GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #995: THE CORRUPTION PERCEPTIONS INDEX

 Ever wonder how truly corrupt your country is? Luckily there's a website that keeps track of these things! It's called the Corruption Perceptions Index, and there's a pretty good method of scoring each country. The one unfortunate thing is, it's not very up-to-date. Right now the most recent data is from 2024.

But what you really want to know is how badly the United States is doing. Not nearly as bad as you would think! On a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 is exceptional corruption and 100 is corruption-free, we scored 65. We're down four points from 2023, but that's still not as bad as I'd expected. But what I really want to know is our score now.

I wonder how many points Trump 2.0 has cost us. Before he was sent back to the Oval Office, corruption was something to be ashamed of. It had to be hidden somehow. Swept under the proverbial rug. But now? He's flat-out saying everything that the other presidents have kept to themselves. Corruption is not just allowed now, but it's encouraged. If you're clean, you're doing it wrong. Corruption is the word of the day. The bolder, the better. Remember when Trump said he could shoot a man on Fifth Avenue and get away with it? I'll bet he could. I wonder why he hasn't. Perhaps he doesn't want his pristine hands to get dirty. Let that filthy drunk*, Hegseth, do it for him. Hegseth almost hurt someone with an axe on live TV once. He would probably be into it.

In a world where old folks and veterans are treated like shit, where we're currently rolling back the civil rights movement possibly to the Jim Crow days (or further back; when will Trump retcon the Emancipation Proclamation?), where authority figures are trying to outdo each other when it comes to cruelty and hatred, corruption is the biggest problem we're dealing with now. Number one with a bullet that sadly went astray in Butler, PA. Not that his death would end any of this. We're going to have to put the goddam leeches on them. ALL OF THEM. To get this to stop. ICE is the new SS. The American way of life is almost over and done. If you don't think we live in a fascist society, then you haven't been paying attention. The only thing keeping the country I grew up with alive are a handful of judges and, holy fuck, comedians doing parody news shows.

The Fifth Amendment guarantees us due process. Due process no longer exists. I mean, it does, for certain people. But if due process doesn't apply to everyone, then it applies to no one. An argument could be made that those who had due process taken from them were in the country illegally, which makes them criminals. But the people who make that argument are using laws as an excuse to abuse people who have no recourse. If they're criminals, then we can treat them as poorly as we want.

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Every single person on the planet has broken not just one but many laws throughout their lives. We're all criminals. Should we all be sent to El Salvador? Speaking of, Kilmar Abrego Garcia is never going to come back. Trump and Friends have a vested interest in keeping him there. I think things would look bad if they pulled an Epstein on him, so he'll probably stay alive, but if they brought him home? He'd be the face of a movement strong enough to destroy Trump. Hence his continued absence.

Trump advised that asshole in El Salvador to build more prisons because he wants to send a lot more people. I believe it was he and Marco Rubio (Little Marco?) who said something along the lines of, citizens should be deported if their beliefs don't align with the administration's. So I'm sure I'd be on that list of people to send to El Salvador. You might be, too, just for reading this.

I don't know how often the CPI gets updated, but I'm guessing we'll have our numbers at the end of the year. If the US is still there, that is. It's already on its deathbed. Perhaps the patient will have passed by then.

I hope not.

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*Yes, I was once a filthy drunk. But unlike this prick, I have never, in my deepest and darkest depths of drunkenness, thought I should be the Secretary of Defense.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #992: A NEW AGE OF FORGOTTEN KNOWLEDGE

 Ever watch LOTR: The Rings of Power? I honestly can't recommend it as a show. For the most part it's a slog. A boring slog. And I've read the Silmarillion twice! But there are some truly great moments on the show. Like, mind-blowing moments. True moments of greatness. My favorite part so far has been in season 2 when Celebrimbor is glamored by Sauron. While Celebrimbor's people are fighting a grim battle for survival outside his walls, Sauron has him believing that everything is fine, and that he's doing great work in creating the titular rings of power. But soon Celebrimbor figures out that he's been tricked, and that his patron is actually Morgoth's ol' lieutenant. And that's when shit gets real grim.

Celebrimbor turns against Sauron, and for his efforts he watches as his life's work is thrown into a fire. It's one of the most horrifying scenes in the show. I know that might not have much of an effect on others, but to see knowledge destroyed is the worst crime that can be committed, I believe. This knowledge is written only on those scrolls. Celebrimbor also has that knowledge in his head, but, well.

(Spoiler alert)

Human progress is really the most important thing we're capable of. Rape used to be a common tool of war back in the days when battles were fought with swords and spears. When you invade an enemy, you're supposed to kill every man in sight and rape every woman you can find. That was not just socially acceptable, it was encouraged by warlords. That horrible feeling you've got in your guts right now, reading this paragraph? That's human progress. Because you *don't* want to think of rape as something that's supposed to happen. Humanity worked a fucking long time to get to this point (tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of years), but we got there.

When you destroy knowledge, you don't just stop human progress. You regress. If you don't believe me, think about the Dark Ages. In England, for example, the Romans had been gone for so long that no one knew how those roads were built or by whom. Without that knowledge, things turned to shit. When the Renaissance came, it was a breath of fresh air. Human progress was back on the menu.

I know this may come as a shock to you, but I'm offended by the mere existence of the Trump Administration. He and his court of lowlifes and scumbags and fuckfaces and dipshits are guilty of a lot of horrible crimes, but I think one of the worst is what he's doing to America. He wants to reverse human progress. I wouldn't be surprised if he wanted to make rape a common tool of humanity, not just of war, where men rule and women obey. White men, that is. No one else need apply. And there's another thing right there. We've come so far with race. If you say something racist in public (in most places, I should amend), people are going to stare daggers at you. Unless you're in the current White House, of course.

His attack on the Department of Education and putting RFK Jr in charge of healthcare is the equivalent of destroying knowledge. Trump's chief tool is lying relentlessly so those of weaker minds, the ones who fall for his Jedi mind trick, hang on his every word. When you lie so often and so hard, knowledge is your real enemy. So why not put an antivaxxer in charge of keeping people healthy? Vaccines are proven to work. If they didn't, we'd still be succumbing to small pox. When was the last time you saw someone in an iron lung? But the guy in charge of health has decreed that we're regressing to the old days when disease could kill you at any moment. As for education, I think this says everything for me:

By destroying the Department of Education, Trump is trying to trap you into a shit life with no hope of escape. You will obey. You won't know any other way.

And it sucks that everyone destroyed their files and went digital because now you can twiddle that shit on the back end, like a corporation changing prices on a digital sign when they know you've just been paid, or a fast food restaurant in their app. Except now the authorities can change our perception of reality by just changing digital documents.

I think the real reason Trump moved the Declaration of Independence to the Oval Office was so no one could actually read the original document. Meanwhile, they can change what the document says because who is going to go to the library to look up the Declaration of Independence if they want to read it? In this day and age, you're going to google it, and Google can just tell you what Trump wants it to tell you. They already changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico, and they did that before our very eyes. Imagine the digital shit him and his band of assholes can get up to now.

If we don't impeach him (or give him the Mussolini treatment) we're going to wind up in a world where no one knows anything. They have to go to the authorities to get that info. And there is no way of fomenting a revolution to save ourselves at that point. Revolution? What's that? America was always here, from the start of civilization. King George III? He had nothing to do with us. He tried to invade us once, but we were too strong for him and sent his redcoats packing. Per Trump, we've been allies of Rome since the ancient days. How long before something like that ends up in a history textbook? If he has his way, not long.

Knowledge is one of the most important things we can have. We need more of it, not less. Those who would throw Celebrimbor's scrolls in a fire are the lowest scum on the planet. Perhaps El Salvador has room for Trump?

That would ordinarily be the end of the column, but I was looking for a meme that would show Trump talking about being allied with Italy since Ancient Rome. Instead I found this. It's very interesting. I enjoy comparing our modern life to Ancient Rome, particularly the Decline and Fall. But there's one throwaway comment in there that made me think about Trump's obsession with the border. I mean, we all understand why he's going off on Mexico, as awful as that might be, but the shit he's pulling with Canada? That's left field shit. The article talks about the black market created by Ancient Rome's tariffs and how traders got around them. I anticipate a new black market being born. It may already exist! But more importantly, cracking down on the borders would, indeed, make it harder for those traders. As my character, Slate, likes to say, "It's something to consider."

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #983: A BLIND PIG FINDS AN ACORN

 It's been a while since Rand Paul reared his ugly head in the news, but he's like the proverbial blind pig. He finds an acorn every once in while, and he found one that no one else is talking about, and I've been wondering this for a while.

Make no mistake. Rand Paul is a shit weasel. Always has been, always will be. He was in the Tea Party when that pack of clowns was around. He mentioned once that he would have challenged the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (when called on it, much like a weasel, he weaseled out of it). He made it his mission in life to kill the ACA. He has a serious plagiarism problem. He's typically buddies with Trump and was among the true believers who barked rabidly that the election in 2020 was stolen. So let's not label him one of the good guys just yet.

BUT! He had this to say about Trump's tariffs:

The whole [tariffs] debate is so fundamentally backwards & upside down. It's based on a fallacy & the fallacy is this: that somehow in a trade, someone must lose. That somehow when you trade with someone, someone is taking advantage of you... I have a trade deficit with my grocery store

That right there is proof that he read The Art of the Deal by Tony Schwartz. I mean, Trump. Right. Anyway, Trump "states" in the book that in every deal there is a winner and a loser, and he will do everything in his power to not lose.

Which explains why he's pulling his pud over tariffs. TRUMP THINKS THERE MUST BE A WINNER OR A LOSER IN A TRADE DEAL. If you want to read Rand Paul explaining how trade works in the world, you can do so here. We are all adults, though, so I'm going to assume that we all know how trade works, and it's painfully clear that it doesn't work like Trump thinks.

Trump sent the stock exchange to Hell simply because he didn't pay attention in school.

Wait, did he mean "Make America Grate Again," instead? If so, he's doing a stellar job. Top shelf.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #966: CAMP CENTURY

 

Americans really are assholes. We have 100% earned our reputation around the rest of the world as assholes. And rest assured, it's not because they're jealous of the shoddy and twisted republic that we have. The worst punishment I can imagine for the rest of the world would be to make them Americans and expose them to American institutions. They would revolt a lot faster than we, the rebellious-at-heart Americans, ever would. In case you haven't noticed, we're such assholes that we used the atomic bomb TWICE. And when another country is having an election, we always back the dictator instead of the people's choice. Then, of course, the genocide and slavery not just in our history but in our building blocks. There's a lot to hate.

But we're also lying to everyone all the time, even nations we have treaties with like, say, Denmark, the owners of Greenland. Back in 1959 we talked them into letting us build a nuclear reactor on their land. For science, of course. We also built a miniature village so people working there (about 200 of them) had a place to live. We called it Camp Century. But what we really did was, we tried to see if we could build a nuclear missile base there. Why Greenland? And why does Trump want Greenland so badly now? Well, about that:

From National Geographic

Pretty useful during a Cold War that could turn hot at any moment. And before you judge us too harshly, please remember that not very long after we convinced the Dutch to let us do this, the Soviets snuck a bunch of nuclear missiles into Cuba, hence the Cuban Missile Crisis. Having Greenland is also pretty useful if you intend to fuck over Putin at some point. Even Trump must know that the two of them can't coexist. I suspect that if he has his way and bends America to his will, Putin will be the next order of business. A little unexpected from him, considering his love of the Russian dictator, but a solid political move.

So what happened to Camp Century? We, uh, well . . . we kinda forgot about it. In 1965 we abandoned it. We told the Dutch that it was a more or less successful experiment, and we did learn a lot about building nuclear reactors in such climates as the Arctic. We even accidentally learned something interesting about Greenland while we were at Camp Century. We drilled all the way through the ice sheet covering Greenland. That ice has long been thought to be 2M years old, but we examined the ground and evidence we found and came to the conclusion that it was a mere 400K years since Greenland was uncovered by ice.

OK, maybe that wasn't all that exciting for you to learn, but big picture, it's pretty important to our understanding of the world. Which is besides the point, so let's get back to it.

What we really learned was that it was impossible to build a missile base there. The conditions were too unstable, so we packed up our shit and left under the assumption that whatever we left behind would be sealed away in ice forever. It sounds kind of stupid to us now to do that, but back then they didn't know about one little tiny thing that is a very large fucking thing now.

That thing they didn't know about? Climate change. Now the ice is melting, and we have rediscovered Camp Century. There's just one problem. We left behind a lot of stuff, including nuclear waste and PCBs, the dreaded forever chemicals. To say nothing of the 24M liters of untreated sewage.

So now Camp Century is a ticking time bomb. Don't worry, you probably won't be alive when it goes off, which is scheduled for 2135 or 2179, depending on which model of climate change you follow. Your grandkids might be alive for it, though. Imagine the sheer joy they'll experience when that waste is exposed to the air and shoved right into the Polar Jet Stream. How much damage could that shit do once dispersed in such a fashion? I imagine there won't be a lot of places in the northern hemisphere you could avoid it.

Yeah, I don't think Trump wants Greenland so he can clean up the US's previous mess, either. All the same, if he somehow figures out how to make a missile base work there, I wonder what Putin might try to sneak into Cuba? Hell, maybe Mexico is tired of the tariffs. Why not put a real threat at the border?

Fun in the end times . . .