Category: Viewing with alarm

Piece in our time

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments
“Ve vant only piece … a piece of Venezuela, a piece of Greenland. …”

Maybe I should count my blessings.

Herself has a good job, plus a small pension from PERA set to start in a couple months. I have my Social Security. We have health insurance. The house and cars are paid for, we live frugally, and our financial adviser says we’re in fine shape.

But I just can’t stop thinking about Nazis.

Goddamnit, I fucking hate fucking Nazis. Especially the homegrown variety. We should be making them jump off bridges. And not into Venezuela or Greenland, either.

Michael O’Hanlon recently wrote a piece for Foreign Affairs that noted, accurately, and with the usual disclaimers, that when it comes to national security policy the current federal management really isn’t that much different from a number of its predecessors.

Ohhhh-kay. Thanks for the history lesson, Mickey. What say we try learning from our mistakes? Remembering the past to avoid being condemned to repeat it? The name George Santayana ring any bells in your cerebral carillon?

It’d be comical if it weren’t so serious. Which of the various Marvel timelines are we experiencing now, in which an unelected strutting fuck-bubble like Obergruppenführer Stephen Miller is running the country, giving Kent State scholarships to educate anyone who won’t do as they’re told, while his alleged supervisor whiles away the hours nailing Hobby Lobby kitsch to the White House walls, cheating at golf, and watching on TV as “Happy Hour” Hegseth punishes another two-bit dictator for stealing the boss’s dance moves?

If they were mine, I’d leave them out on the street with a handlettered sign reading, “Free.” Or maybe just park them in the shitter at Mar-a-Lago next to all those classified documents that should’ve served as his ticket to Leavenworth until Thanos snapped his fingers. Or was it Eileen Cannon? Whatever.

“Aren’t we supposed to be the good guys here?” asks Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., in an interview with Hanna Rosin at The Atlantic.

Not according to the gin pig at the top of the DoD org chart, who’d like to hang Kelly’s pelt on his office wall, no doubt in part because (a) Kegsbreath would like to see what a pair of actual testicles looks like, and (2) Kelly is making presidential noises just in case we ever have another one of those elections.

But first we have to make damn sure we have some midterms, this year. Take the House and the Senate; impeach, convict, and remove Comandante Piggy — take a seat and another fistful of Bayer’s finest, Porky, watch those cankles swell like poisoned puppies in the summer sun— and then, in 2028, reclaim the White House.

And none of this “let’s not look back” bullshit. Not this time. What’s the phrase? Oh, yeah: Never again.

Call me selfish, but I wanna get back to scribbling my little tee-hees, and I find this relentless “America über alles!” screeching a huge distraction.

Yo, Nazis. Here are your MAGA hats, there’s your bridge, what’s your hurry?

Boom times

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
Miss Mia in the sack.

A thunderclap yesterday afternoon startled Miss Mia Sopaipilla, who was curled up in her favorite sack, enjoying her eleventy-seventh nap of the day.

I did not tell her, as did Johnny Lundgren’s dad in Jim Harrison’s “Warlock,” “That’s God barking at you for being such a miserable little pissant.”

No, I reassured her that it wasn’t God, probably, or even the work of a (much) lesser (would-be) deity — say, Felonious Punk, commanding a few of his masked ICEholes to shock-and-awe us back to wherever we came from, or didn’t, whatever.

Even if fascism were to come a-calling at El Rancho Pendejo, Miss Mia should have nothing to fear. She’s a Russian blue, and since the Punk just blew a Russian, she should be A-OK with him and his goons. Cream for all my apparatchiks!

Now, me, I’m an Irish-American Red, so who knows where I’d wind up? Where would a Adderall-snorting asshat send a sober Mick scribbler with a bicycle fetish? A Boston pub to pull pints on St. Patrick’s Day? The International Space Station, to chronicle its “retirement,” slated for 2030? Couldn’t log much saddle time up there over the next five years, but I’d get to rip one helluva descent when NASA — if it’s still around — pulls the plug.

And Herself? Conscripted into the Punk’s platoon of librarians, I expect. Condemned to catalog the pestilential archives of fuck books, Truth Social screeds, and unpaid bills.

And she wouldn’t be allowed to shush any of his minions, who never ever give their festering gobs a nanosecond’s respite from telling the FreeDummies that Making America Great Again requires chop-shopping it into a Dollar Store knockoff of Pooty-poot’s Russia.

Troops to Ukraine? Hell no! But troops to DeeCee? That’s the real global trouble spot, amirite?

The best intel I can muster tells me that the enemy is bunkered up at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. Careful with the arty and airstrikes, lads, and try to avoid damage to the facility if it’s feasible — it is a National Heritage Site, but may have been desecrated beyond resurrection.

I mean, have you seen what these terrorists have done to the Rose Garden?

Ignorance is strength

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
“Hey, I said no DEI! Who wrote this?”

The FreeDummies have finally turned their beady little eyes to the Land of Enchantment.

According to Alaina Mencinger at The New Mexican, Los Alamos National Laboratory has been “suspending programs related to diversity, equity and inclusion and climate change and scrubbing old issues of the lab’s magazine that discuss these now-disfavored topics.”

LANL employees are federal contractors, not federal employees. Nevertheless, a review has determined that at least two of Dear Leader’s edicts apply to the lab’s DEI and affirmative-action programs, “and the lab is ending such programs as a result,” Mencinger writes.

The New Mexican apparently got its hands on some internal communications — a memo signed by lab director Thom Mason went out Thursday — and bits of this, that, and the other have already begun slip-sliding away down the old memory hole, among them issues of LANL’s National Security Science magazine, focused on anything and everything from climate to diversity, nuclear deterrence to manufacturing.

And it’s not just magazines getting fed into the shredder. According to Mason, LANL has “received guidance” to suspend climate action, sustainability and carbon-neutral energy programs. It goes without saying that LANL is also removing “relevant terminology” from external communications.

But, good news, comrades! “The removal of some content isn’t permanent,” according to the Ministry for Sit the Fuck Down and Shut the Fuck Up.

“To comply with recent direction from the Presidential administration, parts of our website are temporarily unavailable while they’re under construction. We appreciate your patience as we work to update and repost them. … You may notice changes to our website while we reconstruct pages and evaluate language.”

Huh. “Construction” and “update” are not the words I would have chosen for this odious project. As for “evaluating language,” I’d be inclined to leave that sort of thing to the smarties, who are very much not in evidence as the Stalinization of the federal government continues.

Reaching

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
In the pink.

I am a creature of habit.

We all have our little routines. Spontaneity, first thing in the morning? No, thank you, please. Predictability is what’s wanted before coffee.

So I arise at stupid-thirty, since that’s how we roll around here. Dress in the dark, because one day this will not be optional. Visit the bathroom. Greet Herself and Miss Mia Sopaipilla. Tidy up Miss Mia’s bathroom and give her a vigorous massage on The Chair of Love.

“Take me out to the ball game.”

And finally, make coffee.

Thus fortified, I usually scan the headlines to inspect humanity’s latest self-inflicted wounds. But lately that feels like rubbernecking at an inner-city ER. Let’s start with something light, shall we?

Jaysis. Even the weather report is all like, “We have good news and bad news.” The good news is that yesterday Herself and I took an afternoon stroll in shorts and T-shirts. The bad news is that high-temperature records are dropping like staffing levels at USAID and if the current precip trend continues we’re likely to be drinking our own wee-wee by March instead of August.

At this point a second cup of coffee is indicated. Black, hold the wee-wee.

Check the email? No joy there. Evil tidings, in fact. Avert the eyes.

Toast, then. With butter and jam. Also, and too, oatmeal, with banana, pecans, cinnamon, brown sugar, maple syrup. Black tea to give the coffee some backup. Play ball with Miss Mia.

Time for The Times? Y’think? And a-one, and a-two, annnnnd. …

Gods above and below!

Maybe I’ll just go back to bed.