recovery

Yes, it will take some time to recover from the parasitic infection aka Donald J Trump. Nothing lasts forever, not even this current blight on America and the world. If America ever needed to clean house, it is now. Democrats must not waver in the pursuit of justice and jail time where needed. No more center of the road Democrats. No more placid Democrats. Justice delayed is justice denied? Maybe, but maybe not. There is much work ahead, and we must not shy away from it.

So as Trump once again tries to hand Putin his victory in Ukraine and will now by putting American money into the Russian war machine while also this morning announcing the suspension of sanctions that will by stealth help Putin kill thousands more in Ukraine. Mostly innocent civilians including mothers and their children as they hide and shelter in their own homes, in their own towns, in their own streets, in their own country.

So let's have a quick observation of what America is at this point in time and history.

America voted in Trump for a second term under his banner that MAGA Would "make them great again." The majority of Americans were scared of the highly educated and qualified black lady that ran against him, so they decided to go with the dumb fuck with absolutely no education of merit, who has bankrupted every business he has owned and was the self proclaimed "King of Debt."

They decided to go with the guy who was a convicted fraudster who even stole from his own kiddy cancer charity and bragged about just grabbing female pussy when and where he saw it. They decided to go with a man who for decades BEFORE he had run for office had been accused of child rape and pedophilia. They decided to go with the then-instigator of a violent insurrection and an already convicted sex predator and multi-convicted felon. They decided to go again with the guy who paid a porn star with party donations for her silence. They chose the guy who previously told them to drink bleach and shove a UV light up their arse to combat COVID. They decided to go with the guy who said no more wars and then bombed more sovereign countries than any other world leader in modern history. They decided to go with the guy who, according to an independent auditor, lies on average 41 times every 16 hours through speech or written text and social media posts.

They decided to go with a guy who has simply thrown away the bond and sacrifice of every historical American ally and discarded the hundreds of years of friendship/love and her faithful brothers in arms, to side with a murderous pasty-faced, little, ratty-eyed man in the Kremlin who, if he could, would wish every single American dead and the entire United States to be a barren dust bowl of nothingness. They decided to go with the man who dodged serving his country during a war and also dodged paying his due taxes to contribute to his country. They decided to go with the man that, as president, made every working American family poorer while helping himself to over 2 billion dollars and also further enriching his own family through the corruption of office that Americans had entrusted him with to improve the lives of them and their families.

They decided to go with the guy that is so mentally unbalanced and so mentally immature that it's now no longer funny but quite frightening. They chose a man who has not once spoken of love and unity and defending freedoms, but whose every speech is laced with hate and accusations and the asking of Americans to share in that hate and harassment, and persecution of anyone who dares speak out against his never ending hateful bigotry, racism, sexism and sheer lunacy and madness.

Is America great again?

America is now lower than a blue whale turd!

No other democratic country trusts America or respects America! MAGA - Americans are detested and despised in equal measure. There is no friendship or love or any remote desire to ever protect American security or her interests ever again, from any of her former allies. America is now the Judas Iscariot of the free world. Americans all now sadly share the long yellow streak of shame and cowardice that runs through Trump.

Ordinary Americans are poorer and in more danger than they have ever been since the country's creation. They are stuck in a pointless, unwinnable war started on yet another lie and another whim of Trump. Millions are struggling to feed themselves or haven't the affordability to keep warm this winter as their Commander in Chief builds golden ballrooms and makes the people's White House into the Trump house of gilted gold, as he renames historical sites and oceans after himself. There are now death squads on American streets killing and terrorizing American citizens under the guise of ICE.

Trump is a walking cancer. He kills, destroys or warps and poisons everything he touches or that comes into contact with him. Hate and bitterness flow throughout him like a normal person's life-blood and the cancer that is Trump is sadly now America. America is now a cancer that is attempting to suck the life and the happiness and safety out of any other country it comes into contact with.

America is not great! America is over spilling with toxic hate, and countries need to make sure that for at least the next two years they can limit the harm that Trump and America can do to them and will most certainly attempt to do to them.

Trump is now the historical stain on America that can no longer be simply washed away or scrubbed clean. That stain runs too deep and is too ingrained now. Americans will have to live with all that shame and treachery and know they brought all this madness upon themselves and then inflicted it upon others who had no part in it. Trump didn't make America great again! Trump damaged America again and made America the most pathetic it has or ever will be. Trump destroyed a country and its dreams, morals, values and the unity that were 250 years in the making.

After all of this is over, the rest of the world will carry on and heal and repair the damage and they will build new friendships and new securities that will once again be built on trust and mutual respect.

As for America and Americans? They will have to live and rot in their own MAGA filth and wallow in all their grubby betrayals and pathetic lies, all on their own. Nobody is coming to help this time. Nobody cares and there will be no friendship or offers of support.

Europe will remember what Trump and MAGA did and what MAGA said about them and how MAGA rubbished the sacrifices they made on behalf of America and Americans who called for the help of Europe in THEIR time of terror and tragedy.

Only now to be told we were never needed, we were not wanted, we were inferior and cowards and that we were nothing without America. Told to us by a serial draft dodger who has never made a personal sacrifice his whole worthless life.

To think that America once had all that friendship, love and unwavering support it could want or ever need and it was all unconditionally given because they were seen as family, our family.

Those days are gone ! America is now dead to us....

The Bare Naked Ugly Truth

The IoT

Do we really need to have everything on the internet? I can really relate to this one by Oliver Kornetzke.

I am entirely in favor of returning to older ways of living, working, and generally going about the business of being human. And before somebody gets the wrong fucking idea, I’m not talking about resurrecting some bygone social order in which women, minorities, or anybody else were denied the rights and dignity they’ve spent generations fighting for. Social progress and technological progress are two entirely different things, and I see no reason we cannot preserve the former while being considerably more skeptical of the latter.

What I would dearly love to see is a retreat from this perverse fucking infestation of technology into every conceivable corner of human existence. Somewhere along the way, we apparently decided that everything in the goddamn world needed a computer inside it, an internet connection, a subscription, and a corresponding application on your phone. Your refrigerator needs Wi-Fi. Your thermostat needs an account. Your automobile needs software updates. Your television needs to collect information about you. Even the humble fucking light bulb has somehow become an instrument of the digital economy.

For fucking Christ’s sake, why?

We don’t need more Internet of Things. We don’t need more Software as a Service, more subscription-based entertainment, more proprietary software, more smart appliances, or another fucking application to perform some ordinary household function that humanity managed perfectly well for the preceding several thousand years.

Give me mechanical switches, physical buttons, analog instruments, paper maps, printed books, ordinary clocks, appliances that can be repaired with common tools, automobiles that don’t require a computer science degree to diagnose, and machines that continue functioning long after their manufacturers have gone bankrupt. Give me physical media I actually own, software that can be purchased outright, and equipment that does precisely what it was built to do without phoning home to some corporate server in California. There is something profoundly appealing about a machine that belongs to its owner rather than a company that reserves the right to disable it remotely.

I say all this as somebody who has spent his professional life working in technology.

I genuinely question whether this enormous proliferation of digital convenience has made us any happier. Certainly, it has made certain things easier, but what exactly have we done with all the time supposedly saved? We’ve filled it with more work, more consumption, more obligations, more distractions, and an endless procession of new conveniences designed to accommodate the increasingly frantic lives our previous conveniences were supposed to improve. It’s a marvelous fucking arrangement. We invent machines to liberate ourselves from drudgery and somehow wind up busier, more distracted, and more dependent upon the machines.

Meanwhile, we are constructing an increasingly fragile civilization whose most elementary functions depend upon enormously complicated networks of interconnected systems. A perfectly serviceable piece of equipment can become useless because a server goes down, a company discontinues support, somebody forgets to renew a certificate, or some miserable bastard halfway around the world discovers a vulnerability.

Consider the recent reported incidents in France of networked refrigeration systems being compromised and their temperatures manipulated to spoil food. Why in the absolute fuck does a grocery store refrigerator need to be accessible over the internet in the first place? Have we really reached the point where saving a corporation a few dollars in operating expenses justifies introducing another avenue through which somebody can potentially spoil thousands of dollars of food? I understand the legitimate benefits of remote monitoring and centralized control, but there ought to be some consideration of whether the additional complexity and vulnerability are worth the fucking trouble.

Beyond all this technical absurdity, I think something considerably more important is being lost. The physical world itself.

I’ve just returned from two weeks in Paris and London, during which I spent remarkably little time online. Instead, I wandered around cities, visited museums and bookshops, sat in parks, drank coffee in cafés, watched people going about their lives, and averaged something like 27,500 steps a day. A figure which, rather ironically, I learned from my fucking phone.

I was happy. Really fucking happy.

There was something wonderful about spending my days simply existing in the world rather than staring into a glowing rectangle and participating in the endless digital circus. I was surrounded by people, architecture, history, books, trees, animals, conversations, and all the peculiar little experiences that make being alive such an extraordinary business. I had no particular desire to know what some idiot was arguing about on the internet or what fresh catastrophe the news had manufactured for my immediate emotional consumption.

I work entirely online, and after just two weeks away from my computer, I feel like an entirely different person. Happier, calmer, considerably less stressed, and more interested in the ordinary pleasures of being alive.

I’m certainly not advocating abandoning science, medicine, computing, or the genuinely extraordinary things modern technology has made possible. I’m advocating a little fucking discrimination in how we employ it. A civilization ought to be capable of distinguishing between an invention that meaningfully improves human life and one that merely creates another opportunity to sell us something, monitor our behavior, or extract a monthly payment.

Progress ought to be measured by the quality of human existence, not by the number of things we can connect to the internet.

I suspect a great many of us would be happier with fewer screens, fewer subscriptions, fewer digital obligations, and a little more time spent outdoors, reading books, working with our hands, talking to our neighbors, and enjoying the physical world we actually inhabit.

Perhaps we ought to stop asking how much more of our lives we can digitize and start asking how much of our lives we can reclaim.

I’d rather live in a technologically sophisticated civilization that knows when to leave well enough alone than one that insists upon putting a fucking microchip in everything that isn’t nailed down.

Oliver Kornetzke

Jesse Dayton

Jesse Dayton, another musician from Texas, has opinions he doesn't mind sharing. A lot of good musicians from Texas shy away from politics. And that can be a good thing, especially when you learn some of your faves are fucking right-wingers. Jesse Dayton isn't one of those. If you see him coming through your town, check him out. His mix of Texas blues, outlaw country and punkabilly is quite entertaining. (I would post a video here for you to listen to, but Blogger seems to have removed that functionality. Drip drip drip. See the link below)

TALAFREAKO AIN'T THE PROBLEM, WILLFUL IGNORANCE IS:

Do you know how stupid Ken Paxton and his overlords in Washington DC think you are? They think my Labrador has a higher emotional intelligence than you do. Resorting to name calling like this is some Junior High football game? Pffft. 30 years of corruption in Texas that only takes 3 seconds to Google "is there systemic corruption in Texas politics?" Please know they're selling the entire state of Texas off to fake conservative billionaire yankees who went to Harvard and Yale and privately laugh at how dumb they think you are. They're pretending that trans bathrooms are more important than Data Centers destroying all of your drinking water, because you're letting them do it. 2 years in and they're still blaming sky high gas prices on Biden, who is oblivious and struggling with dementia. Coercing you with fear slogans from the 1980s about "communism" while these health insurance companies rape your savings over a hip replacement. Ordinary hardworking Americans getting gunned down every single day, while they distract you by flooding your algorithm zone and blaming it all on the oldest and easiest targets "illegal immigrants". Not sure if I'm more shocked that they still get away with using this tired ass fear-based playbook, or that in 2026 with literally a f-n computer in your pocket you can Google anything with, that you're still taking the bait?

What's it going to take for you to figure out you're the mark at their poker table? What's it going to take for you to regain a healthy suspicion of ALL politicians, and not be the schmuck at the strip club who thinks the dancer has fallen in love with you? Greg Abbott and Trump are trying to get precious mineral/oil rights to Big Bend National Park w/ a "wall" and Abbott just sold a massive plot of Texas land half the size of Manhattan to Elon Musk to build a chip manufacturing facility and you guessed it, ding-ding-ding, a Data Center. 

I don't care if you're conservative, liberal, white, black, brown, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, atheist, gay, straight, city slicker, country good ol boy, whatever...if you make less than $220,000 a year in Texas you're getting raw dogged in your poop chute by these criminals in Texas politics. And you're letting them change the narrative from affordable healthcare plan, a solid living wage w/ benefits and safe schools that kids won't get shot down like dogs in, so you can spend all your time getting "revenge" on f-n 000.02 percent of trans people. By the way, what's with the 24/7 fascination with other peoples sex lives? What's with letting Abbott criminalize marijuana? What's with legislating women's bodies? You're supposed to be AGAINST Big Government but you couldn't be any less libertarian while continually blurring the lines between Church and State. Christ, if you're gonna be a real conservative, go back and read Barry Goldwater's book on conservatism, cuz right now it sounds like you hate freedom and wanna throw out the Constitution so these wack job Christian Nationalist can take over your government.

If you wanna do something truly conspiratorial, one thing outside the box before you die in 10, 20, 30 years...vote for James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa and watch things change for the better after 30 years of the exact same corrupt BS. Imagine a politician that's so crooked that the only platform he's running his campaign on is your willful ignorance. The polls are open...go vote. Good luck Texas, you'll need it. onward, JD

Jesse Dayton

I Hate Guns

The title of this piece below from 2015 is "I Hate Guns." Guns are far too prevalent and easy to get in this country. But why does the U.S. have far higher numbers of mass shootings than any other country?  

Data from the Rockefeller Institute of Government Global Mass Shooting Factsheet. 

# of mass shooting incidents from 2000-2020. (frankly these numbers look too low, especially for the US)

• United States: 121 incidents
• Russia: 24 incidents
• France: 8 incidents
• Germany: 6 incidents
• Serbia: 6 incidents
• Israel: 5 incidents
• Canada: 4 incidents
• Turkey: 4 incidents
• Austria: 3 incidents
• Czech Republic: 3 incidents

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Time to trot this out again. First published in 2015, eleven years ago. Was among the most read commentaries in the Minneapolis Star Tribune that year and reprinted and reread in media across the country. I have reprinted it many times since as the situation that prompted it repeated itself with mind numbing regularity and inevitability.

Pardon my French, but what the fuck is wrong with this country?

Here's the post. You'll be seeing it again.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I HATE GUNS

Okay. I have nothing to lose, so I'm going to go all the way out to the edge on this gun issue.

In 2005 I watched as my friends at Red Lake were traumatized, killed, and besieged by reporters, then forgotten after a confused and alienated kid drove a car into the front of the school where I had worked, before pulling out an arsenal of guns and killing 7 people.

I am, as I write this, on a plane back to my home in Portland, 180 miles north of the mass murder site in the town of Roseburg, where I used to buy car parts when I lived in the Oregon woods many years ago, and where I have stopped and let my dog play in the dog park as we drove south through the magical Oregon country side.

I shop at the Clackamas mall where one more confused white kid brought out a gun and killed three people for no reason that any of us can fathom, or should have to fathom.

And all the politicians, no matter how pained and grieved, are dancing around the issue of guns with vague platitudes about the need for mental health services, background checks, the necessity of enlisting the support of responsible gun owners, and on and on.

But, let's cut to the chase: it's guns, pure and simple. Guns.

So, let's go to it.

What is it about guns that so obsesses Americans? Yes, I know all about the second amendment and how it supposedly protects our rights. I know all about the perceived slippery slope into governmental control of our lives. I know about beard boys in Idaho wearing camouflage and facepaint and crawling through the woods to hold out against an upcoming takeover by a fascist and totalitarian government, and about frightened fathers and mothers keeping guns in their houses in cities and suburbs to protect against intruders. I know about all of this.

But forget all of that. Tell me about guns.

There are otherwise perfectly normal human beings in northern Minnesota where I lived who can barely feed their families but have 25 rifles, pistols, and semi-automatic weapons in their closets.

Why? You don't have 25 refrigerators, or 25 pipe wrenches, or 25 anything other than perhaps baseball caps and pairs of shoes, and those things are questionable enough in themselves. So, what is it about a gun? Is it some feeling of power? Is there some crypto-sexual thrill in holding it? Shooting it? Stroking it?

I know I'm being a bit demeaning, but, damn it, I simply can't understand. And, frankly, I don't want to. I am sick of hearing arguments for these cruel and lethal objects. They scare me, they disgust me, and it makes me ashamed that such an adolescent and selfish obsession can be one of the few sacrosanct things in our country.

What drives it? Why are we like this?

Sometimes I think it is part of this culture of fear that comes with our out-of-control capitalist society where every advertisement is based on fear and perceived deficiency, and a gun is just the physical embodiment of a sense of control.

Sometimes I think it has a subterranean racism at its heart, where fear of the terrifying black man at your door drives white people to want to have the fantasy of a protective weapon at hand.

Sometimes I think it is the residual frontier ethic. But the Canadians have every bit as strong a frontier ethic, and they don't share this cultural mental illness.

And, yes, that's what it is — a cultural mental illness, fomented and fanned by an armament industry that needs, or, at least, wants, every man, woman, and child to be packing a weapon in the name of freedom or security or whatever abstraction they can sell us.

But, my God, children are dying, and they are dying from guns. No amount of counseling or monitoring or background checks is going to stop this. People will get guns like teenagers get beer, and no amount of laws will stop it.

Consider the sheriff in Roseburg. He stated quite forthrightly that he would not enforce any federal gun laws, nor would he allow his deputies to do so. And now he is looking in the faces of the mothers and fathers and husbands and wives of the dead. How can he sleep at night? Is he at least a little conflicted?

Sadly, probably not. To him, it wasn't a gun that killed all those people. It was a person. And the fact that it was a gun in the hand of that person, just as it was a gun in the hand of the killer at Red Lake and the killers at Columbine and the killer at the Aurora movie theater and the killer in every other mass murder in America doesn't register with him or people like him. It is a mind-boggling disconnect that simply beggars the imagination.

So, what will stop it? One and only one thing: getting rid of guns on our streets. And this is no easy task. It cannot be done by fiat, it cannot be done in one legislative swoop. It can only be done by changing hearts and minds, and that takes time.

There needs to be incremental change – make it illegal to own handguns and semi-automatics for starters, then begin confiscating them as they come in contact with the legal system. Stop the manufacture, or, at least, the sale of them. Then get beneath this and start to educate our children to the reality that compassion will eventually trump fear, and there is nothing magical or mystical about a piece of metal (or, sadly, plastic) that can kill at a distance. In fact, it is simply sick to look at them as problem solvers.

So, go ahead, unfriend me, refuse to buy my books, write me enraged emails filled with the tired old tropes.

But, for the love of Jesus and Mary and Buddha and things that go bump in the night, take a look in the mirror and ask why this piece of metal that is essentially a killing machine is so damn important to you.

Red Lake. Clackamas Mall. Columbine. Sandy Hook. Roseburg. Coming soon to a neighborhood near you.

And you will be shocked and you will be surprised and you will say, "This was such a nice quiet community. Things like this aren't supposed to happen here."

Well, sorry. They aren't supposed to happen in your particular "here," but they will. And if you prevaricate and trot out tired old bromides and talk about abstractions while another child gets its face blown off by a gun, the blood is on your hands.

Guns are an American sickness, and it is a sickness that must be cured.

Kent Nerburn (author of this piece)

Melinda Fulton

Yet another column from a regular, everyday American. This one is from Melinda Fulton concerning the term "patriot."

I don’t care how many flags you fly off your truck. I don’t care how many hats you own, how many bumper stickers you’ve slapped on your tailgate, or how loud you sing the anthem at the ballgame.

Your “patriotism” means nothing when you cheer for a dictator.

Patriotism isn’t a costume. It isn’t merch. You can’t buy it at a rally booth for $45 and wear it like armor against every hard question. Real love of country is loyalty to an idea that’s bigger than any one man: no one is above the law, power answers to the people, and nobody gets a crown in America. Not ever.

You want to talk about the founders? They fought a war so this country would never have to bow to a king again. They wrote a Constitution full of checks and balances because they understood something you seem to have forgotten. Power corrupts, and anyone who demands total loyalty doesn’t deserve any.

So when you defend a leader who mocks the courts, attacks the free press, treats elections as legitimate only when he wins, and wants punishment for anyone who disagrees with him, don’t call it patriotism. 

That’s surrender. You’ve traded the republic for a personality cult and wrapped it in red, white, and blue so you don’t have to look at what you’ve done.

Plenty of people in this country’s history paid for freedom with everything they had. Soldiers who never came home. Organizers who were beaten on bridges. Voters who stood in line for hours so their voices would count. Journalists who told the truth when it was dangerous. They didn’t sacrifice so you could hand it all to one man because he says what you want to hear.

The flag doesn’t belong to you because you wave it the hardest. It belongs to everyone who believes in what it’s supposed to stand for. And it was never supposed to stand for obedience.

A patriot asks questions. A patriot holds leaders accountable, especially the ones they voted for. A patriot knows that loving your country sometimes means telling it the truth, even when that’s uncomfortable.

A patriot would never cheer as the guardrails come down one by one.

What you’re doing is worship, and America was never meant to have an idol.

So keep the hats. Keep the flags. Keep the slogans. None of it changes the facts. When the moment came to choose between the Constitution and a strongman, you chose the strongman.

History has a name for people who did that, and it has never been “patriot.”

Melinda Fulton

the stupidest people

It's hard to believe that Trump is still going on and on about children going to school being grabbed and having a sex change operation, and returning home same day as a different sex. Only the stupids of MAGA could believe this. Only they would. They are so deep in the cult they can no longer separate lies from truth, or fake from reality. Can you imagine the media obsession if Biden acted like this? Making up shit and then repeating it over and over and over? Goebbels was onto something but he disregarded the maxim: You can fool some of the people all the time (MAGA), and you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. It works for stupid people.

The fact that Donald Trump keeps saying this is absolute insanity, and anyone who actually believes it is either completely nuts or literally one of the dumbest people to have ever lived.

This has never happened and will never happen anywhere — it’s pure lunacy.

To stand there and claim students are going to school, being sent to hospitals for several days without their parents’ permission, and being given transgender surgery is batsh*t crazy.

Just a few questions…

Who’s paying for this?

What doctors are performing these surgeries on children without any parental permission?

How are these students literally being kidnapped from their parents without any police reports being filed about missing children?

Who’s transporting these children to and from the hospitals?

Why would underpaid and overworked public school officials be doing any of this?

Where are all the parents of the children this has supposedly been done to?

Do you see how incredibly stupid all of this is?

Yet this is something Trump has claimed many times, especially over the last few weeks during these dumb rallies.

I’ll say it again: anyone who actually believes this needs serious help because they’re either crazy or legitimately so stupid that I’m not sure how they function day to day without supervision.

And it’s just another example of Donald Trump not simply lying — but literally just making up the most outrageous nonsense, fully expecting his supporters to be stupid enough to believe it.

No one disrespects MAGA folks more than Donald Trump because no one who respected the people who supported them would repeatedly say something so obviously and completely idiotic, fully expecting them to blindly believe it.

Allen Clifton