MAGA Convoy Contemplates Occupation

In a weird case of déjà vu, the MAGA convoy which rode around the Washington DC Beltway a few months ago is back in Hagerstown, MD, contemplating an incursion into Our Nation's Capital. These weirdos believe they can sneak into the city in the evening, betraying a fundamental lack of understanding of urban realities:

In a nightly meeting this evening, The People's Convoy spoke about quietly ambushing Washington, D.C., and occupying the city tomorrow during the evening hours. (They plan to ride into D.C. with their cameras and radios off.)

— Zachary Petrizzo (@ZTPetrizzo) May 19, 2022

In preparation for their invasion, which they oddly refer to as an 'ambush', their leaders are urging 'radio silence', instructing the various video livestreamers to knock it off:

The People's Convoy instructed their Proud Boy and Capitol insurrectionist streamers to stay offline today— they want total radio silence. Considering this violent and fascist convoy has gotten away with multiple shootings, this should be raising major red flags. https://t.co/8f67xZBgJD pic.twitter.com/fQ4gmeoc1x

— Vishal P. Singh (they/he) 🏳️‍⚧️ (@VPS_Reports) May 19, 2022

Because of their ineptitude, they postponed their planned occupation of DC by a day:

- Patriot Mechanic and his wife briefly discussed how the 4pm meeting had been pushed back a day. Getting scared and diverting is par for the course for TPC, so pushing the meeting back isn't out of the question. Neither is blatant dishonesty in any capacity. pic.twitter.com/di5iktnHR7

— Quarks McQuade (@NoMoreQuarks) May 19, 2022

These people are capable of mischief, and some of them are armed, but I don't think they pose much of a danger to the DC metro area locals because they are a bunch of morons who are constantly squabbling.  It's supposed to hit the 90s in DC for the next three days, which should dissuade them from sticking around too long, especially if the locals are sufficiently riled up.

Crimes Against Demeter

Amidst the horrors of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with the wholesale slaughter of civilians and the use of sexual violence against women and children as a weapon of war, it seems like a small thing, but it's the sort of small thing which will have global repercussions... I mean, the destruction of Ukraine's agricultural capacity.

Ukraine is traditionally known as the Breadbasket of Europe, and is the third largest exporter of grain in the world.  It is also a major producer of sunflower oil and potatoes.  Countries in the Middle East and Africa are particularly vulnerable to food insecurity due to the war's prevention of agricultural activity in Ukraine.  Invading a major food producer and exporter on the cusp of planting season is a particularly horrifying act of aggression.

Via Tengrain, we have a tale of a more subtle horror, the destruction of Ukraine's National Gene Bank of Plants.  This facility, in Karkhiv, preserved over one-hundred and sixty thousand varieties of seeds, some of them valuable hybrids, others not extant anywhere else in Europe.  The maintenance of genetic diversity among crops is crucial in this age of monocultures, emergent pathogens, and climate change.  A lack of diversity among our crops leaves us vulnerable to blights which can wipe out genetically narrow populations.  Maintaining diversity also allows agronomists to determine whether certain plant varieties, perhaps regional heirloom landraces, are better suited to changing climatic conditions.  The loss of 160,000 varieties of plants, while not as gut-wrenching as the murder of one civilian, is the sort of slow-creeping horror which becomes apparent on deeper contemplation.

To compound matters, as Tengrain noted, warming in the Arctic doesn't bode well for the Svalbard Global Seed Vault either.

Formula for Disaster

One of the latest right-wing smear campaigns has involved blaming the Biden administration for a shortage of baby formula, with the main narrative partaking of the very same 'Great Replacement' bullsjit which inspired the Buffalo massacre- namely, accusations that the Biden administration is stockpiling  baby formula for undocumented immigrants while native-born white babies starve.

The reality is that GOP policies, such as deregulation and toleration of monopolies, are to blame for this problem, which has been exacerbated by Trump's MAGA-branded protectionism.  The main reason why baby formula is is short supply is because an Abbott Nutrition owned formula production facility in Sturgis, MI was shut down due to contamination by Cronobacter sakazakii and Salmonella NEWPORT bacteria.  The contamination resulted in one probable death and necessitated a recall.  The GOP is the party which views regulation as 'burdensome', and, in true Libertarian fashion, Abbott execs spent money which could have been used to modernize, or at least sanitize the Sturgis facility on stock buybacks.

Another major factor in the baby formula shortage is that 90% of the baby formula in the US is produced by four corporations.  This situation is exacerbated by Trump's vaunted North American trade agreement being disadvantageous to Canadian formula producers.

Once again, we see Republicans blaming Joe Biden for the deleterious effects of Republican governance, which is always a formula for disaster.

Sure Sign of a Sick Society

American society is sick to its core.  Because I was either busy or fatigued last weekend, I didn't cover the racially motivated mass shooting in Buffalo, New York.  The shooter, who should have been flagged to remove his guns, was motivated by the White Genocide or Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which posits that there is a Jewish plot to use immigration from the Global South to marginalize white people in order to create an easily controlled 'mongrel' population.  It's a toxic blend of white supremacy and incel rage that has led to mass shootings throughout the past decade.  Recently, it's been promoted by Tucker Carlson of Fox.  The ten victims of the massacre were decent family people, many of them senior citizens.

As heartbreaking as the news of the Buffalo massacre is, the real horror dawns when you learn that it wasn't the only racially motivated mass shooting in the US that day... three Korean women were murdered at a hair salon in Dallas.  One knows that one is living in a sick society when there are so many mass shootings that they crowd each other out of the headlines.

I spent most of today sleeping, I must confess.  Sure, I worked three days worth of hours in two days, with three hours spent coaching, but I think that a desire not to even leave the house was as much of a motivator as fatigue.

Exotic Breakfast

It's been a long month of bad news and a long weekend of activity, both work related and volunteer gig related.  Frankly, I feel beat... I figure I'd put up a fun post about music, I think we can all engage in a brief bit of escapism.

In the wee hours of the morning, stalwart DJ Big Al of Fairleigh Dickinson University's radio station, played the song Breakfast at Denny's by Providence, Rhode Island neo-lounge band Combustible Edison.  You may recall that neo-lounge, sometimes called Space Age Bachelor Pad music, was briefly in vogue back in the 1990s.  It's a trippy number:

While the song certainly could be interpreted as a song about breakfast at one of the restaurants run by the diner-style chain Denny's, I immediately suspected that something else was going on...  This song certainly seems like a tribute to Martin Denny, a lounge musician who incorporated latinesque and asiatique sounds into his compositions to form a subgenre of lounge music dubbed 'exotica'.  A prime example of Denny's work is the title track from his album Quiet Village:

My primary interest in Denny's oeuvre is the fact that his brand of exoticization of the Mysterious East inspired Japanese popular music giant Haruomi Hosono to form a band as a joke, poking fun at Western stereotypes of Eastern culture.  It didn't hurt that he formed this band, Yellow Magic Orchestra, with fellow geniuses Yukihiro Takahashi and Ryuichi Sakamoto, so this joke of a band was hugely influential on succeeding generations of electronic musicians.  Fittingly, YMO's first single was a cover version of Martin Denny's Firecracker:

It's funny how the mind works, sending me on a musical odyssey, beginning with a jokey 1990s tribute to a 1950s purveyor of 'exotic' music and ending with a jokey 1970s tribute-cum-parody of that very same music.  Along the way, I listened to a good bit of Denny's body of work, itself inspired by the post-WW2 fascination of all things Pacific, and now I want a breakfast at Denny's, complete with some tiki-bar cocktails.  Looks like I might have to whip up some orgeat syrup.

Flying Solo

My cultural reference for a hectic day is the long penultimate scene of Martin Scorcese's Goodfellas, in which a coked-up Henry Hill is running multiple errands while freaking out about a helicopter which he is convinced is tracking him.  It's a darkly humorous film sequence with a bit of that trademark Scorcese cultural, by which I mean culinary, flair that I love.

My day wasn't quite so hectic, but the only stimulants running through my system are a couple of cups of coffee.  I started the day working the graveyard shift. then returned home to take a one-hour nap.  Then I was off to my volunteer coaching gig, where I was the only judo coach present.  I ran four classes of children from ages five to fourteen, going over proper movement and unbalancing techniques, then throwing them using the major hip throw, O Goshi, which is particularly suited to gi-less fighting.  Throwing the students, so they can learn proper falling, is an important teaching technique.  As a treat, I let the kids throw me using O Soto Gari, the first throw we teach them.  I sent a couple of sensei-to-sensei photo messages to our head coach so he could see what he was missing.  Then I had the kids practice uchikomi, those form practices so crucial to the sport.  In the youngest students' class, I was able to enlist the services of my self-appointed nemesis, a young girl who wants nothing more every Saturday morning than to fight me- she's a very enthusiastic student who knows what she's doing, and I basically gave her a brevet rank to assistant coach.  She's a serious girl who wants to use her stuff, so she was more than happy to help rally the other kids to the uchikomi practice so she would have an opportunity to kick my butt... which she did.  I also received invaluable help from the teenage counselors who escort the kids from activity to activity- in one case, one of our students who has earned his orange belt led an incoming class in the ritual bowing in that starts a workout while I led the preceding class in bowing out.  If you are going to fly solo, you need support staff to help you navigate.

After coaching, I was able to go home for two hours of sleep before having to go to work,  

I'm also flying solo at work- the one remaining coworker in my department (while my coworker Jim is on medical leave) is attending his daughter's college graduation/  I had to go to one site at 4PM to help lock up at the end of the day, then hightailed it to another site to help the manager lock up after 5PM.  I'll be working until midnight.  I'm going to be dragging my tailfeathers, but a college graduation doesn't occur every weekend.  I can deal with flying solo all the doo-dah day under these circumstances.

Muskus Interruptus

The main business story today concerns Elon Musk's decision to put his pending Twitter purchase on hold.  He's claiming that he's doing so until he can be assured that fewer than 5% of Twitter users are bots, but I suspect that he was only trolling, and never really wanted to buy the social media company.  Here's a pundit opining that he's also trying to weasel out of the one billion dollar penalty he faces for backing out of the deal.

Musk has long shown that he has the emotional maturity of an eight-year old, and not a particularly well-adjusted one.  He received publicity for his announcement, and he believes he 'triggered' a lot of people.  He's not a genius by any stretch of the imagination, just a weird edgelord kid that never grew up.