Little of this, little of that

“We’ve been in the Void for over a decade, Kamiko.”
“Maybe it’s for the best, Ted, things might be a shitshow out there.”

I'm not coherent enough this evening to put together a "real" post, so I'm figuring to do a kind of potpourri of fragmented thoughts about whatever. Because getting some stuff out of my head seems helpful even when it's scatterbrained.

• First, a brief update on my headspace: The crash-and-burn of the previous post isn't quite in the rear view yet; I'm still climbing out and it's a slower process than I thought it was going to be. I think this is one of those circumstances where it hurts me not to have a day job. Maybe. Anyway, getting going in any given day is still a challenge and sometimes doesn't happen until it's safe outside for vampires and then my tendency to be awake all night reinforces the pattern. Work in progress.
• We had a "bomb cyclone" come through the area the other day and I was without power for not quite 24 hours or so. This also did not help my headspace because without electricity there wasn't much to do during the nocturnal hours I tend to find myself most awake. There's only so much reading one can do by candle illumination and awkwardly-held flashlights. No other inconveniences for me personally, but some folks in the (not-immediate) area had a lot of damage to contend with from wind and toppled trees and such. The rain's been pretty steady ever since, though, and whenever I go out to get the mail I half-expect to see someone building an ark in their driveway.
• Michael Schur is good at TV. I mean, we knew this already, he's not only half of the great PosCast about sports and nonsense, he's also the brains behind The Good Place, Parks and Recreation, and other such things that step up the level of quality and thoughtful humor on television. His latest show is called A Man on the Inside, and it's delightful. Ted Danson stars (with small roles for a couple of other Good Place alums and another for Eugene Cordero) as a widower in need of something to do who gets hired by a private detective to infiltrate a retirement home and be the "man on the inside" in an effort to catch a thief. It's only eight episodes, I watched them all last night. Charming, witty, poignant . . . you know, a Michael Schur joint.
• The Seattle Mariners are cutting ties with a couple of players I'd rather not see them cut ties with. Makes me wonder what they think their doing or if they have any sort of plan. Anyway, today they non-tendered (and thus cast to the free agent winds) both Josh Rojas and Sam Haggerty, two of the only bright spots in the non-pitching portion of the 2024 team. Haggs is recovering from a bad ACL injury and this seems an especially heartless thing to do to him since being with an organization when rehabbing and such can make a huge difference, both in terms of available facilities and financial security (though unless he's squandered it, he's made plenty of money by regular-people standards the last few years even though he's a pauper by professional athlete standards). Haggerty can play seven positions on the field and switch-hits and is the best baserunner in baseball right now (well, not right now, but when he has two working ACLs). And he's inexpensive. Why let him go, just to save a tiny-by-MLB-payroll-standards amount of money? Hard disapprove, Mariners. Rojas surprised me last year by being actually pretty good both as a third baseman and as a batter, though the bar was low; I'd thought of him as the least valuable piece received in the Paul Sewald trade the year before and he proved to be capable. Rojas isn't a key piece of the puzzle, granted, but still sad to see him go. And, this creates a new vacancy to fill—before today, Rojas figured to be at least a platoon partner at one of two infield positions; now, both the second base and third base positions have no one ready to step into them. Unless they're counting on Dylan Moore to fill one, which, ugh. No, thank you. (Or they think Ryan Bliss is ready to be an everyday big-leaguer? Mmmmmayyybe? I mean, good on-base chops in the minors, but all we saw of him with the M's was during the Scott Servais/Jarred deHart reign of error, so who knows.) Dropping these two is another cost-cutting maneuver, saves them maybe $6M in player payroll, but to what end? I guess we'll wait and see.
• Including those Cloud Five strips in my last post (and, yes, I know the C5 site is broken, it's been so for a while now, I just haven't been motivated to fix it) has made me think seriously of reviving it, but if I do I'm not sure what to do about the intervening 11 years or so. I mean, a lot of shit's gone down. Do I age the characters up and just drop into today? Do I pick up where I left off and pull a Newsroom and treat the now of the strip as 2014? Do I do both, do any picking-up-from-before in flashback? Or is it better to just start form scratch on a new thing? Or am I not willing to do that format again? I don't know. It's a big thing to take it up again in any form. Meanwhile I'm just doing some unrelated sketching, which is better than nothing.

Tagged The Black Hole, Baseball, TV, Seattle Mariners   |   Posted on November 22, 2024 at 9:58pm   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Crash and burn

I'd been doing fairly well, depression-wise-speaking, for some time now. Oh, sure, I've had a number of relatively mild stints in The Black Hole over the past few years, but I've come to accept that those are just a fact of life if you have the brain chemistry of, well, me. But I hadn't had a really bad episode in quite a while.

Those mild ones still suck, don't get me wrong. Wouldn't wish them on anyone. But they're tolerable. The bad ones are . . . well, not different so much as just more. I'm not even sure when the last bad one occurred; the ones that stick in my memory are from much further back, and the more recent ones all had the same sort of flavor, if you will, not a lot to differentiate them. Call it six or seven years since the last one, that's about how long I've been on my current Rx, which has been largely effective.

But the streak, however long it was, is over. Nasty Black Hole time returned this last week, particularly from around Thursday night through yesterday.

There just isn't a good way to articulate the experience, my use of the Black Hole metaphor can only go so far and I always seem to mix other allegories in with it which probably doesn't help clear anything up. But suffice to say this one had me basically not get out of bed except to feed the cats—and then only when their patience ran out—for 2½ days or so. It's just so, so tiring, among other things.

I had more explanation here; I'd just finished a longish post when my PC decided to spontaneously reboot itself and I lost everything in temporary RAM. (Not sure if it was a Windows thing, a Bitdefender Security thing, or a screwed-up hardware thing, all I know for sure is that it was a failure-to-save-drafts thing which is a bad habit I can't blame on my fucked-up brain chemistry.) No matter, really, no attempt I've ever made at articulating the experience of clinical depression has ever been close to adequate; the best try was back when I was doing the Cloud Five strip, so maybe that's as good as it'll get (see below).

Anyway, this one was different. It was . . . weird.

Because there is a readily identifiable outside cause. Or, not cause, exactly, but . . . let's call it a prompt. I speak, of course, of the election and it's continuing fallout. And this evening, now that I have some of my critical-thinking faculty back, I wonder if that means this episode will be easier, harder, or about the same when it comes to climbing out of it.

Today's been OK. I got up, got outside, took a lengthy walk in the drizzle before it was completely dark out. A bit of exercise and a decent meal is a good jump-start. But the news is going to stay terrible for a good long while, so does that mean I'm just going to get pushed back into free-fall again? Or was this prompt only really potent becuase of shock value, and with shock dissipating and unlikely to be a factor again—I mean, the horrobleness to come is all expected now, right?—and thus won't be as big a deal in this specific way?

I tend to think this is better. Meaning, the outside-prompted episode is better than the "regular" kind because I'm not wholly at the mercy of my brain. Maybe focus, either on the prompting issues or deliberately away from them, can be a tool here. Combined with a little more diligence in getting some exercise (which I have been severely lacking since before my California trip, save for the adventure at Vazquez Rocks) and avoiding extended isolation, as well as maintaining my Rx, may well serve me better than just the usual having to "ride it out" reliance on time, rest, and energy recharge.

Well, at any rate. Life goes on, and with luck and effort it goes on in a more engaged and less debilitating fashion.

If only our macro-scale problems were so easily dealt with.

 

Here's most of the sequence from C5 I did more than 10 years ago now(!!) that seemed to be my best attempt at articulating the Black Hole in layman's terms.

 

 

I really should revive this strip someday.

Tagged The Black Hole   |   Posted on November 19, 2024 at 11:58pm   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Quotes of the day

Botox cautionary tale and rejected Batman villain Matt Gaetz

“We’re going to see the return of diseases we have controlled for decades.”

—Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, about potential public health consequences of RFK Jr. leading the Dept. of Health & Human Services.

 

"[She is] our girlfriend."

—Russian state television commentator, speaking of Tulsi Gabbard, 45/47’s nominee to be Director of National Intelligence.

 

"I’m sure it will make for a popcorn-eating confirmation hearing."

—Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC), speculating on whether or not Attorney General designee Matt Gaetz can be confirmed for a cabinet post.

 

"[He] will sacrifice our public lands and endangered wildlife on the altar of the fossil fuel industry’s profits."

—Kierán Suckling, executive director at the Center for Biological Diversity, about Interior Secretary nominee Doug Burgum.

 

And the chef's kiss of today's quotes:

 

"Matt Gaetz is a sex-trafficking, drug-addicted piece of shit. He is abhorrent. There are pools of vomit with more to offer the Earth than this STD-riddled testament to the failure of fallen masculinity.”

—Ben Domenech, co-founder of the ultra-conservative publication The Federalist, concerning 45/47’s choice for Attorney General.

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick   |   Posted on November 15, 2024 at 8:27pm   |   Permalink   |     |  

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It begins

The Age of Idiocracy isn't scheduled to begin until next January 20th at 9:00am PST, but the incoming idiot-in-chief has already started naming his subordinate idiots, nominating some truly exceptional individuals to very important jobs.

I don't mean exceptional in a good way, either.

Many people that voted Republican, for POTUS and for Senate and House, likely don't realize what they've invited in. Not only are incompetents Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswami now co-heads of the fictitious "Department of Governmental Efficiency" (no such thing exists and no such agency can be formed without Congress), charged with eliminating government programs they don't think are good for billionaires, but the people being tapped for real jobs in the real government are frighteningly extreme.

For the benefit of some folks I've talked to over the past few days what have been asking who these people are, let's have a look at the proposed nominees for the Idiot Cabinet:

• Secretary of State Marco Rubio. You might say, wait a minute, isn't Rubio "Little Marco," one of those Republicans 45/47 hates and ridicules all the time? Yes, same guy. But that doesn't mean anything, the wannabe führer disdains everyone who isn't himself whether he says so publicly or not. Rubio is a toady, a yes-man, who will go in whatever direction the winds of power are blowing, yet is just enough of a "regular" (i.e. pre-2015) Republican that he won't face much trouble getting confirmed by the Senate. Left to his own devices, Rubio is a simpleton and a hawk who likes the idea of the U.S. being "robust" in confronting nations like Iran and North Korea and has characterized Vladimir Putin as a "gangster" (presumably as a negative), so accepting this gig means he'll do a 180 on all of that (except maybe Iran), since Putin is the incoming POTUS's boss and North Korea's Kim Jong Un is the incoming POTUS's best bud.
• Attorney General Matt Gaetz. In no universe, including this one, is Gaetz confirmable to any cabinet post without shenanigans of some kind. He is (was) the Ted Cruz of the House, loathed by basically everyone. He resigned from Congress early in order to stop a House investigation into allegations of him engaging in statutory rape and sex trafficking. Of course, 45/47 likes him probably because of all that, two peas in a pod, if you will. Gaetz would have no problems turning the justice department into a new form of thug force to carry out the incoming POTUS's grievance fantasies. At least he's out of Congress now.
• Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. Gabbard has zero experience in the field, but she is a Russian propaganda mouthpiece, which makes her ideal for 45/47’s purposes of kowtowing to Putin.
• Secretary of Defense Pete Hesgeth. Though Hesgeth is an Army National Guard veteran, decorated for tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, he has no experience in government of any sort. Instead, his career has been as a pundit/talking head on Fox "News," spewing lies and propaganda on behalf of 45/47. Also not remotely confirmable to the post in any year before now. Oh, and he has tattoos of Christian Nationalist/neo-Nazi symbols on his torso, so, yeah, nice guy.
• Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. Infamous for being a puppy killer, Noem is no doubt attractive to 45/47 for this gig because as governor of South Dakota she defied all health measures during the pandemic and loves the idea of deporting immigrants. Though I suspect the biggest draw was that she killed her dog.
• CIA Director John Ratcliffe. This guy was DNI for the final year of 45/47’s first term, having been nominated, then withdrawn because of massive bipartisan pushback, then renominated and barely confirmed. His only qualification is staunch obedience to 45/47 in all things. When in Congress, Ratcliffe was ranked by the Heritage Foundation as the second-most conservative legislator nationwide. He was a member of the defendant's team in the first impeachment trial of 45/47.
• Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Also not confirmable, RFK Jr. is an anti-vaccine conspiracist and has claimed that vaccinations are a sort of "holocaust" on American children because he believes they cause autism (they don't). During the pandemic he slandered/libeled Dr. Anthony Fauci repeatedly and spread lies about COVID-19 and the vaccines for that virus, no doubt endearing himself to 45/47 in the process, including a whopper that the COVID vaccine killed Hank Aaron (it didn't). At one point, RFK Jr. was regarded as a respectable environmental activist, but no longer; he's a brain-addled nutjob who literally had a worm eating away at his cortex.
• Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins. Another toady, Collins was also on 45/47’s defense team in the first impeachment trial. Collins is a 2020 election denier, a climate crisis denier, an anti-abortion zealot, and an ardent foe of the Affordable Care Act. So, you know, exactly the kind of guy 45/47 would want in charge of veterans and their health care.
• Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum. The perfect guy for the post in 45/47’s mind, the North Dakota governor is in deep with various energy industry CEOs. One of the loudest voices behind the absurd claim that Joe Biden Wants to Ban Your Gas Stove, Burgum supports fossil fuel industry of all kinds, hates the very idea of subsidizing a shift to electric vehicles, and wants to open protected Federal lands to mining and oil and gas drilling. The guy makes James Watt look like a tree-hugger.
• Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin. Zeldin has no experience (sense a theme?) in the field, though he was on the congressional Climate Solutions Caucus as a hostile member. He opposed the Paris Climate Agreement and champions the elimination of regulations that prevent industry from even greater polluting behavior.

Maybe "Idiot Cabinet" isn't the proper term. It's more like the "Bizarro Cabinet." Every official is there to do the opposite of what the job is supposed to be.

And that's just cabinet officials. If we were to get into White House staff it would be even scarier, in part because there's no check on them, the president can put whomever he wants there without approval from anyone.

Of course, 45/47 wants to do an end-run around Senate confirmations because he knows most of the people he wants in these jobs has no business being there. At this point we can only hope that the Senate Republican leadership won't just give away its power and abdicate its Constitutional duty. Not sure what kind of odds I'd give that.

Much of this has to be 45/47 trying to see just how far he can push the envelope before he gets back into the Oval. How many Senators are dumbfuck sycophants like Tom Tuberville and how many value their job to advise and consent and, if necessary, reject? Tuberville, Lindsey Graham, and no doubt at least a couple dozen others are lost causes, but what about the rest? What about incoming Majority Leader John Thune?

I suppose one silver lining of the Bizarro Cabinet is that since they all know nothing about their potential gigs a lot of stuff could blow up on their and in 45/47’s faces. Hopefully some of it, at least, won't blow up in ours as well.

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick   |   Posted on November 14, 2024 at 9:26pm   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Distractions

There is no escaping the political situation and impending clusterfrak this country and the world is facing, but just to keep sane I've indulged in pop-culture distractions lately. Some highlights:

• Lower Decks has come back strong in its fifth and final season. I rather enjoyed the Klingon sibling rivalry in the latest episode ("A Farewell to Farms") and the setting of a world newly post-scarcity partying hard while burning all their money in a prior one ("Shades of Green").
• I've also been enjoying the series Shrinking on Apple+. I watched one with my dad while I was down in California and found that it really is impossible to make any sense of it coming into the middle cold, but that's easily taken care of—just start at the beginning. Jason Segel and Harrison Ford and Jessica Williams, all wonderful as therapists that are more screwed up than their patients.
• Superman and Lois is in its final season as well, and it's been . . . fine. I mean, at the end of last season they killed Superman, so picking up from that was a mess, and the show had its budget cut by a ton and they had to lose some supporting characters, but I'm still enjoying it because I'm a big nerd.
• Season two of The Diplomat (Netflix) is just as excellent as season one was. I binged its six episodes in one evening. It might be weird to seek escape from real-life political turmoil in a fictional political mystery/thriller/drama, but I nevertheless recommend it. Great stuff and a big cliffhanger making us suffer the wait for season three.
• I haven't seen any of The Penguin yet. HBO Max, which I don't have access to. Anyone know if it's any good?
• I dug out some old novels from my bookshelf to reread, including some Heinlein books. I just finished Friday, which I first read in 1988 and had almost completely forgotten. Now I'm halfway through Job, which I must have read around that same time in the late ’80s but have no recollection of, so it's like a brand new read now. Kind of unfortunate timing in that Job is a sort of multiverse story and we've been inundated with such premises in our pop culture of late. I was going to reread I Will Fear No Evil, but apparently I don't own a copy of that one. Thought I did. I guess I borrowed it from someone else when I read it in high school; maybe I'll pick one up used somewhere. Heinlein was an interesting character, a real dichotomy of political leanings (mostly libertarian, with an unpleasant penchant for people going armed as a measure of civilization, but also in favor of regulations protecting civil rights and equality) and a brilliant futurist while still retaining a shocking-by-today's-standard level of sexism—Friday and Job are among his later works, published in the early 1980s, while most of his catalog comes from the ’50s and ’60s—in nearly all of his characters. But all of his stories have big ideas, big romance, big personalities, and fine writing if sometimes a little scattered. Some of my earliest sci-fi reads were his YA books, and I'd be curious to revisit one or two of those to see how they hold up.

Anyone have other recommendations for good distraction media? I think we're going to need a lot of it.

Tagged TV, Books   |   Posted on November 12, 2024 at 6:45pm   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Cheaper eggs

My friend and neighbor Rachel forwarded this to me and I thought it worth sharing with you all. Please to enjoy.

 

 

Follow-up video. Skip to 4:15 and start there; there's supposed to be a way to make it do that when embedding, but it isn't working here for some reason.

 

 

P.S. Eggs will not be cheaper.

Tagged Politics, Tennessee Brando   |   Posted on November 12, 2024 at 5:34pm   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Still processing

It's been a tough week, if I may state the obvious. After a couple of days of basic wallowing I've tried to distract myself with other things—TV, household stuff, the cats, books—which has been helpful. But I've still kept up with all (or most) or the political stuff I'd become accustomed to following, just at a bit more of a detached remove, if you will.

Even at a remove, though, it's pissing me off.

Pundits and analysts and observers and just plain folks everywhere seem to be tripping over themselves trying to find the reasons Kamala Harris lost the election. Theories abound: She didn't distance herself enough from Joe Biden (why would she? Biden's been a fantastic president no matter how people are perceiving him right now and to say otherwise would be dishonest); she erred in being too focused on "joy" and "positivity" (ludicrous; the enthusiasm for her was profound and she had the best ground game of any campaign in decades); she picked the wrong guy for VP (would Shapiro have delivered Pennsylvania? Would not having Walz have hurt her elsewhere? No way to know); she didn't reach out to voters by nontraditional means (bullshit, she was on apolitical podcasts and local television and "The View" and on and on); she alienated voters by being too focused on "wokeism" and "identity politics" (absurd—when reporters tried to goad her into talking about identity politics she called it a "distraction" and insisted they move on).

Garbage, all of them. Not very many people seem to grasp the obvious here.

I've received a little bit of pushback on my last post, where I described most of 45/47's voters as hateful. The argument being that only a minority of them are hateful, the rest voted because of the economy or because they're woefully ignorant. 

First off, if you voted for the fascist because you thought it would be better economically, then you are also woefully ignorant, so I dispute that those are different cohorts. Secondly, yes, there are plenty of voters that are phenomenally uninformed, misinformed, and/or stupid—I just don't buy that most of them are not also hateful.

She lost because a majority of Americans—a hefty majority, at that—either didn't vote or voted for the convicted felon wannabe autocrat for one or both of these reasons:

1. They properly understand and approve of what he stands for and what he wants to do, which makes them hateful. They like his various bigotries and cruelty and thirst for retribution against people who are other than them in whatever fashion. Racists, mysoginists, champions of extreme wealth and poverty, people so fearful of LGBTQ folks that they can't stop to think about why they're afraid.
2. They are so gullible that they bought into the lies he constantly spews and lack the sense to give it any critical thought. You voted for him because of inflation? Then you didn't think it through, or even partway through, or think about it at all, because you actually voted for the guy that made inflation worse in the first place and against the VP of the administration that reined it in and brought it back to better-than-normal levels.

Certainly the corporate media went all in on the second group. Certainly the oligarchs-in-waiting exploited the second group to a truly impressive degree. And certainly much of that second group will be experiencing a kind of buyer's remorse within a year as things start going downhill, but I wonder if even then those people still wouldn't vote for someone with two X chromosomes.

Kamala Harris lost because most Americans won't support a woman at the top of the ticket, can't be bothered to engage with politics even a little bit, and/or hate trans folks and brown people so much that it outweighs anything else. Not because her campaign was flawed or because her policies were unpopular or she didn't sit for an interview with Joe Rogan. It boils down to sexism, willful ignorance, and hateful bigotries. The end.

What to do about it? Well, quit looking for reasons to blame Kamala Harris or Joe Biden or the DNC or whomever for the loss, for starters. Then focus on the people who to this point couldn't be bothered to pay attention.

It's going to be a challenge. The incoming president "loves the poorly educated," after all, because they're easier to manipulate, and his promise to destroy the Department of Education is in the service of further expanding the ranks of poorly educated Americans. How to counter that? Some disengaged people will always be disengaged, but some would be willing to learn. It's a matter of reaching them.

I tried this past spring. I put together a little booklet on presidential history that was intended to be accessible to anyone even a little bit interested; in the end it might have been a little more complicated than that, but still I felt it was something people would respond to. I reached out to a number of people and organizations that I thought would be interested in assisting me in distributing it and was surprised to get zero help. No one on Democratic forums or in campaign offices or on liberal podcasts or educators thought it worth their time, and I didn't exactly have thousands of dollars available to print out and distribute it door to door in seven swing states myself.

When I was a kid we had a more centralized media landscape. Newspapers were prevalent and largely trustworthy, there was civics education, we had Schoolhouse Rock. Schoolhouse Rock was great, it was on TV every Saturday morning in between the various cartoon shows. Truly a brilliant tool. It couldn't be done today because there is no platform like the network TV Saturday morning cartoons used to be. You could make it, you could get it available to people, but they'd have to search it out purposefully, which the people who need it won't do. We're all in our own insulated bubbles.

We have to figure out how to burst them.

Tagged Politics   |   Posted on November 11, 2024 at 11:24pm   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Coping?

Captain Pike showed aliens how WWIII began slowly starting with Jan. 6, 2021

Like many of you out there, I'm trying to cope.

This certainly isn't the first election to have not gone my way, but it is the first one where not going my way has predictably catastrophic consequences and I'm not sure how to deal with it.

My neighbor expected it to go down like this, more or less. She was more cynical than I. Me, I truly thought people were going to repudiate the monstrous cancer on our society that is Trumpism. I mean, how could they not? Especially with the way the guy campaigned in the last month-plus?

And yet.

For the moment I'm still mostly stunned. But there are a plethora of other feelings in there, trying to surmount the stunned numbness. It's hard to catalog them all.

You'd think I'd mostly be angry. Don't get me wrong, I am angry—angry at the corporate media that abdicated its journalistic duty, angry at the candidate himself for his overall awfulness, angry at the Russians for their interference (bomb threats?!), angry at each and every one of the people who voted for this petty wannabe tyrant—but it's not the primary emotion here, and I'm not sure what is.

Sadness is in the mix. Fear, certainly. Helplessness. But also embarrassment.

I'm embarrassed to have not seen it coming. I remember the olden days of 2016, when he-who-shall-not-be-named won the first time, and having conversations with friends about what it would mean. I was 100% certain that he wouldn't last a full term in office (hell, I thought there was a very good chance he wouldn't last a full year), as he was surely going to commit multiple impeachable offenses and he would be removed by Congress. Which he did. And, after too long a period, he was impeached. But what I hadn't counted on was the complete and total slide into corruption of the Republican party.

That was then.

It's been eight years and we've seen the bastard get away with everything. We've seen officials from his party turn against their oaths of office almost to a person. We've seen the cult of personality so envelop tens of millions of Americans as to destroy their ability to think critically.

But I still believed in a majority of the voting public. What a sap I was.

When George W. Bush was reelected in 2004 I took it personally. I had worked for the John Kerry campaign, I knew Kerry was a fantastic potential president, and I knew what a disaster Bush had been. I also knew what dirty tricks and propaganda and outright lies the Bush campaign relied on and resented them no end. (And I still think history will one day reveal that those dirty tricks suppressed may thousands of Democratic votes in order to get Bush over the finish line.) When that election result came in I was furious. Bush had been the worst president in living memory, what the hell, people?

Today is so much worse, and yet I'm not furious, not at the top line. Instead I feel dumb. Foolish, even. I feel that I've allowed my relative privilege in this society to cloud my perceptions.

What the [shudder] president-elect represents is horrifying on more levels than one can easily count, but it's not new, not really. I just visited the site of a World War II internment camp the other day. Jim Crow laws persisted for decades. Misogyny has been ingrained in this culture forever. American society has been this ugly to one degree or another since Day One, but here and now is the first time I have felt—not just intellectually understood, but personally felt—oppressed within my own society. The majority of American voters hate people like me.

I'm not trying to draw equivalencies here, I am fully aware that I'm lower on the scale of hatred than many minority groups and people with more immediately obvious "otherness" about them. But the hatred feels personal for the first time.

Now, many that voted for the monster would tell me otherwise, that they didn't vote for him because they hate people. Some of them might even believe that. Some of them might be right, they could be in the cohort that is so disengaged from the world around them that they voted irresponsibly without knowing a goddamn thing.

But most of them voted for him because they hate. They like the cruelty their guy embodies. They like the bullying, the arrogant simpleton behavior, the basic meanness. The bigotry.

Maybe we need this. I mean, even in the idealized world of Star Trek, humanity had to get worse before it got better. In the series premiere of Strange New Worlds, Captain Pike shows an alien culture how Earth didn't get its shit together until after a catastrophic third World War, the origins of which, it was heavily implied, were traced back to January 6th, 2021 and the ensuing second American civil war. And I can now see how that scenario could come to pass—blue state governors are in a hell of a spot now, it's not difficult to imagine states trying to maintain the rule of law and fealty to the Constitution while Federal forces are arrayed against them. It's not difficult to imagine a violent crisis when the [gag] president-elect refuses to leave when his term is up in defiance of the Constitution. It's not hard to imagine a variety of scenarios that could play out with a fascist in the White House surrounded by enablers on all sides.

The majority of American voters preferred a convicted-felon, adjudicated rapist, fascist-to-the-core white man with the intelligence of a baked potato to a principled black woman with impeccable credentials and brains to shame MENSA. Racism lives. Misogyny lives. Idiocy reigns. Ignorance-as-virtue might as well be the new Republican credo.

And I feel—for now—broken and helpless in the face of a blind hatred I'd allowed myself to not see.

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick   |   Posted on November 6, 2024 at 8:37pm   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Freakout sets in

I had faith in humanity. I had faith in there being more sane American voters than rubes and dupes and fascist bigots. I believed in the ability of adult human beings to empathize with women stripped of their rights and dying in ER parking lots. I believed enough Americans were smart enough to know when they were being lied to and what propaganda was sheer bullshit.

Turns out I was wrong about all of it.

There was election interference and intimidation fuckery in several swing states, Russian interference again favoring the fascist candidate, yet turnout was impressively high. And the incompetent criminal Hitler-loving authoritarian bigoted idiot got more votes.

Even if things take a turn overnight and swing state totals narrow and perhaps even flip in a miracle of miracles, the reality still exists that this country isn't populated by good people. This country is full of stupid, disengaged, and/or evil people.

We're in for a very rude awakening indeed.

I've not processed this yet, really, so I'm just going to share what Ben Cohen wrote over at The Banter.

Enough Americans have been taken in by this extraordinary cult of personality and have voted in a madman to be their president. The mainstream press failed spectacularly, again, to focus on the danger Trump posed to America. They turned the presidential contest it into yet another horse race where the reds were fighting the blues in battle to the finish. Trump was sanitized, repackaged, and finally thrust back into the White House with barely a scratch on him.

The polls, having been basically wrong about everything since 2016, were far more accurate than I and almost everyone in the media anticipated. They did not overestimate the Democrats, and they appear to have correctly gaged Trump’s almost mythical ability to activate his base and bring low propensity voters out to the polls. And that really is the story of the race. Despite having run one of the most racist, deranged, insane campaigns in modern history, Trump pulled out the victory again.

He massively over performed with Hispanic men, and shockingly made the huge gender gap irrelevant. It is the comeback of all comebacks, only it isn’t the good guy who has won, but the convicted felon and sexual abuser who tried to overthrow the US government only four years ago.

Sane, well adjusted people know that Donald Trump should not be allowed anywhere near the White House. He should be in jail for the multiple crimes he committed while in office, including his attempted coup. Now he will grant himself immunity and no doubt commit more crimes during his second term in office.

We are headed to a very, very dark place right now, and those who enabled, funded and voted for this despicable charlatan will have to own what is about to happen.

. . .

This is a war that cannot be ceded. We cannot allow Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Fox News to destroy reality and decimate truth. He does not get a grace period, and he must not be respected. Donald Trump is a fascist, and fascists must be defeated. His lies will be countered with truths, and his disinformation will be fought with facts. This is war, again.

And here's the reaction from Craig Calceterra, which I don't think I could improve upon:

America just enthusiastically voted for a violent, lying, bigoted, misogynist, insurrectionist felon who promised it nothing but destruction and misery. It is a damning indictment of the country and its people.

Unlike in 2016, this was no fluke. This was no low-stakes leap of faith by some fed-up people hoping that an uncouth maverick might make their life better and might not cause much harm. This vote was made with eyes wide open. After all that’s been said and done over these past nine years, millions of Americans have decided they don’t care what Donald Trump is, what Donald Trump does, or who Donald Trump hurts. And make no mistake, he will hurt many. He has specifically and repeatedly promised to do so.

Donald Trump has harnessed a longstanding ugliness in this country. He has given voice to the desires of the tens of millions of people who want to round up, brutalize, and deport immigrants and they, in turn, have now given him the power to do so. He’s given voice to the tens of millions of people who want women to be, for all practical purposes, the property of men and, they in turn, have given him the power to do so. He’s given voice to the tens of millions of people who are just fine with abolishing democracy and instituting an authoritarian regime because they believe that regime will favor them and will punish those who they hate and they, in turn, have given him the power to do so. There is something very real, very large, and very ugly in the American body politic and there always has been. And America’s body politics has given Donald Trump power once again.

There is no coming back from this. America, the nation-state, will carry on in name as long as it has more bombs and missiles and money than anyone else and that may well be a very long time. But the ideas and values which all of us were brought up to believe in and that we have always called America is over. What is about to happen in America’s name will represent a perversion of every value I hold. The fact that it will be done with the country’s eager blessing means that the crimes will be committed with malice aforethought and that the damage will be permanent.

 

Tagged Politics, President VonClownstick   |   Posted on November 5, 2024 at 11:28pm   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Travelogue VI: Ghosts of 9066

Return trip leg 2

Today  is election day and at this moment polls are beginning to close in the eastern time zone. But I'll leave it to others to blog about today's critical decision-making, at least for right now. Erik has a final note on the subject, Mary Trump had a few words on it. Even Andy Borowitz chimed in to lighten the mood.

Instead, this will be the penultimate travelogue post from my trip to SoCal.

Manzanar

In 1942, a few months after the United States' entry into World War II, a stretch of desolate land in eastern California where a long-abandoned township once stood was chosen as one of ten sites to be used as "relocation centers" for anyone of Japanese descent living on the West Coast. Executive Order 9066, issued by FDR of all people, gave in to the paranoia and racism of the day and forcibly removed Japanese and Japanese-Americans—U.S. citizens and non-citizens alike—from their homes and businesses. This unconstitutional violation of rights and ethics was based on the concern that these people would be loyal to the Empire of Japan simply due to their ancestry, that some of them would use their knowledge and existence in the westernmost continental United States to supply an enemy nation with intelligence or act as saboteurs. Because racism. (Notably, German- and Italian-Americans were not similarly treated on the East Coast even though the U.S was also at war with Germany and Italy.)

Manzanar was the first of the camps, though not the largest. At its peak, Manzanar housed over 11,000 people in wood and tar-paper barracks over one square mile of area. Located on the eastern slope of a valley in the southern Sierra Nevada mountains, the environment was harsh and isolation was fairly severe. Yet, for three years the internees made the best of it and turned their concentration camp into a more livable space, planting gardens, running a school, publishing a newspaper, forming a baseball league, and gradually improving their living space structures as materials, such as linoleum flooring, became available over time.

Remarkable, really. The spirit to keep on and make whatever lemonade could be made form the rotten lemons given them impresses me no end. The injustice perpetrated on them was ever-present, and even when the war ended and the camps closed the internees were mostly returned to very little left from their pre-camp lives. It was one of the most abominable episodes in American history, the sort of thing modern Republicans would just assume no one ever thought about or remembered (even though they're now planning on doing this exact sort of thing again if they gain power after today).

Fortunately, the U.S. National Parks Service has taken over the grounds of Manzanar and has preserved what little remains from 1942-1945. They've built a small museum there and are using the few remaining structures as restored  museum exhibits, and are slowly working to restore areas of the grounds that camp residents built themselves, like gardens and koi ponds and a small park. The barracks and other buildings are long gone (though one structure near what used to be the staff quarters remains in dilapidated shape), though markers for each "block" show where things used to stand. (Anyone who's watched M*A*S*H would have a sense of how things probably looked in terms of structures and what kind of comforts were available or not; the structures were more stable than tents, less so than the metal structure of the M*A*S*H hospital building.)

I had stopped by Manzanar once before, several years ago, but only had about 40 minutes then and wasn't able to see the grounds at all. This time I made sure to have an hour or so for the museum bits and at least that long to see the grounds themselves. It's actually rather pretty landscape there at the foot of the Sierras. I'd hate to have to live there in mid-summer or winter with no insulation and little electricity, though.

The few things still standing—which no doubt have been restored to some degree by the Parks Service—include the cemetery and the baseball field, as well as the entry gates and an ominous guard tower. Also a few signs at the perimeter warning of "sentry on duty" should anyone try to venture past the fencing.

It's a sobering and yet inspiring place to visit. U.S. Hwy 395 goes right past it, it's easy to get to. I overheard one guy in the visitor's center say to one of the park rangers, "this is the most horrendous place I've ever been, and I work in a prison." And what that place was used for is horrendous, and the conditions and all that surrounded 9066 that is there in the museum in its unvarnished historical accuracy show us how terrible our society has been and can be. But I'm also inspired by it, by the fortitude of the internees, and gratified that the National Parks service is maintaining and preserving this piece of ugly history.

We need these things to be preserved. We need to remember the ugly parts of our past in order to improve in our future. History often repeats itself—in Battlestar Galactica terms, this has all happened before and will all happen again—but it doesn't have to. We can learn from our mistakes, but only if they are remembered and preserved for our edification. And to bring this back to the election just for a second—if Trump wins, he's promised to create more concentration camps, for immigrants legal and otherwise, as a place to "store" them while he institutes mass deportations. We can make a different choice.

Entry gate with original signage

Restored museum exhibit of a typical barracks unit

Restored museum exhibit of Manzanar schoolroom

Restored museum exhibit of Manzanar mess hall and kitchen

The baseball field has had restoration on the wooden bleachers and dugout benches as well as fencing. I also doubt the traffic cone is original.

A small park area has been restored by the National Parks Service. The dates signify the attempt in 2023 to recreate what existed in 1943.

Part of the restored park

Part of the restored park

The environment is both desolate and picturesque at the foot of the southern Sierra Nevadas

Tagged Traveling, History   |   Posted on November 5, 2024 at 4:02pm   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Travelogue V: F-word 150

Return leg 1

I have returned home from my road trip to southern California, and the time since I pulled into my garage and dragged myself inside Chez Tim has been largely spent sleeping. It's a long drive.

Not two hours after my departure from Dad and Marty's place, though, there was some minor drama. There's a point on the route I was on where the freeway splits off with a fork—take these lanes to go this way, these lanes to go that way—which occurred not long after a previous fork, and I missed it. I realized I was in the wrong lane just as I was too far gone to move over, so I instead got off at the next exit and sought to rejoin the proper road.

I was stopped at a red light and went to consult the map on my phone. In the few seconds my attention was on that, my foot had apparently let up just enough tension on the brake pedal for the car to start rolling forward and I heard a soft thump. I looked up and realized that I had rolled forward and impacted the truck ahead of me at the light.

Oops.

After a second of WTF? reaction, I backed up back to appropriate distance and thought, OK, embarrassing, but no harm done. A couple of seconds later, the driver of the truck got out and came toward my window. I rolled it down as he approached. "Apologies," I said, "I guess I let up—"

"Show me your license," the guy said. "And insurance."

I did a double-take. Yeah, I'd tapped the guy's bumper, but no damage done.

"Are you fucking with me?" I asked, a bit dumbfounded. Maybe he's trying to be funny.

"No!" he yelled. "Show me your license and insurance! You're paying for that!"

I showed him my license and insurance card. "What exactly are you expecting me to pay for?" I said, indicating the back of his undamaged truck.

Instead of answering, he mocked me as he photographed my insurance card. “‘Apologies.' Jesus." Would he have preferred I didn't apologize? 

Instead of asking him if he'd like me to take the apology back, I just said, "Seriously?"

He pointed at his bumper. "That was PRISTINE. You'll pay for it!"

I looked at the bumper more closely. "I'm seeing maybe half an inch of a scratch if that," I said, still remarkably calm.

"It's going to have to be repainted! And it won't match, and I bet there's more damage—" he stopped ranting in mid-sentence.

The allegedly pristine bumper post-bump. Before sending this to State Farm, I noted that of the various mars on his bumper, some must have been preexisting. A Ford F-150 bumper is anywhere from 19-24 inches off the ground; the foremost part of my Prius is the license plate frame, which spans 15-21 inches off the ground. The area I circled in gold contains two tiny mars potentially caused by the bump at either side of the reflection glint; the red circles indicate areas unlikely to have been caused by the bump as the point of impact would not have stretched that far; the blue circles note mars that are impossible to have been caused by the bump.

 

I stopped short of telling him that I, myself, had been looking into touch-up automotive paint for my own new-to-me car that came with some small paint nicks and thus knew that if he really cared about his tiny bumper mar that a bit of sandpaper and a can of touch-up automobile spray paint can be found at AutoZone in matching colors to various vehicles including Fords for about $25. And if it's a color that isn't standard, one can be ordered online for about $40. He clearly wasn't interested in anything I might have had to say. Meanwhile, the passenger in his truck (wife?) got out and took photos of the back of the truck.

I held out my hand, indicating I wanted my cards back. He handed them to me and ranted some more about how I'd hear from him and regret it. "You do what you feel like you need to do, fella," I said. He walked back to his truck ranting.

The light changed and he took off. I followed and he preceded me onto the freeway before he then got off again at the next exit. I went on my way.

Not 40 minutes later my phone rang. Thinking it had to be about this, I pulled over—I was on US 395 by then, a two-lane road with wide shoulders—and answered. It was a rep from State Farm. "Wow, that guy wasted no time," I said the the rep, who identified herself as Hannah from State Farm and I briefly flashed on those dumb State Farm commercials where a guy has to explain to his wife that he's not cheating on her, he's just talking to "X from State Farm."

Hannah was quite pleasant and asked for my version of the story, what I estimated the speed was (based on time of the event and typical distance between vehicles at a red light, I said it was about two feet per second) and if there was any damage to my car. "No, none," I said as I got out to verify that was correct. Hannah and I covered some more information and she anticipated that, given the claimant's belligerence, he might try to harass me but if he does, "just send him my way and hang up." Points to Hannah from State Farm.

Surprised as I was to get that call as quickly as I did, I was glad of it. After it was done I was able to put the incident out of my mind for the most part, while before the call I was, of course, rehashing the whole thing in my head over and over. Yes, because the guy was an asshole, but also because I was embarrassed. In 40 years of driving this was the first and hopefully only time I'd found myself in a situation where anyone's insurance came up.

Anyway, that's how the return trip started. From there on it was non-confrontational.

I was on that particular route only because I wanted to make a particular stop and wanted to make the best possible time getting there. That's the topic for the next travelogue post: Manzanar.

Posted on November 4, 2024 at 10:07pm   |   Permalink   |     |  

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Wrapping it up

The calendar has turned to November, which historically has been my least favorite month of the year but lately hasn't been any worse than others; whether that will hold true this year depends a hell of a lot on next Tuesday's results.

Down do just a few days in Schrödinger's Ballot Box, soon we'll know if Americans chose a live Constitutional democratic republic or a dead rule of law and a new despotism. It's tough not to obsess about the latter possibility and worry about what to do then, but I nevertheless really do think we won't have to face that because I really do think the forces of good will triumph and President-elect Harris will emerge from the fallout of this ugly election campaign.

In just the latest outrage, Donald Trump has insinuated that Liz Cheney should face a firing squad. Add that to the ever-growing list of things that guy has done that should have destroyed his candidacy and yet somehow barely registers at all. Last weekend's version of the latest thing that should have destroyed his candidacy was the hateful screed and grievance rally at Madison Square Garden. It's hard to imagine any other presidential candidate in the history of presidential candidates that could walk out of that and not take a politically-fatal hit, but here we are.

Here's the great satirist Andy Borowitz on that:

PALM BEACH (The Borowitz Report)—With just four days until the election, Donald J. Trump is running out of time to alienate the few demographic groups he has not already offended, campaign sources revealed on Friday.

Though Trump has acknowledged that he did “an amazing job” of repelling Blacks, Latinos, Jews, and Arabs at his Madison Square Garden rally, he has groused that too many other cohorts remain unscathed.

In a heated meeting with aides on Friday morning, Trump banged on a table and shouted, “We need to go after the Inuit.”

“When did they become Inuit?” he demanded. “They were always Eskimos, and then, suddenly, they turned Inuit.”

Trump also expressed a desire to “do a number on the Amish” because “none of them watch me on TV.”

I also recommend spreading around Robert Reich's list of The 101 Worst Things About Trump's Shambolic Presidency. How people have memory-holed all of that heinous incompetence and treachery I will never understand. What makes it all the more remarkable is that one could probably argue an entirely different list of 101 things and still not reach the end of the list of Worst Things.

As the election campaign wraps up, so does my trip down to Southern California. I shall be heading home tomorrow, taking a different route that is more direct but still favoring non-Interstate roads (mostly). Meantime, Dad and Marty and I went to the weekly street fair thingy that happens in downtown Palm Springs last night, and as it was also Halloween there were lots of people in costume. Some of the outfits were pretty cool—in addition to the standard witches and ghosts and vampires, I also spotted a couple of Mandalorians, some stormtroopers, and a Princess Leia to represent the Star Wars crowd; several Dr. Seuss characters; two Velmas from Scooby Doo, but only one Daphne; plenty of Village People (it is Palm Springs); kids in store-bought Superman outfits; a giant Snoopy; one gender-bending Wonder Woman; and two guys in Next Generation-era Starfleet unis.

There was also an additional stage setup a block or so away that is part of a larger to-do being prepped for next weekend's Gay Pride Palm Springs event that Dad and Marty wanted to see, so we wandered over to that for a bit; it was basically a stage with a band, with the accompanying deafness-level speaker system blaring. I can't stand such things. I will never understand why it is standard practice for any rock show in a club or arena or even outdoor stage venue such as this one to amplify the volume to damaging degrees. If it is expected that one should bring ear plugs to an audio-focused event, then something is fucking wrong. I already have tinnitus, why in the world would I voluntarily exacerbate it for "enjoyment"? I once went to see one of my favorite bands, Fountains of Wayne (RIP, Adam Schlesinger), at a club on Capitol Hill somewhere and found it to be a real drag that I couldn't enjoy hearing them play because of the pounding being inflicted on my eardrums. I don't get it. Anyway, I finally dragged Dad away and we returned to the street fair proper and then made our way back to the house. Aside from the aural assault (and the band wasn't bad, by the way, just fucking loud), it was a nice enough time, though on prior visits when going to the street fair there were more interesting things being displayed and offered for sale. Off week, I guess.

It's been a decent week-plus down here, always good to visit, but I'm missing my cats and, frankly, I'm not used to such arid weather anymore and I look forward to being back among the raindrops.

 

Tagged Politics, Traveling   |   Posted on November 1, 2024 at 3:13pm   |   Permalink   |     |  

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