Monthly Archives: May 2020

really most sincerely dead

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Well, that’s it then. The rule of law is dead. Officially dead. Medically dead, legally dead, dead in every meaningful way. Stone dead. Dead as Marley’s ghost. Deader than that, in fact, since Jacob Marley at least came back in an attempt to set things right. That’s not going to happen here. The rule of law in the United States is as dead as the Wicked Witch of the East. Not only merely dead, but really most sincerely dead.

Comrade Donald Trump killed it. Attorney General Bill Barr helped. Trump pushed it out the window and left it crippled and bleeding in the gutter; Barr finished it off by dropping a cinder block its head. 

I’m not a fan of the FBI, although I recognize their dedication and, to some extent, their sincerity of purpose. What they did to Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn was no different from what law enforcement officers at all levels–federal, state, county, and municipal–do every day. They gathered their facts, they interviewed the suspect, they gave him a chance to tell the truth. He didn’t.

That’s routine interviewing technique. Say you arrest a kid for shoplifting. You have him on the store’s CCTV sliding a pair of expensive sunglasses up his sleeve. You detain the kid and say, “Tell me what happened.” If the kid fesses up, that tells you something. It shows some contrition and you take that into consideration when deciding what to do. If the kid lies, that also tells you something. You know he’s still hoping to get away with it, and you take that into consideration.

Flynn got caught. He was given a chance to tell the truth, and he lied. He pleaded guilty to lying. Then he tried to take it back. Then he re-affirmed his guilty plea. Then he tried to take it back again. That tells you something. He was still hoping to get away with it. And hey, he did.

He betrayed his country, and thanks to complicit political appointees in the Department of Justice, he got away with it. Never spent an hour in jail. Nor will he.

The only hope this nation has of returning to some semblance of the rule of law is if voters turn out in massive numbers–numbers large enough to overcome whatever barriers are put in place to hamper voting. Because if we know one thing for certain, it’s that Trump will cheat. He’ll lie, cheat, steal, connive, do anything he can get away with to win. Because he’s learned there’s nothing to stop him–not the Department of Justice, not Congress, and certainly not his conscience.

Ain’t nothing going to stop him. Unless it’s us.

Wash your hands. Wear a mask. Stay alive. Vote your ass off.

 

honoring their sacrifice

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— Ordinary People: Just curious here, but how come y’all didn’t arrest those two guys who shot and killed Ahmaud Arbery a couple of months ago?
— State of Georgia: Well, we were busy.
— Ordinary People: Busy?
— State of Georgia: You know…dealing with that Cabronivirus hoax thang.
— Ordinary People: Coronavirus?
— State of Georgia: That’s it.
— Ordinary People: But y’all re-opened Georgia for business on April 21st.
— State of Georgia: Don’t it make you proud to be an American? Freedom, baby.
— Ordinary People: So why haven’t those two guys who shot and killed Ahmaud Arbery been arrested and charged with murder?
— State of Georgia: We will, we will. You just hafta be patient. We gotta wait until a grand jury can be held to consider the evidence.
— Ordinary People: When will that happen?
— State of Georgia: Oh, probably by mid-June.
— Ordinary People: Why can’t we do that now?
— State of Georgia: Courts are closed. That Wooham Cabronivirus thing.
— Ordinary People: Are you fucking kidding me?
— State of Georgia: Nope.
— Ordinary People: You opened barbershops and nail salons.
— State of Georgia: Yes, we did. Free enterprise is what makes America great.
— Ordinary People: You opened gyms, for fuck’s sake.
— State of Georgia: Got to get our exercise. A fit nation is a free nation.
— Ordinary People: But you can’t open the courts?
— State of Georgia: Well, we got to be careful and be sensible about this.
— Ordinary People: Those two guys hunted Ahmaud Arbery.
— State of Georgia: Well, now, that hasn’t been proved.
— Ordinary People: They admitted it. They admitted they saw him running in their neighborhood on a Sunday afternoon, they admitted they thought…they thought…he looked like somebody seen on security camera footage committing a break-in in their neighborhood, so they grabbed their guns, hopped in their truck and went hunting for them.
— State of Georgia: All Americans got the right to protect their property.

Another unfortunate Cabronivirus death.

— Ordinary People: He was just running.
— State of Georgia: He grabbed for their gun.
— Ordinary People: Because they were pointing it at him.
— State of Georgia: He thought his life was in danger.
— Ordinary People: Exactly!
— State of Georgia: No, I mean the white guy.
— Ordinary People: The white guy with the gun thought his life was in danger by the black guy jogging?
— State of Georgia: The law says you got the right to protect yourself.
— Ordinary People: Didn’t Ahmaud Arbery have the right to protect himself?
— State of Georgia: That’s why we got to have us a grand jury. To figure out what happened.
— Ordinary People: We know what happened.
— State of Georgia: It’ll all come out in the testimony.
— Ordinary People: Ahmaud Arbery is too dead to testify.
— State of Georgia: And that’s unfortunate, but the law’s the law. We’ll get to that grand jury just as soon as we can.
— Ordinary People: It won’t help Ahmaud Arbery.
— State of Georgia: And that’s a shame, sure is. That Cabronivirus, it’s killed a lot of good Georgians.
— Ordinary People: Jesus suffering fuck.
— State of Georgia: We need to honor their sacrifice by letting decent folks get back to work at the chicken processing plants.

i guess we’re just giving up now?

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Did I get this wrong? I mean, it was only a month ago. I recognize that a month in TrumpTime is like a year in normal time, but still. Only a month ago Comrade Trump’s own coronavirus task force cobbled together a vague set of guidelines that individual states should meet before the country would be allowed to ‘open up again’ (whatever the hell that means).

Bringing out the dead.

Here are the state/regional gating criteria Trump said should be satisfied BEFORE starting the first phase of the comb-over comeback:

A downward trajectory of documented cases within a 14-day period.
OR
A downward trajectory of positive tests as a percent of total tests within a 14-day period (flat or increasing volume of tests).

And remember, that’s not even Phase One. That was supposed to be the criteria before entering Phase One. When did we decide to scrap that?

I mean, sure, the guidelines are pretty vague. None of the terms are defined. For example, what constitutes a ‘documented’ case? What is the base proportion of tests that should be conducted (should we test 25% of the population of the region? 10%? One percent?). But at least it says ‘downward trend‘ so you could reasonably assume that meant the number of cases or positive tests would be…you know…going down. Right?

Apparently not. Take a guess how many regions/states that are now relaxing social distancing guidelines (and isn’t that a nice way to put it…relaxing?) have any sort of downward trend in cases or tests. Go ahead, guess.

If you guessed NONE (and I’m pretty sure you did), you’d be right. None. Just the opposite. The number of cases AND the number of positive Covid-19 tests are uniformly increasing. And the Trump administration officials who SET the guidelines are cheering on the folks who are ignoring them.

It’s completely fucking insane.

Storing the dead in refrigerated trucks.

The only conclusion I can draw from this is that after a few weeks of half-heartedly following some very basic social distancing, the Trump administration — and conservatives in general — have thrown up their collective hands and said, “This shit is hard, no way we can do this, let’s just give up.”

I’m old enough to remember President Obama’s 2008 victory speech, in which he kept speaking the refrain of “Yes, we can.” That sort of optimism and willingness to work hard is gone. We’re now living in the era of “I don’t know, maybe we can, maybe we can’t, I guess we’ll see, but it’s not my responsibility.”

So this is where we are in the United States. As I began to write this, the US had suffered 69,942 confirmed deaths from Covid-19. Confirmed. And we all know there are a lot of Covid-19 deaths that haven’t been officially confirmed. Right now there are 69,968 deaths — twenty-six more people died from Covid-19 while I wrote this.

We know with mathematical certainty there will be more deaths. A LOT more deaths if we don’t follow those basic social distancing guidelines. But our government, and most of Trump’s followers, are apparently okay with that. Because it’s such a bother to wear a mask and stay two meters apart from each other.

Refrigerated ‘morgue’ trucks.

So I guess the current plan — not the worst case scenario, the actual plan — is that we’re just going to accept that at least a thousand Americans will die every day for the foreseeable future. That’s the current price of doing business in the US.

But think about this. If Trump is willing to allow that to happen during an election year, what is he capable of doing in a second term?

ADDENDUM: By the way, stories about Covid-19 deaths usually stop in a metaphorical sense with the word ‘death’. But that’s not what happens in the real world. When somebody dies in a hospital, there’s still work to do. There’s a point at which the patient ceases to be a patient and becomes a body. All the machines have to be disconnected from the body; all the tubes and IVs have to be removed. Then the body has to be cleaned — completely wiped down, tidied up, toe-tagged, bagged. Then transferred to the morgue (or refrigerated truck). It’s an unpleasant job. I’ve done it many many times. It wears on you. Give some thought to the folks who are doing that multiple times a day.

ADDENDUM 2: As I hit ‘save’ for the last time, the butcher’s bill has climbed to 69,977. Do the math.

targeted murder hornets

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Okay, so, I have a plan. It’s still in the very early stages of development, so maybe it’s not actually a ‘plan’. At least not in the sense of a thought-out arrangement or method for doing something. I can’t really say I’ve thought this out terribly well. In fact, it would be more accurate to call it a ‘plot’ rather than a plan, since it’s more of a sequence of intended events rather than an actual arrangeme…well, okay even ‘plot’ is probably inaccurate. Let’s call it a thought experiment. Or wishful thinking.

Okay, so I’ve been doing some wishful thinking about those tuna-brained plonkers parading outside the offices and homes of state government officials who have implemented stay-at-home orders in an effort to reduce the Covid-19 butcher’s bill. I should say that I support anybody’s right to protest. Anybody’s, even if I disagree with the protest, and even if I think the protest is stupid beyond belief.

Yeah, THIS is a guy I’d trust with a firearm. He looks nice.

But damn. Look I know I should feel compassion for folks who are so frightened or timid they feel they need to carry at least one firearm (and preferably more, plus some extra ammo and probably some sort of tactical knife) to go to the market or to exercise their civil liberties. It must be miserable to be that scared all the time. But the sad truth is I’m finding it increasingly difficult to be compassionate for people who have to carry a firearm everywhere they go in public in order to feel safe while insisting that others who are scared of a virus should just stay home.

Anyway, I have a plan some wishful thinking about these dolts. It involves murder hornets. Have you heard about the murder hornets? Vespa Mandarina, or something like that. Big fucking Asian wasps that have found their way to the US, probably from Wuhan China (I mean, why not?). Two inches long, with mandibles like scimitars and a stinger long enough to penetrate a bee-keeper’s suit. Also? They can sting you multiple times. Multiple. Flies at 20 miles per hour, so good luck outrunning one of those angry bastards. I mean, Usain Bolt, who is like the fastest man on the damned planet, was clocked at 28 mph, and that was only for a hundred meters. Of course, if he had a murder hornet behind him, he might do better. But the rest of us are fucked. I mean, just look at them.

Their sting has been described as like being impaled with red hot thumbtacks.

Here’s a thing about hornets (well, some hornets, not all of them, but maybe including murder hornets, I don’t know, but we’re still in the wishful thought experiment stage, so don’t discourage me): when angry or attacked, they release an alarm pheromone (your basic 2-methyl-3-butene-2-ol) that incites other nearby hornets to attack. This alarm pheromone is semi-key to my plan wishful thought experiment.

Okay, here it is: we (and by ‘we’ I mean somebody else other than me) capture and breed hundreds or thousands of murder hornets, genetically modifying the brutes so they’re attracted to the smell of Hoppe’s gun oil. How hard could that be?

Hey tunahead, say hello to my little friend.

Anyway, that’s the plan wishful thought experiment. Breed them, train them, turn them loose at these protests. Then stand back. The hornets are drawn to the firearms, the tunaheads panic and swat at them (or just panic and run, the plan work…dammit, the wishful thought experiment works either way), hilarity ensues.

There are still a few wrinkles to work out, I admit. I wonder if Kickstarter would accept something like this.

it stinks

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I’m trying to remember when I hit that point where I stopped trying to keep track of each and every awful thing that happened that day.

I mean, there was actually a time when I could read two or three news sources and feel like I had a solid grasp of all the awful things that happened on any given day. Later I found myself focusing on the primary awful things that happened, because it would take a spreadsheet to keep track of the picayune awful things. But over time, every day became a muddle of major corruption, lying, gross incompetence, vindictiveness, and venality, all of which existed in a melange of Trumpian hate-rage. And it was impossible to keep track even of all the massively awful things that happened in a given day.

This guy is awful in so many ways you need a quantum computer to keep track.

It’s hard to imagine a president who in the course of a single day would 1) shirk his duty during a pandemic that has cost more than 65,000 American lives, 2) lie about the availability of testing necessary to know the extent of that pandemic, 3) encourage states to re-open their economies even though NONE of those states have met the guidelines issued by the president’s own task force, 4) try to extort political favors from states in desperate need of federal financial aid as a result of that pandemic, 4) try to undermine the 2020 presidential election by claiming vote-by-mail is risky, 5) find ways to threaten the unemployment benefits of the nearly 20% of the US workforce that’s unemployed because of the pandemic, 6) use his presidential emergency powers to force workers in the meat industry to continue to work despite the alarming number of Covid-19 cases appearing in meat-packing plants, 7) block the nation’s most trusted information source from testifying in front of the Democratic-led House while allowing his testimony in the Republican-led Senate, 8) encourage armed insurrection against the legitimately elected Democratic governors of states he doesn’t like, 9) float the idea of pardoning his former National Security Advisor whom he’d fired because the man had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI (and the Vice President) about his dealings with Russian intelligence (not to mention his failure to register as a foreign agent of Turkey OR his involvement in a plot to kidnap a Turkish dissident cleric), 10) denigrated and undermined the leadership and line staff of the nation’s primary national law enforcement agency, 11) promoted a number of conspiracy theories, including one about the origins of the pandemic, and 12) tried to pressure US intelligence agencies to substantiate that conspiracy theory.

That’s just what I can recall of the major awful stuff Comrade Trump engaged in one a single day. There’s bound to be awful stuff I’ve missed.

Gov. Kim Reynolds and Comrade Trump ohmyfuckinggod I can’t even look killmenow.

All of this horror is compounded by state governors who are willing (or actually eager) to curry favor with Trump for their own political reasons. Like so many other Republican governors, the governor of Iowa, Kim Reynolds, refused to issue a state-wide shelter-in-place order. She’s not only supporting Trump’s executive order to require workers at meat-packing plants (a large proportion of whom are immigrants) to report for work regardless of Covid-19 outbreaks, she’s also informed low wage workers who are reluctant to return to work because of pandemic fears that if they refuse to return to work, they will be denied unemployment benefits.

The result of this monstrous cascade of really, truly, awful stuff from Trump and his supporters is a sort of numbness. It’s like living downwind from a paper mill or a hog containment farm — you sort of get inured to the stink. Some days stink more than others, but every day stinks horribly.

And it will continue to stink horribly until we get rid of the hog farm.