Marching MAGA Morons

 I got home from work around 8AM, so I've spent most of the day sleeping, waking up intermittently to use 'the facilities' and to check a couple of Twitter feeds that were covering today's MAGA march in DC.  The raison d'être for the march was supposed to be to 'stop the steal' of the election from Trump... so it's basically a shitshow to muddy the waters so the right-wing media juggernaut can attack the Biden Administration's legitimacy in perpetuity.

While the serial prevaricators claimed a million attendees, the best estimates I've seen pegged the crowd at about ten thousand attendees. As usual, Will Sommer of the Daily Beast provided great coverage of the event. Zachary Petrizzo of Daily Dot also provided good coverage, as did Right Wing Watch's Kristen Doerer and WaPo's Marissa Lang. Hilariously, the crowd turned against Fox and Republican legislators. On a not-so-humorous note, this rally will surely turn out to be a superspreader event, with poor mask compliance among the attendees. Also, this is a fraught time, when isolated individuals are subject to attacks from roving bands of angry people who haven't gotten the violence fix they were looking for. Thankfully, DC has stringent firearms regulations, so the right-wingers couldn't bring their shooting irons, but there have been reports of fistfights and other assaults. Go home, MAGA people, Trump lost... and try not to get the emergency personnel in your hometowns infected. Post title yanked from Cyril M. Kornbluth.

Jason Voorhees Has Got Nothing on Your Dad

It's Friday the Thirteenth, a day which lent its name to an interminable franchise of slasher movies. It's also the day when Dumbass Junior decided to make a joke:

 

Great. Friday the 13th in 2020 what could possibly go wrong???

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) November 13, 2020

 

What indeed, dumbass? It's the day that the COVID-19 death toll in the US will finally exceed 250,000 Americans. Donald Trump Sr, due to his repeated failures in addressing the coronavirus pandemic, is a more prolific killer than the fictional Jason Voorhees was over the course of twelve films... and he doesn't even have the courtesy to hide his ugly mug behind a hockey mask.

Sláinte Joe and Erin Go

Joe Biden is a man who talks readily, and with pride, about being an Irish-American guy from Scranton, Pennsylvania... this led to a hilarious Biden quip in response to a BBC reporter:

Biden is literally me any time I’m abroad and someone asks where in the UK I’m from pic.twitter.com/ERceMwZMdt

— Steven (@Steven_Armour) November 7, 2020

Ah, yes, that's our Bonny Biden Boy! Watching this, I thought to myself, I would sing Fields of Athenry to this man. For those unfamiliar with the song, it's a real tearjerker about a man sentenced to penal transportation to Australia for stealing grain to feed his children: 

 

 

 

It's also a rebel song, about a man who refuses to bow down to an evil, incompetent government during a national crisis:

 

  

 

The last politician I sang Fields of Athenry to turned out to be a big disappointment, but I think Bonny Joe Biden will be responsive to the advice of younger, more progressive colleagues when he assumes the office of the presidency. 

At any rate, the people of Ireland have been proud to claim Joe as a son of the diaspora.  For his part, Joe Biden has stated his continuing support for the Good Friday Agreement, and for using trade deals to ensure that Brexit won't lead to a renewal of conflicts on the Republic of Ireland/Northern Ireland border.  In my neighborhood, there is a sense of relief... earlier this year, there was a slight panic as even pale, blonde soccer moms who might have overstayed their visas were spreading a rumor the ICE was pulling people over at a traffic stop on the nearby highway.  The fact that Biden could be a distant cousin is merely a bonus.

Post title taken from one of Shane MacGowan and the Pogues' most remarkable songs.

Veterans' Day in the Age of COVID

I figured that I would take an opportunity this Veterans' Day to check out the COVID-19 statistics for the military and the Department of Veterans' Affairs.  According to the national summary, there have been 85,242 cumulative cases of COVID-19 in the VA healthcare system, with 9,364 current cases, and 4,247 deaths.  The VA national survey also has an interactive map which indicates the number of cases, the number of convalescents, and the number of deaths associated with each Veterans' Administration medical facility.

In contrast, the reported numbers of COVID-19 among active duty military personnel are 91,892 cases and 111 deaths- active duty personnel tend to be younger and in better physical condition than veterans.

At any rate, the current death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic exceeds that of the combined deaths in WW1, Korea, Vietnam, and the two Gulf Wars.  Many elderly persons receive their primary medical care through the Veterans' Administration- they shouldn't have to face 'double jeopardy' by being exposed to the novel coronavirus in the facilities they use.

Bad Year for the Skeptics Community

 As if 2020 weren't bad enough, I recently read of the death of animation giant Ken Spears, co-creator of  the classic television cartoon Scooby Do Where Are You! (sic).  To compound this bummer, I also learned that Ken Spears' friend and collaborator Joe Ruby died last August (and am somewhat chastened by not having known this when it happened).  The original 'Scooby Doo', which I blogged about last year on its 50th anniversary, was an improbable mélange of slapstick comedy, Gothic trappings, bubblegum pop, and mystery procedural.  Each episode was formulaic (the 'gang' would drive into town in their groovy van and encounter a mystery involving a haunting, then hijinx would ensue until the gang could determine the nature of the mystery), but the formula was a winner.  There would always be a slapsticky chase scene accompanied by a pop song, brainy Velma would amass clues, clever Fred would build a Rube-Goldberg contraption to thwart the 'monster', accident-prone Daphne would trip a secret door and disappear for a bit, cowardly gluttons Shaggy and Scooby would inexplicably find the ingredients to make enormous sandwiches, and a cast of malfeasors voiced by Don Messick would be exposed by the meddling kids.

The Scooby Doo series was, in an era in which there was a mainstream backlash against the subversive youth culture, unabashedly pro-teenager.  The meddling kids invariably foiled the plots of petty crooks who used deception to further their own ends... we could have used them for the past four years: 

via GIPHY

The show was also unabashedly pro-reason... the supernatural manifestations always turned out to be smoke-and-mirrors illusions perpetrated by local crooks trying to scare people away so they could bring their nefarious plans to fruition.  Empiracism beats superstition, inquiry beats fear.  By keeping your eyes open and your wits about you, and trusting your friends, you could figure out what's really going on and save the day.

Ken Spears and Joe Ruby went on to form their own production company in 1977, and among other cartoons, produced the post-apocalyptic Conan-Meets-Star Wars adventure cartoon Thundarr the Barbarian in collaboration with comic book titans Jack Kirby and Alex Toth.  Too bad there wasn't a Scooby Doo/Tundarr crossover, with the Mystery Gang pitting their wits against savagery, super-science, and sorcery.  Still, if their only contribution to cartoon history was creating the Scooby Doo Industrial Complex, they would be considered titans.

Again, the original Scooby Doo series was a beacon of reason in an era which produced supernatural thrillers such as Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist... and told us that the Devil wasn't the villain of the story, only greedy Old Man Higgins from the opening scene.

As a coda to this panegyric for Messers Ruby and Spears, I have to note that skeptic and debunker James Randi also died this year after a lifetime of exposing fraudulent claims of the supernatural and paranormal.  I don't know if he was a fan of the cartoon, but I imagine he would have supported its premise.

What Is a Bummer?

 Back in the days when I had nothing to fear (a true sign of straight, white, male privilege), I used to joke that I was afraid the Alex Trebek was a secret dumb-dumb.  It wasn't true, of course, as Mr Trebek, who we lost to pancreatic cancer, took the same qualifying test that Jeopardy contestants take.  The conventional wisdom is that television dumbs viewers down, but that is an unfair categorization of Mr Trebek's show.  While Jeopardy might not have imparted an overview of particle physics to its viewers, it did spark intellectual curiosity- it was the sort of show which would send you to the bookshelf to look up Lake Baikal in an atlas.  Jeopardy also loomed so large over the Trivia Gameshow Industrial Complex that other gameshows often feature disclaimers that answers don't have to be phrased as questions.

I could joke about how Canada-born Trebek was a sinister exemplar of the secret Canadians that lurk among us, virtually undetectable among the throngs of America, but the only sinister thing the man did was a rather funny, self-deprecating cameo on The X-Files:

By all accounts, Alex Trebek was a kind and decent man.  I myself may have been sent to the bookshelf to crack the encyclopedia or atlas after watching Jeopardy, but others have had truly profound reminiscences of the show:

Resharing one of Alex Trebek’s final moments from @Jeopardy, as it paints a picture of his impact on countless people and families.

RIP to a true inspiration. pic.twitter.com/Vv9WF5qKwB

— Field Yates (@FieldYates) November 8, 2020

That's not an ordinary television viewing experience, and no, I don't have tears in my eyes.  While some television viewing is a waste of time, Alex Trebek's show actually made its fans better, a little smarter about a lot of things.  It fired curiosity, cajoled its viewers into digging for deeper understanding of the world after gleaning bits of trivia.  Sure, Alex Trebek's sometimes exaggerated pronunciation of names like Lake Titicaca will never not be funny, any jokes I made about the man were purely affectionate.  I was a fan from day one, I admire the manner in which he confronted his own mortality, and I am genuinely bummed out that he is no longer among us, quizzing us about the world, tweaking our brains to seek out knowledge.  In a world in which learning is deprecated and expertise suspect, Alex Trebek was an unfailing champion of information, and losing him at this particular moment in history is upsetting.

The Worst Take I've Seen All Century

 I'm not one hundred percent sure the article isn't mere clickbait, but Carli Pierson's article in the The Independent, titled Now Trump has lost the election, Pence could pardon him — but it’s Biden who should, has got to be the worst take I've seen all century.  The premise of the article is that Biden should pardon Trump to keep him out of the limelight, thus preventing him from overshadowing the presidency.

Putting Trump on trial would not place him in the limelight, it would place him in the withering glare of scrutiny, something he has been able to avoid for five decades.  Trump's crimes are manifest- collusion with hostile foreign governments, tax evasion, fraud, and a small matter of perhaps negligent (perhaps malignant) mass homicide verging on genocide.  As a society, we cannot let Trump escape the consequences of his crimes... at the very least, we need investigations to determine just how extensive the damage he's caused to our nation.

The problems of our polity arise from not holding powerful persons accountable...  By allowing the financial wizards who tanked the economy in 2008 to escape scot-free, we allowed them to keep exercising an undue influence on the world economy, making subsequent crashes more likely.  By not going after the architects of the Iraq War, we allowed them to get away with engineering the deaths of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis... and they continued influencing politics in the Obama and Bush eras.  By not going after the architects of the Iran-Contra affair, which funneled weapons to both Saddam Hussein and Central American death squads, we allowed those neocons to plan the Iraq War.  So it goes, on and on, until we come to the failure to prosecute the leaders of the Confederacy, those traitors who continued their white supremacist policies, which damage our society to the present day.

Pardon Trump?  Jesus, lady, we haven't even begun to figure out the depths of his corruption and depravity.  By pardoning him, we set the stage for the next demagogue, itching for a white ethnostate, or some other flavor of fascism.  Forgiving powerful malfeasors has gotten us into trouble for the past century and a half, it's time to hold these men accountable for their crimes.