A totalitarian police state falls and goes splat

Sometimes, life comes at you fast. One moment you’re moaning over the fact that wanna-be tyrant got elected in the USA, the next you’re watching a wanna-be tyrant getting slapped down in South Korea, and the next you’re watching a full-blown tyrant, Bashar al-Assad, running for a helicopter to flee Syria before the mob gets him. Putin is very disappointed. Chaos reigns! The citizens are looting the palace!

Forgive me, I’m self-centered and too America-centric, but that got me wondering what we could get by descending on Mar-A-Lago with axes and crowbars.

Now we wait and hope that this is a resurgence of democracy and that a peaceful Syria emerges from the wreckage.

You can always trust Terry Pratchett for the appropriate quote

He’s better than the Bible.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?” shouted Moist. “You can’t just go around killing people!”
“Why Not? You do.” The golem lowered his arm.
“What?” snapped Moist. “I do not! Who told you that?”
“I worked it out. You have killed 2.338 people,” said the golem calmly.
“I have never laid a finger on anyone in my life, Mr Pump. I may be–– all the things you know I am, but I am not a killer! I have never so much as drawn a sword!”
“No, you have not. But you have stolen, embezzled, defrauded and swindled without discrimination, Mr Lipvig. You have ruined businesses and destroyed jobs. When banks fail, it is seldom bankers who starve. Your actions have taken money from those who had little enough to begin with. In myriad small ways you have hastened the deaths of many. You do not know them. You did not see them bleed. But you snatched bread from their mouths and tore clothes from their backs. For sport, Mr Lipvig. For sport. For the joy of the game.”

Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

Musk and Ramaswamy are not qualified or disinterested in their plans

The rich gomers who are in charge of the “department of government efficiency” have floated some of their plans to save money, which mainly seem to involve the wholesale destruction of various government agencies, throwing thousands of people out of work and also gutting important government funded programs, like science. They want to just shut down NIH? Jesus.

Who wants to tell all the veterans who sacrificed so much for their country that we’re going to simply end Veteran’s Administration health care? I imagine they think we can just privatize all the prisons, and that will somehow save money.

There’s more. Let’s dismantle the department of education, starve Planned Parenthood and the IRS, and let’s stop the Federal Trade Commission, Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission from meddling in rich people’s money. They also want to make massive cuts in NASA funding, specifically to end all those “bureaucrats and contractors unearned bonuses”. Yeah, too many outside contractors are leeching off NASA’s budget…like SpaceX, maybe?

You know, killing established programs within the federal government does not reduce expenses or improve services — it just opens the door to private parasites moving in and taking over to increase their profits.

Are you still denying that Israel is genocidal?

Let’s ask Amnesty International.

Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, Amnesty International said for the first time on Wednesday, calling on countries, especially those with influence over Israel, such as the US and Germany, to take action to bring the violence to an end.

Let’s ask the people living under oppression.

“Here in Deir al-Balah, it’s like an apocalypse,” Mohammed, a 42-year-old father of three, was quoted by Amnesty as saying. “There is no room for you to pitch a tent; you have to set it up near the coast… You have to protect your children from insects, from the heat, and there is no clean water, no toilets, all while the bombing never stops. You feel like you are subhuman here.”

Of course, if you ask the Israeli government, you’re going to get nothing but denial.

The Israeli government has repeatedly balked at charges of genocide, claiming it takes great efforts to protect civilians while Hamas deliberately puts Palestinians in danger. The US has made similar defenses, and, when pressed, often defaults to its line that “Israel has a right to defend itself.”

Amnesty found such claims are “not credible,” saying that the presence of Hamas does not absolve Israel from its obligation to avoid indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks.

From “the clear pattern of causing intergenerational harm by dropping bombs on residential areas at night where children, infants, parents and grandparents are sleeping,” to “the constant forced movements of populations that are already traumatized by having been displaced and then attacking them once they have been moved,” O’Brien said it is “absolutely not the case” that Israel’s violence can be “understood exclusively as an attempt to defeat Hamas.”

But the Times of Israel says Lebensraum Needed for Israel’s Exploding Population, as an excuse. They actually said “lebensraum,” as if we’ve never heard that before, and as if it is a legitimate excuse for exterminating the people living on the land you want.

Or we could just look at the numbers.

The Israeli military has killed at least 44,532 Palestinians, injured at least 105,538, and displaced an estimated 90% of people in Gaza since the war began. The death and injury toll is feared to be a drastic undercount due to decimated health and tracking capabilities, and thousands missing in the rubble.

With its conclusion, Amnesty International now joins an ever-burgeoning list of people and organizations who have found Israel to be committing acts of genocide against Palestinians.

How about looking at the pictures?

Now that the question of whether Israel is a genocidal regime is settled, let’s ask another question: why are we still propping them up with arms?

He’s priming the MAGAts

Trump met with Prime Minister Trudeau of Canada and had the kind of friendly conversation that should make everyone nervous.

The president-elect told the prime minister if Canada cannot fix the border issues and trade deficit, he will levy a 25% tariff on all Canadian goods on day one when he returns to office.

Trudeau told Trump he cannot levy the tariff because it would kill the Canadian economy completely. Trump replied – asking, so your country can’t survive unless it’s ripping off the U.S. to the tune of $100 billion?

Trump then suggested to Trudeau that Canada become the 51st state, which caused the prime minister and others to laugh nervously, sources told Fox News.

But he continued, telling Trudeau that prime minister is a better title, though he could still be governor of the 51st state.

Sources told Fox News someone at the table chimed in and advised Trump that Canada would be a very liberal state, which received even more laughter. Trump suggested that Canada could possibly become two states: a conservative and a liberal one.

He told Trudeau that if he cannot handle his list of demands without ripping the U.S. off in trade, maybe Canada should really become a state or two and Trudeau could become a governor.

Could he be joking? Maybe he’s joking. Except…this is the kind of thing Trump would dream about. I also suspect there are a lot of Fox News junkies/MAGA hat wearing assholes who have just perked up at the idea of their red wave rolling across the border and teaching those commie liberals up north a lesson.

If it came to that, I’d be on the Canadian side of the fight.

Uh-oh, South Korea has gone authoritarian

This is personally worrying — my son is in the midst of interviewing for a new position in the army (he’s a Major in the signal corps), and just this past week he was narrowing his options down to a position in South Korea. We thought this was good news, since he’s currently stationed in Kuwait, and we’d rather he were in a nice, peaceful, calm place. But look! South Korean President Yoon has declared martial law, citing vague threats from North Korean communists while actually targeting the South Korean opposition parties.

“I declare martial law to protect the free Republic of Korea from the threat of North Korean communist forces, to eradicate the despicable pro-North Korean anti-state forces that are plundering the freedom and happiness of our people, and to protect the free constitutional order,” Yoon said.

Yoon did not immediately specify who constituted the pro-North Korean anti-state forces. But he has cited such forces in the past as hindering his agenda and undermining the country.

He did not say in the address what specific measures will be taken. Yonhap reported that the entrance to the parliament building was blocked.

“Tanks, armored personnel carriers, and soldiers with guns and knives will rule the country,” Lee Jae-myung, leader of the opposition Democratic Party, which has the majority in parliament, said in a livestream online. “The economy of the Republic of Korea will collapse irretrievably. My fellow citizens, please come to the National Assembly.”

Yeah, everyone who opposes my politics is a Communist who supports the terrorists. Sounds familiar.

The news sources are predicting immediate protests, rallies, and even riots in response — South Koreans do not abide autocracies taking over. The American military won’t respond (we hope!), but it’s probably no fun to be hunkered down in Camp Humphreys while the citizenry takes to the streets.

It’s probably too much to expect that someone in the military will always be posted to someplace calm.

Who is going to profit?

The first quarter of 2025 is going to be rough.

Does he even understand what tariffs do? Like, who ends up paying for them? He wants to impose a 25% tax on our two most important agricultural partners, and also on our trade partner, China. In the middle of winter, fruit and vegetable prices will be launched skyward. I also expect that the big grocery chains will see this as an opportunity for even greater price gouging. Didn’t he campaign on complaining that grocery bills were too damn high?

He also tried this before in 2018, slapping more tariffs on goods from China. It doesn’t seem to have worked.

I think my Christmas present to my wife and myself will be all about stocking the pantry in December, and maybe we’ll have to expand the backyard garden in the spring.

Do we have to remind him of Smoot-Hawley? I hate having to dust off my high school civics knowledge.

Science has always been political…but especially now

Augustin Fuentes has a letter in Science. It’s pretty good.

Science, both teaching and doing, is under attack. The recent US presidential election of a person and platform with anti-science bias exemplifies this. The study of climate processes and patterns and the role of human activities in these phenomena are at the heart of multiple global crises, and yet the scientific results, and the scientists presenting them, are attacked constantly. The dissemination of knowledge on health involving reproduction and human sexuality is increasingly marked for attack (in Russia, Uganda, and the USA), and researchers in these areas are often the target of extensive political pressure. The massive attack on the science and the scientists behind vaccines, pathogen transmission, and public health during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond is well documented, as are attacks on basic science education and the practice of science (for example, in Hungary and the USA). Even in the arena of biodiversity conservation, there is growing politicization of the data and political targeting of the scientists producing it. According to the US-based National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT), climate change, reproduction, vaccines, and other evidence-based scientific topics are being deemed “controversial” by school boards and state officials and are being removed from state-approved teaching resources across the country. Core research on health, climate, human biology, and biodiversity is being undermined by private foundations, governments, and anti-science ideologues.

Whether science is political, and if it should be, is an age-old debate. Some assert that scientific institutions and scientists themselves should seek to remain apolitical, or at least present a face of political neutrality. Others argue that such isolation is both impossible and unnecessary, that scientists are and should be in the political fray.

But…is there really a serious debate about whether scientists should be politically neutral? In my experience, the question is settled: scientists should be activists. I emerged from the University of Oregon in the 1980s; Aaron Novick was the chair of the department. He was a veteran of the Manhattan Project, who protested against the Vietnam War, and was on the board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. I worked with George Streisinger for a year, and he was even more radical. His family fled Hungary as the Nazis came to power, also opposed the Vietnam War, and when I knew him, was campaigning against mutagenic pesticides and testifying for the Downwinders, and writing editorials on the dangers of radiation.

What debate?

WTF, NPR?

Here’s a little cartoon that nicely summarizes my attitude towards all those people who voted for Trump.

Get the fuck out of my life. Don’t ask me for anything, not even sympathy. Don’t try to tell me it was nothing personal, you just wanted lower grocery prices (I have news for you — you won’t be getting them), that I’m bad for letting politics interfere with friendship. It’s you that stabbed me and all my friends and a few million innocents with your politics.

That goes for NPR, too. They have a story about a couple in which the wife leapt down the MAGA rabbithole.

Late one night in June 2020, Katrina Vaillancourt lay awake in her bedroom, overwhelmed by the stress of the COVID-19 pandemic. Unable to sleep, she pressed play on an online video series that a friend had sent.

The videos’ narrator promised to reveal “evidence of an elite plan so evil, so all encompassing, that people will be shocked to the core.”

The dizzying 10-part video series was called Fall of the Cabal. It promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory that society is controlled by a satanic cabal that is abusing children. Vaillancourt would later think back on this moment as the point at which her beliefs radically changed overnight, rupturing her closest relationships — including the one with her then-fiancé, Stephen Ghiglieri, who was asleep beside her.

This is a horror story. It couldn’t be worse if instead, she had a debilitating stroke. This was a devastating, near instantaneous transformation that would have warranted an emergency trip to the hospital. NPR treats it as a mundane change of opinion, though.

As Vaillancourt watched, her initial skepticism gave way to a feeling of devastation. She was relieved when the final episodes claimed a group of government insiders was working on a plan to take down the cabal with then-President Donald Trump’s help. The narrator called the president a “genius, a 5-D chess player, a man with a huge heart.” A “golden age” was on the way.

“I felt nauseated by the sight or the sound of Trump prior to this particular night,” Vaillancourt said. But at a time when the world felt chaotic and uncertain, the message in the series gave her hope. “My fear dissolved,” she recalled. “I felt this beaming of love” and “like the curtain had been thrown wide open.”

Dear god. Was she poisoned? Was she always this gullible and delusional? Don’t worry, though, she got “better”.

Vaillancourt voted for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. even though he had dropped out of the race. Trump has picked him to be part of his administration, which she says has given her a reason to feel optimistic.

“I have been of an opinion that’s different than Stephen’s [her husband],” she said. “And that’s a difficult thing for me to even say right here. I don’t share the fear that so many people around me do. That’s difficult to acknowledge too.”

This lunatic woman and her husband have reconciled…and NPR treats this as a happy ending. See, they just have different opinions — she may have voted for a manic anti-vaxxer, she may see a wanna-be dictator who wants to deport millions and deny health care to women, but love will find a way and she will face no consequences from her insane views.

She sounds like the kind of person who loves NPR.

He is both an airhead & a rabid Christian nationalist

Pete Hegseth is much more than just a Fox News airhead. He’s a man with a plan.

When Donald Trump announced his intention to nominate Fox News host Pete Hegseth to serve as Secretary of Defense, concerns were raised immediately about Hegseth’s undisguised Christian nationalism.

Hegseth, who has admitted that his multiple crusader tattoos got him “deemed an extremist” by his own National Guard unit, has deep ties to misogynistic Christian nationalist pastor Douglas Wilson.

On Monday, Hegseth appeared on the “CrossPolitic” podcast, which is hosted by Toby Sumpter and Gabe Rench, both of whom are closely tied to Wilson and his church.

Douglas Wilson often seems to fly under the radar, but he’s a far-right religious nutjob. Hegseth is cut from the same cloth, apparently. This is not someone you want overseeing the military, especially given his plan to start a culture war.

During the discussion about Hegseth’s book “Battle For The American Mind,” Hegseth said that he is working to create a system of “classical Christian schools” to provide the recruits for an underground army that will eventually launch an “educational insurgency” to take over the nation.

“I think we need to be thinking in terms of these classical Christian schools are boot camps for winning back America,” said Sumpter.

“That’s what the crop of these classical Christian schools are gonna do in a generation,” Hegseth agreed. “Policy answers like school choice, while they’re great, that’s phase two stuff later on once the foothold has been taken, once the recruits have graduated boot camp.”

“We call it a tactical retreat,” Hegseth continued. “We draw out in the last part of the book what an educational insurgency would look like, because I was a counterinsurgency instructor in Afghanistan and kind of the phases that Mao [Zedong] wrote about. We’re in middle phase one right now, which is effectively a tactical retreat where you regroup, consolidate, and reorganize. And as you do so, you build your army underground with the opportunity later on of taking offensive operations in an overt way.”

He learned a lot in Afghanistan. I don’t think it would be too hard to translate to the USA — one nation infested with heavily armed, rabid Abrahamic fanatics is much like another.

Role models for the religious right