United States unleashes the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

 Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death. The United States has become the harbinger of death, the agent of suffering and evil across the globe. Trump voters must be so proud.

We invite disease back into our own country through anti-vaccine bullshit. We facilitate its spread in the world by cutting funding for AIDS treatment and withdrawing funding from medical research.

We allow our Defense Department to strut and pose, and drop expensive bombs on regions already volatile, where the detonations will not quell the anger that dwells there. Tough guy rhetoric from the television host who was hired to portray the Secretary of Defense reinforces the bombast from the reality television character portraying the President.

The cruel tyrant, aided by greedy billionaires, cut foreign aid, throwing millions of people, including children, into deeper poverty and the certainty of famine.

This regime is centered on death. Its supporters pride themselves on their cruelty toward the people they deem inferior, in their own eyes and in the eyes of their god.  They detain and deport children with cancer, cutting them off from their treatment Everything they do is geared toward the destruction of millions, billions of people, so that the survivors can have lebensraum. They don't have allies. They have enemies and subordinates. They don't have a vision of shared humanity, they have a dream of monoculture enforced by conquest.

Would-be conquerors have had thousands of years to try to make it work. Their efforts have always ended in a tide line of dried blood where they crested and fell back, or simply dried up in place. The story of empire is ultimately one tragic failure after another. From the mid 20th Century, super power has only been held through the threat of murder suicide. It's a global abusive relationship.

The United States had a chance to be something different. There was a lot wrong in our past, but some of us were trying to make it right as best we could. Instead, the current party in power wants to return to the wrong and intensify it. Choose your world.

Impeach and remove the rogue president

 The best message the United States could send to the world right now would be to impeach and remove Donald Trump from the office of the presidency. It won't happen, because the Republican congressional majority has neither the will nor the skill to fulfill its role as a potent and vital component of our government, but it would demonstrate clearly that the American people do not support the unauthorized military action ordered by the current occupant of the Oval Office. It would prove that the government described by Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address is not dead, it's just been very sick for a while.

Our current chief executive is an embarrassment and a danger to every American citizen, everywhere. Military personnel and other Americans operating outside the country, particularly in and near the Middle East, are in the most immediate danger, but anyone, anywhere, could get caught in retaliatory actions by Iranian-aligned operators, as well as other entities with a beef against the United States. When the United States acts like a threat to world stability, the world will respond by trying to contain and neutralize the threat. Little countries, mostly through non-state actors, will strike with a sense that they have nothing to lose. Major powers will move with more deliberation, to exclude the US from cooperative endeavors that it used to support and now undermines.

The military will not save us by "refusing an unlawful order." They all take an oath to the Constitution, but there's nothing in the manual about exactly this situation. No one ever imagined a president as bad as Donald Trump actually making it all the way into power. Long before the thin-skinned aspiring dictator could order something truly horrific from the nuclear arsenal, he will have put armed forces not just into harm's way but into guaranteed losses, as commanders who were unable to talk him out of these adventures do their best to carry out their assigned missions. Congress could shut it down, but the majority party doesn't have the sense to do it.

The only sure way to end the threat of Donald Trump's instability is to remove him completely from office. That leaves us with the rest of the right wing coalition still embedded and entwined in the government. They have been building to this point since at least the 1970s, and really gained their foothold in 1980. However, they're not a solid bloc. They all like being able to rule rather than represent, but their motivations fracture their unity. The arguments would go back to being about policy more than personality.

No one should have the power that Donald Trump has usurped for himself. That's the bottom line. He is a threat to the people of the United States. The people of the United states must demand that their representatives in Congress use their constitutionally mandated power to remove that threat.

Bitching about the age of Democrats

 The age of Democratic elected officials is a symptom, not the disease itself. It's a troublesome symptom, a side effect of inconvenient truths about the party itself and the psychology of American voters.

Jeet Heer in the New Republic wrote: "The party is a heterogeneous coalition of centrists and progressives that has failed to define a core goal." This is and has been a simple truth since the party shifted to the left in the 1960s, as the Republican Party became the party of business over individuals, property rights over civil rights, and truculent conservatism in general. Those are some great core goals. Their evolution has led to the current authoritarian regime.

Heer pointed out that three House Democrats have died this year, all from states that Trump won or that have a Republican governor. This implied that more youthful presence of Democrats in those states might have improved the party's standing overall, but I think it says more about the states themselves, and voter psychology. 

Representative Raul Grijalva of Arizona died at age 77, from cancer. He had represented his seat to the satisfaction of the majority of voters in his district for more than 20 years. Seventy-seven seems old when you're 35 or younger, but wait until you're in your upper 60s, still working and feeling pretty energetic, and have some respect for the value of experience. If someone has been doing an acceptable job, gets the votes, and contributes to the party's national presence, why not keep sending them? Arizona is full of old people. It takes a particularly persuasive whippersnapper to get old farts to switch their allegiance. Grijalva was a reliable Democratic seat in the House. Maybe the district is drawn to keep it that way. But if a fresh-faced newbie hops in there and makes a mess, all of those calculations fall apart.

Gerry Connolly drew ire earlier this year when the party chose him as the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee instead of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Then he up and died of esophageal cancer, which he knew he had. He was 75. He had been an effective legislator for more than 16 years. 

The current occupant of the Oval Office will turn 79 on June 14, and is a babbling wreck. His backers will keep pushing him along as long as they can, because he is a reliable brand for them.

Most voters hate to think. I'm with you. My life is a testimony to my lack of mental discipline. Also, when you're busy busy busy, either scraping out a living or trying to have enough fun in your time off to feel ready to go back to scraping, you don't want to dig through the dense language of policy analysis. You want someone to tell you that everything will be okay if you put them in office. Public prominence brings with it an automatic assumption of some level of competence. Look at how Joe Biden was alternately a drooling bumbler and the evil mastermind of a vast criminal conspiracy. Anyone who makes it to the top has to have done something right. Right?

Hardworking, solid, prosperous citizens who put aside the artistic dreams of youth and became corporate lawyers are just as pressed for time as dishwashers, shop clerks, and bicycle mechanics.

An analysis of Kamala Harris's loss in 2024 stated that her voters were mostly "super voters" -- people who are more attentive and engaged in politics than average voters. We spent more time reading and absorbing analysis of the threat presented by another go-round with MAGA at the helm, and did what we could to prevent it. Added to that would be habitual party voters. But her race and gender were too much even for some of the regular partisans. Those regulars who sat it out did not believe that the current regime would be bad enough to warrant setting aside their core prejudices to elect a woman, especially a non-white woman whose voice they might not like.

Democrats re-elect old farts because they keep being electable. I've dunked on electable Democrats before, but even a dead weight like Joe Manchin at least held a seat that added to the technical majority. Yes, it's a coalition party. It always will be, because it collects all of the people and sub-groups that don't move in lockstep: the true exemplars of individual freedom of thought. We are the reason that the Constitution was written and amended as it is. The lesser of two evils is still less fucking evil.

The elements gathered into the Democratic Party have been fighting to defend their lives since the 1970s. Even as the work to expand civil rights and full citizenship to women and minorities has gone on, public perception has morphed and modified under the influence of changing media and economic pressures. And public perception is the foundation of electoral politics. Facts matter, but opinions get you into office.

The young have vision. The old have experience. The old also have the memory of their younger visions, many of which might match surprisingly well to those of the young today. 

If I'm still alive at 75 or 77, I fully expect still to be working, because I was too much of a dumbass to secure a lucrative retirement package. Or maybe AI will have set up a robot army to cull out the slower members of the herd. We can be processed into any number of useful things. A lot of us out there expect still to be working if we haven't been forcibly removed by some ageist purge.

Burdened by the bullshit of Thomas Jefferson

 "When the public fears their government, there is tyranny. When the government fears its people, there is liberty." 

Snappy, right? Punchy. Memorable. And so true. What a genius.

The first premise is true. A government that rules by fear must back it up with violence and repression. But the second part oversimplifies the relationship and validates anarchy and lawlessness in which the people end up fearing each other. Unity is lost. Democracy is lost. Faith in government is lost. The nation defaults to tyranny as the void is filled by ambitious, opportunistic leaders.

The mess we are in now is the direct result of the 1980 Reagan campaign undermining the legitimacy of government. Generations since have been trained to be contemptuous of government.

The Reagan administration was full of shit, using their anti-tax, anti-government rhetoric to round up voters disillusioned by the mistakes of the Vietnam era and constantly paranoid from decades of the Cold War. All they really wanted was to make rich people richer. And they had no strong objection to racism and homophobia as long as those sentiments continued to bring them a reliable voting base. But the main objective was always wealth concentration.

Government that served the people broadly cost too much money that the rich could spend more wisely on more real estate, and whatever gratified them personally. This includes high profile philanthropy as well as gaudy, shameful ostentation like gold toilets. The underlying premise was that rich people were the elite. They deserved all the money they could attract and were free to spend it as they wished. Their expenditures would magically create jobs and prosperity as the money dripped from their fingers with every wave of the hand.

Every young person who gets their first job learns about taxes. They sign on for X-amount per hour, and then their check is a lot smaller than the product of simple multiplication. Stuff gets taken out. Once a year, you have to take a math test to get some or all of what was withheld refunded to you. Often, they get this first job while they're still in school, perhaps struggling with math, as I did. It doesn't seem fair, especially when you learn that the more you earn, the higher percentage of your income goes to taxes. Whaaat? The more I make the more you get? Fuck you! The concept of progressive taxation takes too many words. What do you mean when you say that the businesses that generate income also burden the public and should pay for services? Huh?

Then there are the other deductions. To a young worker, Social Security seems remote. The money deducted for that doesn't get refunded the way overpaid taxes do. The return on it sits too far off to seem justifiable when you could use that money now. It's easy to believe various charlatans who assure you that you could make far more playing the market with private retirement investments. Forget volatility and untimely market corrections. Don't ask how the brokerages make their cut. You'll do great! Just keep the government off of everyone's back. The great Thomas Jefferson said that the government is supposed to fear the people. Keep them on the back foot! They're the enemy.

Bumper sticker philosophy rules public opinion. A popular one says, "Become ungovernable." This glorification of immature oppositional defiance strikes at the foundation of our constitutional system, but it sounds so damn cool. Yeah! Ungovernable! Don't tread on me! I'm a badass!

Jefferson is also credited with saying that the roots of the Tree of Liberty need to be refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants from time to time. This was written at a time when the meat on your plate at supper might have been walking around your farm that morning, and you might have slit its throat yourself. Human history is drenched in blood. At least the cause of liberty is a worthy use of the violent death in conflict that you might face anyway at the whim of a king or emperor. It was also written when war on a global scale was held back by the transportation and weapon technology of the time.

After World War II, the survivors of that conflict all seemed to agree that we didn't want to do that again. We've had almost constant warfare since then, but on a smaller scale. Hard to say how the score sits between the tyrants and the patriots. But we do know a lot more about post traumatic stress disorder and how to reconstruct physically maimed people. So there's that.

Regardless of the political labels, elected representatives have to deal with the details when they enact policies that will affect the entire operation of the country. They put lives at risk in the military and intelligence services. They kill or save millions inside and outside of our borders. Every two years, the voters kick the table and open the door to strong winds that blow the papers around. They base their decisions on whatever they can hold in mind about the people they're voting for and the beliefs they represent. A lot of them skip it altogether and hope for the best.

If fear is valued, fear will be cultivated. If the choice is only between a government fearing its people or a people fearing their government, we will only live in a constant climate of fear. That doesn't lead to good decisions.

Quit publicizing racist twats

 A racist twat in Rochester, Minn., recently dropped repeated n-bombs on a Black child she suspected of filching something from her bag in a city park. The boy is five years old and reportedly has special needs.

A bystander took video and confronted her. I won't link any of it because you can find it easily, and I don't want to give her any more publicity. I also omit her name, because she has raised a reported $500,000.00 so far, based on the claim that she has been doxed and fears for her safety.

First off, she has a right to say anything she wants, including racist epithets against a child, as long as she doesn't slide into criminal threatening. Representatives of the child might sue her for slander regarding the allegations of theft, but the First Amendment gives her plenty of latitude to spew ignorant garbage. This should never have become a cause celebre.

Our zeal for public shaming has begun to backfire spectacularly. A video meant to embarrass this loser instead gave her prominence to attract her fellow racists to protect a poor waif beset by threatening Black people and their terrorist white allies.

The racists and other far right adherents constantly shift between presenting themselves as badasses that you should just surrender to outright, and poor, noble victims of a legal system perverted by miscegenated Communists. They might walk around with firearms draped all over them, and talk about how they ask and grant no quarter, only to whine piteously when someone publishes their home address. What part of "no quarter" don't you get, tough guy? Total war is total war. Are you advocating for it or not?

America is basically a nation of shit-talkers. In the course of a day, how many thousands of death threats are flung back and forth in the heat of a moment and never go anywhere? In that mix, some may be credible. Most are not. In angry discourse, it's more common to oversell and under-deliver than vice versa.

Racism won't go away if you ignore it. But individual incidents of it won't turn into fundraising opportunities if you give it less air. Racists are not ashamed. Why do you think that a particular club is called Proud Boys? Putting a racist in a viral video is no longer a good strategy.

Along with hardcore racists come fashionable racists and the business interests that simply follow the money. Those business interests were into diversity when diversity seemed to be winning. Now that racism seems to be on top, business interests are okay with it. Corporations have no morals. They try to appeal to buyers with whatever seems to be attracting them at a given time. Some business interests will hold onto their support for diversity because they know that a solid percentage of consumers will choose them on that basis. Rather than compete in the more crowded arena of racist businesses, the "good guys" can depend on a loyal customer base to tide them over until things swing back to favor diversity overall. It is morally right, but also safe business.

I originally headlined this piece Nonviolence versus Violence because of reactions I read from the anti-racist community as the story about the Rochester bitch plays out. Certain Black activists called out their white supporters for a lack of resolve. Supposed supporters take down their Black Lives Matter signs and flags of support for marginalized groups. This may in fact indicate a weak will among some of those allies, but it also acknowledges a sad and frightening reality: the right wing likes to use violence and vandalism more than the left does.

The right wing cites the left's lack of violent propensities as a sign of cowardice and weakness. Paradoxically, they also accuse the left of perpetrating violence or of threatening it as an excuse for their own armament. Back in the Cold War, we did wonder whether the Soviets would outright invade us. Long before that, in the rise of Marxism in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Communists did engage in violence. They also didn't act very communistic wherever they gained power, but that's a tangent for another day.

Nonviolent protest emerged as a powerful tool in the 20th Century. However, it was only one tool. Outbreaks of actual violence in support of civil rights, for instance, showed the government that the costs of maintaining the racist status quo were higher than the costs of expanding the rights of full citizenship under the full protection of federal law. Gay rights got their big kick forward from the Stonewall riots in New York City.

Riots are battlefield actions. The combatants form ranks under their banners on a piece of ground that's publicly accessible, often completely public: streets, parks, business districts. There have been spectacularly bloody exceptions in which mobs descended on residential areas. This has most often been white forces attacking minorities individually or collectively. A handy list is provided here.

Slavery in the United States was not ended by peaceful protest. It was ended by a bloody and wasteful war between factions that conveniently lined up with geographical boundaries, allowing the South to secede and pretend to be their own country for four years. They spent those years proving that their economic system couldn't support a long-term military conflict against an industrialized power. They were not only morally wrong, they were economically inferior in an era when business competition was evolving rapidly. But they were so in love with their hateful ideology that they let thousands of their men get killed and their land was laid waste by Union forces. And afterward they merely shifted their tactics  -- still to their own detriment -- in order to maintain racial hierarchy.

Meanwhile, the rest of the country received both Black residents and racist ideologies. Exposure to both has led somewhat to acceptance of Black and brown people as a part of normal society, but also to the persistent cancer of racism. If the Civil War happened today, battles would break out all over the country. You would also find out in a hurry who really had the stomach for it.

When Timothy McVeigh bombed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, he thought that he would trigger a revolution against the tyrannical United States government. Instead, he set the militia movement back ten years as people recoiled at the horror of his act. We had those dopes walking around our town in their little Confederate hats, and then poof! they all ditched the regalia and shut the fuck up for a while. It was nice. They probably still met in private. You can tell by the signs and flags around town today that a good chunk of them suck up conspiracy theories and far right propaganda. And the few years of relative peace were bought at the price of innocent people killed and maimed in the Oklahoma City bombing.

My point is that large scale violence is the best advertising against itself. Too bad that it does not inoculate against small scale violence.

Bad actors on the right in this area have engaged in vandalism against targets that they could identify as holding opposing views: roofing nails in driveways, political signs cut down with a chainsaw, slashed tires, broken windows, occasional arson. During one dispute in the tiny town where I live, people were advised to put a padlock on their well cover (if they hadn't already just for general prudence) so that someone on the other side of the dispute didn't drop something unpleasant in there.

Whether to display symbols of a political position calls for a cost-benefit analysis. How many people will be swayed toward your point of view compared to the odds that some destructive, hateful chud will damage or destroy something you depend on, like your car or your house or an outbuilding containing tools you use?

The same Black activist noted that racism always attracts more funding than anti racism does. Anti-racist endeavors depend on mostly small donors. As a small donor myself, I can tell you that I view the many problems that our species faces as interlocked. Racists and destroyers have the benefit of their simple minds to help them focus their contributions on the narrow front pushed hard by their narrow minds. Saving things is much more complicated and delicate than destroying them. Because I tried to be content with a frighteningly modest income, I don't have the money to toss monthly donations totaling a couple of hundred dollars once I have paid my routine expenses and set aside some for non-routine expenses. Before I put a target on myself, I ask what my sacrifice will do to advance the greater good.

Once violence breaks out, it shapes reality to itself. The conflict becomes more important than the stakes in it. Combatants fight for their lives. We talk of the sacrifice of heroes who fall in battle, but that's a very different act from the human sacrifice celebrated by Christian churches, in which their pure messiah was executed just for being too darn good.

In either case, the gruesome deaths don't have a lasting good effect. One dead on a cross in 33 CE and millions dead by 1945, and yet here we are. Thousands obliterated in the 1860s just so some racist twat can raise a half a million dollars on the n-word and speculation that she might receive pizzas she didn't order on a few nights in 2025. I don't know what -- if anything -- will smarten up the racist dipshits. It's reached the point of unreasoning hatred, so no reasoned discourse will sway them. The death toll of racists is in the millions just since the 1860s, and yet there are still millions of them, so you won't "kill the problem out," as violent right wingers like to say.

Should the racists manage to rule the world, they will discover that they cannot make it into their utopia any more than we progressive dreamers could. Maybe the technofascists will achieve their fantasy of entirely automated labor serving a handful of actual humans living in luxury. In that case, the vast majority of people will have died out. It seems like a long term goal at best, except for the part where most humans die out. That part is too easy to achieve.

I can see it: Jesus comes back in about 2075.

"Hey, I'm back! Hey! Where did everybody go?" And then some AI planetary defense system vaporizes him.

In the meantime, we're alive now. How nice or not nice we make it is up to us. One more war or era of bloody skirmishes won't fix a goddamned thing.

Jumping off a cliff won't hurt you

 It's the landing.

Experts and concerned citizens have been warning us for years about the threats presented by the right wing elements currently in complete control of the federal government and many states. They described the dire consequences well in advance, attempting to sway voters after the 2020 election to keep up the pressure to hold back the MAGA faction and their allies and backers. They have failed at every step. Voters gave the House of Representatives to the Republicans in 2022 and the whole shootin' match to them in 2024.

Now that the Trump regime is energetically demolishing many decades of progress, we're starting to feel some consequences, but nothing like the devastation we were told to prepare for.

No one wants to see store shelves bare and businesses closing. No one wants to be part of massive layoffs. Not everyone wants a white ethno-state. Nor does everyone want to see women relegated to dependent, subservient status. I will venture that a minority of people want to see more dangerous workplaces, rising pollution, loss of cropland, privatization of national parks and other pubic lands, and unregulated drilling, mining, and transportation of resources through communities that happen to be in the way. But none of that has happened yet. Or not much. If you happen to live where lots of federal workers haven't suddenly lost their jobs, or where farmers have suddenly lost contracts they were counting on, maybe life seems pretty normal.

We're in midair right now. Feeling weightless, enjoying the view...

It's over in seconds.

What "Made in America" means

 Goods made in the foreign countries selected by Corporate America when they shipped the jobs off to maximize their profits are produced by low-paid labor, often in unsafe conditions. Sort of like the way factory workers were treated in this country in the Gilded Age, before unionization and health and environmental concerns delivered a one-two punch to corporate corner cutting.

Low priced consumer goods depend on exploited labor. In the countries where the factories are, the labor might feel well compensated for now, but if they get a taste of better and better living conditions they might upset the equation. In the meantime, anyone operating an industrial facility in the United States has to pay more for personnel, even if they don't pay particularly well by US standards. 

It's easy to say that you would gladly pay more for a US made item instead of one from China, until you start doing all the math and figure out how little you could afford. And it won't necessarily be made with better materials and workmanship. So you'll be paying more to get something that is only as good as you were getting from overseas. Meanwhile, the workers will face constant pressure from management to produce more for less. At the same time management will be fighting with regulators to ease up on pollution and safety standards.

Look at automobiles: You shell out five figures for even a dinky one, and with the best of care it starts letting you down within 3-5 years. We're talking about cars made in America. Consumer goods manufacturing is designed to make you buy things. It doesn't matter where the factory is. The calculation is the same.

We're awash in consumer goods: Televisions, computers, mobile phones, kitchen and household appliances, clothing... some stuff is produced here. Most is not. If companies tried to move the volume of production here that feeds our level of consumption, it would not only drive the prices of everything way up to cover the costs of establishing that infrastructure, it would require more land area than industry previously occupied at the height of domestic productivity. There are many more consumers now.

On the plus side, consumers now have less money to blow than in the latter part of the 20th Century, so they have less ability to gorge on the output of consumer goods manufacturing.

Economy is tricky. For all of the bullshit about "wealth creation," we're working with a finite planet. In nature, good times for any species are generally followed by a population collapse. The exception might be cockroaches. They seem to be able to thrive no matter what. When times are good, they eat the best garbage. When times are tough, they eat their own dead, and cast-off exoskeletons. As humans, we're more like the predators whose numbers boom when their prey proliferates. Those predators die off after they have eaten their prey population down to its low point. In the case of humans, we're preying not only on animals that we eat, but on each other, metaphorically, in economic competition.

Big companies don't really care where the factories are, as long as the numbers work in their favor. Since we have exalted obscene wealth as the ultimate marker of success, corporate leadership is only concerned with paying as little as possible to achieve whatever their business model calls productivity. Productivity only means how much money gets sucked in and funneled to the top.