We all need to put our hands together in supplication and thank The Donald.

I mean really, genuinely thank that guy for what he has done for our country.

Right now.

Seriously.  His present supercharged flameout is an obvious effort to create a phoenix narrative from which he will emerge from the ashes of his presidential bid reborn as the media demagogue that he never could have been on his show “The Apprentice”.

He is the new Breitbart. He will galvanize both sides of the shadowed, unspoken debate about power, class, race, gender and privilege that exists in patriarchy. He already has mobilized the ‘alt-right’ and brought their quasi-fascist ideologies into mainstream.  The conversation about feminism and sexual assault he has unwittingly initiated will open the door to a more mature discourse on the pervasive effects of violence and entitlement across power spectra (read: class, race, gender, sexual orientation) that will force people to take sides.  This is what we want. We need this schism in order to fully dissect the nature of our society and the evils perpetrated in the course of simply ‘doing business’ as a patriarchal superpower.  Women are routinely sexually assaulted here for the same reason that black men are routinely shot by police, for the same reason that everyone bitches about illegal immigration while forgetting that NAFTA compounded by the ‘tough on crime’ drug laws of the 1990’s fomented the creation of the Mexican drug cartels that now essentially rule our southern border.

This violent entitlement is integral to the worldview of many Americans, and yet not even recognized by its worst offenders.

So thank you, Mr. Trump, for playing the role of Entitled White Man so absolutely, so ostentatiously that you have roiled up those who admire and wish to emulate these repugnant traits in our nation.

Now we know who the bad apples are.

Keep it up.

The Magic Has A Name: Trump

Trump might just be the Ultimate Salesman insomuch as he cloud of bullshit he peddles is so amazingly popular and yet so entirely inaccurate. I can't even say entirely what he is selling, I don't understand him in the least. Whenever I try to unpack what it is about Trump that people so adore I get basically the same answer over and over, that he speaks his mind- then I point out that much of his talking points and random comments and tweets are falsehoods, that he doesn't just say what is on his mind but rather that he says whatever he wants with no regard for its validity. I think that is a terribly dangerous habit for a man who would be president. The blue collar guys I work with love it. In some respect I think the subtext in this admiration is that all politicians are fucking liars, so if their personal favorite says things that are wildly untrue simply because he is saying whatever makes sense to him then they accept it all the more because his intuitive and warped sense of the world mirrors theirs- I try to point out that many of these intuitive non sequitur moments are carefully crafted to perk their redneck ears.
They don't care, because, again, all politicians, all campaigns are exercises in bullshitting.
I hate to say it, but they have a point.

That said-
Fuck that guy.

Five Words All Construction Workers Should Say Out Loud

All right. All of you blue collar wage earning manly men out there who currently think Donald Trump is the horse to bet in the coming election I have five words to say to you. Five words you should say out loud.

PRESIDENT SANDERS LOVES DAVIS BACON

Know that Bernie Sanders is in love with a plan to tax the hell out of the rich and spend one trillion dollars resurrecting our infrastructure.

That means boatloads of Davis Bacon jobs.

And everybody who has ever been paid Davis Bacon wages knows just how sweet they are.
I made 20 and 7 resurfacing a bridge.
Before overtime.

Say it out loud, think about it before you head to the polls.

Prognostication Ain't Easy... (But It's Necessary)

Well, it's been nearly a year since I last posted, which is a grim reminder of just how busy things are these days. That said, I've got to bend the page a bit here and let a few cynical predictions out.

1.  The Donald vs. The Sandman

Yes this is what it will come down to.
Good luck America.

2. The failure of Too Big To Fail.

There are two versions of this inevitability:
        2.1 Sanders wins, the banks freak out, congress seizes up completely and we get hit with a 2008 level of recession with no way out because congress will only approve another TARP style bailout, and Sanders will veto anything that smells like corporate welfare. This happens weeks to months after the election in response to Sanders' win. Out of the fear that there will be no bailout, the banks curl up like sensitive plants in a drought and credit stops moving in every sector of the economy.
Nothing gets done.

        2.2 Trump wins, his buddies in finance go looney tunes with deregulatory lobbying, the market surges like a drunken walrus masterbating in a vat of lard. For eighteen months the economy spirals upward with the frat house intensity of the very coke fueled benders driving it forward.

Then it all fails. Uproariously. The global economy vomits unceasingly in a toxic overdose of debt and investor terror.

Trump goes into a spin management cycle that keeps him within a bulletproof whirlwind of bluster and media whoring.
He becomes the president we all hoped Jesse Ventura might have been.
Nothing gets done.

3. Warheads go missing in Pakistan.

Yup. This happens.

The world shits a collective Brick.
Sideways.

ISIS claims responsibility and goes into overtime on the propaganda front while we all wait to see which middle class neighborhood goes up in a thermonuclear fireball.  Will it be Mumbai, L.A., Paris? We will never know, the damn things fail to surface and everybody forgets about the threat by the end of 2018.

4: Apocalyptic Drought

By 2020 the water supply throughout the Middle East is so depleted that ISIS pretty much rules a caliphate of bleached bones and parched waste. Oil prices continue downwards as Iran opens up the tap and the US subsidizes oil production to spur job growth. Also, global warming becomes an inescapable reality forcing even the saltiest of rednecks to finally admit they have been had by the very companies their tax dollars are subsidizing while they line up to compete for horrendous, low paying jobs in the oil fields.

5. Irony Becomes Completely Passé

Hipsters vanish from the earth with the only pockets of their kind living in grey haired enclaves in Olympia and Williamsburg.  Irony is considered too painful to be interesting except to a few noble game theory mathematicians who recognize that irony has an actual place in stochastics. Their research fuels a new form of ironically based investment derivative that causes the rebound of the markets in 2021.