Another day ending in "y"...

...bringing with it more Trumpfuckery. 

Given the utter firehose of stupid shit these nitwits produce it's hard to decide whether to yawn, scream, or try and find discounted dimension lumber for the many, many guillotines this Evil Clown Posse so desperately needs and deserves. 

I do have a couple of random links to read and ponder before that, though.

First, from the ever-useful Techdirt, this extended discussion of the recent release of a couple of Elmo's DOGEboys stumbling and blabbering about the fundamentally ignorant and nihilistic methods, if such they may be called ("I see no method at all, sir..."), they employed in doing whatever the fuck they were doing. 

It's good that Masnick lays out the indictment of these callow techboys, and yet...what the fuck else should anyone have expected from this whole DOGE nonsense?

It was obvious from the jump that Elmo didn't actually give a shit about federal government "efficiency". What he wanted was to get inside and wreck the place. 

 

Like almost all these tax-fattened scabrous techbros he hates the entire notion of collective governance if it doesn't further fatten his wallet or pimp his ride. The whole fucking point of DOGE was to insert these gooning wankers inside the GSA to yeet confidential information useful for making money and in the process jerk the public around to increase skepticism in the notion of government of, for, and by the People.

You need fucking TikTok videos of a couple of these useless DOGE wingnuts actually saying the quiet parts of all this out loud? 

That just confirms that you were way too credulous and gullible in the first place, to the point where it should be a matter of real weight whether or not you should be issued a credit card or allowed to operate heavy machinery. 

Then, from the military history blog A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, another extended rumination, this on the Fourth Gulf War. 

Bret Devereaux breaks it down - the preconditions, the circumstances leading to the initial attacks, the current situation, and the potential likely outcomes - in a clear and easily understandable fashion.

The nut graf, in my opinion, is that the whole "who's "winning", who's "losing" arguments miss the point; that there's a reason that, as irking a geopolitical irritant the mullahs have been to the Gulf region, there were damn good reasons that U.S. governments all the way back to Reagan's time resisted the impulse to do more than huck the occasional round downrange at them.

Many of those reasons are all over the current news cycle; Iran's response attacks on regional neighbors, effective closure of the Persian Gulf, and the potential long-term destabilization of the region, or many parts of it.

Worse, as Devereaux points out:

"And you may then ask, here at the end: if I am saying that Iran is being hammered, that they are suffering huge costs, how can I also be suggesting that the United States is on some level losing?

And the answer is simple: it is not possible for two sides to both win a war. But it is absolutely possible for both sides to lose; mutual ruin is an option. Every actor involved in this war – the United States, Iran, arguably Israel, the Gulf states, the rest of the energy-using world – is on net poorer, more vulnerable, more resource-precarious as a result.

In short, please understand this entire 7,000+ word post as one primal scream issued into the avoid at the careless, unnecessary folly of the decision to launch an ill-considered war without considering the obvious, nearly inevitable negative outcomes which would occur unless the initial strikes somehow managed to pull the inside straight-flush. They did not and now we are all living trapped in the consequences."

Although it's also worth pondering this, from earlier in the piece; that the U.S. airstrike on the purported Iranian nuclear storage/production facility back in June of 2025 wasn't just a bit of the usual big-stick Great Power dick-waving..

(which I, at least, thought at the time given that it didn't seem to make sense any other way.) 

...but was actually a major geopolitical mistake because:

"The problem with that strike is that attacking in that way, at that time, meant that Iran would have to read any future attacks by Israel as likely also involving attacks by the United States. So Iran would now have to assume that an Israeli air attack was also likely an American air attack (emphasis mine, not Devereaux's). 

It was hardly an insane assumption – evidently according to the Secretary of State, American intelligence made the exact same assessment.

But the result was that by bombing the Iranian nuclear facilities in June of 2025, the Trump administration created a situation where merely by launching a renewed air campaign on Iran, Israel could force the United States into a war with Iran at any time. (again, emphasis mine)

It should go without saying that creating the conditions where the sometimes unpredictable junior partner in a security relationship can unilaterally bring the senior partner into a major conflict is an enormous strategic error, precisely because it means you end up in a war when it is in the junior partner’s interests to do so even if it is not in the senior partner’s interests to do so."

It's funny - in a "not-funny-like-a-clown" but in the funny-how-sometimes-something-that-looks-idiotic-really-IS-idiotic way - that Trump, a living embodiment of insecure manospheric compensatory tics, who insists that only HE is "the decider", that he's the Ultimate Alpha Male, was trick-fucked into becoming Bibi Netanyahu's Bitch because he's some combination of too stupid, gullible, aggressive, and ignorant to realized that before waving his kinetic dick back in 2025.

 
But, yeah, here we are.

To me the even-bigger problem is that probably about a quarter of the U.S. public are actually okay with all this stupid fuckery, and there's probably another third that either doesn't know, doesn't care, or doesn't understand.

Meaning here we will continue to be.

Is there a way out of this dystopian mess?

Without a better electorate in a better country?

I don't see it. 

What fresh hell is this..?

I'm a soccer fan, but one thing I've been able to miss is the appalling "barstool sports" sort of "fan culture" shit. Apparently it's a thing, and not a good one. One of the staff over at Lawyers, Guns, & Money has a post up about this freakish "sports fandom fandom" that cuts to the real heart of our national problem:

"There are so many parallels between the popularity of Barstool and MAGA, it’s frightening. In fact, as this podcast very astutely points out, things like Barstool and Gamergate were very much proving grounds for MAGA. They’re all cults centered around the most toxic idiots on the internet. They’re all troll armies. They all have an undisguised loathing for women and POC. And most importantly they’re all movements and moments that give people permission to be their absolute worst selves.

Editing to say: It really hit me how much MAGA centers on monetizing being awful and how absolutely dystopian that is"

Tl:dr? "MAGA means never having to say you're sorry you're an asshole."

Here's my question, though; what the everlovin' fuck do you do with someone who WANTS to be an unapologetic asshole?

Seriously.

How do you possible "reach" someone like that?

Because the implicit part of being an unapologetic asshole is that you want, expect, and will fight to ensure that the "public square" is asshole-friendly. You're gonna do everything you can to ensure that there's no, not the slightest hint of, pushback against your assholery. You're never going to back down, give up, or give in.

Which is what we've seen from MAGA since Day Zero.

These dickstains have been loud and proud up in the grille of everyone and everything that has tried to stand up to or against them. Now, especially, since they have all the levers of federal power they've forced their opponents to bend the knee. And to their eternal shame, many have; universities, media conglomerates, pundits, functionaries.

Which is why I keep repeating; we, the non-asshole non-MAGAts, need to realize that

We

Are

At

War

with these people and their institutions.

They know they are; their openly stated objectives are to crush us and destroy everything we value. They are not our fellow Americans, not our fellow citizens, but our mortal enemies.

Because that sort of person is effectively unredeemable our battle must not be directed at them but against those around them, the non-voter, the marginal MAGAt (who cannot be won but who can be disheartened or frightened and terrorized into passivity), the "independent".

We have to detach and discourage the auxiliaries if we are ever to hope to crush the MAGAts.

Because that has to be our ultimate goal.

The lessons of Reconstruction, and the post-WW2 occupations, need to be absorbed this time.

After WW2 we hung the enemies, and hunted and terrified their partisans into fearful silence. After our own Civil War we pardoned the enemies and, as part of reconciling our society, let them craft their shitty Lost Cause stories into our national myths.

But. 

Assholes are always gonna asshole. There's no changing them, or that. Instead they must be forced into silence, and since they feel no shame, by fear. Fear of retribution. Fear of consequences. 

After 1945 we learned what we'd failed to absorb after 1865. 

Bill Sherman said "Fear is the beginning of wisdom". 

But for those who choose never to be wise, fear is, at least, the beginning of silence.

In my personal opinion? The best silence for these people is the silence of the grave. As Stalin was wont to say, if people are the problem? No people, no problem.

But I will take living but fearful silence if that's the best we can get from them.

Just for fun - Friday palate cleanser

Given the dire and dreary doings of the Second Fraudulency Administration, I've been trying to actively avoid all their bullshit in the news - it just makes be want to kill people and break shit, which at this point is still somewhere between "treason" and revolution" - and instead I've been trying to find things to enjoy.

Like this; "The Logistics of Road War in the Wasteland" from Bret Devereaux's wonderful A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry blog.  

Besides the pure entertainment value of a serious discussion of the mechanized combat of the "Mad Max" world (and related/similar movies or video games) it introduced me to this insane IRL thing; the "Toyota War" in Chad.

Now there's a fun subject for a "battles" piece! Toyota Hilux versus T-55! I could see doing either the January 1987 Battle of Fada, or the larger and more critical engagement where the Chadians took the Libyan post at Ouadi Doum in March...any interest in either or both? 

What's not to like?

I think I need to get my hands on a copy of Ken Pollack's Armies of Sand first, though. It's supposed to have the best account of the Toyota War, and I'll take a look and see.

But if you've got a moment or two, go read up on Devereaux's take on the Road Warriors:

"All of that is a kind of warfare that actually supports the fractionalization of power, producing the sort of smaller-scale warlordism that the fiction tends to want in these settings. But rather than display their power with massive (but very vulnerable) war rigs, such warlords would likely attempt to overawe foes with impressive displays of their large stock of technicals. And, this being a Mad Max themed setting, by large spikes placed on everything."

Make sure you read the footnote that I've omitted from the end of the final sentence in the above quote to learn more about the "armored codpiece". 

Which reminds me of...

..."Ironlily's" cute take on 14th Century religious orders of knighthood, girly Gothic armor (including armored codpieces) and (okay, yeah, a lot of...) cartoon cheesecake in general. 

Nothing serious, but kind of adorable (in a sort of smutty way...)

OTOH here's cartoon "adorable" without the smutty: Carol Cao and her delightful "little life in the woods" artwork:

(I apologize for the Muskrat link, but Cao doesn't seem to be posting anywhere else...). I love both the sweet feeling of her art and the attention to detail of the things like the rebounding raindrops on the little temple roof, or the suggestion of the kitty hanboks.

I've also been trying to find kind, soothing, happy reads. These have included the very "cozy" little adventure story The Teller of Small Fortunes by Julie Leong as well as several more chapters in Kashiki Takuo's series ハクメイとミコチ, Hakumei to Mikochi. 

Not all of this effort has been successful; I'm presently struggling with Axie Oh's The Floating World. 

I love the idea - Korean folklore meets science-fantasy (think a sort of Ghibli-world-building only without the aircraft...) and hero's quest fiction - but the writing just plods. It's not gross or face-smacking, it's a slow drip of little stuff, like this:

"...they waited for the guards to pass, their bright lanterns giving away their positions."

I don't know any other kind of lanterns, do you? I mean, if the guards had something dim, something like little chemlights, that only hinted at their passage, sure, that would be worth detailing. But "bright" is kind of a default "lantern", innit?

Or this, just a couple of sentences later, when one of these random NPC guards stumbles into our heroes:

"Sighting Sunho, he lashed out at him with a concealed dagger."

Not really "concealed", is it now, seeing as how the guy "lashed out" with it? And how do you "lash" with a dagger? Did the author mean "slashed"? Then why not say that? Mind you, slashing with a dagger - unless it's made on the lines of a full-size bowie or a pesh-kabz (a "Khyber knife" for you Great Game/Kipling fans...) is kind of a mug's game, especially given that the Macguffin of this part of the story is that these aren't random rent-a-cops but "Sareniyan soldiers", the regular army of the Evil Warlord dude of the story.

I mean, I get what the author was trying to say; this troop pops out of a door and immediately attacks our heroes who are very obviously not supposed to be where he finds them. Presumably because he's not on guard at the moment he lacks his issue weapon - probably a spear or sword, based on the worldbuilding - so he whips out his sidearm knife to take them out.

So that seems pretty easy to me:

"They stared at the guard and the guard stared back - for only a moment before drawing his belt knife and stabbing (slashing?) at Sunho, the closest of the three intruders."

Fixed.

I've got a couple of almost-sure-winners on hold at the library; Chris Moore's Anima Rising, more inspired wierdness from the Dirty Jobs guy, and a local author (Mark Pomeroy)'s Tigers of Lents, a semifictional story about soccer and our local Felony Flats, the southeast Portland neighborhood once famed for the New Copper Penny and now the home of the ridiculous Portland Pickles amateur baseball outfit.

Portland being Portland you knew there'd be a homegrown reaction to the feeling of being mulcted by big-time pro sports outfits like the Trailblazers and Timbers. This "Pickles" ballclub is one.

(The other is a nonleague soccer team run by the Pickles people called the "Bangers".

I've never seen the Bangers but if the Pickles level of play is anything to go by, well... let's say that I was a Cubs fan back in the day so I've seen some pretty bad baseball, but...

Then you realize that these are college dudes who aren't getting paid, so. 

 One last "fun thing" - Adult High School.

 This little chanbara/bad girl/school comic is just 100%, no-holds-barred, pure fun.

 

 Like BIG fun.

 

If you have a moment and a spare dime. go kick Alexis Flower a buck or three.

That's all I got. 

Blogrolling, resentment, and pronoun trouble

Paul Campos has a good piece at the Lawyers Guns and Money site that pretty much spells out why our particular system makes these people so dangerous:

“But what gives these paranoid visions so much political power is that there is, in fact, an empirical reality in which the MAGA base is suffering a massive ongoing status degradation. The country is becoming less white, less religious, and less culturally conservative, while people who aren’t part of the increasingly mobile and increasingly credentialed professional classes are bearing the brunt of increasing economic inequality, and the precarity that comes with it.

It’s an oversimplification to say…that the Republican party is now divided between college educated people who are embarrassed by Trump and prefer their tax cuts and cultural reaction is a more genteel form, and a working class base that is all in on the MAGA paranoid vision, but there is something to this.

Trump’s support comes primarily from downwardly mobile less educated white people, small business owners obsessed with low taxes, lax regulation, and good old days (read: white supremacist) nostalgia, along with a non-trivial percentage of ethnic minority members who are attracted enough to the authoritarian patriarchal cultural reaction he represents to ignore their own out status within that hierarchy.

It’s a coalition that reflects a rapidly dying vision of America, but one that may not die fast enough to save an increasingly sclerotic constitutional system that, as almost all the experts Edsall interviews assert, is moving into a potentially existential crisis.”

In a more flexible system such as a parliamentary one the whackos would be firewalled into a Monster Raving Looney Party.

(Which, as Israel is showing us, is NOT a vaccine against these political pathogens – get enough of them who are willing to cooperate and you still get Hitler! – so a lot depends on the sociopolitical bedrock beneath the system…)

But here? They’ve taken over one of the two parties we’re limited to by the Constitution and FPTP voting.

 
Guess what? Turns out that maybe the Constitution IS a suicide pact! Whoodathunkit?

(A brief note re: the graphics for this one. I'm frankly sick of posting pictures of MAGAts to go with these. Instead I'm indulging my fondness for 1) old Warner Bros. cartoons and 2) Hayao Miyazaki. In case you're not familiar with the bottom image, it's Bugs as Howl and Daffy as Sophie cosplaying the iconic scene from Howl's Moving Castle. 

Here's the original:

I totally stan for the revision version's expressions; Daffy panicking (because that's what Daffy does) and Bugs smug and kind of smarmy (because, well...Bugs).

Anyway, even in the darkest timeline there's points of light. Excuse me while I go an rewatch Chuck Jones 1952 classic Rabbit Seasoning...

Oh. and...

 Ceterum autem censeo the GOP esse delendam.

Soon...

 

I love this so much.

This awesome piece of Nevermore is by Jim Wright, of Stonekettle Station, on Twitter, proving that, just like I said; if you don't go looking for fucking Nazis there's still lots of good stuff over there.

Light Housekeeping

Quick note: I've had to do a bit of cleaning up the sidebar where I've put up links to what I'm reading or sites I want to push up. I removed several links.

That's always a bit saddening, because it means that I've lost some friends from my digital life.

One of the saddest was having to remove The Hidden Thimble.

I've followed Talyssa and Siree's blog for years, as long as I've posted their blog up on the right side of my page. I've enjoyed the hell out of their adventures both for the adventures themselves and for the way the two of them shine through the words and pictures on their blog like good deeds in a weary world.

But their last post was over a year ago. 

The site has drifted, untended, since then. I'm afraid my friends have moved on in the way people on the internet do. I hope that means they've moved on to other happy, adventurous places. I hope they're well, and enjoying their lives.

But I'll never know. And that's a trifle hard. As much as you can "like" someone you've never met IRL, I liked the Thimblers a lot.

Another loss is Maia's The Voyagers. 

(Here's what I remind the reader that Graphic Firing Table's privacy policy is that we don't show anyone's face outside family - and The Girl has made clear that it's not okay to show her face, either, so that's no longer a thing - so if someone is mentioned in a photo it's only from the knees down. Cats? They're attention whores, so they don't count...)

Not Maia herself - she's still busy and creating beautiful things over at Feather and Stone - but her account of her voyage through her and her amazing child's lives.

That's been dark since 2019, and I have to conclude that she, like so many other friends, has moved on from blogging. She joins the rest of the crew that was linked by our adoptions, like Carrie (formerly of walternatives) and India (formerly of The Atomic Ranch) who are nu kyr'adyc, shi taab'echaaj'la; not gone, merely marching far away.

I still need to do some more work here. The US Army Field Artillery site isn't linking anymore, and the TechDirt links to some sort of gibberish.

The happier news is that I have some new places to link to, but that's a matter for another post.

Fuck the Bread

From the Paris Review, a small gem of crystalline brilliance by Sabrina Orah Mark:

"I like it here. I feel like I’m in Gertrude Stein territory, where the buttons are so tender they’ve come undone. The whole kingdom is spilling out of itself. There are holes everywhere. To the east, a pile of impossible tasks of my own making. To the west, a mountain of broken crowns I will melt and recast into a machete. “This is so nice,” writes Gertrude Stein, “and sweet and yet there comes the change, there comes the time to press more air. This does not mean the same as disappearance.” It’s day sixty of homeschooling. Eli asks me to remind him how to make an aleph. I take a pencil, and draw it for him very carefully. “It’s like a branch,” I say, “with two little twigs attached.” “You know what, Mama?” he says. “You’d make a really good teacher.” “Thank you,” I say. And then I show him how to draw a bet."

Go. Read.

It's a great quantity of goodness in a ha'pennyworth of your time.

Biblical Soil Science

My work here in Everett has been postponed, so I'm sitting in the hotel waiting to hear from my temporary masters on what they need me to do for them, if anything, and idly surfing the 'net. And in so doing I came across Frank Moraes' essay on atheism and theology.

In it Frank concludes:

"One can’t be an atheist without knowing what it is to be a theist. And most atheists don’t seem to even know what God is supposed to be. What they seem to be against is ignorant people with childish beliefs. If that’s the case, we should call such people areligious. They don’t know or care enough to have an opinion about God, and thus don’t deserve to be called atheists."

Hmmm.

I guess I fit into one of these niches. I'm an atheist, or, at the very least, a "don'tgiveashit-ist". My feeling is that I have no fucking idea what is God, or gods, or what it or he or she or they do. Or whether they do anything. Or care, really.

(I should note that it seems to me that if what I see as human life, life on this planet, is really the province of a God, or gods, then those Powers are, at best, some pretty fucking capriciously feckless sonsofbitches and, at worst, some serious assholes).

If people did what those Higher Powers are accused, or credited, with doing in the physical world they'd get kicked from here to Armageddon.

Plagues? Floods? The Penn/Madonna Shanghai Surprise? WTF, deities? You got nothing better to do than eff with people bringin' that shit?

Moraes links to an earlier post of his that references S.J. Gould's idea of "non-overlapping magisteria"; the idea that science (or, at least, non-theological explanations for physical matters) can happily exist side-by-side with theological/philosophical/spiritual explanations of moral and ethical (and ontological) matters.

Moraes' problem is that, apparently, there are a group of atheists who are not content with the Gould idea but are directly attacking religious ideas of, well, pretty much everything. And that this attack is focused on the "worst" aspects of theology, the "Answers in Genesis" sorts of theology that insist that God created dinosaurs and humans and the one rode the other (or something; I never bother much with the AIG people). Moraes wants atheists to a) ignore the AIG dumbshit and b) learn genuine theology - at least, learn enough to understand it - if they want to debate it.

But as I commented on Frank's post, I think the biggest problem is this “worst theology” and how predominant it is over the “better”, and how destructive, and I think that's why the theists are attacking religion, not because they don't understand the higher thinking or care.

There was no Great Flood. We know that. "Know" as in know; the "flood" of Genesis and the Middle Eastern texts that preceded and fomented it were legends, stories, fictions. The textural references to it are stories made up by people who saw things they didn’t have the intellectual tools to understand.

There were no humans riding dinosaurs. "God" didn't give humans "dominion" over volcanoes and oceans and squirrels. That's "Answers in Genesis", the Bible (or Torah, or Quran) as soil survey manual. Iron Age superstition and ignorance dressed up in churchy clothes.

And you'd think there'd be no point attacking or debating that.

But, dammit, this sort of “Answers in Genesis” theologian are all over the fucking place, and their nonsense contributes mightily to the very real damage that religion does in the public square.

It's that sort of Vacation Bible School "theology" that permeates the GOP and helps them in their quest to free their patrons to resume dumping shit into Love Canal and crap into the sky and credulous nonsense (or canned "facts") into kid's brains.

It's that sort of simplistic "theology" that encourages We the People to make stupid choices based on what we've been told about God and Man and the world around us (and politics as God-bothering, another real problem).

THAT’s why the atheists go after them, I think.

Not because they’re a “worthy” opponent Moraes wants to engage...but because, as rubbishy as they are, the Answers-in-Gensis sort of “theology” is much more destructive than the theology of the "better" sort, the kind of theology of people of faith willing to start from the NOMA standpoint.

To put it in videogame terms, it’s all well and good to recommend going up against the boss in an epic struggle.

But it doesn’t help when the damn trashy little minions are running all over the place wrecking the joint.

(h/t to Gods Playing Poker for the comic...)

The Art of the Deal

From somebody named Corey Robin (via, and h/t to, Frank Moraes):

"The Talmud tells a story: the reason God covenanted with the Jews was that they were the only ones who were willing to take the deal.

According to a commentary on Deuteronomy, “When God revealed Himself to give the Torah to Israel, He revealed Himself not only to Israel but to all the nations.” First God goes to the children of Esau, asking them if they will accept the Torah. They ask him what it contains, God says, “Though shalt not murder,” they say, no thanks.

God goes to the Ammonites and Moabites. Same response, only for them the prohibition against adultery is the deal-breaker. He goes to the Ishmaelites, to all the peoples of the earth. Each time, they turn him down. They can’t accept some portion of the Torah’s instructions and injunctions.

Then God comes to the Jews. They don’t ask questions. They simply “accepted the Torah, with all of its explanations and details.” So God “surrendered them [the Torah and all of its details] to Israel.”

You almost get a sense, reading the midrash, of God’s weariness. The Jews aren’t his first choice, but they’ll take the deal. God’s exhausted, history is made."

And...

...then His chosen people spend the next several-odd thousand years quibbling about, reneging on, breaking (or at the very least, trying to hedge and/or cheat on), the “deal” they made. God spends an assload of time He’d probably rather be creating galaxies, constructing mysteries, and contemplating the Universe hanging around some shitty mudball in the Sol system smiting worthless little pissant heretics, making up new rules to keep his choice from fucking with the deal, and arguing with dissatisfied dickheads and pissed-off prophets.

He just THOUGHT he was exhausted after His initial search. Compared to his subsequent dealings with the Chosen People.

Which just proves the point of which his Son reminds us in his parables: “Don’t EVER agree to anything when you’re short on food, sleep, or sex.”

Thus endeth the lesson.

Thanks be to God.

This is why I don't write about U.S. politics anymore.

Because we have Pierce.

And, as usual, he sticks the landing:

"If the elite political press is going to treat fiction as fact as long as the fiction is delivered in a compelling, dramatic manner, then the country truly is lost. If Carly Fiorina is adjudged to be the winner of a debate simply because of how "crisply" she delivered lies about Planned Parenthood, or how "forcefully" she responded to a cartoon like Donald Trump, or how "sharply" she presented her nonsense about reining in Vladimir Putin with "aggressive military maneuvers" on his borders, then there is a problem in the political process that is metastasizing by the hour. Ronald Reagan was the index patient for that problem. They truly are his children now."

This is one of the two parties we have allowed ourselves. This is the face of a third of our "fellow citizens". This is the "conservative" party. This is what somewhere between a quarter and a third of the U.S. public wants.

We really are so, so, so, so fucked.

Tuesday Jukebox: Prisoners of Starvation Edition

From the Croatian Slovene group Laibach, whose work is either the most ingeniously subtle neogothic-neofascist neo-prog rock I've ever encountered or the most ingeniously subtle send-up of neogothic-neofascist neo-prog rock I've ever encountered (not so much this one but their cover of Opus' 1980s hit Life is Life).



As The Donald would say, youuuuuuuuuge extra credit for the Internationale. I loves me some Internationale.

Remember when I said a year or so back that I just had nothing more to say about the U.S. political process? That the entire maguffin was so thoroughly riddled with ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision, that the money had so thoroughly corrupted the whole shithouse, that the ginormous elephant-in-the-room-problem was that somewhere between a quarter and a third of U.S. citizens identified as Republicans and that the sorts of people who were still Republicans were clearly the sort of human dross that intelligent civilizations would find too credulous to be made into citizens, too stupid to be made into subjects, and too vicious to be made into slaves?

Well, that hasn't changed. I still have nothing worth saying that hasn't been said better elsewhere, and my opinion of the nation in general hasn't changed, either: We. Are. So. Fucked.

Fortunately for you Paul Bibeau still does, and he's tearing up the Trumpster. This post alone is worth the price of admission and the admission is free.

You really need to buy a copy of his book, too.

Oh, and those of you in need of more bloggage from this shebeen?

In about a month I am going to have my hip resocketed, borescoped, and pulled over. I will be completely bedridden for weeks and then housebound for months. So, be warned. Idle hands are a devil's playground, and I suspect that there is a devil in me, yet.

A youuuuuge devil, full of barbed spite and ire.

But we'll see.

Liebster Award - Graphic Firing Table Edition

So those winsome fashionistas (and connoisseurs of fine food, travel, and Korean culture, pop and otherwise) at The Hidden Thimble have tagged me for something called a "Liebster" Award. This thing is (as Talyssa and Siree describe it) an "...award is given to bloggers by bloggers like a chain to encourage and support the discovery of other upcoming blogs out there."

Anyway, there are some rules for this. According to the Thimblers, I need to; 1) thank the person who nominated me, 2) answer the questions from my nominator, 3) nominate bloggers who have less than 500 followers. (Basing this on Bloglovin, if not then Instagram “microblog”) 4) Create 11 new questions, 5) notify my nominees through social media.

So, okay - first, thanks, Siree and Talyssa!

Then...questions? Sure. I can do questions.

1. What’s the story behind your blog name?

well...the slogan up at the header of the blog reads "...firing unobserved rounds at anything moving." I was an artillery fire direction chief when I was in the Army, and I still write a lot about military issues. A "graphic firing table" is a sort of slide rule the gunners use to adjust fire. In one of my first posts I described it as: "...a simple but useful tool that helps you to commit broadcast mayhem. Kinda like a blog." So, there.

2. What does a normal day in your life look like?

Wake up before daybreak. Make coffee, feed cats. Drive to work. Drive to job site. Explain to contractor the this isn't fucking Burger King and he doesn't get to do it his way, he has to do it the way he's supposed to (which is my job - I'm the dirt nanny). Drive back to shop, write up field report. Do lab test, set up drilling exploration for tomorrow. Drive home. Cook dinner. Read to kid(s). Cuddle with wife. Blog. Sleep. Repeat.

3. Tea or coffee?

Coffee, cream. Something dark and earthy; Sumatran is good.

4. Why did you start your blog?

I love the sound of my own voice and I'm an opinionated sonofabitch. It was that or stand on a box in the park ranting at strangers. This way is less degrading.

5. What’s the best advice you have ever gotten?

In blogging, or in life? In life, probably "You're not nearly as important as you think you are." and "Why are you afraid of doing/saying/trying that? What's the worst that could happen?" In blogging, probably "If you write what interests you you will interest others."

6. What is your favorite post that you’ve written? (Please provide link!)

I think maybe the one about the great Ice Age floods in the Pacific Northwest called "When Da Levee Bruk".

"...dissolve into hopeless panic before the wall of water sweeps you all away into chaos and the darkness of the vanished years. Or perhaps you can only stand there, transfixed, staring at the long white line across the black horizon, as the first cold puff of wind racing out before the waters shivers your cheek like a lover’s last caress."

Sometime I can flat-ass write.

7. What is the most exciting thing about blogging for you?

The nature of it as epistolary friendship; meeting and talking to people - like the Thimblers, and you readers - from very different places and with very different mindsets. That's why I like comments; it takes this whole thing a step further, from me talking to us having a conversation. Letting my inner curmudgeon out for a walk.

8. What’s your favourite social media platform?

The only SMing I do is Facebook, and that only because I have a number of geographically distant friends that migrated over from blogging.

9. Do you think of yourself as an introvert or an extrovert?

Very much an extrovert.

10. What or who is your current obsession?

For some reason I've been fascinated with religion, at least, the variety on display in these various "Religious Freedom" laws being passed in the redder parts of the United States.

Soccer, of course.

So. Blogs...who else should you go read?

Well...Goblinbooks, of course.

An old and peculiar favorite of mine: D.D. Tinzeroes

The Snarky Penguin; Badtux

Labrys, The Experiential Pagan

And Lisa Jakub's blog...tho I have no idea whether it's a "micro" blog or not, she's a fine writer and she swears like a trooper.

Now I need to go put ice on my rotator cuff - I think I sprained something patting myself on the back.

Fierce, and bald, and short of breath

This post over at the Girl With The White Parasol (who's pretty amazingly terrific about movies, by the way, if you like the movies) got me thinking.

Because it's about movies (no, duh!), and actors, and acting, and, in particular, the acting of Marion Robert Morrison, who you probably know better as "John Wayne".

I have an odd sort of relationship with John the Wayne.

I loved his flicks when I was a kid, in part because the ol' Duke looks a lot like my father the Master Chief. Plus, well...he was the tall-in-the-saddle guy. The hero. The Ringo Kid, full of decency and strength.

It wasn't until I grew up, and joined the Army, that I began to have problems with the Duke.

Aubyn at TGWTWP sums up those problems thusly:

"Wayne knew that he owed all his success to his audience and he believed it was his responsibility to live up to that image. This belief would cost him plenty. Although he played the soldier many times onscreen, Wayne never served in World War II and this failure ate at him, fueling the macho militarism he would express later in life."

But I think The Problem of John Wayne is bigger, and goes deeper, than just that.

Wayne didn't just "never serve" in the war that defined his generation. In 1941 - possibly with the aid of his studio, but possibly not - Wayne was assigned draft status "3-A"; "deferred for [family] dependency reasons." At the time he might have had good reasons for staying out of the fight. Although we now think of him as a big star of the Forties he was a big star - of the LATE Forties. In 1941 he'd just had his breakthrough role as the Ringo Kid in Ford's Stagecoach. He was still a "struggling young actor" with a toehold in the studio system in '41, and spending three years on a destroyer might have 86ed his career and his family's shot at security.

But that wasn't the end of Wayne's curious lack of ferocity for actual fighting.

Wayne worked his way up the studio ladder quickly in the early Forties. By the last couple of years of the war he was a made guy; he could easily have volunteered and never lost a real shot at a movie career. He is supposed to have sent in some p-work to John Ford's Naval Photographic outfit but never followed through on it. There was always another movie to make.

Wayne was reclassified "2-A" in 1944 - "deferred in support of [the] national interest." for his war film work. After a month the Selective Service decided to revoke many previous deferments - remember, by '44 the U.S. manpower well was running dry, the bodies were piling up in France and the Pacific, and even old married guys and war-plant workers were getting their draft notices - and reclassified him 1-A. Wayne's Wikipedia entry states:

"Wayne did not attempt to prevent his reclassification as 1-A (draft eligible), but Republic Studios was emphatically resistant to losing him; Herbert J. Yates, President of Republic, threatened Wayne with a lawsuit if he walked away from his contract and Republic Pictures intervened in the Selective Service process, requesting Wayne's further deferment."

But...this is John the Wayne we're talking about! Mister "Green Berets", the embodiment of Sixties and Seventies superpatriotism! How come the young Duke didn't insist on doing what so many of his studio counterparts were doing and joining the Good Fight? As for the story about Yates, in his biography of Wayne Gary Wills notes that no other studios took action against their actors - many of them stars such as Clark Gable, Tyrone Power, Henry Fonda, Robert Montgomery, and Jimmy Stewart - that joined up. Frankly, that sounds as lame as the old "football injury" story about Wayne that is a Sixties fabrication to explain his lack of wartime service.

"Cecil Adams" at The Straight Dope has an entertaining theory about why the future COL Kirby wasn't so eager to take on the Japs or Krauts:

"Nobody really knows why; Wayne didn't like to talk about it. A guy who prided himself on doing his own stunts, he doesn't seem to have lacked physical courage. One suspects he just found it was a lot more fun being a Hollywood hero than the real kind. Many movie star-soldiers had enlisted in the first flush of patriotism after Pearl Harbor. As the war ground on, slogging it out in the trenches seemed a lot less exciting. The movies, on the other hand, had put Wayne well on the way to becoming a legend. "Wayne increasingly came to embody the American fighting man," Wills writes. In late 1943 and early 1944 he entertained the troops in the Pacific theater as part of a USO tour. An intelligence bigshot asked him to give his impression of Douglas MacArthur. He was fawned over by the press when he got back. Meanwhile, he was having a torrid affair with a beautiful Mexican woman. How could military service compare with that?"

Actually, I wonder if even at this point, even while all this fawning and torrid Mexican womanizing was going on, that Wayne didn't get some small sense of how this failure to put himself at risk might become an issue later on.

William Manchester talks about Wayne getting the bird from servicemen in WW2, an incident that I knew about long before I read Manchester's actual account of it:

"After my evacuation from Okinawa, I had the enormous pleasure of seeing Wayne humiliated in person at Aiea Heights Naval Hospital in Hawaii. Only the most gravely wounded, the litter cases, were sent there.... Each evening Navy corpsmen would carry litters down to the hospital theater so the men could watch a movie. One night they had a surprise for us. Before the film the curtains parted and out stepped John Wayne, wearing a cowboy outfit...He grinned his aw-shucks grin, passed a hand over his face and said, ‘Hi ya, guys!' He was greeted by a stony silence. Then somebody booed. Suddenly everyone was booing. This man was a symbol of the fake machismo we had come to hate, and we weren't going to listen to him. He tried and tried to make himself heard, but we drowned him out, and eventually he quit and left."

You would think that the sort of man who had lived through something like that would have become, if not reticent, at least a little more ambivalent on the subject of war and fighting, military service and patriotism, than the man Wayne grew to be.

The Wayne I remember as a man was the Wayne of the Sixties and Seventies, and that Wayne was so virulent a "patriot" and "American", so much a symbol of fake machismo as to be almost a parody, one of Sassoon's scarlet Majors.

Here's The Rockford Rascal quoting him quoting Wayne on the subject of killing the native inhabitants of North America:

"I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them [the Indians], if that's what you're asking. Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves."

You can practically hear Wayne's thoughts...all that good land and all those wholesome Europeans wanting it, who the hell were those damn redsticks to keep US out, those selfish bastards!?

When I watch a film I try to see the character not the actor. But for me, with Wayne, it's very, very difficult. He so often plays "John Wayne" that it's hard not to see Wayne the man, not Wayne-the-actor-playing-a-Civil-War-cavalry-officer.

What doesn't help is the place he has come to hold in many other American's minds. I had a roommate in Panama who really, really luuuurved him some John the Wayne. He'd watch any Wayne movie, even awful shit like The Green Berets, even ridiculous, endless, tedious tripe like The Alamo. And get him started on the man himself? Seems that for SGT Meany John Wayne was the living embodiment of America. "A great American, a hero", SGT Meany kept calling the Duke.

I would look at him slantwise.

"You do know that ol' Duke never really did all that stuff, right? Never fought in a war, didn't defend the Alamo, wasn't ever a cop, wasn't ever a pilot, or a cowboy, or a DA. He was an actor, a guy who made his living pretending to be things he wasn't."

I might as well have been speaking Lithuanian. To this guy Wayne was the real thing, a hero, as much as symbol of America as a flag, or an eagle, or an NFL football.

Since my childhood I've run into a lot of other people like my old roommate. Many of them seem to be as politically conservative as Wayne was, and you can't shake them from the idea that the guy was some sort of ginormous American "hero"...and I wonder how much of that goes back to Wayne himself and his "legend", the image of him as he appeared on the screen; fighting man, American soldier (or sailor), patriot, going into harm's way to serve his country.

Only...he didn't.

Not only that, when he had the chance to do, and be, all of those things he chose not to.

I don't begrudge him that choice. Any man who can choose peace over war is a wise man. But, having made that choice, such a man would do well to remember that choice and have the grace to refrain from loudly encouraging other young heroes to hasten up the line to death.

Wayne did not, and for that reason I still find myself uncomfortable with his portrayals of military sacrifice.

The guy made some hellacious fine movies, and did some fine work on-screen.

But the man's self-forged patriotism clangs so fiercely, the trumpet of war he sounded is still so loud and so brassy that I can't forget the man often enough to appreciate the work of the actor, and that, to me, is a damning thing.

Kaiju Hentai!

Every so often something utterly innocuous just tickles the living shit out of me. For example:

Over at Lawyers, Guns & Money one of the bloggers (bspencer, to be specific) does something called a "Friday Creature Feature" where she profiles some sort of paleontological critter. Today's was the Permian reptile Dimetrodon - that's the dinosaur-y looking one with the big sail on his back, right?

OK, so I enjoy this little feature and I'm reading down the comments section and I come to this:

Denverite says:
April 18, 2014 at 12:59 pm

So I had no idea these “mammal-like reptiles” were around long before the reptilian dinosaurs.

Yeah, a lot of people don’t realize that dinosaurs and mammals really kind of evolved parallel with each other. A good way to think of it is that the dinosaurs were the reptiles that evolved into birds, and the mammals were the reptiles that evolved into rats.

And in the comment string to this comment are the following:

mike in dc says:
April 18, 2014 at 4:42 pm

B-B-But then, where did Godzilla come from, if not from the unnatural union of a stegosaur and a T.Rex?
Reply

sharculese says:
April 18, 2014 at 4:57 pm

Well, see, when an undersea lizard and a nuclear blast love each other very much…

And that's the point where I completely lost it and laughed so hard my Diet Coke came out my nose.

Tears cannot restore her. Therefore I weep.

One of my sort-of-forbidden pleasures is the cinematic stylings of the Self-Styled Siren. I am a great fan of the studio films of the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties and she has a studio full of stories, observations, critiques, revelations, and appreciations of them.

Here's the thing, though. She so often writes about the cinematic and movie-related things she enjoys that it's easy to forget that the Siren can flat-out, pure-D, stomp-down, kick-ass, tear-the-roof-off-the-muthsucka fucking write.

Every once in a while, though, she reminds us. Here's a terrific little story for your enjoyment; Manhattan Thoughts on a Hot Evening

"...she was most likely weeping because Citibank has plenty of money, and she does not."

Pure brilliance.

Fracture Lines

The Boy and I went to see Oz, the Great and Powerful the other night. And this should warn you; if you haven't seen it yet and want to - there be Spoilers About Oz Ahead.



Anyway, the original plan was to go see the film playing down at our local St. John's theater as Family Movie Night. But the Girl felt poorly (she had been fighting a stubborn cold for the past day) and she begged off, asking her mother to stay home with her.



Had it been her brother I would have suspected that he was sandbagging, using the cold as a face-saving way to avoid seeing a film that (from the trailers we'd seen on television) had some fairly frightening moments.



But Missy is a fearless little soul and she seems to have a much firmer grasp of what is fiction and what is fact; she can view films and stories and television that scare her older brother witless without so much as a shiver. "That's not scary." she will announce in that flat tone that little girls who are dead solid certain of themselves can employ.

So, instead, the Boy and I drove to "downtown" St. Johns in the spitty rain and ran inside the arcade that shelters the doors to the old building.

The moviehouse is a great old place; it has been showing flicks since it was built in 1925 (as "McCreadie's Venetian" - see the picture below) and as we waited in line at the small ticket window I couldn't help imagining that some earlier St. Johns father and son - perhaps even the father and son that had moved into our little house when it built just three years earlier - had waited in line for the original Wizard of Oz back in '39.

I got myself a beer (a nice dry-hopped IPA, too, to celebrate the repeal of the Prohibition of McCredie's day) and a slice of pizza to go with the Boy's popcorn and soda; the joint is now a theater-pub sort of place, very popular here in Portland since the advent of the McMenamin's chain. We settled in with our snacks through the endless previews (although the Boy did like the looks of the upcoming entry in the G.I. Joe franchise so I may be in for another movie night soon, just me and him...)

And then the film began.

Let me say upfront; it's not a "great movie". Frankly, I loves me some Sam Raimi and expected better of him. It's overlong. It drags in stretches, and the opening Kansas sequence is kind of a bust. And I wasn't able to pin down what the hell Michelle Williams was trying to do as Annie/Glinda. Was she trying to seem flirtatious? Mysterious? I have no idea. She's very good at cute and spunky, though, and that went a long way towards making her Glinda likeable.



But that really didn't make a difference. A Wizard of Oz movie isn't about "good" or "bad"; it's about magic.

And flying monkeys. And even MORE bizarre creatures. And little girls made of porcelain. And wizards, munckhins, and spectacle.

And Oz has all that in job lots.

The Boy liked the heck out of it. He was frightened by a couple of the scarier moments - he really is a very gentle little guy for all that he pretends to be rough and tough. He loved that the Head Witch (Evanora, the future-wicked-witch-of-the-East) could throw lightning like Emperor Palpatine in Star Wars,



and (true movie geek - or at least Star Wars geek - that he is) noted that Evanora/Palps both turns her sister into Darth Vader...



...AND has a final throwdown with Glinda/Yoda in the throne room/Senate Chamber complete with lightning sumo.



I enjoyed it, too, for what it was; a sort of simultaneous riff on and tribute to the original. It hit all the canonical nodes (flying monkeys, green witches, munchkins, Winkies marching around chanting "Ore-e-o") while being very much different in spirit. The 1939 Wizard was all about home, and finding your place, and reaffirming the beliefs and loves you'd always had and never appreciated.

The 2013 Oz is about the journey, and exploring new worlds, and finding in them and within yourself new beliefs and loves you hadn't thought you had or ever could have.

But, oddly, the one thing that I really, truly, genuinely loved about the film was China Girl.

I have to stop here and admit something; there's a point in the film where the Wizard and his faithful companion Finley are heading out to the Dark Forest to find and destroy the person that they've been told is the Evil Witch (she isn't, but that's another story). They get to a crossroads, and there's a signpost; one arrow reads "Dark Forest". The other reads "China Town".

And I hate to admit this, but for a moment my mind stopped dead, gibbering.

China Town? In Oz? China Town?

I had a sudden mental image of a pigtailed, squidgy-eyed, bucktoothed cartoon Chinaman - Chink-ee from Gene Yang's American Born Chinese - bowing and chanting "Me doo-ee washee? Velly good washee! Ah-so, Chinkee Chinaman velly good washee-washee!"

I hate it when I do that.

Remember that I was a kid in the Sixties. The popular memory of that time was the Summer of Love and hippies in sandals and VW Bugs. The reality was very different, and included a lot of vicious, open racism. It wasn't just about whites and blacks. I vividly remember hearing a Chinese friend of mine, a slim quiet girl named Anne Kwong, called a "slope" by one of the drumline thugs my freshman year in high school; to my shame I did or said nothing.

But the worst part of that sort of thing is how insidious it is. A lot of that time, and a lot of those thoughts, and words, and images, still live inside my head and struggle to escape, usually at the very worst moment.

But of course, the "China Town" of Oz isn't "Chinatown". It's just what the words say it is; a China Town.

A town made of china.



The China Town sequence was Raimi at the top of his game, and the main character you meet there - the China Girl - was a creation of absolute magic. While I'm an animation fan and a CGI enthusiast in general I'll be the first to admit its limitations. It is very difficult to get a genuine "performance" out of a CGI character; the essential inhumanity of the pixels always seems to force its way through onto the screen.

But when you meet China Girl there is none of that.



I'm not sure why. Some combination of the character design itself, the voice acting of Joey King as well as the way the other actors play off her, and Raimi's direction. But the overall effect is winning, and winsome, and very poignant. I defy you not to love the little character. She's terrific.

And this is where I link to my friend Maia's blog. Because her little girl QQ was another person who fell in love with China Girl.



QQ is a lucky girl; her mom and China Girl got together to make some real magic happen. Go ahead and read her blog post; it is achingly sweet.

But the thing that makes it as touching as the character herself is the teardrop at the heart of the story of the little girl in Denver who is going to sleep tonight with her new friend. As Maia says;

"I'm sure that it did not escape her that this character is an orphan, left without a family or a country, and that she is desperate for a family. Also that she is fragile and injured, but also stubborn, tough and brave."

And - in very different but very similar ways - both are China Girls, who have to find a way to find a new belief, and a new love, with a new family they never expected or hoped to find.

I won't pretend I didn't tear up reading about little QQ's quest for, and meeting with, her little china doll friend.

The other night, though, there was none of that sweet sentiment.

The Boy and I rode home having a discussion of near-critical geeky mass about the parallels between Star Wars and Oz (we agreed on Palps-Evanora-Yoda-Glinda-Vader-Theodora but never could decide who was the Luke Skywalker character; Boy held out for the Wizard, while I insisted that there was no direct match).

The house was dark and silent; we brushed our teeth together barging against each other quietly. He washed his face and gave me a hug and I breathed in the boy-and-popcorn scent of his hair against my cheek. And he went into his bed to burrow into the immense pile of stuffed friends inside, and I went to the computer to blog-read and wait.

And, surely enough, about an hour later I heard the sound of crying.

At first I wasn't sure whether he was awake or not. He's had "night terrors" before; horrific things that simulate nightmares but are far, far below the dream-layer. This wasn't one of those. Boy was barely asleep, frightened by the afterimage of some frightful moment in the film. He was shaking, and crying, and (unlike the night terror state) scooted quickly over into my arms.

I kissed his forehead, still slightly damp with fear, and told him that I had stayed up to watch over him. I asked him if he was frightened by the scary parts of the movie and he nodded, shrinking deeper into my arms. I suggested that, instead, he might dream about how he could make a place for a puppy we might foster over the summer; how he could build a house for the puppy, and make a place for it to play, and all the ways that he could show the puppy that it was safe and loved and welcomed.

And, whether it was the pleasant thoughts of pets, or the sound of my droning on, or the steadiness of my arms around him, the Boy's eyes started to droop. He roused himself to give me a final hug, and tunneled back below the top layer of stuffed critters.

The bare leg that remained exposed looked very fragile and unprotected, like China Girl's as she lays shattered amid the ruins of her family. For we all have our fractures, don't we? Our planes of weakness, the mend-lines of our old breaks like the patterns of ancient porcelain that run across our limbs, like China Girl's.

Or sometimes across our minds, or our hearts.

I stood in the twilit doorway listening the the sound of the Boy's breathing, peaceful again, gently closed his door until just the faintest pillar of light remained streaming out of the room and turned back into the darkened hallway.

Three Way Riot; "Troops of Doom"

Beavering away on the Rhineland 1936 for March, but I wanted to take just a moment to recommend one of my secret vices; Troops of Doom.



What the fuck is a "Troops of Doom"? I hear you ask.

Well, imagine what you would do if you were a grown-up science fiction geek with a lingering love of all those little poseable dolls - sorry, "action figures" - you collected in your G.I. Joe and Star Wars periods and just couldn't bring yourself to give up.



Add to that you had a camera, a lot of time on your hands, mad diorama skilz, and a quirky sense of humor?

You'd probably create a webcomic where the Star Wars stormtroopers and the G.I. Joes and their COBRA adversaries faced off in the three-way free-for-all knockdown-drag-out. Oh, yeah, and you'd throw in those goofy LEGO guys as some sort of freakish super-alien wierdos with mysterious "LEGOtech" powers as the object of all three sides' greed, right?



Add you'd in a wickedly funny gift for dialogue.

And there you'd have "Troops of Doom".



Anyway, aside from recommending the comic to my regular readers I don't know of George Lucas reads this blog. I kinda doubt it, but...if you're reading this; George, dude, you NEED to become a regular reader of "Troops of Doom" because your last couple of movies pretty much sucked pipe, and I hear your talking about making another three and you could do a lot - I mean a REAL lot - worse than hire this guy to write your script.

I guaranfuckingtee he can do better then "I hate sand."

Okay; back to work. But, seriously, check it out; ToD is a total hoot. And you can say I said so.