I know I haven't been keeping up with blogging at this site the last couple months.
A lot of it has to do with the overwhelming bullshit flooding the zone as donald trump and his MAGA lackeys shred every last element of our constitutional norms. Every day, something new and horrifying happens, with almost no pushback or outrage from the mainstream media still stuck in their "both-siderism" mindset.
Everything I could write here would be merely reactions, my expressions of dismay and anger which doesn't do my spirit or anyone reading this site any favors.
At best, you all should keep following the news sites and blogs that I track:
In the meantime, there are actions you and I can take like supporting the No Kings protests getting planned for June 14th. Unless you're Catholic, in which case you'll wanna go to Chicago to livestream Da Pope.
In the meantime, to everyone who voted for trump and the Republican Party across the board this 2024, I hope the leopards enjoy eating your faces. /rage
And he's from the South Side of Chicago, home of the beleaguered White Sox, the Daley political dynasty and, until they decamped for Washington and eventually the White House, Michelle and Barack Obama.
The new pope, who has spent much of his career ministering in Peru and leading the Vatican’s powerful office of bishops, was born Robert Francis Prevost on Sept. 14, 1955, at what was then called Mercy Hospital, at the corner of South Prairie Avenue and 34th Street.
But while Prevost made his debut in Chicago, his parents and two older brothers were already living just south of the sprawling city in a working-class suburb called Dolton...
Prevost's father, Louis Prevost, served in the Navy during World War II and worked as a superintendent of schools in the south suburbs of Chicago.
The future pope's mother, Mildred Martinez Prevost, was a librarian with a master's degree in education and two sisters who were nuns.
His mom was a librarian?! (respectful grumbling noises)
The rest of the bio at the NBC News article details Prevost's education, heading to Villanova to get a degree in math before joining a Catholic Order - for St. Augustine - getting another degree in theology and then a doctorate for Canon Law in Rome itself. His career in the church was balanced between work in Peru - to where he got naturalized as a citizen there - and overseeing the Augustinian order as an admin.
The bad news? Prevost got involved in the cover-ups of various sex abuse scandals both the American Midwest and in Peru. While he himself hasn't been accused of the acts, he failed to report the matters or failed to remove the culprits from their positions. It can be argued that the church's bureaucracy was corrupt enough that Prevost couldn't do any other, but it remains shameful that he didn't do more to protect the victims and work to prevent any future ones.
The good news? Prevost's taking the name Leo (the XIV, that's 14 in Latin) as symbolic of what role he wants to perform as pontiff: Reformer. In particular, carrying on his predecessor Leo XIII who stood for workers' rights, better wages, and social justice for the poor on a global level. Leo's already attacking the Artificial Intelligence movement, how it threatens human dignity and labor rights.
...the conclave that concluded today in Rome has chosen the first American pope in the history of the Catholic Church: Robert Francis Prevost. Making the milestone even more remarkable is that Prevost was chosen on just the second day of voting by the most geographically diverse body of papal electors in history. Perhaps most surprising of all is that the Church’s first-ever American pope was selected during Donald Trump’s presidency, as Washington assumes a more contentious stance toward the rest of the world...
Many observers are likely to cast Leo as anti-Trump, a role that Francis was often cast in himself. In February, a profile on X apparently belonging to Leo reposted an article criticizing J. D. Vance, who had argued that Catholics should prioritize their family and neighbors over foreigners. And indeed, it seems likely that the new pope will continue policies—such as advocacy for migrants and environmental protection—that his immediate predecessor embraced and that the current U.S. administration largely opposes. But almost any of the 133 men voting in the Sistine Chapel today would have done the same had he been chosen pope... By taking the name Leo, the new pope is clearly signaling an intention to highlight modern Catholic social teaching, a tradition that began with Leo XIII, who reigned from 1878 to 1903.
That the new Pope is going to come out swinging for workers' rights is happening just as trump and his oligarch billionaire buddies like Elon Musk are gutting federal workplaces and causing havoc with our trade / tourism industries to where large-scale unemployment is unavoidable.
A social media account under the pope’s name repeatedly criticized the Trump administration — and especially Vice President JD Vance — in the months and years before assuming the papacy.
A series of posts under an account for Robert Prevost — now the Bishop of Rome and newly anointed as Pope Leo XIV — shows the Chicago-born Cardinal reposting an op-ed criticizing Vance on his interpretation of his faith, and the strict immigration policies that Vance along with President Donald Trump have touted.
The account in mid-April reposted someone else’s rebuke to Trump’s meeting in the Oval Office with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, and pointed to an op-ed by auxiliary Catholic Bishop Evelio Menjivar of Washington, D.C., highlighting the suffering of migrants summarily deported by the Trump administration to El Salvador.
“Do you not see the suffering? Is your conscience not disturbed?” the op-ed that Prevost reposted reads.
In a more pointed example, the account in February posted an opinion piece from the National Catholic Reporter, a liberal-leaning Catholic newspaper, titled: “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”
Right after the news broke that Robert Francis Prevost was elected as the new pope of the Roman Catholic Church, the internet produced lots of evidence that he has promoted articles critical of JD Vance and Donald Trump, and even expressed sympathy for George Floyd. That prompted MAGA figures to erupt in anger. They attacked the new pope as anti-Trump, pro–open borders, a Marxist, and soft on thugs and drug dealers, as Media Matters documented...
In a podcast with Matt McManus (a contributor to Commonweal) Sargent covers some of the attacks (via transcript):
McManus: Well, I’m sure we’re going to learn a lot more about the new pope’s views over the next couple days as people scour everything he is ever written and everything that he is ever said. The choice of the name Leo is itself significant. Pope Leo was widely regarded as the “People’s Pope” or the “Workers’ Pope” because he is one of the founders of Catholic social teaching. Now, to be clear, the O.G. Pope Leo was by no means a socialist or a Marxist, the way they, say Laura Loomer, is trying to imply that the current Pope Leo is a Marxist. But he did stress that there were significant problems with capitalism that led to the emergence of things like atheistic socialism and atheistic Marxism and called for a conciliation between workers and capitalists that would favor the workers—or at least better their conditions. So I think that in itself is telling about the direction that he is planning on going in.
But if you look at some of the stuff he said over the past couple years, he is very clearly pro-immigrant. Back in 2015, he stated that he was opposed to the death penalty. He spent a long time in Peru, by all accounts living in quite modest circumstances and demonstrating an unusual level of concern for the poor. So that’s all a positive sign.
Sargent: Well, MAGA is not happy about any of it. Charlie Kirk accused the pope of “retweeting George Floyd propaganda.” Laura Loomer erupted over the idea that the Pope seemed to endorse the need to pray for Floyd, calling him a “career criminal” and “drug addict.” MAGA figure Sean Davis called the Pope anti-Trump and pro–open borders...
If you are known by your enemies, then we know Leo XIV is going to be someone standing up for the immigrant, the impoverished, and the "what the hell happened to our jobs" citizenry.
It's still early, but there ought to be a betting line in the UK on how quickly the Pope is going to excommunicate JD Vance, and for whichever sadistic stance Vance will take in defense of trump's crimes.
Still working on the -Isms book at the moment, but I needed to take care of a few items.
The big story - almost literally - over the past week or two has been the Chinese spy balloons flying over North American airspace. The developments getting out are that 1) this has apparently been going on for years, 2) our NORAD alert system has only recently been able to target these balloons more effectively, and 3) our habit of calling these balloons "unidentified" are mixing them up with actual non-terrestrial UFOs flown by innocent aliens looking for a concert hall to play in.
Oh, and I woke up this morning to yet another goddamn mass shooting, this time on the Michigan State University campus. Three dead so far, more wounded. Goddamn this nation for our Angry Guy With Guns bloodlust.
With all of the nonstop media coverage of Queen Elizabeth's funeral kind of drowning out all the other news, we need to pay attention to the change of fortunes going on in Ukraine as the defenders are earning major gains in their counteroffensive to retake the eastern half from Russia. Brief report from Digby first:
Ukrainian forces pushed deep into Russian-controlled territory Saturday, handing Kyiv some of the most strategically important towns and cities in the northeast of the country and delivering retreating Russian forces one of their biggest setbacks since the start of the war.
In a matter of days, Ukraine retook swaths of its Kharkiv region, where Russians had fought ferociously for months, spending lives and ammunition to take over cities, sometimes a building at a time.
In the weeks leading up to the offensive that Ukraine launched earlier this week, Kyiv’s forces used Western-made weapons, including High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or Himars, against Russian supply lines and front-line positions.
The growing success of Ukraine’s advance signals to Western backers the effectiveness of weapons the U.S. and Europe has given to Kyiv. It comes at a particularly critical time for Western powers, days after Moscow indefinitely suspended natural-gas flows to Europe, raising the prospect of energy rationing this winter.
Russia’s retreat from key cities is likely aimed at avoiding encirclement after Ukraine captured the town of Kupyansk, which sits on a rail and road hub, and severed the last artery that connected Russia with thousands of its front-line troops.
“It’s a complete collapse,” Phillips O’Brien, professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, said about the Russian pullout of forces between Kupyansk and Izyum. “In the battle of Donbas, they probably had more troops deployed there than anywhere and now they seem to be unable to hold anything.”
The Ukrainian military was incredibly busy today...
Also, the Russian military was busy too; running from the Ukrainian military...
Here’s the British MOD’s assessment for today. They did not post an updated map.
"Russian forces were likely taken by surprise... Ukrainian units are now threatening the town of Kupiansk; it's capture would be a significant blow to Russia because it sits on supply routes to the Donbas front line..."
Social media is flush with frontline video clips of Ukrainians finding abandoned tanks and personnel carriers still in working condition. Troop morale was reportedly low before this counterattack: By all evidence Russian morale is flat out gone.
There is just trash everywhere, no policing of debris, etc. Yes, war is hell and all that, but if you are in a set position for a while you maintain your AO for a variety of reasons, including just maintaining basic discipline.
Anyone who's been a solider, like Cole, will tell you discipline matters: It keeps you focused and on your game. It's a reality of war since the days of Sparta all the way through the Romans to the Revolutionary Army drilled by Von Steuben to the World Wars to today. Without that discipline, you're not an army.
From what I've read about the modern Russia army, it seems to have been lax about discipline because they relied on overwhelming numbers, advanced armor, artillery barrages out the wazoo, and bad weather to get them out of jams. They were riding on their reputations post-World War and on the fact they had relatively decent heavy armor to match the strength of Western (European/US) armor.
Their more recent invasions and incursions - including their seizing of Crimea back in 2014 when Ukraine rose up to overthrow their corrupt pro-Putin regime - focused on limited gains and minor bits of territory. This time around it was a massive nation-sized invasion... and all of their flaws - over-reliance on shock and awe, lack of logistics, poor leadership in charge of poor troops - got exposed in real time. Advancements in anti-tank weaponry turned dreaded Russian tanks into death traps and scrap bounty for Ukrainian farmers. As soon as Ukraine got upgraded artillery weapons from the West - HIMARs in particular - they were able to strike deeper into Russian-occupied locations to disrupt their supply chains. Everything built up to this past week's counterattack using Kershon as one front and opening up Kharkiv for a rout on a scale that hasn't been seen in decades.
The last time Russia felt a loss this bad, they were the Soviets and getting driven out of Afghanistan. But that was a loss that carried across nine years of bloody quagmire. This is a loss dragged along for five months - ever since they bogged down in April - and enacted over five days. We're talking hundreds of thousands of losses to KIA or POW. Half their armored might blown up or abandoned. Even if Putin panics and makes a call to conscript more cannon fodder to his war, it will take months to plan out another attack: Any hasty push and he's merely repeating the same mistakes to lose even more bodies and armor he can't afford to lose.
There’s RUMINT that Putin is preparing to order a general mobilization. And the sealing of of the center of Moscow is related to that. I doubt it. First, we haven’t seen any information come out that would indicate that anything is being done to prepare for a general mobilization. Secondly, I think it is more likely this was done preemptively to try to prevent mass protests as the news from Kharkiv and Kherson filters back into Russia despite Putin’s best efforts to completely control the Russian information space.
Frankly, ordering a general mobilization isn’t going to help Putin remove his tuchas from the the crack he’s wedged it in. A crack of his own making. Unless Putin has a fully equipped and properly trained army stashed somewhere that no one knows about, it’s only a matter of time. The question is what does he do at that point? Does he cause a meltdown at ZNPP? Does he use lower yield nukes and just wipes out Ukraine and every Ukrainian he can because he can’t have it? Does he decide that a world without Russia as a great power isn’t worth surviving and he fires all his nukes...?
It's a good question, and the big reason why NATO (especially Poland) hasn't escalated matters by sending in their own troops to give Ukraine more than enough trained personnel to beat Russia back to their border. The fear of nuclear retaliation is pretty much the only reason why a nation that's barely in the top 20 economies and clearly now with the worst ground army in the world - seriously, Iraqi troops in 2003 were better trained than this - can still command any fear.
However, unlike Silverman I can't imagine Putin or Russia getting angry or desperate enough to go nuclear on Ukraine. If Putin gives the order and drops a "Sore Loser" warhead on Kyiv, he becomes a global pariah for the rest of his short life. Instead of making opposing nations cower, it will terrify them into quarantining Russia with absolute sanctions and complete cutoff of travel, anything and everything to starve the oligarchs of their wealth and power. Every Russian embassy will be shut down and sent home. The United Nations would rebel at the broken nature of having Russia as a permanent member of the Security Council. And that's just the political fallout: LITERAL FALLOUT from even one nuke can very well cover Russia and cause backlash from Putin's own people.
Even with low-yield nukes - read up on Davy Crocketts sometime, that might scare you a little, and yes Russia has that type of yield on hand - you will see a backlash of global proportions. No other nation has used nukes since 1945: Ever since we've learned the consequences of such weapons, even the U.S. has refused to use them again. For Putin to be dangerous enough to use a nuke, it will be the last weapon he uses. The rest of the world would do everything in their power to make sure he doesn't use another.
What matters now is if Ukraine and solidify their defenses in Kharkiv, and bring in more troops to circle around and cut off Kershon and Crimea to regain all of that before winter sets in. It may be September now but even in this age of climate change the likelihood of bad weather swirling in fast is pretty high, and it won't favor either side when it does.
But right now, all the advantages favor Ukraine. Their troops are spirited and disciplined and winning. Russia is retreating in a way they haven't done since 1917.
Here's hoping Ukraine reclaims so much of their homeland that Putin can't lie to his own people anymore.
Also, I REALLY need to find out where to order Ukrainian "Russian Warship, Go Fuck Yourself" Stamps for Christmas time. I got a relative who's into stamp collecting...
We should expect the COVID pandemic to continue on. The massive upturn in cases due to the Omicron variant means this January we're going to see overwhelmed hospitals and ICUs again with no foreseeable relief for our health care professionals.
The United States is heading into the Congressional Midterms, meaning the damned Beltway obsessions over the horse races between Republicans and Democrats are going to obscure everything else going on. The maddening drum beats of political warfare, with unhinged mudslinging and "gotcha" moments of increasing absurdity, is going to deafen and blind us all (again).
Our schools are going to be overwhelmed by the Far Right groups pursuing another round of book banning and ideology purging, such as the schools in Oklahoma getting threatened with a law weaponizing the bounty system to gift offended parents $10,000 per book in school libraries that offend them. Just think, an outraged grifter parent can complain about five different titles - hell, one of them can be the DICTIONARY that happens to include curse words like "hell" - in one week and steal earn $50k of easy money from our financially-strapped schools - an amount that's roughly an annual income for most Americans - without breaking a sweat.
Did I mention the ongoing COVID pandemic? Because it feels like this should be big news every night instead of getting overlooked while our HOSPITALS CROWD UP AGAIN.
The House Investigation into trump's January 6 Insurrection is reportedly looking at issuing more subpoenas, starting to look into the financial backing of the war rooms and overall organization that planned the riots. But they need to hurry: The committee needs to get all their criminal charges filed to the Department of Justice before any possibility of the Republicans retaking the House after November...
The United States has sold the only copy of the Wu-Tang Clan album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin to an anonymous buyer. The price of the sale was also kept confidential.
The album was previously owned by Martin Shkreli, the infamous "Pharma Bro" who raised the price of a life-saving drug by 5,000 percent and was later convicted of securities fraud and sentenced to seven years in prison. He was forced to hand it over to the United States in 2018 as a part of a $7.4 million forfeiture judgement.
The announcement was made today by Jacquelyn M. Kasulis, the Acting United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. "Shkreli has been held accountable and paid the price for lying and stealing from investors to enrich himself," said Kasulis. "With today's sale of this one-of-a-kind album, his payment of the forfeiture is now complete."
Shkreli purchased the 31-track album at auction in 2015 for a reported $2 million. It was promoted as a "unique work of art" with no physical or digital duplicate in existence, and included appearances from the wider Wu-Tang family from Redman to Killarmy. Upon learning that it was Shkreli who bought the album, Wu-Tang member RZA told Bloomberg that the group decided to give "a significant portion of the proceeds to charity..."
DAMN YOU, JUSTICE DEPARTMENT. TELL US WHO BOUGHT THE WU-TANG ALBUM.
Are we gonna have to plan that Wu-Tang/Bill Murray heist after all???
I've written before aboutSaturday Night Live, a long-running weekly skit / music show and its' impact on our nation's cultural norms and political views.
It's a show that has the occasional bad night, due to a weak guest host - usually a hot marquee name coming off a blockbuster hit movie or TV show that turns out to be too one-note or bad at comedic timing - or just a bad time of current events where there's not much to make mockery of. It's been running for a loooooong time, which has brought up accusations that the show is outdated, out-of-touch, unnecessary... usually by people who wonder why Adam Sandler or Bill Murray still aren't on the show.
If you hadn't noticed, SNL goes through a rotation of core cast members - due to most acting contracts set between three to five years - which adds to the uneven nature of the show's history (some cast groups like the original Not-Ready guys from 1975-1979 or the late 80s-early 90s were epic crews that loom large over all the ones who follow them). You might remember them through the actors/actresses who were/are clearly the "glue" character-types keeping up with the A-list caliber types holding everyone's attention (Eddie Murphy in the early 80s, although his fellow castmates of that era weren't slouches and still occasionally annoyed how Eddie sucked up all the attention and glory).
For the current tenure, the main Players were inarguably Kate McKinnon, Cecily Strong, Aidy Bryant, and Kenan Thompson (who had honestly been there so long he's a core player to three different eras). That the four of them stood together for the Cold Open as seen above on that YouTube clip signals big time that those four are ready to move on.
Granted, this comes up EVERY season finale - the OMG online chatter of who's gonna stay and who's gonna move on to their own TV show or three-movie contract with Paramount - but this year it seems like it might finally happen with the core crew... because in the Real World, things have finally changed.
In that I mean, trump is out of office.
If we go back to the craziness of the 2015-2016 SNL Season (Number 42, oh ye Gods Douglas Adams knew!) the show's mandate to skewer current events went into hyperdrive (no, worse, LUDICROUS SPEED) as the trump campaign hurtled our nation (no, the entire world) down the Darkest Timeline ("Stop me before I subreference again!" - Dennis Miller before he went mad). The SNL cast was game enough to try and document all of the atrocities that the 2016 election year was throwing at us, save for the moment when the show's producers decided to let trump himself host an episode - a moment the show has been apologizing for ever since - but when the Electoral College results meant goddamned donald trump was going to the White House everything suddenly imploded.
McKinnon's Cold Open tribute to Leonard Cohen - who had died earlier that week - wasn't just a memorial to a passing musician, it was a funeral dirge for half of a nation - and for most of the planet - sideswiped by an unwanted and fear-driven "victory" for one of the worst human beings in modern history. McKinnon was doing it dressed as Hillary Clinton - whom she had effectively parodied on the show - but this time was all serious and reflective, realizing that we were all going into at least four years' worth of madness, corruption, and anger. "I'm not giving up, and neither should you," McKinnon said - as herself as much as faux-Hillary - and that's pretty much what she did.
And so for four years, SNL has skewered, mocked, belittled the trump regime with a darker, more strident tone than any previous Presidential era that preceded this. Saturday Night - notoriously Liberal most often, at best Center-Left - had been hard on Presidents - even Liberal-leaning ones like Carter, Clinton, and Obama - from time to time, but often displayed a side of empathy that allowed for pathos to underline their criticisms of the Commander-in-Chiefs. Dana Carvey's turn as Bush the Elder is a perfect example of that empathic display. Not so with trump, Loser of the Popular Vote, whose ignorant, greedy, bullying habits were on full display every time guest-star Alec Baldwin had to put on the wig and fake nose (Baldwin himself was begging by 2017 (!) to stop playing him because even pretending to be trump was soul-draining).
For four years, roughly the same SNL crew had to carry the psyche of a battered United States through this Darkest Timeline, dreading every possibility that somehow trump and the Republicans could make it worse (see the following YouTube clip):
There have been notable departures - Leslie Jones in particular left in 2019 - but it felt as though most of the cast who came in at the turn of the decade were sticking around longer than expected because in some respects the job - Surviving trump - hadn't been finished.
And then the COVID-19 Pandemic hit. All of sudden, everything was put on hold. Oh, the show kept running - using home recordings, Zoom chats, long-distance connections - but as the world went into lockdown so too did SNL, reflecting the anxiety, sorrow, and yearning we all carried with us through 2020 to now.
There were a lot of tears watching this one because it felt like this was a farewell episode for too many of the cast at the end of Season 45:
It was actually a surprise that the entire 2019-2020 cast returned for this season. Again, probably due to the sense of "unfinished business." But now it's Biden in the White House, the vaccination of America has half the nation safe to unwind again, and there's this tiny sliver of relief letting us all know we can go back into the world now. So now, we're finally going to say farewell.
I'm mentioning how emotional a farewell can be to watch SNL cast members go, especially for the eras you can just tell are going to end, mostly because these actors - and often the characters they portray - become beloved during their tenures.
But this one - if this is indeed the farewell for many of the Players who kept us laughing and crying since 2016 - is going to hit harder than before.
These Players were the comedians and performers who did their best to keep most everyone else sane during the craziest years of our lives. The combination of trumpian madness and pandemic anxiety has hit a lot of us hard emotionally. Watching SNL was like trauma therapy, helping us through crisis after crisis as we crawled into 2020-21 and onto the shores of a calmer, happier future...
(Michael Gaetz does something ridiculous and criminal off-stage)
OH GODDAMMIT, COLIN JOST GET BACK OVER HERE YOU'RE GONNA NEED TO MAKE MORE JOKES ABOUT HOW YOU LOOK LIKE GAETZ.
Alas, he may be gone next year (unless they have him do a cameo Cold Open standing in a jail cell whining "Attica! Attica!" with Kate McKinnon as a jailed Rudy asking "You talking about the prison?" with Jost/Gaetz replying back "Nah, it's this high schooler I was gonna hook up with for the Halloween dance!")
Formed in 2017, So Badly is a four-piece dream-pop indie rock band from Fredericksburg, VA. Four years later, the band is ready to release their debut album, Lemon Blue, on March 12...
So Badly was established in 2017 by Sarah Kinzer (they/them), Grace Howie (she/her), and Kevin Coleman (he/him) in Grace and Sarah’s college apartment. It started as vocal and two guitars but blossomed from there as Howie learned bass.
The first drummer added was Annie Frazza (she/her) who was with the band until late 2018, followed by current drummer Daniel Drees (he/him). They recorded their first LP in early 2020 and eventually replaced Coleman with current guitarist Frida Salmoran (they/them).
Samples of their music are linked at that magazine article.
Sarah is daughter to my first cousin on my mom's side (makes her second cousin if I know my genealogy), my cousin is a music college professor with some recording history of his own, so she's following in his footsteps.
To HELL with that, Sarah's LIVING THE DREAM, people!
Tonight is December 17 and the official start to Saturnalia, as always an excuse to ask Mithras for presents and avoid the Krampus like the plague. Or have I gotten holiday traditions mixed up again?
Anywho, for a brief moment I would like to thank the planet Saturn for agreeing to meet with Jupiter to form a Great Conjunction in the night sky for December 21, here's hoping it doesn't cause any prophesied dooms on Earth, 'cause you know how the fake preachers around here like to grift their flocks whenever freaky sky stuff happens.
And if I can pass along to the Gift-Givers of the Solstice, I'm personally okay this year so I would instead ask the Powers That Be to make sure every trump-worshiping asshole refusing to wear masks in public all catch COVID-19 like they deserve and to keep every honest decent American wearing masks and trying to survive these last two months of trumpian bullshit safe from the pandemic. Gratias vobis ago.
“It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear...”
"And, again, when you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that's a pretty good job we've done."
"It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away... [B]e calm. It's really working out. And a lot of good things are going to happen. The consumer is ready, and the consumer is so powerful in our country with what we've done with tax cuts and regulation cuts and all of those things. The consumer has never been in a better position than they are right now. So a lot of good things are going to happen."
"...It goes through air, Bob. That’s always tougher than the touch. You know, the touch, you don’t have to touch things. Right? But the air, you just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed. … And so, that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than your—you know, your, even your strenuous flus. You know, people don’t realize, we lose 25,000, 30,000 people a year here. Who would ever think that, right? Pretty amazing. And then I say, well, is that the same thing? This is more deadly. This is 5 per—you know, this is 5 percent versus 1 percent and less than 1 percent. You know? So, this is deadly stuff..."
"I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don't want to cause a panic."
Schadenfreude doesn't cover this. Schadenfreude is less sociopathic and less hateful than what's required here. The pain and suffering associated with Schadenfreude is malicious yes, but the thing getting damaged is usually the person's pride, a much deserved rebuke by the universe, a joke played on the fool who didn't know better but doesn't deserve any greater pain than that.
This, this falls more under Karma. A serious rebuke instead of a humorous one. trump wanted to play politics with COVID? trump wanted to ignore the suffering of millions of infected, and thousands of our loved ones dead? trump wanted to mock our protections, deny us our medical aid, take away the masks that can help slow the spread of the virus? trump wanted to host massive gatherings at his rallies, bringing together so many people into super-spreader events?
It was all about the United States bombing an Iranian political figure/Iraqi instigator/bad-guy-at-least-to-US on Iraqi soil in a way that violated a couple of international laws. I worried - as did others - that we were seeing an escalation to an actual U.S.-Iran ground war that would have been disastrous for America at the worst possible time.
Ah, how quaint that all seems now...
Yeah, that was JANUARY 2nd of this year. And I have to admit, um, I knew it was going to be crazy coming into 2020 because 1) election year, 2) trump getting worse, 3) Republicans deflecting and defecating like mad, 4) etc.
And ever since this January, it's been... it's uh... you know how Einstein once noted that time is relative? Well, it's been feeling like an entire DECADE of history has just happened in about FIVE MONTHS.
Just... I'm not the only one who's noticed. Here's a YouTuber Julie Nolke realizing it too.
And then her JUNE self visited that APRIL self:
I started laughing at the moment she freaked over the MURDER HORNETS because I did too, and I had to laugh because I dare not cry (I would not stop if I do).
And the thing is, Julie overlooks a lot of stuff I took as major news the first half of this year. And *I* overlooked things like the Australian wild fires.
It would take me days right now to create a checklist of sorts for all the crazy crap that the universe has thrown at us - including evidence that there IS a parallel universe and it's going backwards in time - and I would still miss on certain things like Tiger King being a cultural meme phenomenon probably because I don't want to go watch a crazy show about deranged people abusing poor tigers and other animals for our amusement (when a retired drug dealer is the most mentally balanced and decent person in your list of suspects, there is something fundamentally wrong with this universe...).
This is part of the reason why I haven't been blogging as much here in an election year. I've been doing this long enough to have a backlog archive, and you might notice that my writings go up every four years. This year, I'm not keeping pace... and a lot of it has to do with being overwhelmed with the madness of this world. I can't keep up.
I am trying to finish an article about Tank Man, an annual effort to remember our hero for freedom, but it's getting tied into OUR ongoing protests here in the U.S. to fight for our own freedom and well-being.
This is gonna take a while.
And if anybody shows up claiming to be me from November 2020, I'll remember to ask him our Trust Password first. I DO NOT WANT TO KNOW, FUTURE ME.
Look, I have a lot of schadenfreude watching the Dow Jones drop like a stone over the last month, but we're at the point - probably way past it - where a lot of middle-class 401k and mutual fund portfolios are getting nuked. Isn't there a way to close down the markets for two weeks, let things cool off, like the banking holiday FDR ordered back when he took office at the height of the Great Depression? Those trading floors will be one less place for people to pick up the COVID19.
My library closed to the public back on March 17, we spent the remainder of the week getting our holds into Books-by-Mail for those we could contact, the rest are stuck here until late April when we *hope* to re-open. We're still coming to work until further notice, depending on what the state does, and in the meantime we're using the closed time to re-arrange office space and catch up on paperwork. We DO have ebooks available through Overdrive...
Most libraries - public and college - have closed, almost all the schools have closed here in Florida... and yet our governor DeSantis, obsessing over the economic hit that would happen, isn't doing anything to get the state to block off the beaches and reduce public gatherings there. He's resisting calls for stronger "Shelter In Place" emergency orders to get more residents to stay at home and not spread contact by infectees. Even as we're getting a shitton of New Yorkers fleeing a locked-down New York City and bringing more infectees with them.
For all my science fiction/fantasy and horror readings, for growing up on Stephen King's The Stand, for all the zombie apocalypse movies I've seen, I still can't believe that when a global pandemic finally hit the first thing to go was all the toilet paper. (I kid. Hand sanitizer and eggs disappeared just as quick)
I just found out today that the TV show Supernatural predicted it back in 2009!
We're looking at a possibility of the number of people filing for unemployment - due to layoffs at a lot of tourism, travel, retail, education, restaurant/bar, luxury service jobs because we HAVE to avoid these places of business now - jumping into the 30 percent range during this month. We need to remember a few things: 1) unemployment figures relied a lot on people claiming that, which was lower than actual numbers that can no longer live off-the-books as it were 2) we're looking at a collapse of several industries that will take YEARS to recover meaning those numbers are going to stay up well into 2021 (and 2022 for that matter).
We are looking at both funding unemployment and other social aid services way more than we already are (which wasn't all that great to begin with), AND we are looking at the reality of a Universal Basic Income - a monthly payout by the federal government to help cover the basics like rent/mortgage and food - getting implemented for a long period of time (if not set up permanently). THIS means one thing: The Federal government has to pay for this, and our nation is going to HAVE to raise taxes on upper incomes to balance this out.
None of this would be happening if trump took his job seriously, recognized the warning signs from JANUARY, and prompted both Congress and the Executive branch into funding and manufacturing the medical supplies - not just masks and gloves but also ventilators and respirators - so that when we got to here in March we'd have the bare minimum of those supplies to keep our hospitals functioning. Instead for reasons of his own - either sheer laziness, ignorance of the severity, some twisted idea this crisis would work to his advantage this year of election - trump fiddled while Rome got burned.
With all the craziness this year for the Ides of March, I didn't want to rehash the whole Roman Civil War thing or any other historical/Monty Pythonesque madness.
Instead, one of the things cropping up on social media is how Italy has been coping with the pandemic that has hit their nation real hard the past month. With most everything shut down, and people ordered to stay at their homes, what the neighborhoods and cities have done has been heartwarming. Just watch and listen:
Humanity at our best.
We love you, Italy. Stay healthy, and virtual hugs to your loved ones in need.
Update: Did I get this one?
Oh here's another!
I swear, it has something to do with having 2,000 years worth of balconies to your living spaces.
I want to know if the other countries have something similar. I know there's little news getting out from some of the hardest-hit like Iran, and stuff out of China I would question because of their censorship rules, but how are all the other nations coping?
Hurricane season is picking up. August tends to be the month the big ones start forming in the Atlantic before crashing through the Caribbean and the U.S. And some parts of the United States and Puerto Rico haven't recovered from the last two years.
So far, he's insulted the Prime Minister May, insulted CNN as "Fake News" and gave Fox Not-News a handjob, lied about his own interview with The Sun, and is probably en route to meet the Royal Family at which point he'll probably insult the Queen in some horrifying fashion.
Ahh, the 1980s, when MTV showed up and all of a sudden EVERY single release needed to have a video clip with it... whether it even made sense or not.
Ergo, the infamous Bonnie Tyler video for "Total Eclipse of the Heart." Basically a song about a woman falling in love with a vampire, the video for it turned into a twisted metaphor for boarding schools filled with possessed choir boys and dancing Fonzies.
In fact, the only SANE way to watch the video is with the Literal Song Lyrics:
The only reason I'm even thinking about this is because tomorrow is the TOTAL ECLIPSE OF THE WAL-MART... across half the United States, although the totality will be a narrow band of OMG THERE'S NO PARKING HERE because 50 million Americans are getting there ahead of you.
NASA has a website dedicated to the eclipse. Even if you can't get within the band of totality, you can at least enjoy the partial eclipse within your zip code. As long as it doesn't freaking rain in the early afternoon where you live (mutter grumble freaking Florida weather grumble).
As for getting within the Band of Totality, you have to know a musical instrument and have a decent sense of melody and rhythm. /owstophittingme
Remember kids, don't stare right at the eclipse: let your parents do that for you instead!
One of the things I teach about writing in Microsoft Word class is how publishers work with Font Size. Normal reading text is 11 or 12 point font. Book publishers have chapter titles usually between the 24 to 32 point font sizes. Newspapers and magazines usually go between 24 to 36 point sizes for their minor stories under the fold or inside the pages. Anything over 42 point font size is for major news stories.
Anything Earth-shattering - the start of a war, landing on the moon, Hillary getting a replacement server for her email account - and we're talking 72 point at the least. Sometimes the headline banner will take the entire front page.
So when one of history's more pivotal players on the global stage of the last 60 years passes away - a person who was the target of hatred on a scale comparable to Hitler, Stalin, and that guy cutting you off at the McDonald's drive thru - it's gonna be headline news at the largest possible font you'll ever see. I guarantee you the front page of this morning's Miami Herald had to be printed on extra-sized paper to handle this:
Fidel Castro is dead.
You can't begin to imagine, even if you've lived in South Florida for nine or more years, just how hated Fidel was down in Miami-Dade. It was a passion, more fiery than a thousand suns and more dark than a thousand nights. I met anti-Castro Cubans from time to time back when I was a registered Republican at some of the party gatherings - most memorably at a rally for John McCain's Presidential campaign in 2000 - and those guys were rabid about Commies and Fidel.
To quote the Herald:
Millions cheered Fidel Castro on the day he entered Havana. Millions more fled the communist dictator’s repressive police state, leaving behind their possessions, their families, the island they loved and often their very lives. It’s part of the paradox of Castro that many people belonged to both groups.
Few national leaders have inspired such intense loyalty — or such a wrenching feeling of betrayal. Few fired the hearts of the world’s restless youth as Castro did when he was young, and few seemed so irrelevant as Castro when he was old — the last Communist, railing on the empty, decrepit street corner that Cuba became under his rule.
He held a unique place among the world’s leaders of the past century. Others had greater impact or won more respect. But none combined his dynamic personality, his decades in power, his profound effect on his own country and his provocative role in international affairs...
Castro rose to control Cuba by wrenching power from a corrupt regime, promising major reforms and an end to that corruption. But he also delved whole-hearted into Communism and alienated Cuba from their closest neighbors, above all a United States that did not enjoy the idea of a Commie nation just ninety miles away from Key West.
Whatever benefits Castro brought to Cuba, he also brought major civil liberties violations - his record of homophobia in particular was deplorable - and essentially quashed dissent or differing views. He held onto his Communist ideals even after the fall of the Soviet Union by 1991, unable to find enough allies to share that ideology to keep his nation fiscally afloat. By the time he retired in 2011, all he had left was pretty much Venezuela, and that nation is in worse shape (that nation is one bad day away from food riots that could topple everything).
The only thing that kept Castro and his party in power was his open defiance of a United States government that could never abide his Communist ways. To a Latin American culture that never enjoyed the dominant - sometimes arrogant - behavior of the United States, Castro was a quaint middle finger aimed at Washington DC.
What happens next with Cuba, and with the United States, is anyone's guess. But the last four/eight years had seen encouraging signs that relations between the neighboring nations were finally opening.
Trapped in the reality that the global economy can no longer let nations isolate themselves, Cuba under Raul Castro began undergoing various economic reforms aimed at lifting US sanctions. Obama, sensing the opportunity of being the President who ended 50-60 years of Cold War hostilities with Cuba, did lift enough sanctions to signal approval. Both sides made outreach efforts to open up Cuba to travel, which is supposed to allow air travel with regular flights to Cuba and back (there are still some restrictions on who goes and why, but the rules have so many loopholes involved that if you can give the State Dept. a decent excuse they'll let you go). And as of last March, Obama promised that the whole embargo on Cuba will end (although arrangements haven't actually finalized yet).
This could be a huge coup for Obama if he could, within the last two months of his Presidency, work out a final deal with Cuba that would see an end to this sorry and painful split between two neighboring nations. He doesn't have much time, because with Trump entering the Oval Office in January there's no telling how this could go FUBAR. The Republicans, left to their own agenda of petty grievance and bullying habits, could easily refuse sensible compromises and push for even harsher sanctions to try and break the Communists still in control in Cuba.
If Raul cares for his brother's legacy - that some semblance of an independent Cuba still stands apart from the United States even as they reconcile into a partnership that could benefit both nations - he should deal with Obama as soon as possible. If they can get something figured out by Christmas, that would help.
Any deal with Trump would likely involve terrible Trump-owned casinos and massive corruption on a scale even Batista never signed off on. And waiting on a wingnut-led Republican Congress to do anything sane or legal is a bad idea no matter what.
It's turning out 2016 is a historic year all right. Sliding into outright horror if the right people in charge of things don't do what makes the most sense. Just saying, Raul, you'll get a better deal from Obama than anybody else. And Obama wants to get this deal made, he wants to leave office on a high note. Whatever the sticking point is, take a step back and recognize what can be done to fix it, and get the deal done.
Well, the trial came up right real quick, which itself is a bit odd because usually these things pad out for months if not a full year with court fights and delays and stuff. I figured the prosecutors must have had enough of a case with the evidence on hand - these Bundy Boys videotaped themselves doing this! The whole world saw this... - that they just wanted it done-and-done.
The verdicts finding Ammon Bundy, older brother Ryan Bundy and five others not guilty of a federal conspiracy drew elation from defense attorneys who spent five weeks arguing that the armed takeover amounted to a time-honored tradition of First Amendment protest and civil disobedience.
Despite overwhelming evidence these clowns occupied a federal building on federal land... with guns... with the intent to disrupt federal employees... essentially an open attempt at insurrection...
And this jury in Oregon looked at all that and said "Huh. Guess they were just showing off their camping skills."
The jury apparently bought the defense's argument that this was an honorable protest, a legitimate uprising against unlawful authority. The jury must have ignored the vandalism that took place at the wildlife preserve. The jury must have thought... well, crap, I can't comprehend what the hell this jury was thinking.
The jury must have figured this trial wasn't all that big of a deal.
This trial - and there's been a lot of them over the years - brings up the biggest vulnerability of any jury system: The jurors themselves.
We're talking about a group of people who may not necessarily be "peers" of those on trial. We get jurors who are, despite all the court instructions and seriousness of the matters at hand, are going to bring their own personal biases and perspectives. This Oregon jury had to be made up of people who at some level sympathize with the Bundy movement's arguments against federal land use laws.
White juries freeing violent White radicals. Gee, who'd a thunk it.
Worst of all: These juries are made up of people who are not experts on law, being asked for that trial to become experts. And many of them are just not up for it.
The outrage is going to spill over into this day and week. I'm sure the political landscape will get affected, because a lot of the "Alt-Right" crowd are going to be crowing about this victory over the hated Feds while everybody is going to go WTF.
Meanwhile, there's a protest going on in North Dakota over a pipeline going through a tribe's water source. I guarantee you a lot of those peaceful and unarmed protesters - most of them Natives - are going to see jail time, 'cause you know, Not White. Meanwhile, there's been protests in a lot of cities across America over this Black Lives Matter thing, with a lot of peaceful and unarmed residents - most of them Black - getting jailed half the time simply because that was their neighborhood they lived in. I figure most of them are going to see jail time, 'cause you know, Not White.
I'd argue for more protests in the streets about the inequalities of the jury system, but I figure only White Boys like me should show up for it. And not a lot of White Boys will, will we, since this is a system that benefits us, right?
Eight months after the nation watched an armed militia take over a wildlife refuge in Oregon to protest federal land ownership, a jury has come back and said that the militia members are “not guilty.” This includes not guilty of a charge that describes what everyone knows these militants did, considering that they live-streamed themselves doing it: conspiracy to prevent Bureau of Land Management and US Fish and Wildlife employees from doing their jobs at the wildlife refuge.
Again, this is literally what they did. They armed themselves and took over a wildlife refuge, preventing federal workers from going into the facility and doing their jobs. Ammon Bundy, the militants’ leader, even participated in interviews in which he called for more people to join him in his cause...
...The defense argued there was no intent to keep federal employees off the refuge. But come on. An armed group occupied a federal building. Your imagination doesn’t have to stretch very far to realize what was happening.
Yet a jury found them not guilty.
It is impossible to ignore race here. This was a group of armed white people, mostly men, taking over a facility. Just imagine: What would happen if a group of armed black men, protesting police brutality, tried to take over a police facility and hold it hostage for more than a month? Would they even come out alive and get to trial? Would a jury find them and their cause relatable, making it easier to send them back home with no prison time?...
At some point, the reality that juries are going to be habitually biased is going to sink in.
At some point, the Angry White Guy movement is going to cross a line nobody can excuse or defend, even the damned NRA (who sells White Fear to make profits off of guns). And of course, when that happens a whole lot of innocent people are going to pay for it.
Update: well, dammit. Because of the mass shooting in Munich - dammit NRA, stop exporting this sh-t - Hillary held off making an official announcement at the speech. She announced via email afterward... and... it's Kaine.
