There is no doubt, no confusion, no mistaking noise amongst the data, at this time in the United States Covid-19 is killing more ‘conservatives’ than ‘liberals.’ At both the state and county level vaccination rates track with election results, the more a region voted with the Democrats the more vaccinated its population and the more vaccinated the population the more protected that are. Where Trump won larger votes shares more people are dying of Covid. The cause and effects are stark, clear, and lethal. Rejection of vaccines and mitigation measures such as masks are the cause of the pandemic continued lethality among ‘conservative’ populations.

To those basking in schadenfreude at this misfortune, at the suffering and death of your political opponents I say, stop! For practical and moral reasons, we should not, at all, take any sort of pleasure or preen with and sense of superiority over these human tragedies.

Many, if not most, of the people suffering, dying, and losing loved ones are pawns, used and manipulated by cynical sinister and anti-democratic forces. They are victims of the greedy, venal, and evil people that control ‘conservative’ thought in America. Yes, they placed those people into power and now those in power are sacrificing them as they have so many others before. ‘Spiking the ball’ will not open eyes, it will shut them, but perhaps, maybe, a little compassion will save some of these misguided souls.

This terrible tragedy is killing more than just those who have been led into suicidal behavior. Hospitals in these regions, already underfunded, are stressed to. and some areas, beyond the breaking point and people in need of critical care are dying because there is no care left for anyone else. If you are taking joy in these prevented covid deaths, you are also taking joy in the collateral damage it spreads. There cannot be one without the other.

Abuse, individual and cultural, is a cycle and the abused becoming the abuser. Only when the abused can find their way out and not visit upon other what has been done to them can the cycle shatter. Many of these ‘conservatives’ have indulged in their own schadenfreude over others suffering from disease and addiction and while it is hard, very hard, now is the time for the formerly abused to break the cycle and not continue it.

None of this is to say that the political fight ends with compassion and welcoming arms. There is a proto-fascist movement seeking to end democracy in the United States. It’s aims are to subvert and discredit elections while stealing them with discriminatory laws and regulations. For that enemy there is no compassion, no forgiveness, but for the pawns that use, abuse, and discard we can be the better people. When they said, ‘hate the sin not the sinner,’ they lied, we do not have to lie. We can be the moral people and we can be the righteous people without becoming the cruel people taking joy in death.

In the long before time of the Cold War it was easy to see who the enemy was in the eyes of nearly every Republican, The USSR its satellite states and its desire to spread the glorious revolution globally. The enemy allowed the diverse GOP a point of unification. Northern ‘Rockefeller’, rambunctious Libertarians, evangelical pro-lifers, and southern social conservatives set aside their vast and deep differences to unit in the fight against global communism.

Then they won.

The USSR dissolved, the Eastern Bloc shattered, and the only Communist nations left in the world was Cuba and North Korea.

The division that had been suppressed within the GOP became meaningful. Rockefeller Republicans were run out of the party labeled as RINOs and the remaining cliques fixed their eye on a new enemy to unify their ranks and stoke anger and fear to motivate their base into the frenzy required to separate them from their cash and win their vote and that enemy were their fellow Americans. But the calculus that stoked the anger failed to recognize that anger can be self-generating and the energized base is easily transformed into the murderous mob. Now, with the murderous mob in their party no one has the spine to confront their creation and the list of enemies grows and the list of actions ‘beyond the pale’ to acquire power shrinks to nothing.

The attempted recall of California Governor Gavin Newsom failed by a staggering 28 points. Wasting time and nearly a quarter of a billion dollars the sane citizens of the Golden State resoundingly rejected the GOP’s desperate do-over and its mad scheme to place the control of nation’s most populous state in the hands of a conservative celebrity.

Hopefully I wish for the national Democrats to learn this valuable lesson, tie every last Republican to the leader of their Turd Reich. From dog catcher to Senator every single motherforking one of them to their orange man-baby, endless sound bites of them praising the Manhattan Mussolini and at every debate pushing them into corners forcing them to either denounce the madness or own it. Rick Wilson, former Republican election strategist wrote a book Everything Trump Touches Dies, make every damned GOP candidate touch him. This must be the North star for Democrat for countless election to come.

But California needs to reform its recall system. This is madness. I’d say go ahead and leave the signature requirements and such the same. We should not make it too difficult to remove a person who needs to be removed but the actual replacement should simply be the Lieutenant Governor. That’s why the office is there, to become Governor when there is a vacancy. Given that the GOP has proved it cannot win statewide offices anymore that post is almost certain to be a Democrat and there would be little fire to exchange one Democratic for another.

I hadn’t planned on two political posts back-to-back, but a bit of news sent my blood boiling and made this morning’s essay inevitable.

First off let me state that I do think the second amendment as written was intended as an individual right but like all rights that is not absolute. It can certainly be met with restrictions and regulation. So, my anger does not spring from a well of hatred towards guns or their owners.

Nearly nine years ago an evil man strode into Sandy Hook elementary school and slaughtered children and teachers.

Federal law, rightfully or wrongfully, protects gun manufactures from liability in how their products are used but parents or the gun-down children filed a suit in court not focused on the use but on the advertising used to sell the guns and a lead defendant is the arms company Remington. I do not know if their case has merit or not, I have not studied the law in the matter and that is something for the courts to determine. Remington as much as any person has a right to their day in court and to their defense.

When you sue or are sued you have a right to force the other side to retain and produce documents and evidence. IN this case the plaintiffs are demanding internal documents and such pertaining to Remington’s advertising campaigns. That’s fair, that the crux of the matter in the lawsuit.

Remington on the other hand is demand the attendance, grades, and disciplinarily records of murdered children.

How the actual fuck does any of that pertain to defending themselves over their advertising choices? I can’t see any conceivable way this at all bears upon the question before the court.

To me this stinks of nothing more than mental torture, of harassment, perhaps to cause enough metal trauma and anguish to force the parents to leave the suit.

Everyone has a right to a full and vigorous defense, everyone. Everyone also gets to reap the whirlwind of being a vicious, cruel, asshole which Remington and their lawyers seem intent on reaping.

The Stasi were the Secret Police of Communist East Germany tasked, among other things, with watching the population for signs of disloyalty. Recruiting people to spy upon their friends, neighbors, and family near the end of the brutal murderous regime the Stasi had informants that comprised over 2% of the nation’s population. Turning neighbor against neighbor particularly with payments and profits is a lessoned well learned by the Republicans of Texas.

This week a new Texan lawn, one that is blatantly unconstitutional, went into effect after the conservative Supreme Court of the United States of American declined to issue a stay to put the novel legal tactic on hold. Texas made illegal all abortions, save that to explicitly prevent the death of the mother, after six weeks of pregnancy, in direct contradiction to nearly 50 years of constitutional precedent. But rather than making the enforcement of the law a matter for the state of Texas the law places enforced in the hands of the public by way of civil action creating standing for anyone who wishes it to sue any and all person involved in performing, assisting, or in any way aiding the abortion of its procurement. The law also creates a floor of ‘damages’ with this standing of $10,000, allows for the plaintiff to recover their legal expensive should they prove victorious in court while also disallowing the defend to recovery their legal costs should they prevail. By removing the state as the enforcement the Texan GOP hopes, and so far, has been correct in their plot, to make this difficult to review, halt, or reverse in the courts. Resolving this by way of the courts could take years and lots of money and contrary to Conservative propaganda most abortion services providers are far from rich.

Never create a political power you aren’t willing to give to your political opponents.

There are already rumblings, though I fear it will never come to more than talk, of ‘Blue’ states retaliating in kind. Pass blatantly unconstitutional gun control laws and put enforcement into the hand of the public with ruinous ‘damages’ and expensive court fess.  Frankly I wish this would happen. Not because I am an avid supporter of gun control, I have dear friends that are gun collectors, enthusiasts, and merchants, but I also have dear friends and family that are women and whose right are being trampled for utter bullshit and if this is the sort of pain that must be inflicted to protect them, then so be it.

My SF/Noir Vulcan’s Forge is available from Amazon and all booksellers. The novel is dark, cynical, and packed with movie references,

What is transpiring in the graveyard of empire is a terrible crime against humanity that women, girls, LGBTQ, non-believers, and other will bear the horrid costs of.

That said going into Afghanistan on a nation building project was in all likelihood a fool’s errand. Before the invasion but following the attacks of 9/11, the United States gave the Taliban leadership of that country an option to avoid invasion, surrender the terrorists to us. They rejected that offer and we invaded to get those that had killed 3000 of our own. (And now one of own political institutions shares culpability in killing 200 hundred times as many Americans.)

Our goal should have been getting al-Qaeda and then leaving. But that is don and the past cannot be changed. What to do now?

We should get every translator and their kin out of the country that wants to leave. If you have no loyalty you have nothing.

This should not extend in any manner to senior Afghani politicians scooping money into their pockets. Those who used the occupation as an excuse to fleece the country we owe no loyalty to; I have no issues leaving them on their own and closing our doors in their faces.