Le Tricoteur

It was these fucking things that got me thinking about what eventually became this post. The "Arts of Peace/Arts of War" statues located near the Lincoln Memorial and the bridge across the Potomac between Washington D.C. and Arlington, VA.

The idea for these things dates from the late 1920s. The committee tasked with decorating the D.C. side of the new bridge - apparently the old span was beat-up and undersized, but didn't get up on the target list for replacement until the party to cut the ribbon on the post-World-War-denkmal (the "Tomb of the Unknown Soldier", in case you couldn't guess it...) was crashed by some traffic jams and general clusterfuckery so noticeable that even the Former Boss of 20th Century Political Corruption, Warren Harding, couldn't look past it - came up with "equestrian statues" since that's what every fucking republic needs is more "statues of men on horseback", right?

Well, the design and construction of these lawn ornaments sounds like a perfect parable for a city run by Congressional committee. The request for proposal went out in 1928 (the actual bridge RFP was issued in 1925) but there was a whole bunch of dicking around with the designs. I especially love this description from the Wikipedia article on how the sculptors were selected:

"James Earle Fraser and Leo Friedlander were both commissioned to craft sculptures for the eastern terminus. Just how Fraser and Friedlander were chosen is unclear. Fraser's biographer, August Freundlich, and the National Park Service both say there was a competition. Freundlich puts the date of this competition as 1931, and gives no further details. This contradicts reports from the Office of Public Buildings and Public Parks and Washington Post, which point to a selection process (not necessarily a competition) in 1929. Friedlander's biographers, however, state the artist was directly chosen in 1929. Museum curator Joel Rosenkranz says Friedlander's commission came directly from the firm of McKim, Mead & White, and mentions no competition."

"The more things change...", right? These jamokes would have been right at home slipping Felony Fats' Reflecting Pool Boy a bagful o' cash under the table to fuck up the pond liner.

The tale of the journey between design and construction is a similar sort of "designed-by-a-committee" epic. Design submittals, reviews, redesigns, resubmittals, re-reviews, re-re-designs, and then along came the Great Depression and the whole fucking thing got shut down for lack of funds.

The project diddled along in the Thirties - one big change was in materials for the statues, from granite to bronze - and then along came another World War and bronze was needed for making mess kits or something, so the statue plans went back into storage until VJ Day.

Okay! Now they were cookin'; the post-war boom was ready to go boom, and...wait...now you're telling me that the cost of casting these ginormous traffic islands was twice what you told me in 1939? The fuck..?

Being good American entrepreneurs the sculptors and their Congressional committee patrons shipped the manufacture overseas. To Italy, to be precise, where these paperweights were cast at several foundries between late 1950 and April, 1951.

The Wiki article says that the idea was to "...use fire-gilding to finish the statues. Fire-gilding is a process in which gold leaf and mercury are applied to the bronze. Fire is applied to the area, which causes the gold to adhere to the bronze and the mercury to evaporate."

This apparently was a problem. The quality of the various foundries varied significantly; some were good at the bronze but poor at gilding, others better with the gilt but sketchy with the bronze itself. All the initial gilding was judged too glitzy - the Wiki says that original casting samples were "...shipped to the United States, where it was discovered that the color was too bright." The sculptors' on-site rep had to finesse the Italians to get the metal finish to look like the design plans called for, but eventually did, and the big metal slugs were finally set up and officially dedicated in September, 1951.

And there they sat, for the succeeding 75 years.

Now bronze is a very common sort of "outdoors-metal-sculpture" material. It's fairly durable, and it's also fairly ductile - that is, "not brittle" - so it deals with heat and cold changes, rain, snow, sunlight, all the stuff you can lump together as "elements", pretty well.

It also develops a "patina", a natural (or artificial - different patinas may be applied to bronzes to get certain effects) oxidation product. The link describes perhaps the most familiar patina you know:

"Oxygen and water molecules react with the metal and form a layer of corrosion that discolors the metal. Think of the Statue of Liberty. This statue is clad in copper sheets, but its long exposure to the air and water has corroded the copper, giving it the statue’s iconic green color. That green color is patina, therefore the Statue of Liberty is the perfect example of a beautiful patina statue." 

Yep. The big green Frenchwoman in New York Harbor wasn't originally green but shiny copper.

These bronze ponies developed this patina over the course of 75 seasons, like this:

Now I've seen various bronzes, and the natural patina can add some depth and character to what is otherwise just a shiny hunk of metal. The photos of these statues don't look particularly interesting to me, but some of that may be that big Art Deco stuff kind of leaves me cold. It's the Thirties "burly peasant and heroic soldier" kind of monument sensibility that makes me think of Moscow subways and Mussolini's Marble Arch looming over the Libyan desert.

Anyway, peacefully oxidizing along the Potomac is where they were until Trump lumbered into view.

Okay.

Now, if there's one thing that Fats luuurves more than money (for him), and pussy (for him), and punishment (for his enemies) it's gold. I mean, if you know any one thing about the porcine rascal, it's that "gold" is his thing. 

His reign is the "Golden Age". The money he throws at the U.S. Navy is to build a "Golden Fleet". His special pay-me-for-a-green-card for rich white foreigners is the "Trump Gold Card". He's nailed up so many gilded knick-knacks in the Oval Office that the sonofabitch looks like the party room in a sleazy Vegas cathouse only with Gilbert Stuart's George Washington glowering down from over the bathroom door.

So it's hardly surprising that when Orange Foolius turned his artistic vision to these statues the result was to go from this...

...to this.

 

And that's what got me going. 

I'm not sure exactly what part of this latest damn gold Trump thing that got me so hot.

Was it the gaudy waste? Sure! Here's the guy with whose encouragement his buddy Elon took a chainsaw to government pennies that went to help people, like USAID, but who's been hoovering up graft and hucking tax dollars to J6 traitors, rich pals, and other scummy wingnut fool farms like beads off a MArdi Gras float. 

That this cretinous toad thought nothing of chucking a million or five at slathering gold on fucking statues while telling people who he was kicking off food stamps and utility-bill-assistance to suck it? Sure!

Was it the whole Welthauptstadt Germania neo-Nazi/grotesque Soviet statuary gilded vibe of these things? Sure, that too! The Atlantic magazine piece about them starts like this:

"The 19-foot statues, called The Arts of War, were once easy to miss but now look a bit like oversized children’s trophies, especially next to the classical and austere Lincoln Memorial. Seeing them is as if, on the walk between Arlington National Cemetery and the National Mall, you’d suddenly stumbled upon a P. F. Chang’s."

I'd say that equating them with a Chang's was a bit too high-tone a metaphor for this paint job; they look more like the sort of cheapo gilded plaster knockoff "Venus de Milo" yard ornament you'd expect to see outside the "Dolphin II Gentlemens' Club" on Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway right off Highway 217.

But after I sat down and thought about it I realized what really pissed me off about this. For itself, an as an emblem of my country circa 2026.

I hate all of this.

I hate the "fuck you, I got mine" arrogance of it. 

I hate what that says about the person who did it. About the people who applauded it. Or ignored it. Or hand-waved it. Or voted for it.

I hate that while something like half to two-thirds of the people in the nation he rules despise this motherfucker, loathe what he's doing, utterly reject what passes for policy coming out of his gilded palace and the fuck-you to all of us who despise him that these golden idols symbolize...

And that there's not a goddamn fucking thing we can do about it.

Our system makes it possible for him, for them, to rule like kings. With 50.1% of the Congress, 6 of 9 of the Supreme Court, that Felony Fats can rule like goddamn Caesar.

And that's what this shit looks like.

It's Louis XVI with his table full of ormolu clocks while starving kids begged in the street and died.

It's Nicholas II playing warlord while his soldiers were butchered by his incompetent "leadership".

It's George III, it's Charles I, it's Nero and Tiberius and Caligula. It's every other goddamn plutocratic royal moron, lolling about in golden ignorance and carelessness (or petty anger or madness...) while the nation burns and the people rage in powerless fury.

The original tricotreuses were poor women of Paris.

In October 1789 their fury - at their own poverty and starvation and at their royal masters' wealth and indifference - erupted in something called the "Black March":

"Encouraged by revolutionary agitators, they ransacked the city armory for weapons and marched on the Palace of Versailles. The crowd besieged the palace and, in a dramatic and violent confrontation, they successfully pressed their demands upon King Louis XVI. The very next day, the crowd forced the king and his family to return with them to Paris."

As is so often the case, however, these people were offered public praise and made much of...until they tried to get hold of real power to punish those aristocratic scum and to change their lives for the better:

 "On 21 May 1793 they were excluded by a decree from the galleries of the Convention; on 26 May they were forbidden to form part of any political assembly. The veterans of the march and their numerous successors and hangers-on gathered thereafter at the guillotine in the Place de la Révolution...as sullen onlookers...the tricoteuses...watched the guillotine as they knitted."

And that, my friends, is right where I am. Exactly how I feel.

Does that mean I'm not going to do whatever I can do within the current political climate to defenstrate the gilded sonsofbitches? Ohhellno. 

But in a political system increasingly tilted against me, with "allies" on my side of the political divide who seem to think that empowering words and optimistic protest songs will defeat fascist goon squads, I'm left with nothing more than a hot coal of rage burning my chest.

I long for nothing so much as a day when I can sit and rock and knit and smile as one after another the bloody heads tumble down off the block.

Trump, Miller, Hegseth, Thomas, Roberts, Kavanaugh, Markymarkwayne...fuck it, let's toss Alex Jones' and Newt and Callista Gingrich's and Steve Bannon's empty noggins in the basket, too. 

It took millions of soldiers and sailors and aviators, tens of thousands of bombers and aircraft carriers, tens of millions of tons of bombs and shells and bullets to defeat the last great outbreak of fascist scum.

Before that it took years of war and hundreds of thousands of deaths and miles and acres of destruction to defeat the first great outbreak of racist traitors here in this nation.

Now that task is before us.

 
"I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. 

"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

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. 

The cheaper the crook...

 

...the gaudier the patter.

I didn't waste my time watching Felony Fats' Big Beautiful Lie-o-palooza last night. I don't, usually; these things are always polititheater, regardless of who delivers them. I might have listened to FDR, had I been around then, but I can't think of anyone else who's stood up at that rostrum worth spending an hour (or damn near two, in Tubby's case) hearing talk shit about how fucking great things are.

I read some excerpts from the transcript. The best description I've seen comes (as I'd suspected it would) from salty sailor Jim Wright: "If a psychotic off his meds gave a disassociated rambling speech to the inmates in the middle of the dayroom while being chased by the interns at the local home for the criminally insane it would look a lot like this."

Beyond that? I only got two reactions, the first being the quote from the Maltese Falcon that opens this post.

The second, though, was prompted by this line from Fatso's interminable Weave-of-the-Union: "I've always wanted the Congressional Medal of Honor, but I was informed I'm not allowed to give it myself... If they ever open up that law, I'll be there with you someday,"

This isn't the first time this draft-dodging fuck has talked up the idea that his ginormous ass deserves the nation's highest decoration for bravery. Supposedly some time earlier he'd said:

“I decided to go to Iraq. I was extremely brave. So brave in fact that I wanted to give myself the Congressional Medal of Honor, I said to my people, ‘Am I allowed to give myself the Congressional Medal of Honor?’”

There have been some Chief Executives who could have had a legitimate call on a high award for valor. This boastful bastard? Don't make me laugh.

The mere thought of this bloated nitwit in the same grid square as the MOH makes the Army sergeant that lives in my head reach for a sturdy piece of dimension lumber, wishing for ten minutes in a locked supply room alone with his criminal ass to provide him with some wall-to-wall counseling on how he isn't just not just unfit to wear the medal but utterly unfit to empty a urinal overfilled by the lowliest private in military history.

Nice try, slick...

 

One of the people I worked with at my last job ("last" as in a week or so ago, mind...) apparently just went to the HR department and - according to my ex-chief-engineer - "threatened" to quit.

Now. This person may well be the single most appalling individual I've ever had the misfortune to work with. He's surely the worst I've ever had work for me.

He's a toxic combination of 1) illiteracy (his daily reports are unreadable, and the thing with these is they're nearly 95% pure boilerplate - you just copy what the go-by says and change the location and date - and he'd been given the go-bys within a week of his hire and shown how to use them. Didn't help; his stuff read like it was written by someone whose English was their third language), 2) obliviousness (which is deadly in his job, which is to be the engineers' eyes and ears on the jobsite, so he is supposed to see, hear, and record everything that happens...), and 3) a bizarre creepy/nasty personality (one of his other coworkers used to refer to him as "school shooter" and remark that if anyone shot up a Safeway or elementary school in his home town we'd know exactly who was responsible...)

He had the annoying habit of disappearing; he lives more than an hour from the central Willamette Valley where his job takes place so it's not like you could drive around and knock on his door. When he'd ghost on e-mails and phone calls and texts? He was unreachable.

You can imagine how well that worked with scheduling.

When the chief engineer told me about this "threat", I replied:

"How could (name of dirtbag) "threaten" to quit? You can "threaten" to quit if you're a critical employee who has skills your employer will find difficult or impossible to replace. If you're a tech and in grossly incompetent one, at that? The only reasonable response to your "threatening" to quit would be a sincere goodbye and wish for success at your next career at Jiffy Lube."

Apparently HR responded just so, and the gomer handed in his two weeks' notice. Good riddance.

I tend to be unsympathetic to the chorus of job-creators whining about how nobody wants to work anymore. No, they want to work just fine. Just not at your shitty job for shitty pay under shitty conditions.

But.

I gotta admit, I've been seeing some pretty goofy hires lately.

Maybe it's my old outfit; I'm not sure their hiring-fu is strong. But I wonder...this guy. The dude who quit before him who wasn't creepy and incompetent but just dumber than a bag of hammers. The other dude whose literacy was even more precarious than this goofball and who quit just ahead of getting canned...

Meanwhile the great people this outfit brings in leave, largely because the work is grim; endless brain-destroyingly dull development construction work, spending hours a day watching dirt move and arguing with people who tell you to believe them and not your lying eyes.

But this guy...wow. That's really special.

I think I'll make sure I go to Oil Can Henry's next time instead.

More fucking thoughts and prayers

I see it's time to drag this one out.

Again.

I know this has nothing to do with the results of the 2016 elections, yet I look around and what I see is just a part of the toxic stew of the very worst of my country that seems to be bubbling cheerfully on every stovetop; arrogant, corrupt, ignorant, splenetic...it makes me think of the piece of Robert Graves' I, Claudius where the cunningly-not-really-a-gimping-halfwit emperor turns his appalling heir loose on Rome, whispering "Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out."

What hits me hardest about these nutter shootings is how they never change anything because of the magical incantation "the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" as if the whole "well-regulated militia" thing was a fantasy and the U.S. Constitution is some sort of Holy Writ, handed down on gold tablets never to be altered or re-imagined.

Well, the Constitution once said that black people were 3/5ths of a registered voter, and that it was illegal to drink a beer.

Both of those ideas were fucked up. So We the People changed the Constitution.

So far, the score of the Second Amendment is "resisting tyrannical government", zero; "butchering other Americans", about a gajillion. I note that all these ammosexuals with their arsenals seem curiously mute about "tyranny" like the idea that the government can freely spy on our communications, or take our stuff if we get arrested - not convicted, mind you, just arrested - for smoking weed. So I conclude that the notion that the "right to keep and bear arms" has pretty much zero percent to do with the sort of people doing actual tyranny-resisting and 100% to do with the sort of fucking people who get a woody out of busting out more than thirty rounds a minute.

But who gives an actual fuck?

Nobody is going to do anything about this. Tomorrow another nutter will take another semiautomatic weapon into another school and another N > 0 number of kiddies and teachers and random poor sonsofbitches will die or be hideously wounded. And we'll hear that there's nothing we can do - in the only industrialized nation that this happens regularly - and we need to have more mental health care (but fuck-all funding for it), and we need to send our thoughts and prayers to the new set of grieving parents and lovers and brothers and sisters whose beloveds have been blown away so I can go to the range tomorrow and bust out 200 rounds of 5.56mm in fifteen minutes.

So, fuck it.

Here's a fucking cute picture of a cute fucking cat.

Dear wingnut...(an open letter to "conservatives" on the Malheur Morons)

I've been reading your responses to the outpouring of anger and vitriol that has greeted the news that a bunch of self-identified pals of yours had "occupied" the vacant headquarters building at Malheur NWR out in the lesser paved portions of my home state.

You were angry yourselves, and scornful, that the "libtards' heads were exploding" over this. You seemed incredulous that these scruffy seditionists had aroused such ire on the Left, apparently as much because it is the Left as the subject of that furor. After all, we're supposed to be all "tolerant" and "squishy" about taking stands, except when we nag you about your hatred for things like homos marrying and Muslims...well, being alive...as "intolerant" and "rigid". You don't get it. Why are we so fucking pissed off about a handful of patriots exercising the Constitutional Second Amendment right to protest gummint tyranny?

So let me try and explain why this particular incident got up our collective wick so quickly and so badly.

First, a lot of it is the cumulative hammering you've been doing since...well, it feels like forever but at least the fifteen years since 9/11. We got used to - not okay with, but used to - being called "traitors" and "cowards" and "pussies" because we questioned your excitement about bombing and/or shooting the shit out of the public enemy de jour. We grew to expect that you would call anything we supported, whether it was abortion or freedom from theocracy or using cunning (or economics, or diplomacy, or pretty much anything) instead of bullets, "foolish", "impractical", "cowardly", and "anti-American".

We got used to hearing you describe our belief that taxes are the price of civilization as "stealing" and our conviction that regulation of the commons helped prevent the sort of greed and selfishness that got these Hammond people in trouble as "tyranny".

We didn't like it. Oh, hells, no. But we pretty much gave up trying to unscrew your heads on that subject, figuring that this was just your default setting.

We also got used to the big media outlets giving your whackadoodle ideas equal time just like they were actual human thoughts. So when we tried to discuss things like heading off climate change or not going all Operation Wetback or treating women as women and not as life-support systems for wombs and you started shrieking "Liar!" and "Babykiller!" we just sighed. Forget it, Jake, it's Wingnuttown, we would mutter. It's not worth the aggravation.

We especially gave up trying to warn you, and the newspeople, about the fire you were fucking with your fondness for wild talk about "Second Amendment solutions" to "government is the problem". See, we kept saying, We the People ARE "the government"; that's the idea, anyway.

Right? Kinda baked into the pie back in 1789?

That the problem with "Second Amendment solutions" pretty much led to the sort of "solutions" proposed by the western Pennsylvania whisky distillers and Dan Shays and Jeff Davis. And that those "solutions" were the kind of solutions that led to "solutions" like burning down your kitchen to get the roaches out of the oatmeal bin; ugly and violent and not really "solutions" at all.

Because every time we'd bring that up you'd start shrieking about "gungrabbers!" and "tyranny!".

Sigh.

So. Here we are.

A bunch of your pals - or, at least, people who claim to be your pals - have taken their bullet launchers and their energy drinks (but not enough jerky or cheeze doodles, apparently...) and done, in effect, what Shays and Davis and the whisky rebels did; taken a patch of ground that the U.S. government claims and broken rules the U.S. government has made and are defying the U.S. government to come and make them behave.

And are you guys ashamed about this, this armed sedition? Are you angry that these stupid jamokes are saying the quiet parts of Tentherism and "Second Amendment solutions" out loud? Are you out there with a bullhorn telling these screwheads to knock it the fuck off?

Hells, no. Once again, we're left to remind you that part of "a republic, if you can keep it..." is not losing the fucking Whisky Rebellion.

And, once again, the news media is fucked up like a football bat about this and giving your screwhead pals all sorts of free airtime to blarb their nonsensical screeds and, once again, you're giving, and going to give, us nothing but shit about it.

And we're really, really, really fucking sick and tired of it.

But since we've long figured out that arguing with you about this stuff is like trying to teach German irregular verbs to a cat we're reduced to screaming at these HeeHawsbullah morons and at our federal government to quite treating them like they have a point other than on their fucking heads so's we don't lose the fucking Whisky Rebellion.

Will that work? Doubtful. It hasn't so far. Christ, you're on the verge of electing Donald Fucking Trump your presidential candidate, forcryinoutloud, and the feds have let these goddamn screwhead VanillaISIS teahadis off the hook before. It's not like we're really hoping to get you knuckleheads to try a taste of realism for once.

It's just that sometimes the bullshit gets to the point where a liberal's just gotta fucking vent.

Let's you and him fight

Believe me whan I say that I am seldom surprised when the stupidity and overall fatuousness of the U.S. public is exposed.

Still, this brought even me to a standstill:

The graphic is from a Fallows post in his Chickenhawk Nation series and in the manner of pictures is worth a thousand words.

This image makes me almost physically ill. Almost two-thirds of my fellow "citizens" want to fight the Islamic State; want to send their fellow citizens - again - to fight a land war in Asia against jihadis who want my Army brothers there killing people and wrecking shit because of the success it brought them when we tried and inevitably failed in Iraq. Almost the exact same proportion of these cowardly shitheels want someone else to do the actual fighting, someone not their precious snowflake selves.

I don't think that my country has changed all that much over the years. Enough retrospective accounts of the "Greatest Generation" have emerged to correct the wartime propaganda tales of American heroes fighting to get at the dirty Japs and filthy Huns. Were there a lot of volunteers? Sure. Were there also a hell of a lot of people looking for cushy Stateside billets, cozy hidey-holes in noncombat service jobs, and deferments? You bet your ass.

But this...this is really beyond disgusting.

First, because the entire notion is both stupid (it failed huge when we tried it when the Iraq-Syria was still actual sorta-kinda Westphalian states instead of the colossal shitmire of failed-statedom-and-Sunni-rebellion it is now) and obviously so. It's not like we don't KNOW that this hasn't worked and why.

Second, because the geopolitical setting for this stupid is completely different from the sort of problem we faced in 1941. Germany and Japan had actual armies, navies, and air forces. They could have really defeated our armed forces and destroyed the United States. There was really no other option between victory and defeat. This is, instead, a classic "cabinet war", something that We the People can choose to do or not do without risking any real danger more serious than that presented by the random drunk driver or household slip-trip-fall.

Worse. Shoving U.S. armed force into this meatgrinder - short of deciding to become an open empire and conquering and occupying the places the Ottomans themselves couldn't hold - is in itself a defeat; as Sun Tzu would remind us, if you are fighting without an obtainable goal you have already lost.

But damn near two-thirds of my "fellow Americans" are too fucking stupid to see that and too fucking selfish to put their own asses on the line to back up their own stupidity.

Honestly. These fucking people...

I don't get it

I'm still working down in southern Oregon, living out of a hotel - this time the less-swanky Ramada up the street from the nice Hampton Inn where I spent the first two weeks and where as I type this on the other side of the gimcrack-cheap paper thin hotel walls someone's infant is screaming as though it is being vigorously lashed with a length of coaxial cable - and pretty much just waking up, going to work, coming back to the hotel, eating, reading (or watching some television) and going to sleep. Wash, rinse, repeat. It's about as much fun and exciting as you'd think.

Plus we're back on standard time, so darkness falls in fucking mid-afternoon and there's no daylight left after work hours to even go exploring the southern Oregon scenery. And that's about as much fun as you'd think, too.

The one thing that's hard to avoid here in Oregon's Dixie is the politics. This isn't the blue part of Oregon. This isn't even the relatively purpleishly-liberal outpost of Eugene and the University of Oregon. This is hard Red Oregon, home of the Dope-smoking Rednecks. This is Trump territory, or, at best, in fealty to the Paul clan. God, guns, and taxation - even WITH representation - as the ultimate Evil.

It's in places like this that I really despair for my country.

Because you look around here, and then look at the Red talking heads on the electronical teevee and you wonder...what the fuck would make me want what these people are telling me to want, if I was one of the people here in Medford?

I mean, the bog-standard GOP talking points are exactly what "conservatives" wanted a century ago. Low taxes on their wealth. The freedom to do, well, whatever they damn well pleased. Dump their chemicals in the rivers and their shit into the air and fuck the upstairs maid when they got to feeling frisky. Keep the nigras on the plantation and the women on their backs. Work the hunkies and the polacks and the other white trash for chump change, kill them if it made a buck of extra profit, and throw them on the trash heap when they weren't good for ten minutes work anymore. Back then it was called the Gilded Age and for everyone but the Carnegies and the Mellons it was like an electric fan; if you looked at it one way it sucked, but if you looked at it the other way, it blew.

I mean, in the Reagan and early Bush years the GOP grifters used to at least try and pretend this stuff was something else. Freedom or prosperity or, well, whatever would convince the public marks to vote for them. But now they aren't even trying. Have you heard Trump? Christ, that idiot couldn't have won a junior high school class election with his nonsense forty years ago. Tax cuts for the Kochs and Medicare for white people and wars for the towelheads and a balanced budget? It's enough to make a cat laugh and yet these freaking southern Oregon C.H.U.D.s are out there lapping it up and baying for more. It''d be ridiculous if it wasn't so tragic.

I think that some of these people - Trump, for sure, and I suspect guys like Bush and Rubio and that loathsome harpy Fiorina - are just flat-out grifters. They know that the snake oil they're peddling is nothing but wood alcohol and turpentine, and that it's poison for the rubes. They're grifting because they'll profit from the grift, and they need the rubes to buy it, and don't care that their toxins will poison the rubes by stealing their jobs, blighting their lives, and crushing them under debt and imprisonment and unemployment and hopelessness.

But some of these people can't be grifters. Some of them must truly believe this stuff. Carson, maybe. Cruz? The Pauls?

But...it's such a grossly fucking obvious grift. It's not like we haven't seen the America it will reduce us to; an America where people die in dangerous jobs and their orphans starve, an America where the rich do what they can and the poor suffer what they must, an America of filthy toxic slums huddling below shining mansions, an America where if you aren't born to the purple your life is nasty, brutish, and short.

It was that America that the reformers, the muckrakers, the socialists, the labor unions, the New Dealers beat back into its gated communities and boardrooms and forced to give up its oligarchy, creating the Middle Class America of the Fifties and Sixties, the America I grew up in. That America isn't what these Republican policies will produce.

That America is the America these Republican policies, from the "right-to-work" to the end of Social Security to the fight against minimum wages and workplace safety and health regulations and progressive taxes, will destroy and replace with the old, dark, dirty, oligarchic America, the America of the Gilded Age.

How can these people, the ones not in on the grift, how can they not see that? How can they want that, that Gilded Age America, back?

I honestly have no idea, and the rank, feral stupidity of that wanting just makes me violently ill.

Not Blogging

I just happened to glance at the sidebar while proofing the previous soccer-jersey post and realized with a start that I only posted six times in March 2014.

Six.

Fah! Six crummy posts? Six?!

I know that March was badly slow, if nothing else from the comments on the Glorieta Pass writeup. People were "welcoming me back" and I briefly wondered where I'd been.

But now I realize; not here.

And I got to wondering about that; have I ever been that unproductive on this blog before?

Well, yes. But it was a long, long, long time ago.

Going back over the past seven years - I started this thing back in the late summer of 2006, almost seven and a half years ago - the slowest period was the winter of 2008. I posted a whopping total of 26 times between January 1 and March 31, 2008; 9 posts in each of January and March and the low point, 8 posts, in Fabruary.

But you have to go all the way back to December of 2006 before you find a month when I was slacking this badly.

In December, 2006, I also posted only six times.

Well. Crap.

I can blame some pieces of business outside my own laziness.

A lot of traffic on this blog was generated by the ridiculous wars in southcentral Asia. Those wars are not exactly finished, but the end, like a dragon by the side of the road, is well in view. There doesn't seem to be anything more to say about them, or, really, much about military affairs in general. I've been out of the service too long to have any more inside information. And, frankly, all that remains at this point seems to be arguing over trivialities. My friend jim over at Ranger just put up a post fulminating over women in the combat arms that got me thinking "Damn...if this is what we have to argue about now we don't really have jack shit to argue about, now, do we..?"

The other big-ass reptile squatting alongside the highway seems to me to be the degree which We The People have stood around with out thumbs up our collective ass and our brains in neutral and let the plutocrats, the oligarchs, the hedge-fund fraudsters and wanna-be aristos and Great Power fantasists kidnap our republic.

But what's the point in my writing about that?

You want incisive take-downs of these skeevy bastards you've got Pierce. And Krugman. And Taibbi (although Matt appears to have disappeared into the mists of some sort of fucking vanity project called "First Look Media").

You don't need me pounding my little tin drum. Hell, my friend Labrys can work up a better head of outraged steam than I can these days. My opinion has pretty much settled on "You worthless fucktards are perfectly happy to let these scumbags steal your patrimony for a mess of pottage. Fine. I'll do what I can where I can right here and the hell with you people."

Right now the part of this casual abandonment of the Republic that most grates in my craw is the...well, you can't really call it the "revelation" since we all pretty much knew this shit had been going on for years, but the...deobfuscation, if you will, of the brutal regime of secret prison and vicious torture that we have payed for and looked away from since a bunch of raggedy-ass Allah-pesterers made the Bush Administration shit its pants.

(That's the Boy on the left, above, by the way. I have no excuse for the illustrations in this post. I'm simply going through my pictures folder and doing a photo dump. Cartoons, personal pictures, nonsequiturs...the visual accompaniment for this one is "you get what you get"...)

Anyway.

Here's the thing about this.

There is no way. No possible way.

Not a single, imaginable, potential, even-wildly-hypothetically-conceivable way that the Islamofantacists could have created an existential threat to the United States of America, even after 9/11.

Never.

Not possible.

Created havoc? Perhaps. Killed people? Maybe.

But destroyed the Republic itself? Overthrown the "freedoms" that they were so supposed to hate?

Nuh-uh.

But imprisonment not just without trial but without even a public name or a file number? Disappearances into night and fog without trace?

Lawless torture, and then frantic efforts to hide this lawlessness and torture?

That not just can but inevitably will destroy any democratic state and the freedoms it is supposed to protect.

A state must, if it is to remain in the hands of the People, be a state of law, of open government and relatively equal justice enacted in open courts.

When you start giving parts of your government the go-ahead to do their business in secret, when you give them the authority to sieze people and disappear them, to spy on your own people, to torture and kill in darkness and without fear of justice, you cannot simply stop them outside your borders and at the strandlines of your oceans.

Those people will then come within your government, within your states, and your citie,s and your houses.

And they will bring their own lawless entitlement to take what they deem needs taking, to destroy what they deem needs destroying, and to rend what needs rending.

Because that is what you have taught them to do.

They will not stop because you protest your innocence, because you avow your loyalty, because you claim protection under the law.

You have already given them absolution from the laws, you have already taught them that the end justifies the means, that secret torture and secret imprisonment and secret spying are part of their brief.

You will have given the sheepdogs a taste for the flesh of the sheep.

Right now this nation should be seething with anger. Our agents, paid with our taxes, have been torturing and kidnapping in our names, and then lied to and hid from the People in Congress. As they have before and will again, we have sowed the wind, and even the dullest amoung us should know what bitter storm that sowing reaps.

And we do not seem to care.

If those simple facts do not enrage you, I cannot think of anything I can say that can.

And thus I found that I just stood silent, having nothing more to say. I feel utterly voiceless, shouting over the roaring waves of indifference like Demosthenes.

I'm still here. And part of my silence was laziness, and distraction, and the world intruding on me.

But if you wondered why the other reasons why there was so little here in March, well...there they are.

Russia Gets Pucked

I won't pretend that I wasn't quietly satisfied at the hockey "Winter War" when I got up this morning.

The 2014 Sochi Olympic Games as Putin's pet project always irked me. I know, I konw, the guy is no worse than many another politician, just another grifting thug, but he's a grifting thug in charge of a hell of a big country with pretensions of global power and seeing the Finns piss in his morning kvass was as satisfying as watching a Gingrich marriage fail or a Wall Street CEO perp-walked.

No matter how painful the failure, if the object of the pain is really loathsome you just can't help smiling when they get booted in the nuts.

I don't pretend that my country is a treasure. But Russia is, by all accounts, a goddamn mess.

That made me think about how many of the world's nations and governments are similarly completely screwed, at least for the people who have to live with them.

My friend Labrys mentions a couple of the more visible of these sorts of screw-jobs this morning: Ukraine. Syria. North Korea.

The amazing thing I come across is the number of people - largely on the Right but extending across the political spectrum to the "liberal interventionists" - who seem to think that the United States should use its Green Lantern powers of armed force to "straighten out" these fucked-up places.

In most of these people it seems to me that their "analysis" completely elides why these places are so damn fucked up right now. Which is, simply put, that they were always fucked up for one reason or another (or a cascade of multiple reasons..!) and are just showing the latest symptoms of that total fuckedupitude.

I mean, how the hell was, short of a massive sociopolitical and economic makeover, Ukraine every going to be a haven of social peace, economic dynamism, and political good-government? Ukraine is an internally divided pseudostate suffering from the usual post-Soviet hangover of thugokleptocracy and economic malaise. The conflict between the West-leaning “Ukranian” western part and the Soviet-leaning, “Russian” eastern and southern parts was almost inevitable and almost equally doomed to messy political breakdown.

How the fuck is anyone, let alone some helicopter foreign power, going to change that without an investment of blood and treasure that would make the Roman or British Empires look as brief and shallow as a Hollywood marriage?

Syria? Gee…autocratic rule by a Shiite minority over a Sunni majority in a part of the world where the lagacies of Ottoman and colonial rule range from dysfunctional to toxic and are constantly rubbed raw by the irritant of Israeli and U.S. (and Soviet) fucking-around? Who’d have thought that THAT would end up being fucked up and difficult to fix?

North Korea? What sane person even wants to stick a fist in THAT tar-baby? The best possible outcome from intervention – nearly immediate collapse of the Kim regime – still leaves the neighbors China and South Korea with an impoverished and desperate mess on their hands that makes the unification of Germany look like child’s play by comparison.

The worst possible outcome is so nightmarish to make anyone but a complete idiot shudder.

My Bride, lovely woman that she is, is perhaps a great example of this. She has recently become fascinated with North Korea, and was glued to her tablet as the U.N. laid out its case against the North Korean government. And what a case it is: Murders, judicial and otherwise. Rape, torture, infanticide, starvation, confinements that make the Cell of Little Ease look like a chaise lounge...

She was, as any decent person should be, appalled. But what appalled her more was my cynical response to her report of the U.N.'s call to action.

"Yeah. Sure." I said. "And who the hell is going to do that?" She asked what I meant.

"The Norks won't do anything, the people are beat-down and the Kimistas like things how they are. There's almost no economic or political leverage strong enough to make the Kim regime people chance making reforms that will end with them getting Ceaușescued.

The Chinese don't want to prod them in case the place falls apart and they get overrun with a gajillion starving Norks. The South Koreans want that even less plus with the possibility of nerve gas sauce on the side?

Not.

We, the U.S., already have too damn much on our plate to want a potential geopolitical disaster on the Pacific Rim. Nobody else has either the give-a-shit, the muscle, or both."

"Plus, frankly, what the hell could you do?

North Korea is a fucking black hole of bad governance and economic disaster that has intentionally cut itself off from the sane world. It's never had a moment of civil society or modern democracy, not a scintilla of economic sanity, or social normality since some time before the Japanese invaded a-way the fuck back near the turn of the 20th Century. North Korea is a complete fuckstory, and simply arriving with an M203 in one hand and an Ipad in the other? Ain't gonna change that."

"Regardless of what happens to the Kim regime, North Korea is destined to be fucked up for generations unless the North Korean people can manage a miracle AND some combination of foreign powers can help them and not fuck up somehow, which is more likely than not."

She desperately wanted to believe that there was something that the Good People of the World could do to change that. And in that she's no different than the other good people of my country who want the U.S. to "help" Syria, or Ukraine, or Egypt, or Nigeria, or Venezuela.

Or the assholes that just want to nuke 'em until they glow and then pick off the survivors in the dark.

Neither approach is an actual sane foreign policy.

Which needs to accept that a whole lot of the world is utterly screwed, politically, and pretty much all those of us in the relatively-unscrewed portions can do is stay the fuck out of their nuthouse and learn from them that good government is precious and not to be taken - or thrown away - lightly.

By, for example, electing idiots, grifters, and morons who will reject things like science and rationality in favor of religious nonsense and economic snake-oil. By pretending that economies are magic and not created by humans with human failings and, thus, liable to reward thieves and charlatans if not judiciously managed. By blundering about the globe expending blood and treasure trying to unfuck places that can only be unfucked by those living there with a critical stake in accomplishing and preserving the unfucking.

By ignoring that social and political divisions are far easier to create than repair, and that once the social, political, and economic cohesion of a polity is wrecked it may be impossible to reassemble.

Once we've figured that out then we might simply be able to sit back and just enjoy watching a gang of plucky Finns take an axe to their asshole neighbor's motti.

That and enjoy watching the Russian autocrat forced to listen to the organ in his hockey palace play him a sad, sad song.

Under the mossy rock...

I usually read Ross Douthat and just smirk.

I mean, the guy is a sort of poster-child for "entitled and clueless". His positions on pretty much every issue can be limned by just looking at any sort of potential subject of political, economic, or social dispute and thinking "Now...what would I think about this if I were a clueless douchebag who never had to face a moment's fear or a minute's want in my entire pampered, deferred-to life..?" and you'd have it nailed.

So I can't pretend I was eager to read his latest editorial about why the Teatards shut down the federal government. I figured I'd pretty much sussed out what he had to say. But I had some idle hands and those are, as you know, the devil's playgrounds. So I clicked the link and off I went.

And I found that he DID have something I needed to read, but not, I'm sure, for the reasons he wrote it. Here it is, in his own words:

"Conservative politicians take power imagining that this time, this time, they will finally tame the New Deal-Great Society Leviathan...and then they make proposals and advance ideas for doing so, the weight of public opinion tilts against them, and they end up either backpedalling, getting defeated at the polls, or both."

At which point I have to admit, I didn't smirk.

I laughed out loud.

In a nation with perhaps the industrialized world's least-comprehensive "social safety net", where a single major illness or screw-up or a couple of cases of hard luck can put you out in the street, where, for example, were I to lose my job through no fault of my own it is entirely possible that I and my entire family will drop into poverty because no one will hire a 56-year-old geologist with a family and a bum hip in one of the shittiest development economies in fifty years...that when you "make proposals and advance ideas" that will make the lives of people like me less secure, more precarious, more likely to end up in poverty in our old age...our opinion "tilts against you".

Can you imagine that?

But there you have it. The inside of the heads of the people who, like Ross Douthat, think of themselves as "small-government conservatives" who..."see as forty years of failure, in which first Reagan and then Gingrich and now the Tea Party wave have all failed to deliver on the promise of an actual right-wing answer to the big left-wing victories of the 1930s and 1960s — and now, with Obamacare, of Obama’s first two years as well."

You note the crucial qualifier here.

The Thirties and the Sixties.

Not the Forties, when Big Government went from a standing Army of 100,000 to one of 8 million. Not the Oughts and Teens when the CIA became part of a Directorate of National Intelligence and the NSA became all of our internet service provider. Not the Fifties, when Ike warned us about the "Military-Industrial Complex" (he left out "Congressional" but, hey, the man had to think of his Party...)

Nope. "Big Government" isn't the National Security Agency. It's not the Department of Homeland Security. It's not the Department of Defense, or the hungry corporate remoras that live off the federal dollar from those organizations; Raytheon, General Dynamics, Electric Boat Company, FLIR Systems, Boeing.

It's poor people.

It's sick people.

It's old people.

It's the "Great Society".

THAT's the evil "Big Government".

THAT's who Ross and his "small government conservatives" want to take out behind the barn and put two into the skull.

THAT's why we are where we are.

Because the people that Ross Douthat talks to, the people who are talking to the numbskulls in Congress, the numbskulls themselves, want to "shrink" government...not by getting rid of all those expensive warships, or by not bombing unpaved parts of the world where someone might be eating some Osama bin Ladin kulfa balls, or by cutting back on agribusiness subsidies, or tax giveaways to Kim Kardashian...but by making sure that I can't get insurance for my pre-existing condition or a pension when I'm too old and sick to work and my broker has looted my 401K.

Honestly.

"And if this attitude sounds more like a foolish romanticism than a prudent, responsible, grounded-in-reality conservatism..." concludes Douthat.

Well, no. Actually. This attitude sounds like the meeching whines of a bunch of sour douchebags terrified that somewhere, somehow, someone they don't like is doing okay because of some tax dollars that they think should be going to the Walton family to buy yet another vacation home.

I'm still waiting for some "prudent, reasonable, grounded-in-reality" conservative to show up with a plan that isn't based on hippie-punching and sour grapes that their side fucked up in 1929.

And if our boy Ross is any example I don't expect that to happen anytime soon.

These fucking people...

Utinam journalis et Norks et North Carolina et fuckin' omnes sed(autem) unam cervicem...

I don't know why, but today's immense mountain of stupid is immensely depressing.



I'm not sure which particular item pushed me over the line.

Was it the State of North Carolina declaring the right to establish a state religion? (And to think that we could have just let the dumb fuckers secede, but noooooo...)



Was it a man who is paid as a profession educator suggesting that as long as the rapee is unconscious the rapist should feel free to "reap the benefits"?



Was it the statistical data that indicates that somewhere between one fifth and one third of my "fellow Americans" fall somewhere intellectually between "utterly fucking batshit crazy" and "dumber than a stump mating with a bag of hammers"?



Was it the usual idiot news media panicking over the usual idiot North Korean bluster without realizing that they always do this, and our media always falls for it? Honestly, it's like the fucking morons are playing tug-of-war with a dog and wondering why the dog won't stop first.



Or was it the people - presumably the same 28% who still think that there's a secret UN conspiracy to take away our precious golfs - who were so utterly gormless as to confuse a 25 pound, 18-inch long housecat for a 120 pound, five-foot long cougar?



I honestly don't know for sure.

But whatever it was, like the Emperor Caligula, it makes me wish that all these fucking idiots had one neck so with a single stroke I could rid the world of them.

It's bad enough that I've finally had to call the Dove Lewis guy to come out to give the Little Cat her quietus (it was either that or declare the Fire Direction Center a solid waste treatment facility). But when I think that that harmless little moggie will be gone before the sun rises Saturday and yet all these goddamn blockheaded, ignorant, selfish, greedy, shortsighted, mewling, puking, festering soulless moronic waste products of humanity will be here to see it I just get pissed off.

Bearing Arms

The Newton Massacre has brought all the usual rhetorical suspects to our discussions on this subject over at MilPub and my friends' Jim and Lisa's blog Ranger Against War.

I've said quite a bit on the subject of the "right to keep and bear arms" against the right to not have some armed sonofabitch busting caps at you for no good reason at both places. But I wanted to take a moment here to clarify my position on this whole business.

There seems to be two main veins of argument against any sort of tightened regulation of firearms. Boiled down to their bones, they are 1) humans are awful and will do terrible things, so there's no point in trying to use firearms regulations to do anything about that, and 2) the "right to bear arms" is sacred and guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and any attempt to mess with said right is to commit grievous harm to the liberties of American citizens.

Before I move on to my own points let me address both of these, which I consider largely canards and excuses not to do something that the speakers find either inconvenient to themselves or intellectual distasteful rather than actually critical to the issue of reducing the toll of dead Americans.

Regarding the first point, yes; humans are fucking awful. They are also miraculous, delightful, irritating, ridiculous, and bizarre. Man was born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards says the narrator in the Book of Job and what was true for the Hebrews of the Old Testament is certainly true today.

This human tendency towards fucktardry is one of the reasons that human societies devised things like laws and rules in the first place. We know that people will cheat each other if possible, so we institute things like certified weights and measures so that your butcher will not short-weight your beefsteak or financial regulations so that your bankster will not steal from your 401K. We know that people will rape other people, will drive too fast and do all sorts of other nasty, irritating business if not constrained by rules.

So it seems at best rather louche to pretend that this human bastardy is a reason against, rather than for, devising ways to decrease the mechanical advantage of firearms provided to people in general. I may feel perfectly capable of driving 120 in the interstate - and I may well BE capable of doing just that - but to allow that the state of Oregon would have to allow that fucking idiot in Clackastan driving the clapped-out beater of a Chevy K-car. That's a good reason for keeping the speed limit down to 65; the lower, the safer for all of us.

As for the second, well, the "right to bear arms" is only a part of the phrase "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." To understand this phrase is to delve into the minds of the Framers and understand the conditions of the United States at the time of this writing.

The men who wrote the Bill of Rights had had their belliesfull of goddamn regular soldiers. The British government had taxed the colonies to pay for the troops that had fought the French and Indian War and had forced the colonial gentlemen to house and feed those regular troops - you'll notice that the Bill of Rights contains another entire Amendment, the Third, that prohibits "quartering" of troops by fiat - and then used those regulars to try and suppress the colonists when they rebelled. So the idea of a standing force of regulars was a hissing and a byword amongst the lead men of this new nation.

The notion was that the United States would be defended by a hardy force of volunteer militamen arising from the armed populace; tens of thousands of Cincinnati rallying to the Colors when the nation was in danger, bearing the arms that they kept. This way the nation would be both free of the danger of Praetorian treason and the expense of paying for arms and equipment of a standing army - a win-win for the impoverished country!

So the Second Amendment is directed specifically at "providing for the common defense". The arms that the People are not to be infringed from keeping and bearing were for the security of the free state; target shooting for pleasure, home defense, fighting off the zombie apocalypse?

Not so much.

So; can we agree that, first, humans are shit and that's a reason FOR, not against, letting them have all the rounds they can shoot and, second, that the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution does NOT provide for unlimited private firearms possession but, rather, for the provision of an armed civilian military reserve with the implicit authority of the federal government to determine the nature of that armament in the same way it arms the regular military forces?

Well. Whether or not you agree I will continue.

So here's what I believe on this subject, and let me state for the record that this will be my final post on the subject; I will try and fully expound on what I believe here so we will not have reason to further address this here.

1. I don't think that there is ANY way to prevent people from killing other people. Homo homini lupus said Plautus in 195BC; "Man is a wolf to man". We are killers; with our native American genocide and the way we've applied - and are applying - our devastating military power overseas the United States certainly qualifies as one of the great killers of history. As individuals and collectively we have killed, and certainly will kill, our thousands and tens of thousands.

That, in my opinion, makes it a reason for, not argues against, making it more difficult for us to kill each other.

2. I believe that there are steps we should take on the social and medical fronts to make these massacres more difficult and less frequent. It should be simpler for troubled people to get serious mental health treatment. It should be simpler for people who know people who are troubled to get those people referred to treatment, and simpler for people who fall into the legal system and show signs of genuine mental trouble that looks dangerous to get treatment.

This will not prevent these nutter-shootings, but it might help.

3. But I also believe that we can take steps to prevent private individuals from turning up heavily armed in public spaces.

- Nobody needs to fire more than six rounds without reloading. Period. If you are a hunter and you cannot drop your buck in six rounds you are a sorry excuse for a hunter AND a menace to both wildlife and your fellow hunters.

This is a simple solution; starting tomorrow every magazine will be manufactured with a fixed six-round cutoff, and a program established to buy-back all unaltered magazines. Possession of an unaltered magazine will be a Class C felony punishable by a ginormous fine.

- Close the "gun-show" loophole, and stiffen background checks. Prohibit sales of firearms, ammunition, and magazines over the Internet. Period.

- If you purchase a firearm you will be required to purchase a locking safety device such as a gun safe and a trigger lock and required to use it when not actively firing.

- Purchase of a firearm will require successful completion of 8 hours of firearms training, to include safe storage, handling, and operation of your firearms, to include a practical exercise. If you cannot or will not successfully complete this training you cannot possess a firearm. This includes every individual who buys a new firearm. You say you're a fucking expert and know every facet and quirk of your weapon? Too fucking bad; age and knowledge are no guarantee that you won't walk around doing stupid shit like keeping a round under the hammer.

I would consider these a minimum.

I don't pretend that these measures will end nutter shootings. NOTHING will end the human delight in destroying other humans. But it will make it harder for the nutters.

The simple fact is that killing people with firearms is simple. A child can do it, and children have. And firearms that produce volumes of fire make this simplicity even simpler. Forcing the nutters to reload once or twice would at least give their victims a chance to escape, or to tackle the nutter.

I don't consider these regulations "infringing" on people's "rights". Financial regulations don't "infringe" on banker's rights to make bank and speed limits don't "infringe" on your right to drive. But they do put some sensible limits on the abilities of skeevy bastards to endanger your bank account and your car insurance premium and as such constitute a fairly sensible approach to limiting risk while still allowing human commerce and travel.

You could still "keep" and "bear" your arms. You'd just have to do it in a way that insures a bit more domestic tranquility and provides a touch more public safety.

And...in case you think I'm being drastic, you have no idea.

Frankly, I think that young American males are waaaaayyyy too groiny about autoloading weaponry and waaaayyyy to casual about the horrors of war. With the end of the draft there are far too many young men whose sole experience with soldiering and warfare is through the ridiculous lens of Call of Duty Black: Ops or some such video crap. As a society we have far too little understanding of the ugly realities of what weapons do and mean. I think that has a lot to do with the casual way we treat the secret wars we are fighting in Asia right now; we have no skin in the game.

If I had my way I'd draft every goddamn mother's son for a sixteen-week basic military training. And this would be as nasty as I could make it; grim, spartan, physically painful and stressful. The guys would fire and clean their weapons repeatedly under the nastiest conditions, fire them until they were sick of the sight of them, clean them until they hated the smell of Break-free. They would live in the mud and the cold, eat cold rations, and march until their legs came off. They would get as close to the worst conditions of soldiering that I could make them.

Because that was what cured me.

I went into the service like most other green kids, thinking that it would be cool to be the Lord of War. But spending hours with a green plastic issue toothbrush and a black bottle of Breakfree grinding carbon off the bolt after more hours hunkered down in a concrete culvert staring at plastic Russians in the misting rain and cursing the forward assist knocked the magic and the mystery out of semiautomatic fire.

Knowing how to handle a rifle safely and accurately is a skill, and one (in my estimation) worth knowing. But the grim reality that comes with that skill, and is implied every time you squeeze the trigger, is even more worth knowing, and I would gleefully beat that knowledge into the fat head of every wannabe Rambo that came through my BT company. I came by it the hard way. I would be happy to provide that wisdom free of the charge in blood and death.

And then...I'd send them on to two years of National Service.

Those who chose could go on to the uniformed services. The others could pick a sort of Civilian Conservation Corps, doing pick-and-shovel work on infrastructure projects, or a VISTA/Peace Corps sort of national or international assistance doing anything from teaching kids to read to drilling wells to deworming goats.

After two years of this hopefully that would return to American life a bit more experienced in the world, and a bit less eager to barge about knocking things over. Plus a bit more knowledgeable about the sort of other people out there, the ones that many young men never know about other than through the television news, as fables and nonsense, or...through the sights of a rifle.

But that's just my wild notion.

On the subject of firearms I have no hope that any of my ideas will get past the idle discussion stage. Whilst we have gleefully pissed away so many of our rights in the current nonsensical wars against "terror" and "drugs" we find a critical minority of our fellow citizens unwilling to even consider a check on our "right" to bear any sort and any number of firearms.

We torture and even kill our helpless prisoners, hide them in secret without even admitting their names, we consider secret snooping and spying normal and natural. We lionize those who send out our soldiers to invade nations that have no injured us while we prosecute those who reveal the crimes of those we have celebrated. We have given up huge portions of our rights to speedy and public trials, to freedom from imprisonment without due process of law, to a free press and free speech.

And yet, on the question of restricting the "right" of a lunatic to shoot more than six rounds at a go we are adamant; this shall not pass!

What the fuck are we thinking?

Update 12/23 p.m.: And just because people who are smarter and funnier than you are should always receive their due, I refer you to the blog Goblinbooks for the most incisive and funniest takedowns of the whole firearms-as-the-guarantee-of-liberty horsepuckey. Good stuff and you can say I said so.

Update 12/25: And here's Badtux the Firearms Penguin with a rather brilliant explanation of why removing the sort of handguns and rifles used in the Newton Massacre (and many of the other nutter-shootings) would have a vastly minimal effect on private possession and use of firearms. I have no doubt that this will have zero effect on the sort of person whose masturbatory fantasies "need" two or more AR-15 knockoffs. But I sure as hell wish that Congress would read it.