byronius
byronius's JournalDangerous Posturing Inside A Strange And Unsurvivable Bubble.
So I went backpacking this weekend, weather.com looked nice but didn't say anything about the foot of snow already on the ground. I took the Big Dog for his first time out (rescue, older, haven't had the chance to take him), and the kids made me promise not to traumatize him with any risk-taking behavior, to which I solemnly pledged agreement.
So we find ourselves a little cheap motel in Pioneer. I've stayed there before; nice little place. We day-hiked in the snow and had a blast before collapsing back into the motel room to cook and shower. Great vacation. I loved it, he loved it.
Bits of a problem, though, especially Saturday. Why? First day of hunting season.
Three things:
1) 300 pound guy in brand new camo on a brand new 4-wheel ATV (also camo), two scoped rifles in the special holders, boots that looked like they never touched ground, giving me the bloodlust drug-glare. Every hunter I saw was toting twenty grand of tech crap, down to satellite tablets mounted on their ATV's. Every one of them was vibrating like they were on meth, but I think it was just the Bloodlust Drug. I try hard not to judge, but every one of those hunters I saw had the same weird jittery glee, and every one of them was clearly offended that I was not dressed like them nor doing what they were doing.
Naked guy with a knife or a spear slipping through the trees tracking a deer? I'm better with that, can almost respect the devotion to craft. Buncha guys roaring around on trails using satellite tech to murder herbivores? Stupid and ugly.
2) Truck full of hunters at the motel. One older guy sees my Obama sticker, postures and leers at me -- clearly, I'm supposed to be afraid of him; he's got some mental picture of how guys like me are less-than, and he's a-gonna skeer me with his NRA shirt. What I'm really thinking is: dude, you shouldn't mock strangers, you can never tell when you're gonna run into the Bad Dexter, the guy who'll track you down and kill everything you ever loved for the joy of it. I learned that lesson along the way -- the Truly Dangerous always mask. Best to be friendly to strangers. Plain Darwin.
3) Woman in the line at Vic's IGA testifying to the cashier, who echoes her sentiment. Rumbles of agreement from up and down the line -- we gotta teach these kids to fear god, that's what's missing --
Gave me chills. The Clean Hunters and the NRA T-shirt guy didn't scare me, but that lady at the store did. I suddenly felt like I was in Crazy Town, and better watch my back.
I did get a sense of Hard Times. Pioneer looked a little dirtier than last I saw it, more shuttered shops and stands, more destroyed and decaying houses --
I get the Primate Thing. We all tend to look for someone to blame, and we all tend when pressed to let our rage and fear guide us, even expressing it as a Holy Truth -- but history clearly shows that walking that path leads either Nowhere or Badwhere, and the Better Angels and a little Barbara Tuchman will tell us that thoughtful reason and reading and inner study are probably a better bet.
It wasn't all bad. I met cool people here and there, like the Sikh guy at the liquor store and the lady running the front desk at the motel, the big family with kids and dogs hiking to Devil's Lake -- but I live in my own kind of bubble these days, and bumping up against the Other was startling and Weird.
World's still here. Today.
The Goldfinger Theory.
Digby
The rest of the world now believes that scourge of our planet is us.
I wish I understood why people persist in seeing his rhetoric as isolationist. He sounds to me like a Bond villain announcing that he seeks world domination. Of course he always issues disclaimers that he doesn't. But it's obvious that he believes the US has the right to dictate how the world works and has no respect for multilateral institutional or international law or treaties.
It's not the "madman" theory. It's the "Goldfinger theory." And that's not exactly the same thing.
He's itching for war. You can feel it.
Mueller's Kitchen's getting hot. He's got to get out of there somehow. Even if it's over the ashes of everyone else.
Anybody here ever see Bob Marley play live? I woke up today wondering what that was like.
Must have been amazing.
How Russia Infiltrated the Trump Campaign & Stole The Election (Abridged).
The WeeklingsTHE UNABRIDGED STORY OF TRUMP/RUSSIA is long and complicated—like a Tolstoy epic, but written by the content creators at the National Enquirer. The dramatis personae alone runs to half a dozen pages. We may never know the full extent of it. So this is by no means an exhaustive examination.
The best way to explain Trump/Russia, it seems to me, is to focus on one key player (Jared Kushner) and one key moment in time (March-July, 2016). That was when the Faustian bargain was made between the Trump campaign and Russia—when it was decided that Donald Trump would accept help from Vladimir Putin in order to win the White House.
This account, drawn entirely from mainstream news reporting, is an attempt to shape what seems like a slew of disparate stories into a cohesive narrative.
This is how we got to where we are.
http://www.theweeklings.com/golear/2017/09/07/how-russia-infiltrated-the-trump-campaign-stole-the-election-abridged/
The rest is extremely coherent and worth the read.
There was once a Republican President who would have had marching Nazis shot or imprisoned.
This guy.
... the most interesting—although horrible—sight that I encountered during the trip was a visit to a German internment camp near Gotha. The things I saw beggar description. While I was touring the camp I encountered three men who had been inmates and by one ruse or another had made their escape. I interviewed them through an interpreter. The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said that he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to 'propaganda.'
-- excerpt from Eisenhower's cable to George C. Marshall
It is a fact of history that Dwight David Eisenhower grew to hate Nazis so much after touring Ohrdruf concentration camp that his aides had to desperately try to prevent him from scheming to murder the entire German General Staff before the Nuremberg trials. He spent much time, effort, and command capital trying to find ways to exterminate as many Nazis as possible before the peace fully descended, with a maniacal focus that startled his closest friends.
At the beginning of the Ohrdruf tour he was accompanied by a full staff and the press; by the end, he was alone, having insisted on seeing every last nook and corner of the fresh horrors held in that place. George Patton could not follow him, nor could any of his aides after awhile. The experience marked Eisenhower with a murderous obsession that would stay with him until his death.
Had Eisenhower as president witnessed Nazi flags marching through any American town or city, it is not conjecture that his obsession would have led him to press with all administrative power to snuff out such an event with all possible brutality. In fact, I don't believe that any Nazi march in the United States during the first ten or fifteen years after the war would have survived the wave of angry combat veterans who would have certainly shown up armed and dangerous.
I have a soft spot for Ike because of this story. He wasn't perfect. But Republican or no, I kinda miss him.
Now more than ever.
It's never straight up and down.
They say the fittest shall survive
Yet the unfit may live
Let 'em wear gaudy colors
Or avoid display
Hey it don't matter
It's all the same
So I do this and I do that
So I do this and I do that
So I do this and I do that
It's never straight up and down
It's never straight up and down
It's never straight up and down
It's never straight up and down
Oh you got a nickel
I got a dime
I'd like to get to know you
But I haven't got the time
You gotta walk like a mannequin
Roll like a tire
Act on reaction
Dodge the big spud fryer
So wiggle on the bottom
Wiggle on the top
Wiggle up the middle
And laugh a lot
Cause I've been living in a wiggly world
Wiggly world, a wiggly world
I got to tell you
I've been living in a wiggly world now
Wiggly world, a wiggly world
Well I've been living in a wiggly world
Wiggly world, a wiggly wor/d
I got to tell you
I've been living in a wiggly world
WiggIy world, a wiggly world
I always love it when the Americans show up and kick the crap out of the Nazis.
Best part of every war movie ever made.
I've started watching 'Walking With The Enemy', got to the part where the P-51's show up and change the story. Made my heart rise. Always does.
Anyone who does not believe we are not at war right now is a fool. We've been attacked, a sneak attack launched by a dirty crew of truly evil darkhearts. A part of our own population welcomes them, but most are turning around.
None of us alive have ever been through anything like this before. It's going to be a rough road. If we survive, we'll come out of it with scars.
I have to believe the Americans are going to show up and kick the crap out of the Nazis. By which I mean American Us.
PS: The guy playing Adolf Eichmann (long may his name be synonymous with moral rot and mass murder) looks JUST LIKE Stephen Miller.
Excellent actor Charles Hubbell:
Stephen 'Moral Rot And Mass Murder' Miller:
When Abbie Hoffman faced off the Klan in McComb, Mississippi in 1964.
He was a short-haired, straight-laced college student in a suit and tie when he joined friends during the summer of 1964 to register black voters in the worst part of the Deep South. He was beaten, chased, jailed, and nearly lynched on several occasions. William Kunstler met him during this period, and wrote this about him in his autobiography -- "As a liberal northern Jewboy in the argot of the southern rednecks, Abbie got beaten up a lot."
The experience radicalized him. By 1966 he had grown his hair out and joined the Diggers, and in 1967 planned and executed one of his most famous stunts, the 'bombing' of the New York Stock Exchange with dollar bills that stopped trading in its tracks and forced the NYSE to install expensive glass partitions to prevent further disasters of that kind.
I post this because I have always considered Abbie to be one of the bravest of Americans, fearless and pioneering, ruthlessly peaceful, politically creative beyond his peers and an expert in the art of guerilla theater. He thrust himself into the most dangerous situations seemingly without regard for his safety; his nose was broken eight times, his spine twice. Nixon can be heard on the infamous tapes calling him 'that damned dirty radical Jew', a badge of honor that should cement Abbie's posterity as a True American forever.
It's my personal opinion that he was murdered by former elements of Nixon's CIA shortly after H.W. Bush took office. He was found in his bed under the covers with his shoes on. The window was open. His brother had just spoken to him and said he was ebullient and positive. I had seen him speak a few months before, and he fairly brimmed with plans for the future.
Fearless. American. Willing to step up into the flame-wall that was and is American race-hatred, and he did it with intelligence, humor, and a dedication to non-violence that still astounds me considering the personal damage he suffered. I saw him debate Allen Ginsberg at the '81 Kerouac Conference, and he spoke brilliantly and honestly about his experiences, urging everyone there to rise to action. To the last moment of his life he was an inspirational activist, willing to put his life on the line for progress.
I miss him terribly during these Orange Hell days. May his spirit guide us.
"You are talking to a leftist. I believe in the redistribution of wealth and power in the world. I believe in universal hospital care for everyone. I believe that we should not have a single homeless person in the richest country in the world. And I believe that we should not have a CIA that goes around overwhelming governments and assassinating political leaders, working for tight oligarchies around the world to protect the tight oligarchy here at home." -- Abbie Hoffman, 1987
When Nazi LARPing goes bad.
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Member since: Wed Feb 23, 2005, 03:32 PMNumber of posts: 7,515