25 June 2020

Counterpoint - Or?

Saturday again;

Comes around a lot these days;

And then it's Thursday;

And then, and then - it's Saturday again.

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Solstice again;

Always seems to have just been there;

And then it's winter;

And then, and then, it's Solstice again.

23 June 2020

The Brilliance Of Facebook Or Coming Unhinged A Little At A Time

Mark Zuckerberg figured out that if he could get the 30 or 40 percent of the population of the United States that are Cretins to sign up for his service he could pull off an amazing secondary level metamorphosis.

He did.

And it has worked.

Here is the rest of his plan: if he could get all the rest of us to also sign up, the little component of  Cretin that lurks in each of the rest of us, when exposed to high test Cretins, would come out to play and would cancel out whatever redeeming characteristics we might have had before the exposure/metamorphosis; at that point we all become indistinguishable from real full blooded Cretins and a giant Fête des Cretins ensues.

(We used to call such things cluster fucks, but Mark is a real upscale guy so he translated it to French; it should not be confused with a zombie cavalcade - zombies have redeeming characteristics.)

"What an advertising opportunity; probably worth billions".

Mark said to no one in particular.

And then there were billions and they had a giant cluster - pardon - Fête des Cretins as a four color graphic backdrop.

And we got donnie.

I realized this while re-reading several of my recent blog posts.

Mitch McConnell is the one in the middle, between Lindsey Graham on the left and Ted Cruz on the right.


Just Wondering

There have been several shootings, one fatal, in the Capitol Hill Organized Protest zone of Seattle.

No shooters have been caught and apparently no suspects are in the hopper.

It's hard not to wonder if the Seattle Police are making a point by recruiting various shooters from the fringe elements that Police are so comfortable dealing with.

That's not suggesting such a thing; it's just hard not to wonder.

Atlanta Police are throwing their tantrum by sicking out; why wouldn't their Seattle counterparts throw their own sort of tantrum?

That's not suggesting such a thing; it's just hard not to wonder.

After all, they have lost a big piece of real estate.

That's not suggesting that the police would want revenge for looking stupid; it's just hard not to wonder.

Are there any more shootings scheduled?

Just wondering ...

It Aint Jesus ...

You know how people over time and place are always seeing Jesus or Mary (never Joseph) in their ice cream swirls or in spots of coffee dropped on their otherwise pristine table cloths?

Well, recently a genius saw donnie in a mass of pig guts.

Probably an immigrant worker in a Tyson facility.


21 June 2020

I Just Snapped

I just received this email from a long time friend.

I should say that the word "friend" describing this relationship has been an increasingly frayed piece of cloth since Tea Party Time.

I guess the raiment is finally ripped.

*****************************************************

Here is the essence of the email:

What ass she is


Subject: Let this one sink in..... 

Our Military and our veterans and our first responders are treated like crap!! So what does Nancy Pelosi do?? She presented George Floyd’s brother with a folded American flag that should be reserved for service men and women. 
I don’t care what your stance is on the situation, he was NOT part of our armed forces nor was he a first responder!!! This is something you earn through service to our country or to your state or community. This is an extreme insult to all who served as military or first responders. 


Here is what I had to say; it came out as a burst of genuine, white hot anger; I hadn't even Googled my belief yet; I just had to get out of me my hatred for the snidely smiling little pissants who roam the internet in support of the most paper mâché piece of shit that has ever inhabited the house of the American People.

It came out without thought.

But I did finish with a search for validity of what I was pretty sure was the non-cretin truth.

********************************************************

Where is it written?

I am so tired of assertions from the cretins being accepted as gospel that I could, and probably will, puke.

I am unwilling to accept, any more, that the mudsill of humanity, closely kindred to Kipling’s Bandar Log, have any right to be free roaming entities.

Let alone citizens.

I think they should all be sent to breeding camps for the genetically inferior in some essentially uninhabited part of the United States.

Their spawn could be used for experiments on how to avoid  certain syndromes and create useful genetic antidotes to things like intentional  malignant illiteracy and  profound sociopathic stupidity.

Avoiding those characteristics, if only we had, in some previous time - like with an education system, or a health care system, or a fair and equitable distribution of our copious wealth - would have saved the world an amazing amount of impending misery.

IMPENDING MISERY COULD HAVE BEEN AVOIDED.

But we have donnie the dildo.

Over, and Out.

Here is the truth of the flag:

19 June 2020

The New Atlanta Cop Tantrum Bonus


And the  bill currently before the U.S. senate will pay them for not killing black people.

It's a great time to be a cop.

It's good that their extreme delicacy has finally been acknowledged and compensated.











18 June 2020

Cops Throwing Tantrums




An argument for defunding, not "restructuring": let's get people in place for "public safety" who aren't so frightened that they are always shooting people in the back and so sickly that they only show up intermittently.  On the plus side of a sickly FORCE, however, is that blue flu usually elicits sighs of relief in black and brown neighborhoods ("no shootings tonight" can frequently be heard when the cops throw one of their tantrum sick outs).

17 June 2020

Police Reform: A Triune Farce

First it was the House of Representatives.

They want to "restructure" the police.

"Restructuring" is a first class weasel word, the meaning of which has long been lost in the mists of bureaucratic antiquity.

While incomprehensible as to its meaning, its results are easily seen: various nodules of various structures of various organizations are moved around and re-named and given different reporting structures.

Sometimes some are combined making few out of many; sometimes many are made from few; anybody that has ever worked for a large company, or anyone who has observed any kind of large organization has seen this process many times.

Nothing much changes and the re-organized organization continues on its former trajectory.

*************************************************

Next, and close on the heals of the first, we got donnie's executive order.

donnie is outlawing choke holds unless the police feel threatened.

Those poor little pansies - the nation's police -  have a long history of feeling threatened by black men, culminating in an astounding inventory of black corpses with shattered wind pipes or an armory's worth of bullets in their backs.

So much for the muddled thoughts of the grand wizard.

*************************************************

Finally, hot off the press this morning, the Senate has weighed in: they are proposing we pay the police to stop killing black men.

I heard that and stopped listening so I don't know if that is a reverse bounty per non-murder, or an aggregated bonus paid monthly.

**************************************************

Meanwhile we're all waiting for which American city will be host to some new night-time  black man murder.





14 June 2020

Cats


They were younger then.

We Are In So Much Trouble ...



From Daily Kos

Here are The first two paragraphs:

"Donald Trump has a superpower. Believe it or not, he can become completely invisible. Of course, Trump isn’t invisible to everyone. He’s only invisible to Republican Senators. This power manifests every time Trump makes a statement or tweet in which he clearly violates the law, calls for acts of random violence, or demonstrates ignorance at a level that clears the very high bar of embarrassing the GOP.

Trump flexed that power on Tuesday when he issued a tweet accusing 75-year-old peace activist Martin Gugino of being an “antifa provocateur” and of attempting to “scan” Buffalo police, and of faking his fall and injury. Trump’s tweet, repeating a conspiracy theory voiced by a reporter for Russian state propaganda, was both ugly and silly enough to generate a tall stack of “didn’t read it” and “didn’t see it” responses. But a day later, Trump’s statement is looking like it’s coming back into view, and the White House is doing what it does every single time that Trump issues a statement this patently ridiculous and unacceptable: They’re doubling down."

*************************************************
This is a good summary or where we are as a nation and a people and a republic.  

And where are are is in deep trouble.  

This Kos post is dealing in specifics, but they are archetypical of everything that has happened since 20 January 2017.  

That "everything" has gone into hyperdrive since the republican senate found trump not guilty of what he was obviously guilty of.  

Now those same republican senators, when asked what they think of this latest trump outrage - well described in this post - either said "I'm late for lunch", "I haven't heard about it" or "I haven't seen anything about it". 

I'm not making that up.  

The only way we can have a separation of powers and avoid the fate that the Founders all feared mightily, is to have three branches offsetting each other.

Here and now we have a questionable court and a hypnotized senate.

That senate can neither see, nor hear, nor say any evil wrought by donnie the dildo.

Ol' Mitch is the one in the middle.
  

And evil is jumping out and biting them on the ass every day.

And the two most recent members of the court are so shaky that there is little to hope for as far as separation of powers.

The really maddening thing is that I always expected the dictator, if one were ever to appear, to be smart, not a sociopathic, senile moron.


12 June 2020

I warned About The "System" Managing Its Own Change

I heard Representative Jim Clyburn on Politics With Amy Walter this morning.

I haven't heard anything from him since he endorsed Joe Biden.

I was surprised at what he said.

He said he doesn't support defunding the police.

He said that, instead, he supports restructuring the police.

The reason I heard him give was that he has to go to the voters with his thinking and he can't go to them with "defunding" because that is just a "slogan"; "restructuring" on the other hand is easily understood - it's something the voters and, therefore, he, can really get their teeth into.

Any kid who had his or her allowance cut off has a gut level understanding of "defunding"; what's hard to understand?

"Restructuring", on the other hand, is a first class weasel word, the meaning of which has long been lost in the mists of bureaucratic antiquity.

While incomprehensible as to its meaning, its results are easily seen: various nodules of various structures of various organizations are moved around and re-named and given different reporting structures.

Sometimes some are combined; sometimes many are made from few; anybody that has ever worked for a large company, or anyone who has observed any kind of large organization has seen this process many times.

I saw it over the years as an employee of IBM.  In 1992, after its then most recent restructuring, the company nearly went bankrupt.

Do a search on "restructure" and "police" and see how much incomprehensible gibberish you get.

We've had all the "restructuring" we can stand.

Consent degrees "restructuring" various police departments span the continent.

Nothing changes; The Daily from the New York Times gives five reasons why.

The "restructured" police just keep killing black people.

We need to take their allowance away.

Maybe that's an understandable slogan.

10 June 2020

The Acid Test

The real test of whether black lives matter will be November 3, 2020. 

If all of us vote, we win and we can put an exclamation point at the end of BLACK LIVES MATTER!

We are going to need super human support from all Americans to neutralize the trump slime apparatus: “no, donnie, you cannot suppress the vote”. 

I don’t believe in prayer, but I suggest we all start. 

09 June 2020

I Just Read My Post Of 17 November 2011

Russian Revolution Day 2011.

An auspicious date.

I was trying to analyze my catholic politics - catholic in the non religious meaning of the word.

I drilled down to this post today because I was thinking of using it as Exhibit A in a post for today that I had aformin'.

By the time I found the old post I had forgotten what I was going to currently post about, so I read the old one.

It was shocking, at the end of it.

I had no idea that I had ever said any of that.

The most interesting part of the post was that I called the GOP (the gop because of what I am about to reveal about what I said) a cult.

One needs to read Musings Of An Occasionally Fallen Away Democrat to discover that I was a bit more nuanced than that opprobrious term might  seem to imply.

But I used it and the irony, nine years later, is that the term "cult" inarguably describes the gop today, but it's a genuine cult, the cult of agent orange, the cult of one protoplasmic blot on the history of the human race, not a cult of ideology.



A Timely Warning From An Unlikely Prophet

Earlier today in a post about the need to dismantle the police "system" of the United States I issued a warning about the "question" of what to do about centuries of state sponsored terror and murder.

"Beware (I said in that post) of the answer to 'The Question' being managed by the very 'system' that has brought us centuries of terror wrought upon the non white, non wealthy segment of America".

It was less than two hours later that I heard Michael Moore, the head of the Los Angeles Police Union tell the BBC that the "answer" to that "question" is for the country to adopt the LAPD "system"; Los Angeles, he asserted, has everything all fixed up.

I am not normally that much of a prophet.

Yesterday, Today - How About Tomorrow?

I have always had an aversion for cops.

I wrote about that aversion in my first book, Screen Saver, a memoir I published in 2008.

Throughout the book I included little stories about various cop encounters, all bad, that I have had over the years.

Here is the first one.

"The Hollywood Theater experience had been a particularly distasteful one for me because I had never liked cops.  The probable reason for this feeling, like so many attitudes, preferences and aversions I had in my life could be traced to my mother.  Sometime about the time of the birthday party I had been with my mother in our car.  She was going to pick up my father.  My father’s arrival at the car must have been imminent because my mother had stopped outside the place that he was going to come from.  There were cars filling the curbside locations where she would have parked, but since my father was apparently going to be right out, she had stopped in the street parallel to one of the parked cars to wait.

Suddenly there was a big fat guy in a blue suit and with a red face outside my mother’s side of the car motioning for her to roll down the window.  When she had rolled down the window he started yelling at her. I was probably between four and five years old.  One of the things he was yelling was “double-park”.  I have had a horror of both double parking and cops ever since.  I had had my first unpleasant cop experience."

******************************************************

Over the years I began to notice that my black fellow citizens all had stories similar to mine, only different.

While my stories always ended up with me being unbelievably pissed off, their stories always ended up in police violence, mental and physical abuse, arrest, and, often, death; in the case of death the stories were always told by family or friends of the deceased.

Nothing much ever came of any of those stories.

But that was then.

Ubiquitous video recording capacity has allowed the truth of those stories to finally be documented beyond argument;  that has caused the truth and horror of those stories to register in the minds and souls of even the most obtuse among us.

One wonders why we had to wait until now for the incessantly documented with video murders to register in the minds of America.

But at least now it has happened.

Memorial Day 2020; Minneapolis Minnesota.

So we're in now, now.

Now the question seems to be (beware: "The Question" is being managed by the very "system" that brought us centuries of terror wrought upon the non white, non wealthy segment of America) "what are we going to do about it"?

The right answer to that question is crucial because anything less than the right answer will be terror as usual.

(Since the wrong answer would result in continuation of the "system" it would not seem unlikely that, once exonerated with the wrong answer, the "system", turgid with thoughts of revenge, would unleash terror of sort heretofore unimagined - kinda like donnie after ol' Mitch and the Boys lied him "not guilty".)

Here is the current system in a few words: the police have for a couple centuries been deployed to fend off any attempt by the non white, non rich population of the United States to exercise their rights as citizens and to get ahead in life and to ascend the ladder of success, wealth and achievement.

In current parlance, the cops are the guard dogs of the great gated community that is rich, white america.

In the case of black people the most expeditious means of fending them off and guarding the gates against them has been for the police to kill them.

That's the "system".

It is working perfectly.

That's why that system needs to be dismantled; it is, from the ground up a paid vigilante apparatus with the mission of allowing the economics and sociology of slavery to forever remain as the dominant component of America's DNA.

Defunding that system is the quickest way to dismantle it.

Anything other than dismantling the system would be terror as usual.

08 June 2020

I Have Had A Strange Thought

I've had lots of them over life, but this one is new and really off the wall.

The republican convention might get interesting.

I have no idea how the mechanics would work, but it seems that the GOP, in some degree of magnitude, is getting really nervous about trying to re-elect a sociopathic moron.

Maybe Mitt Romney can ride again?

Show Stopper From Biden


From the National Review:



The Joe Biden campaign has announced its opposition to defunding police departments in the wake of widespread George Floyd demonstrations, advocating for reform measures and even additional funding instead.

“As his criminal justice proposal made clear months ago, Vice President Biden does not believe that police should be defunded,” Biden spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement. “Biden supports the urgent need for reform–including funding for public schools, summer programs, and mental health and substance abuse treatment separate from funding for policing–so that officers can focus on the job of policing.”

Bates added, “This also means funding community policing programs to improve relationships between officers and residents.” Biden’s criminal justice plan would earmark an additional $300 million to community policing efforts.

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There are 20,000 police departments in the United States.

If each got an equal share of Joe's $300,000,000, that share would be $15,000 (LAPD has an annual budget of $1,189,000,000).

The ridiculousness of that proposal seems to me to be mathematically unavoidable.

But the real problem is that Biden apparently wants to leave intact a system that is working perfectly.

The police have for a couple centuries been deployed to fend off any attempt by the non white, non rich population of the United States of exercising their rights as citizens and getting ahead in life and up the ladder of success, wealth and achievement.

In the case of black people the most expeditious means of fending off has been for the police to kill them.

That's the system.

It is working perfectly.

That system needs to be dismantled.

Defunding it is the quickest way to get that done.

Joe is flat wrong: his math is ridiculous but worse, his grasp of the problem is apparently non-existent.





What A Moron Looks Like

Talk About Iconic ...



But This One Is Good, Also:




Potpourri Des Images 060820 - Mostly Paris