2003 protest fusillade in Fallujah - both had paratroops on the occupying side doing the murdering.)

But the second was for the troopers themselves.

Because they had only two options, both of them exceptionally poor.

Option 1 was to treat the city and the citizens where they were deployed as an active and dangerous enemy. In other words, like the paras in Derry or the 325th in Fallujah. Treat everyone as a potential guerilla, treat every encounter as a combat patrol. Go out of the wire locked and loaded and looking for trouble.

That would have set up a Bloody Sunday or Fallujah April as surely as the sun rising. At some point there'd be one of those "checkpoint shootings" that were a daily routine in Iraq, and all Hell would break loose.

But Option 2 was to treat it like what it is; a ridiculously pointless piece of political theater. Loaf about in a gaggle or three, scroll on your phone, pass the time, just kinda hang out...like this:

That's a "One grenade'll get y'all!" clusterfuck if ever I've seen one.

But how else can you "occupy" one of your own cities that's not in open revolt? Without creating a 100% chance of the checkpoint shooting inevitable in Option 1?

Since this is The Land of The Free and the Home of the Insanely Over-armed, that was also inevitably leading to this:

You knew where this was going, right?

Of course Felony Fats has seized on this grim little horror his own stupidity and incompetence set in motion to help push his little Nazification project of ridding the precious pure American blood and soil of the taint of evil foreigners, dusky invaders, liberal traitors, and...well, every other fucking thing the bloated sonovabitch hates.

I have no idea what the poor GIs were doing when they were ambushed, but I'll bet you all the money in your pocket that it was some version of "standing around with their thumbs up their asses"; something utterly worthless. They were torn apart - or killed - for nothing. 

Nothing.

There's nothing about any of this that makes any kind of sense. There's almost nothing about it that can be made to make sense; it's all just a hollow shell of nothing.

I have no idea what any possible value there is in any of this; Trump's lunatic war on blue cities, whatever his legionaries are supposed to be doing, what happened to make an Afghan drive from Washington state to D.C. to kill two randos in tree suits, the larger war on "immigrants"...any and all of it.

It just looks from here like stupidity running head-on into angry assholishness then bursting into flames and sailing off a cliff into a cesspond.

And we've got three more fucking years of it.

Christ, WASSSSSSSF... 

Tonight's episode of "Our Idiot President!": "Tariffmaaaaannnnn!!!"

I had to send the following e-mail to UPS today:

"I dispute the tariffs charged in this invoice for the following reasons:

1. The item the tariffs were levied on is a "Genbu-Toryumon V2 Koshirae Iiato" replica sword manufactured by Tozando Co., Ltd. of Kyoto City, Japan (see attachment 1: Tozando components"). The cost of the item (less shipping) was $399.00.

2. Unless I am misinformed, the tariff rate on whole goods from Japan is 15%.

3. Unless my math is incorrect, 15% of $399.00 is $59.85, not $813.96 (see Attachments 2 through 4, "UPS Invoice 12456784523").

4. I paid $54.96 in tariffs upon entry of this item to the U.S. Therefore the balance of tariffs due on the item is $4.89, which I will gladly remit."

The foot-thick skull under the dumb shit's pathetic combover is impenetrable to many facts and logic, but the moronic insistence that these tariffs are some sort of brilliant America First plan is one of the flat-out, stomp-down, bull-goose, come-to-Jesus fucking stupidest things inside it.

No, you ignorant fuck. I'm the American and I'm paying the fucking tariff. How does that Make America Great in any sense? Are we protecting the country's vital strategic Imitation Samurai Sword industry? What the actual fuck??? 

Christ this asshole finds a new way to piss me off every single day.

How about this; I'll pay all eight hundred bucks plus, but in return I get a real blade and one cut at Felony Fats' fat neck.

One cut. Just one.

That seem fair, donnit? 

 

 

Quiet desperation

I've tried.

I was sure I could get enough ridiculousness out of this idiotic "Portland is burning!" Trumpenonsense to dope up an "Acting 1st Lawes..." piece.

But.

I just can't.

This has become...whatever "reeeally fucking not funny" is.

The President of the United States is an unhinged moron, a complete and utterly lethally dangerous fool, acting on the delusions that exist only in his addled head as well as direction from the dangerously evil, greedy monsters that prowl around him.

And We, the People, can do nothing to stop or deter or delay this.

He's going to send soldiers to peaceful cities, his ICEstapo goons are going to try and gin up unrest to justify violent force, because this ninny has nothing inside his fat head outside greed and bile and prejudice.

And We can do nothing to change that, or to stop it.

I honestly don't know what more to say. We are at the nonexistent mercy of Nazis, the real-honest-to-God-no-shit variety as well as every flavor of other White Christopathic Scum that rides with the old school swastika-suckers.

And We can do nothing to change that, or stop it.

Well. 

We can vote. 

Sure.

In a year. And hope that the Nazis don't do what Nazis do; use force and fear to make that vote meaningless. And trust that they'll do what they haven't for the past year; bend the knee to the popular will and the laws and customs of the nation.

There's armed resistance, of course.

And without an invading army to destroy the occupation forces?

Ask a Soviet partisan or a French resistant or a survivor of the Polish Home Army how that goes.

So what can I say? That if, as they surely will, the MAGAts refuse to allow, or accept the results, of the popular vote, the choice is between hopeless rebellion or desperate inaction? 

Well, here I am, saying just that.

It infuriates me. Infuriates as in the old cartoon where the vulture says "Patience, my ass. I want to kill something."

It provokes nothing as much as murderous rage. Rage at the MAGAt scum. Rage at my own political faction who couldn't be arsed to turn out last year to defeat the MAGAt scum. Just...rage.

I'm sorry.

I wish I had more hope. I wish I had an eloquent prescription for escaping the jaws of this vise of thug fascism, of restoring the promise of the nation I grew up in.

I don't.

I'm going to try and come up with some sort of content this autumn. I still need to finish the "Frontiers" series. I still love to write...I just need to find something to write about other than the state of my nation.

Because if I do I'll find myself right back here, my gaze darkened, my fists clenching in a hate that begs, that longs for, that craves the sweet feel of the parting of throats under the blade. 

Ashokan Farewell

 

My Dearest Martha.

I write from our fall-back position in the former Rose Garden in Albina Park. We had our last hot meal - a warmed-up plate of Pine State cafe' biscuits-and-gravy and some day-old Starbucks dark roast drip coffee - two days ago. Word is that an elite Antifa bicycle-troop strike force used their stealthy nonmotorized stealthiness to ambush our resupply convoy as it left the rest area outside Wilsonville and was trapped in the usual traffic jam at the Boone Bridge.

 

I can't describe the awfull Hellscape that is war-ravaged Portland. There are actual hippies here! Hippies! Long hair! Bellbottoms! Pachouli! Feminists...my Lord, the unshaved armpits that are are terrifying in their contempt for patriarchical standards!

 

We will not abandon the good people of this beleaguered city without doing our utmost to Make Portland Great Again!

 

Yours in Trump:

Caleb

 

It's time for me to write another of those "Acting 1SG Lawes" things again, innit?

Well....fuck.

 

War and Remembrance

 Several thoughts about the recent U.S. military in the news:

1) Randomly sinking vessels on the high seas is called “piracy”. Pirates are by definition criminals who are liable to execution when caught in the act.

 

2) Calling it the “War Department” isn’t unreasonable (that’s what it does, basically) and that’s what it was called for decades, so I don’t precisely have a problem with the idea.

 

3) I have a problem with THESE fuckers - Felony Fats and Whiskey Pete - because I think it is a giveaway; that the dumb bastards think “war works” when anyone who’s lived through Iraq and Afghanistan and Vietnam or studied war (Thuycidides and Clausewitz (drink!) are holding on Line 1) knows that the reality is complicated and very dependent on a deep understanding of and clear-eyed analysis of the ends and means and especially the possible unintended consequences.

 

These gormless fucksticks wouldn’t know “deep” and “clear-eyed” if it hit them on the ass singing “unintended consequences are here again”.

 

So I dread the implications of the rebranding. Handing these poop-flinging monkeys a live grenade is…not a good idea.

 

4) So apparently in 2019 the USN ran a covert operation in North Korea that went bad. Which happens. CO are inherently risky.

 

That said…SEALs, WTF? These guys’ record is iffy at best going back to Grenada in ‘83 when a bunch got dropped too far offshore and drowned and another got caught trying to do a “hostage rescue” thing and had to be rescued themselves.

 

Punta Patilla in Panama, 1989. 

 

Several ugly fails in SW Asia.

 

Seems to me like the outfit needs better strategic (or operational) sense to direct their tactical skills…

 

5) I’m reading that Felony Fats’ Operation Big Balls’ Revenge has prompted the GIs to coin their own nickname for the clusterfuck; they’re now “National Gardeners”

 

What’s NOT funny is that the fucker is playing stupid games with Joe and Molly.

 

His buddy Whiskey Pete isn’t transferring funds to the Guard Bureau to cover the costs, so troops who were activated are now being put on inactive status after returning to their home station.

Depending on their drill and activated time that might prevent them from ringing up a “good year” - that is, one that counts toward retirement.

 

That’s 1) bullshit, and 2) totally on-brand for Fats, who’s Art of the Steal has ALWAYS been “stiff your contractors”.

 

And to think that a perfectly good assassin put a bullet into James Fucking Garfield, a pathetic loser nailed JFK right in the ten-ring, Abe Lincoln’s theater evening went completely to hell and yet THIS shitheel is still wasting perfectly good oxygen…

 

There is no justice in this sorry world.

Welthauptstadt Germania; an update on D.C.

So the eagle has landed, and boy fuckin' howdy are the Bad Guys on the run:

"Between the first two nights of the federal takeover, 66 arrests were made, with another 45 being made Wednesday — numbers that Parker argued paled in comparison to the potential millions of dollars the deployment will cost taxpayers.

“In fact, 1,450 officers participated in Tuesday night’s operation to arrest 43 people; this comes to 34 officers per alleged offender,” Parker wrote.

“On Wednesday night, 1,650 officers participated, which breaks down to about 37 officers per alleged criminal. And on Thursday, 20 officers arrested a plainly overwrought man who allegedly threw a sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection agent at 14th and U streets NW. Your tax dollars at work.”

Which takes us back to the first post about this, which asked several questions but not, perhaps, the most important one, which is

"What, exactly, are all these GIs going to actually do?"

These aren't civil cops. They're Joe and Molly, weekend warriors, cooks, bakers, mechanics, grunts, MPs, PAC clerks. You don't enforce law with fucking PAC clerks, you fill in forms.

That has been lingering in the back of my mind since I posted earlier.

Don't handwave. Be specific. What is one of these DCARNG "presence patrols" going to do?

Can you imagine a couple of the guys from your local Guard unit chasing robbers like T.J. Fucking Hooker? Rousting bums from the park? How? At bayonet point? With just their amazing Guard jedi mind trick powers?

Will they walk around hand-in-hand with the newly-federalized D.C. cops the way the Royal Army did the RUC in Belfast?

And if so, why? The IRA was an armed insurgency. Backing the Ulster cops with soldiers made perfect sense (not that I'm arguing that the British occupation of Ireland made or makes sense in any fashion, just that if you're going to try and do policing during a guerilla war you kinda have to do it that way...) but the D.C. cops aren't fighting guerrillas.

So...what? What are all these GIs shambling around the Tidal Basin doing? They're on our fucking taxpayer dime, so I'd sure like to know if my money is being wasted on the military equivalent of a multi-million dollar gold-encrusted fucking ballroom.

Just sayin'.

Update 8/17: So, couple of things. 

First, here's where all these Sicherheitsdienst commandos are strolling:

 

As the Fallows account post that contains this image notes; this ain't where the crooks are.

These are the "good" neighborhoods and where the public attractions like the monuments and other touristy shit are. These jokers are not Crushing Crime. They're wandering around doing fucking presence patrols, and about as uselessly as in Kandahar or Fallujah.

The other fucked-up part? Porky has got wingnut governors tripping over themselves to send GIs; Ohio, South Carolina, and West Virginia.

Okay, now. I mentioned that how you could do this here in Oregon is bus guys from downstate, or out in the Greater Idaho parts of the joint to bust Portland heads, but that the District is too small for that. 

This is how you get around that.

But...South Carolina? Seriously? You're gonna send those fucking crackers to D.C.? Now that's gonna fucking end well. That's just mindbendingly ridiculous. 

I get it; just like the rest of this, it's not about anything real. In this case it's wingnut governors competing to see who can get their tongue the furthest up Tubby'a anus.

Doesn't make it any less goddamn irritating, mind.