A Modest Proposal

I made a big mistake last night and checked Twitter right before going to bed.  I read the Baltimore Sun’s editorial titled “Its better to have rats than be one”.

People keep wondering when we are going to get in the streets like Hong Kong, Puerto Rico and now Moscow. 

And I had this idea.

Congress is back in session Sept. 9 for four days.

What if we who can afford it go to DC for those four days. We stay in every hotel except one. Every motel, inn, B&B, campsite or RV slot. We tip. We are pleasant and kind. We visit the memorials, galleries, and each one of our elected officials.

We bring with us an index card. Each card is addressed to the elected official. It contains 3 points.

1. Fix immigration/close the concentration camps.
2. Secure our elections/handmarked paper ballots
3. Stop the division/stop the hate

The back side of the index card is our name, address, and signature.  It’s a ballot of a sort.

Now, I know these are not the only issues we care about.  But, frankly, the concentration camps and the deaths are a high priority. If we don’t secure the elections, then we know 2020 is going to be stolen. And we need to let this president* know that we stand together. I’m sick of the racism, the attacks on Americans and American states and cities. I’m sick of the division between the “left” and the “right”. 

I’ve marched, I’ve picketed, I’ve protested and I can’t honestly say that any of that made any difference.

But, occupying a city for four days, being a tourist, being a citizen, might have an impact. And those index cards cannot be ignored.

Obviously, this is limited to people with the means to do it, with the time to spend. But ANYONE can fill out three index cards and get them to a library or some central place for those of us who can deliver them. My three elected officials are all white men who don’t represent me one bit. So my visits won’t be pleasant, but they can be civil. And while I’m there, I can stop in other offices to say thanks and to show support. 

I’m not an organizational genius or a PR giant. I’m a fed up citizen who just is mad as hell and doesn’t want to take it anymore. 

Can we do this, America? Can we fill out three index cards? Can we occupy DC for four days? Can we say enough is enough? I’m fortunate enough that I can. Will you join me?

On Social Media

My troubles didn’t start until this year.  After being on Facebook for years and years with few problems, this year, suddenly, I’ve been thrown in Facebook jail three times.

The first time, I probably had it coming.  I called a guy a fuckhead.  Generally, I try not to do the whole name calling thing, but the MAGAts love to come to liberal sites like Mother Jones and do their troll act.  I got fed up with a relentless asshole.  I should have just reported him.  My bad.

The second time, I got thrown into jail for 7 days for posting an Associated Press news article about the New Zealand massacre.  I still don’t know how, exactly, that violated Facebook’s community standards.  It wasn’t as if I live streamed the horrendous act (that Facebook somehow allowed to happen) and it wasn’t that there was any video in the news story.  But I did my nine days in jail (Facebook doesn’t count weekends as days, so my 3 days was 5, my 7 days was 9 and my latest….well, we’ll see).

During the nine days in jail, I finally answered the siren call of Twitter.  And now I’m an addict.

Most of my time on social media is spent on politics, because politics is my abiding passion.  I follow all of my elected officials that have social media accounts, and comment on their posts.  I’ve “met” some of the absolutely worst people in the comments sections of politicians, the true believers who reject reality and think they “own the libs” with their misspelled and grammatically and factually incorrect comments. 

That’s how i wound up in jail again, this time for 30 days.  I violated Facebook’s community standards by replying to a MAGAt. 

“Sweetheart fool…the wall is *about* racism.  Immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than ‘Murikans do.  White men are shooting people all over the place.  You’re too stupid for me to bother with.  All you can come up with are Spanky’s talking points and all he does is lie.”

But liberals are the snowflakes. 

Facebook has banned me all three times on a Friday evening.  I guess the jailers don’t like working weekends. 

There are a couple of secret groups I’m in on Facebook and so I lurk those groups now.  Can’t post.  Can’t share.  I can and do grab articles and memes and share those on Twitter.  I haven’t totally figured Twitter out yet, but I don’t think they have secret groups.

Can’t use messenger, so even if people did notice that I’m not on Facebook, and reach out on messenger, I can’t respond, so I just deleted the app. 

So far, I like Twitter and it’s even better for political junkies like me because it’s so much faster and more up to date than Facebook.  I joined in February and am following 280 people and have 163 following me, though these numbers go up daily.    

It’s kind of like being at a really erudite cocktail party.  Everyone is saying pithy things, and I’m reading them and enjoying them, but I’m also intimidated as hell and kind of stay in my corner and hope no one expects me to be witty or pithy.

I’m following lawyers and writers.  Politicians and my three twits (Jason Smith, Roy Blunt and Josh Hawley).  I follow activists of as many stripes as I can find, and sit quietly, listening in and learning.  I follow journalists and artists.  I’m following most of the people running for President.

 Twitter has allowed me to hook up with a lot of people living in Missouri and we can mock the lying republicans and send them articles that disprove all their lies.  It’s fun.

I’ve toyed with just creating another Facebook account during this jail time.  Seems like a lot of work for not all that much pay off.  I’ve also thought about just getting off Facebook all together, but I’d miss a few people that I’ve grown to care about.

So, from my experience, it’s hilarious that conservatives whine about social media blocking them. Conservatives own Facebook.  Mark Zuckerberg is not exactly a liberal. 

Twitter can and does reflect the best and worst of human beings.  As you might expect.  So far, I’ve tried to avoid the worst and drink in the best.  

Shades of Grief

Anyone who has ever grieved knows that grieving carries with it a tremendous wear and tear to the body itself, never mind the soul.  Loss is an assault…..

Elizabeth Strout   Abide with Me

 

 

It’s been a rough year.  

I have had virtually nothing to say since March of this year.  Unprecedented for a big mouth like myself.  

The older we get, the more the losses mount.  With every new one, we re-experience the old.

My dad died in July.  Handy, who I wrote of in a 2014 post called The Monster, died this last summer, too.  

And Buddy, who I introduced in a 2015 post called Reversal of Fortune, disappeared on November 3.

Of the three losses, you would think that my father’s would have been the most difficult.  It wasn’t.  

He was 91 years old, for one thing.  He had survived 5 melanomas, colon cancer and a stroke.  But nothing lasts forever, especially humans.  He had had a good life, mostly.  By the end, he couldn’t do any of the things he had once enjoyed.  I still see his end as a good one.  He died at home, with drugs, with family nearby.  Mourning seems superfluous in his case.

My sister died of suicide in 1995 and that has taken me a long, long time to process.    

My mother’s death, in 2007, was unexpected and I still miss her and mourn her and probably always will.  

Handy’s death was a surprise.  We met him through our purchase of this property….he had built a porch and fences and finished the basement and we liked him and his work quite a bit, so he built our library and did some other building here.  Nice man.  Didn’t have health insurance, so he postponed going to the doctor when he started to feel sick.  Liver cancer.  Another death on republican hands.  I think about him often.  

It’s Buddy’s disappearance that has had me in the dumps.  A stray cat, a tabby, one of many and that’s what makes me sad.  I let him out of the barn that Saturday morning.  He went off to do his cat things and we never saw him again.  My theory is that he was shot and killed by a neighbor.  Maybe by accident, maybe not.  That Saturday had been a real noisy one, though.

When we got up Sunday morning, and there was no Buddy waiting for food, we split up and combed the property and the neighborhood, calling for him.   He was microchipped.  I’ve posted his loss on missing pet sites.  Every dead cat I see along road sides in the vicinity gets checked out.

I look for him all of the time.

 

I had to nominate a book for the book club last year and finally wound up selecting Joyce Carol Oates’ memoir, A Widow’s Story.  We discussed it yesterday, finally.  One of the metaphors she used in the book was what she called a “sinkhole”.  These are “places fraught with visceral memory, stirring terror if you approach them.”  

Our property has become a Buddy sinkhole.  The barn, the deck, everywhere where Buddy was is a sinkhole. 

One of the first things I did, after he disappeared, was to put the bird feeders back up.  I thought for sure that this would “work”, that he would reappear. 

Over the weeks since, I’ve slowly taken down his heated huts (one in the barn, one on the front porch), his dishes are all clean, his food still waiting for his return. 

I never had any doubt that he loved us.  I cannot say that about most humans.  My dad, for sure, didn’t love us equally and while he loved “his children”, I don’t know for sure that he even understood me, much less loved me.  

Buddy loved me.  Our Chippet certainly does.  Even the two girls, the indoor cats we’ve had now for eight years are finally demonstrating affection.  Animals can’t deceive, they don’t lie, they don’t try to hurt you.  

I know that when we leave this place, I will leave behind a picture of Buddy, with a note to the new owners begging them to call us if he should ever reappear.

Delete and Denigrate

A safe republican seat in PA-18 suddenly isn’t so safe anymore.  The polls closed last night and it’s still too close to call.  Republicans are blaming the candidate, of course.

Jason Smith, my congressman here in Missouri’s Eighth Congressional District also occupies a safe seat.  Judging from his Facebook posts, he is still madly in love with the idiot in the White House.

You will note that Facebook says there are 62 comments about this post.  Yet, only 14 were showing when I checked a few minutes ago.

So, my tax dollars are being used to delete over 80% of people’s comments.  Fortunately, I know that Smith censors, since he’s been blocking me for months now. Ergo, I take screen shots of comments whenever I can.  I could give you five names right now of people who made perfectly civil comments on his post that have been deleted.  They just didn’t agree with him.  Only fawning is allowed.

Jason Smith is very much in the Trumpian mold of putting people down, dividing people into camps (democrats and liberals being useless, stupid, divisive, and many other terms), using Jesus as a shield to hide his hate, and so on.

He graduated from law school in 2004 and ran for office in the Missouri State House a few years later.  He’s been employed by the taxpayers ever since, making him a career politician, which is hilarious since he doesn’t like career politicians.

As you can no doubt see from his post above, he is a white supremacist.  He also hates women.  Again, in the Trumpian mold.

This district is overwhelmingly white.  And only about 85% have graduated from high school.  So you can imagine what comments appear on each of his posts.  But the only people who get deleted are the ones who disagree, and if you post a link or two to support your comments, you are going to get deleted very quickly indeed.

Women get deleted much faster than men.

I like to look at people’s profiles.  The hardcore Smith supporters have Christ or God all over their Facebook pages.  These tend to be the ones who call people names.  I’m sure there is no connection.  I’ve seen confederate flags and white power symbols on his supporters pages.  They get quite defensive, though, if you mention race or racism.   That’s playing the race card and only they get to do that.  As you can see from the post above, the dog whistles are there.

Indeed, one deleted comment said, “So, Jason, you’re saying SeMoans’ values and things they hold dear rhyme with ‘wormy spaniels’?  I’m unclear.  And, ‘contemptuous attitude’?  Do you mean ‘uppity’?  Realize, there are folks in the Bootheel who can decipher smoke signals, sir.  And dog whistles too.”  These comments, which give me hope, I cannot support because I’m blocked.

So let me just vent about that.  Because I want to call Jason Smith a liar, a thief, and a hypocrite of the highest order.  He is exactly the guy that Jesus would have cast out of the temple.

Every time Smith deletes a comment, he is stealing at least one voice, and for sure any possibility of community with like minded people.  I hate not being able to “like” someone in this district’s comment.

I’ve never seen any politician behave like this before, and I’ve lived in conservative districts my whole life.  Justin Amash was my “representative” before we moved to Missouri and I routinely commented on his posts.  I don’t like his politics much, but the man has town halls, and uses social media to explain his votes.  I can give him props for that.

Jason, on the other hand, doesn’t have town halls, provides no specifics on his votes, lies to his constituents, and then, insults them by censoring them.  His own chief of staff, Mark Roman, argued with me about whether or not I was “conforming” to Jason’s “community standards”.

And they don’t respond to constituents emails either.

So, Kathy Ellis is running against Jason for the seat in November.  Jason has raised over a million dollars and Ms. Ellis has raised about $35,000.  I’ve sent her money and will continue to do so.

Smith has received thousands and thousands of dollars from big corporations like Anheuser-Busch, UBS, Bank of America, and big Ag.  Also from PACs and groups like the NRA, who has awarded Smith with an A+ rating.  The vast majority of his money is coming from outside the district, and a surprising amount from out of state.  All of this information can be found on OpenSecrets.org.

He has also gone from being about $500,000 in debt to having over a million dollars in assets.  Government, which he hates, has been very, very good to him.

Fewer and fewer people are voting these days.  And I get that, I really do.  There is too much money in politics, for one thing.  I stopped supporting the Democratic party years ago, when they veered too far to the right, becoming moderate republicans in all but name.  The parties have changed the rules to benefit them, not the citizens.  The system is rigged.

But.  This year it matters a whole lot, because if we don’t have some checks on the idiot in the White House, life in America is going to get much worse.

This regime has no interest in governing.  That requires compromise, give and take.  This regime wants to rule.  And if we don’t vote in November, they will.

 

 

Family Values

It’s been somewhat amusing to watch the party of family values rule.

Donald Trump is leading this party.  Which makes the people with brains laugh.

Donald Trump paid $130,000 of hush money to Stormy Daniels, a porn star he had an affair with prior to running for office. He had her spank him with a rolled up copy of Forbes magazine.  He is reputedly currently involved in an affair with Hope Hicks, a member of his staff.  He’s had five kids with three different women.  One wonders how many abortions he paid for.  I’ll bet it’s more than one.  Then there are all of the allegations of sexual harassment, sexual assault, underage sex, and rape.  You can tell what a committed family man he is.

And by now, you may have heard about Missouri Governor and former Navy SEAL Eric Greitens being in some hot water.

You must always describe him as a former Navy SEAL. It’s become part of his name here in the great state of Missouri.

He isn’t denying that he had an affair with a woman outside of his marriage.  He isn’t denying that he taped her to a Bowflex, blindfolded and gagged her.  He admits to that.  He also hasn’t denied taking pictures.  The only thing he denies is that he threatened to use the picture to blackmail his paramour if she told anyone of the affair.  That would be a crime, so of course he denies it.  We should believe a documented liar because he says so.

He ran as a conservative outsider. Formerly a democrat, which, considering his policies is kind of mind boggling, he is now a republican. Funded by outside people and dark money, he rode the Trumpian train to power.

His parents are democrats and sound pretty liberal.  I wonder how they feel.

He’s on his second marriage, to a woman who on paper, looks as wonderful as he does. Smart and educated.  Kinda like Hillary Clinton.

The story about his extra marital affair broke right around the time he was giving his State of the State address this month.

Now all of the Chrinos, Christian in name only, are absolving him by pointing to Bill Clinton. (And you know they immediately “forgave” Mr. Clinton for his infidelities.) Or by saying that what goes on inside a marriage belongs to the two people in it. Or by saying only those with no sin should cast stones.

It’s all bullshit.

I’ve been married three times. The first was me being very young and stupid and it ended quickly. Infidelity on both sides. The second time, I was older and wiser, and it still ended badly. That one is all on me. I was working with a married man and we fell in love and it resulted in a scandal. We got through it and have been married to each other for 27 years now.

So I feel qualified to talk about marriages and infidelity. Been there, done that.

This is the thing with being a sinner; I know it. So I don’t feel morally superior to people when they fuck up. We all fuck up at one time or another, in one way or another. It’s called “humility” and it shows that you understand that you are not the only person in the universe who counts; that your opinion is one of many; that public service is serving the public, not imposing your will.

Eric Greitens ran on family values. He’s pro-birth and extremely moralistic about how others should live their lives. And therein lies the difference. He introduced morality into his campaign.  He portrayed himself as a family man.  Now he wants the rules to change.

His wife, Sheena, has played a big role in his governorship and she has forgiven all and now wants everyone to leave them alone. I would like to slap her face.  She can’t possibly be that naive.

These two are well educated enough to understand that “public” is different than “private.” They ran for public office. Kinky Eric is a public figure; it even says so on his unofficial Facebook page. Now, now they want to be private? It’s too late for that and they should know it.

You run for office, you should know that your lives are no longer private. Private and public are two different words and two very different things. It seems that this distinction is being ignored willfully by the Chrinos and other apologists for some reason.

I will say that as a political science major and a political junkie my entire life, I’ve been asked why I’ve never run for office. This is the biggest reason: I grew up in the sex, drugs and rock and roll period and I experimented quite freely. Privacy is the biggest loss in a life of public service and I knew that even in my 20s. There is no excuse for Eric Greitens, who is in his 40s.

The timeline on all of this is a bit murky, but so far as I am aware, these are the salient facts:

Eric and Sheena married in 2011. The affair took place in 2015 just before Eric filed the papers for his campaign and Sheena was either pregnant or had just given birth. The affair was conducted in the family home, a detail that really turns my stomach. Was he too cheap to get a hotel room? What would motivate a “family man” to bring his paramour home? That level of betrayal goes deeper than anything I ever did. It seems to me to be either tremendous hostility or sociopathic behavior. Or both.

Maybe I’m over reacting to that little detail, but to me, it’s part of a deep violation. As a woman, I don’t feel safe anywhere but my home. To have a trusted person violate that trust AND in the only safe place really strikes me as a horrible thing to do.  His kids live in that house, too.  It’s just disgusting.

These are the people we are electing nowadays.

Eric Greitens is a slimy character. I didn’t vote for him, of course. Like many in the GOP, he doesn’t really care for the first amendment in our constitution. He has two Facebook pages. One is “unofficial”, but he is identified as a public person. He blocks people on that page. That one is the one he uses to defend himself and to lecture people and to post pictures of his kids. His official page has his title in it, and he isn’t blocking people there (yet). That one doesn’t get updated too often and he didn’t bother to wish his unblocked constituents any holiday greetings, which I thought was pretty shitty. He will eventually, I hope, be sued by the ACLU for his censorship and I don’t know how the hell he will argue that the unofficial page shouldn’t be considered since he posts way more often on that page than his official but uncensored page.

He is also under investigation for using the app Confide that deletes text messages. Which, you know, could kind of interfere with transparency.

These people think we are stupid. I find that offensive.

I also find it offensive when Sheena tell us to leave her kids alone. Who brings the kids in? They do. Both of them pimp the kids like nobodies business when it benefits them, when it makes them seem human and cuddly and warm. Kids that young should be shielded from public, in my humble opinion. Leave them at home when you’re conducting business. You make them pawns when you drag them around with you on photo opportunities.  Sheena has reportedly taken the kids out of state.  Good for her.

And does anybody believe that this is the first time Eric has strayed? When you bring another person into the family home, blindfold and tape them up, right before you run for public office and you know you are about to run for public office,  you are demonstrating an arrogance beyond what most of us could even imagine.

The woman at the center of all of this has not commented. It’s been her ex-husband who brought this out. He also recorded a telephone conversation between them without her knowledge or consent. This woman has been used and abused and my sympathies go out to her. She is a private citizen, who obviously used some very poor judgment and is probably kicking herself silly. I hope she is able to move on with her life.

Since the story broke, the Greitens issued a statement that said all is forgiven in the marriage and that we should all just move on.  The party of family values and it’s Chrino membership may or may not obey.  Judging from the comments on social media, the more “Christian” you think you are, the more likely you are to ignore the hypocrisy.

Then we have Jason Smith, the US Congressman from Missouri’s Eighth District.  Jason is another big Chrino family values guy.  He’s also unmarried at the age of 38.  Jason is a closeted gay guy and all of the family values people have apparently agreed to never bring up his sexuality or lack of a spouse.

Given what has been on display with Republicans, I’ve got to wonder about Jason’s rhapsodies about farm life.  Maybe he’s more into animals than we think.  His mom runs a puppy mill, so maybe Jason is a Poodle pumper.*  Or could be cows or pigs or who knows?  Jason is such a piece of shit, nothing would surprise me.

These are the people who tell us how to live our lives.  They are defining morality. Their Chrino followers are excusing them and enabling them because that’s what family does, right?

 

*Stolen from the movie Grosse Pointe Blank

 

D.I.V.O.R.C.E.

My last post ended with the sentence, “stick a fork in us, we are done.” My husband of 27 years commented that it’s painful to walk around with an embedded fork. That is true.

I can’t fix our fate, much as I’d like to. But I do think, a lot, about how we could make life better here in America, while it all falls apart.

One of the best loved doomer novels is Nevil Shute’s On the Beach. The action takes place in Australia after a catastrophic nuclear event. Because of the hemispheric differences, Australia is the last area to get the extinction level fallout. And because radiation sickness is painful and drawn out, the merciful government hands out suicide pills.

I think that is a lovely gesture. We’re doomed, but we could go quietly, painlessly, and with dignity.

To that end, I propose some actions for your consideration.

I’ve said before that I think Abraham Lincoln was wrong to spill 600,000 lives to keep the confederacy in the union. We should have freed the slaves and let those states go. Our divisions cannot be healed.

I’d like a divorce. I don’t want to be married to the idiots anymore. I know it’s going to be wrenching and painful and costly, but the relief we will feel (and they will too) when it’s over will be lovely.

Let’s break up. The GOP…all of them, from Trump to everyone else….out. You go live in the former slave states.

Florida, Alabama, Texas, both Carolinas, Virginia, Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, West Virginia would all go. And I’d throw Missouri and Arizona into that group. The idiots in Idaho, Wyoming, Montana would have to make a choice, assuming they are not registered as Republicans. But all registered Republicans go.

Think of it.

All of the people who believe the earth is 6,000 to 8,000 years old (and flat) and that evolution is not real, who want a theocracy, who deny climate change….all of them….gone. Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, the Koch Brothers, the Mercer’s, the KKK, the Nazi’s, they can continue on in another country, not ours. Their guns can go with them, of course.

Oh. Just thinking about what a relief that would be is so so lovely!

Trump can rule from Mar-A-Lago and everybody can be happy.

We can have a free and open election and elect someone competent. The US territories of Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands and Guam can vote on whether or not they want to become states in our United States with full representation and voting rights, or go the independent country route.

Of course, we would have to build a wall and have security to keep the cult members where they belong and our country safe.

There would be hardship and turmoil, of course. This happens in any break up of this magnitude. But it would force a rethinking on both sides of how to proceed. One side could have sensible regulations, universal health care, a secular government, good public education, and qualified public officials to make policy and laws that benefit and protect the citizens.

The other side can implement whatever the fuck they want, as long as they don’t bother us.

At the very least, this would keep us occupied. We would need to concentrate on our own problems for a period of time, so we would stop bombing, intervening, interfering, and otherwise screwing up other countries for awhile. Considering we have done all of that for about 93% of our entire existence as a country, I’m sure the world would appreciate the break.

It’s a great mulligan in the sense that we could use this opportunity to fix some problems. Like, overturning Citizen’s United and repealing the laws that say that corporations are people. Having independent commissions do the redistricting. Public financing of elections. Sane gun laws.

People who don’t identify with the groups named above, who are not registered as republicans, can choose which country they want to live in. But they will swear an oath to the abide by the constitution of the United States of America.

I see this as essentially bloodless because both sides win. The people who want white male supremacy and a theocracy can go ahead and have what they want. They just won’t be able to impose their unconstitutional ideas on us.

I think it’s time to quit pretending we can compromise and fix all of this together. Yes, that’s a wonderful ideal, but not practical. Our differences are deeply entrenched and I doubt any amount of counseling can or will work. We’ve been fighting the same fights over and over again with no one really happy with the outcomes. The idiots hate us and we hate them and these are irreconcilable differences.

Clean break, with maybe a 24 month period for people to move to their assigned or preferred countries, and then we start with the wall, which I’m sure people on both side of will pay for, and then we can all get on with our lives until the big collapse.

It could be done.

 

 

2018 Predictions

Yes, it’s time for predictions for the coming year, and frankly, it’s going to be a supremely bad year for everyone but the healthy and the rich.

I think most of what Americans will face in 2018 is what I call Death Panel Bingo. Remember when the republicans were crying about death panels in the Affordable Health Care Act? They’ve actually implemented them, only without fanfare.

Every safety net that Franklin Roosevelt put into place after the Great Depression will be mostly gone by the elections of 2018. Food stamps, medicare and medicaid, social security……all of it will be gone or weakened.

Because our idiot President and his supporters haven’t funded any help for Puerto Rico, they are without power. IV bags and many medications are made there, so of course there is a shortage here. If you have cancer, or any illness, or you live in Puerto Rico, you are on the Death Panel Bingo card. Ain’t the GOP great?

Then, the Americans with Disabilities Act will be gone or diluted.

Programs for children aren’t being funded.

The old, the young, and the sick are pretty much being targeted by the Greed Over People Party.

They will repeal every environmental protection they possibly can. OSHA will be weakened so that business can do whatever they want. Get hurt on the job, tough luck. But this will keep big Pharma in the bucks, to profit from man made illnesses.

The Nazi’s just rounded up people with illnesses and gassed them. Here, it’s more “civilized” but the sentence is still death. And that these assholes call themselves “pro-life” is enough to induce vomiting.

We didn’t have a financial crash this last year, so I’m guessing (based upon history) that by fall of 2018, Wall Street will require yet another bailout. That should wipe out what is left of the middle class and have the extra benefit of completely fucking over retirees.

So, there will probably be another war. Your guess is as good as mine on whom we shall drop the bombs upon. Syria, Iran, North Korea are the current frontrunners, but you never know.

Disasters in 2017 alone cost over $300 billion in damages. This is not an anomaly. Whether it’s wildfires, storms, flooding or drought, climate change is costing huge amounts of money and it’s only going to get worse. The idiots in charge deny that climate change is happening, because they want to rape and pillage everything that is left.

The only really good thing about being a doomer is that I know we are already past the point of no return. The deniers have “won”. Even if we stopped burning all fossil fuels today, the climate would continue heating for another 20 years or so, and we know we aren’t going to stop burning fossil fuels today or tomorrow. That ship has sailed. If I weren’t a doomer, I would be even more pissed than I already am, because they are putting the nails in the coffin. And if I were young, I would be rioting, because the GOP is ensuring that the future is going to be absolutely horrific. I would be absolutely out of my mind if I were young or had children.

In a way, what we are seeing are the mirror images of collapse. The earth is collapsing under the weight of 7.5 billion people and growing, and pollution, and climate change. As people starve, and move, and make war, the social systems collapse under the weight of the physical collapse.

And these can be manipulated further with net neutrality being repealed, which will result in increased censorship and repression of dissent, and for profit prisons to take all those dissenters. Because, unlike the Nazi’s, we want to profit until we can’t profit no more. There is a reason why the GOP is content to let us play Death Panel Bingo. They are culling the herd.

When culling the herd, it’s important to take out the weakest, the ones that slow down the group. Sick people, old people, and regrettably, children, tend to be a drag. These will go first. Workers are what is wanted, and preferably slaves.

Poor people have always been on the death panel bingo card, and they will suffer terribly.

There are a couple of wildcards. The Mueller investigation is one. The November elections are another. Some are predicting a “Blue Wave”, but I’m not putting too much stock in that. For one thing, you have 65 so-called Democrats voting for the privacy invading survellience bill.  With friends like that, who needs enemies?

Stick a fork in us, we are done.

 

Cultists

You really are never too old to learn.

I’m 60 and experiencing something new.  For the first time in my life, I’ve started to hate a whole class of people.

I’ve hated individuals before.  Institutions as well.

But a class of people..well, that is new.  I go to bed at night hating them, and I wake up in the morning despising them.

They are the Trump voters.  I don’t care about their religion or race or politics, even. I hate them because they revel in being wrong, in lies, in hatred for “the Other”, because they reject even the tiniest bit of basic human decency.

The Trump lovers looked past the sexual harassment, the disparagement of people with disabilities, the lie after lie after lie.  They look past the fact that this individual inherited millions of dollars, lives in a gilt-lined world, and thinks there are very fine people who happen to be Nazis.

The Trump lovers like the lies.  They believe he is an outsider who is non politically correct.  They think that diplomacy and tact are signs of weakness.

They reject any objective reality outside of their understanding.

In other words, they are stupid.  And proud of it.  They hate education because it makes them feel inadequate.  It apparently does not motivate them to educate themselves.  Ignorance can be fixed, but they are not interested in that.  They want to be respected because they are stupid.  They want the rest of us to be as stupid as they are.  In my district, only 85% of people have graduated from high school, and way fewer than that, from college.

Watching the Senate confirmation hearings of Trump nominees is painful.  Men have been nominated to life time appointments to the bench that have never tried a case and have no understanding of the law.  The very, very few females that have been nominated are just as bad.  Betsy DeVos would be hilarious if she wasn’t so freaking dangerous.

The Republican party is all in.  Just witness the Roy Moore debacle in Alabama.  A man who was kicked off of the bench twice for violating the law was supported by the Republican National Committee.  The child molestation claims were icing on the cake.  Some Republicans found the claims credible and still supported the guy.

There is no line they will not cross.  There is no standard of quality.  The only thing Trump lovers want or need is loyalty to Trump.  They are prepared and willing to trash the constitution (especially the Bill of Rights), the separation between church and state, the rule of law…everything that this country was ostensibly founded upon to prop up their awful selection.

The Trump lovers in Congress are willing and maybe even eager for another Civil War.  They are constantly demonizing anyone who questions President Bone Spur.*

They live in a world without nuance.  Without logic.  They live in a faith-based world that demonizes any non-believer.  There is no room for compassion or love or empathy or learning.  They attack everyone and everything that is different.  They believe everything they see and hear from Trump and nothing that anyone else has to offer.  And they don’t see that as dangerous or ill advised in the least.

Which makes them a cult.  Look up that word and it describes, perfectly, the phenomena existing today in the US.

So, I hate them.  I hate them with abiding rage.  And I hate them because I hate them.  Hate feels energizing for a little while, but eventually, it just eats the person up from the inside.  I know this.  I can feel it.  I don’t enjoy hatred, actually.  I would much prefer a world and a country based upon fairness, empathy, justice.

If we survive this administration (and I put the odds at 50/50), we are going to have to deal with the surviving cult members.  When the first Civil War ended, the losing side didn’t go to jail for treason.  They weren’t even tried for treason.

Let’s not make that mistake again.  If we survive this administration, there should be consequences in store for the cultists.

 

*Not my invention.  H/T to Jim Wright.

 

 

Aarrgghhh

I usually do a year end review, just to check and see how I did on my predictions this year.

But I don’t need to do that, because I know I was pretty right on the money, and that just depresses the hell out of me.

Lately, I’ve been wondering how on earth I’m going to survive another year.  Clearly, something needs to change and it’s going to have to be me.

I want to show you.

 

What I want for Christmas is a bunch of indictments.  Failing that, tons of heroin.  I can’t stay informed, stay sober and stay sane for much longer.  The cognitive dissonance is too great.  And the idea that this could go on for years makes me so heartsick I can hardly stand it.

Being right makes me sick.  Where this country is headed will make us all suffer.  Well, except for the one percent.

While the memes have been funny and insightful, the pain of watching this country descend into fascism with the help of people who have sworn to defend and protect the constitution is high.

I guess that makes me a snowflake and a libtard, according to my duly elected “representative.”  According to my moral guidelines, that makes me a patriot.

American Mourning

Another day, another mass shooting. This time in Las Vegas, with 59 dead at this writing.

I wrote about two other mass shootings, in 2012 and then I stopped.  What is the point, after all?  Money is all that matters.

It’s heartbreaking.

Thoughts and prayers are offered. Because they don’t cost anything.

All of the treasure in lives and money that has been spent on this “war on terror” and I feel more terrified today than ever before. Like the “war on drugs”, this endless war is more about profits than safety. The military/industrial complex has a healthy bottom line and that is all that matters.

At this same time, Congress has gun laws before it. The SHARE act, and two others. Since the US Congress is pretty much a wholly owned subsidiary of the NRA, I expect all of the bills to pass, none of which will make anyone any safer, but will add profits to the gun manufacturers.

The NRA, with a membership of somewhere in the neighborhood of 4.5 million has the clout to buy legislation.  It’s not the membership that our congress fears, it’s the financiers, aka, gun manufacturers.

Regular citizens have no clout.

The bullshit about calling and writing your “representative” only applies to people living in an area that still has a relatively independent thinker, someone who puts country before party. Those are rare and they are leaving because the money backs ideology. Whether it’s Soros or the Koch Brothers, money is all that matters. The amount of money it takes to run for office these days is just obscene.

We’re expendable.

Meanwhile, American citizens are still suffering in Houston, Florida and it really sucks to be in Puerto Rico, or the Virgin Islands, what with being surrounded by an ocean and all.

The denial of climate change and the denial that guns kill people are coming from pretty much the same people. You know, the people in charge. The people that don’t want us to have an efficient health care system that covers everybody. Those people, who are 100% “pro-life”.  Liars, all.

Every time I hear about rebuilding, I want to vomit. Yeah, rebuild all the same crap and watch the same thing happen all over again. Einstein was right.

And people eat it up! The flag is at half-mast over the Capitol building, so it shows that they care! Because it doesn’t cost anything.

This is what collapse looks like. This isn’t accidental, or even coincidental. All of the damage being done by hurricanes, wildfires, floods and humans cannot be fixed. There isn’t enough money in the world to cover everything that is happening all over the world right now. It’s ludicrous.

We elect people who will not change a thing, because it feels better than having to make hard choices.  We are selfish, destructive morons.  I don’t want to live here anymore.