Frog It Into the Abyss
but it still doesn't matter
If you spend much time on X, you’ve probably met the Frog of Shame. The frog is deployed by Enguerrand VII de Coucy, which is a rare instance of a 14th-century knight using modern social media.
This week, His Excellency frogged the congressional idiot Debbie Dingell:
Republicans spent $93 billion on lobster and steak. This is what passes for political argument. They can’t even believe any of it themselves. Debbie Dingell presumably has a lump of sugared suet for a brain.
John Carter recently described a series of dire crises, concluding that in each, “nothing much happened.” Reviewing the empty crises, he proposes a principle: “Nothing Ever Happens.” I think he’s onto something, here. Trump opened a war without any of the expected rituals. He didn’t deliver the somber address to the nation in prime time, and he didn’t summon Congress for a joint address. He just kind of…kicked the sucker off, like, hey, let’s do the bombs, now. Congress pretended to be outraged, held failed and noticeably lazy debates over the War Powers Act, and then promptly moved on to bitching that the military gets steak. They can’t hold something. They can’t sustain a controversy. The news cycle won’t keep a crisis in the foreground for some absurd period of time like six months, no matter what it is. If Trump nuked a whole continent somewhere, with hundreds of millions dead, it would be like TOTALLY HUGE for like a full week. Seriously like dozens of headlines. Before everybody moved on.
Remember when the whole nation was in some alleged state of rage over Renee Good? Remember the Minneapolis thing?
Anyway, that’s over. I passed through Minneapolis last weekend, and had a cheeseburger at the airport. It was like a fascist civil war, by which I mean that it was a normal airport.
We’ve reached this moment where actually, seriously, nothing that happens matters at all. Imagine if the Germans invaded Poland and people tweeted about it for three full days before there was a new Sydney Sweeney jeans ad or a new season of whatever shit people watch on television now.
Related, there’s a perhaps very mild sense of hope developing in Los Angeles over the degree to which people here absolutely despise Karen Bass, who gets jeered at in public. People are finally fed up, see, and they aren’t going to take it anymore, so you can tell that real change is coming.
The problem, though, is that I lived in the City of Los Angeles ten years ago, and I remember how much everyone hated the scumbags in city government. There were homeless encampments everywhere, and the city was filthy, and people just weren’t going to take it anymore.
Anyway, now everybody hates the scumbags in city government, because the city is filthy and there are homeless encampments everywhere and people just aren’t going to take it anym sorry, what was I saying?
A waterfall can create the phenomenon called a “recycling hydraulic,” in which the action of the water traps a person under the surface with a kind of circular movement that keeps feeding back into itself.
We seem to be more or less there: An endless repeating cycle of nothing much, blurring by in a circle. Talk me out of it.
Regarding political action, I think the problem is that the people in power - the upper end of the professional managerial class - have deliberately made it so that the plebs can't change things easily.
That of course is the big reason why they hate Donald Trump and Elon Musk and people like them because those people do actually change things and in fact solve long standing problems while doing so.
Solving problems is of course anathema to the PMC because solving a problem means it does away and nothing needs to be spent on it any more. The PMC want to "manage" problems because managing the problem leads to funding and jobs for the sisterhood and so on.
The problem the PMC have is that, despite all their desperate attempts at denial, people are noticing more and more that the PMC is not delivering what it says it is and yes, I know it takes 10 years of rinse repeat in LA to get nothing, but nationally that isn't the case so much.
Nor is it in other countries. In the YooKay, we thought Brexit would solve the problem. it didn't because the PMC just pretended to implement it while doing a deliberately shit job and ignoring completely the underlying concern. They are going to get a Reform like wake up call unless they manage to actually ban the party or cheat blatently, and in that case I expect actual revolt. Elsewhere much the same, from Japan to Chile voters are electing candidates who promise to solve stuff and not manage decline. Some of them will fail, some of them will solve things the wrong way, but the desire is there. It just takes a while
I had read somewhere that it was 15 million. Maybe that was just the steak. Or just the lobster. Not both. Anyway… Divided by 1.3 million active service members that was $11 each. They damn well deserve it.