US Media invents a new sport: Apocalypse Golf.

So, as I understand it, yesterday the last part of Aleppo fell to the Syrian Army.

Yesterday, and last night at work, I followed a lot of what was happening via Twitter.

The posted image is from last week.


Today, I saw both on Facebook and Twitter, that Golf Digest wants to name Trump the "Best ever Golfer-President." For the hell of it, here's a link from Golf Digest (apparently from 2008) http://www.golfdigest.com/story/presidentsranking that (based on my half-remembered knowledge of a game I mostly played so I could drink more beer) that suggests the actual best Golfer among Presidents was George H.W. Bush.

But then, 20 seconds or so of research would be a facts-based approach, if to a completely pointless story.

This is typical, not only of the American news media at this point...but increasingly typical of the people of the United States of America as a whole.

If you ever wonder why so many Americans think it's all about them, and that education is evil, or act like the "real world" ends at the county line and the center of the Universe is located in  Ass Fuck, Texas, Booty Poke, Iowa, Bourbon Chug, Duckfuckistan Louisiana, Cousin Screw, West Virginia, Dry Hump, Kansas, Meth Teeth, Michigan or ... MY HOMETOWN GODDAMN IT, MINE!!! MINE!!!!!!!!!! Screw you rotten people in North Dakota!!!!! *And* whatever they have is something that everybody else in the world wants (and they are afraid that people who look different from them or who say God's name in a different language are going to come and take their stuff, as if their stuff is what they have that makes life worth living) not to mention how THEY and/or some rich person they think they identify with should get everything and Nobody else should get anything at all...or why so many white people think they want to burn down the United States of America so the Blacks or the Mexicans or the Muslims who Obummer is bringing over by the millions whose ancestors have lived here since they came over to work for arch-conservative automaker Henry Ford in 1912 can't have any, This kind of crap would be the reason why.

Not to mention, the fact that due to the cultural diseases False Gospels of Base Tribalism, Pilgrim Calvinism, The modern Prosperity Gospel/19th Century veneration of the rich and the White Jesus, your basic American Idiot has now handed the US Presidency over to some Orange-hued fool who thinks that restarting a nuclear arms race (and giving Japan, Saudi Arabia and South Korea nukes) is somehow a good idea.

As I have said several times, I'm pretty sure Donald Trump thinks he can just snap his fingers and in a few months Boeing will start cranking out new AGM-69 SRAM (Short Range Attack Missiles) and they'll be carried on FB-111A Aardvark tactical bombers based at Plattsburgh Air Force Base in upstate New York and he'll get to play the role of Ronald Reagan in some explosion-filled Michael Bay movie about how time-traveling Trumpist FBI Agents helped the Mujahideen defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan while persuading them to become Capitalism-friendly Gulf State-like Muslims instead of the Taliban later and preventing Afghanistan from crumbling into a cesspool of chaos, poverty and war by sharing good old-fashioned American values like hard work, pickup trucks and sodomy between rural conservative white men who are actually married and don't tell their wives...

No, that last one is *Not* over the top, this is a real thing.

Add that up with the Opiate epidemic ravaging a lot of conservative, rural areas and you've got another wonderful thing from the 1980's: AIDS. Except that wasn't wonderful for anybody except Jerry Falwell, and it devastated a lot of lives particularly among gay men. A (gay) neighbor of my Grandparents and my Mom died of AIDS. I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. Oh yes, with proper health care one's virus count may be rendered negligible and they may live a normal life...

But remember, the Republicans have pledged to repeal the Affordable Care Act, while gutting Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

Medicaid and Social Security were the only reasons our neighbor had bills paid and food to eat and health care for pretty much the entire time I knew him. Think about that, for a second, will you?

The missiles and the bombers have been scrapped, Plattsburgh AFB closed in 1995. Nobody misses the days of 3 A.M. alert scrambles with the SAC crews dashing out to their BUFF's in the cold at Castle, Griffiss,  K.I. Sawyer, Mather, Loring and Wurtsmith except for people who never lived them, who never had to deal with the stress of the high-intensity mission and the threat that any time the klaxons sounded it could mean the missiles were on their way down, that you, your buddy in the Air Operations Center, or your family over in the base housing might all have fourteen minutes to live. Imagine dealing with that, for an average of ten days out of every month for your entire career...

The remnants of that time, the bases repurposed to support tankers or other missions, the BUFF's at Barksdale and Minot, the missiles under the prairies in Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming, the Spirits at Whiteman and the Ohio-class Submarines silently keeping watch beneath the waves are all still needed...but now all but the ICBM crews support conventional missions as much as (or more than) they prepare for the Apocalypse. That is a damned good thing, if you ask me.

Let us not make the sacrifices of previous generations and of men like my grandfathers be in vain. I can tell you for a fact what a lot of those old guys, or the ones I knew anyway, would say about the Republicans sucking up to the Russians if they were here to say something about it.

Actually, it most likely involves fists and one hell of a lot of profanity.

The ironic thing is, it's the spiritual (and in some cases, literal) descendants of the Anti-Communists and the Arch-Conservatives and the Professional Cold Warriors that are the ones who seem to be just fine with selling the United States of America out to a KGB man.

I'm pretty sure somewhere in hell, Joseph McCarthy is drinking himself into a stupor over this...

Let us not continue to kill ourselves with irresponsibility...and that's what all this is and don't you forget it. Many Americans value their comfort, distractions, profits and the illusion of safety more than they value the ability of humanity to live on this planet and continue to survive. Deal with the fact that, simply put, we as a species have nowhere else to go.

Assuming one believes in all that, the End Times will happen on God's calendar, not ours.

Jesus is not going to come back and save us if we blow up the world, and there is no profit in Apocalypse.

We are forfeit of our moral right to exist as a nation at this point. By next month, we and our distractions and illusions could very well be an existential threat to the rest of humanity.

...And if you think the rest of humanity isn't watching in horror and trying to find a way to prevent this disaster, I'm quite sure you have another thing coming.

Fundamentally, we need to stop looking inward, realize that the rest of the world exists (or that most of it stands with us if you're somebody who is against Trump) stop all this navel-gazing, stand up and fight and survive, and remember just what the hell it is we're supposed to be doing here.

If we don't do that, if we continue to fall prey to the media-generated spectacle and continue to forget who we are and what we're supposed to be doing  and continue to fail to live up to our values because doing that would be too hard, we're going to deserve everything that we get.

We can stand up and resist, or we can hit the links and then watch FOX News and have some beers at the club while the world burns.

It's your choice. Reality, or Unreality.

Both parties are not the same, man.

Remember that to abandon facts is to abandon freedom. Without truth no one has a basis to criticize power.

The least we can do is go down standing up.