Despite RWNJs assuring us that climate change is a hoax,
the National Weather Service assures us that we’re in for an exceptionally hot
summer. Deep joy.
For the past two days here in the environs of the District
They Call Columbia, we’ve had temperatures hovering around 90F, with humidity
at about the same percentage. It was already 75F and ghastly humidity when I
went out for my morning walks.
And they’re predicting a heat wave for the weekend.
Meaning: high 90s and “you need gills to absorb oxygen” to distinguish from the
past few days.
When I walked out of the house yesterday morning, it was
75F, but the humidity must have been about 90%. All the windows were fogged
over because of the condensation on the exterior, and my glasses fogged up the
instant I stepped over the threshold.
Big, big gratitude today for the millions of people in the
US (and around the world) who peacefully marched in the No Kings protests on
Saturday. There were gatherings in around 2000 communities across the nation, in
numbers even the completely Klepto-cowed media could not ignore.
In Minnesota, following the assassination of one Democratic
lawmaker and her husband, and the attempted assassination of another, protest
leaders called off the planned march, but people still showed up at the state
capitol in their thousands.
Estimates for the flagship march in Philadelphia put the
number of marchers at 80,000.
My hometown of Pasadena put on a parade of 20,000.
LA, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, 60 cities in
Texas, Boston, NYC, West Palm Beach—all across the country, in Red and Blue
states and cities—people flooded the streets to declare their repugnance for
this administration and its enablers. Even on the streets of Washington, D.C.,
which pointedly had not scheduled a protest (because of Kleptocrat threats),
120,000 people showed up—without incident.
(Although the evening before, Capitol Police arrested about
60 veterans who’d parked themselves on the Supreme Court steps to protest cuts
to Veterans Administration services while hundreds of millions are being spent
on invading US cities and a pointless parade. This action provided visuals that
encapsulate the ethos of the regime: two cops handcuffing an 87-year-old vet
who uses a walker for ambulation.)
Except for the trigger-happy LA cops firing "less-than-lethal" rounds at a non-NK demonstration and a
couple of incidents involving people driving their cars into crowds of
protesters, the events of the day were peaceful, belying the Kleptocrat’s
rationale for nationalizing the militia to put down “insurrection” and “rebellion”
last week. It was delicious.
Meanwhile, his long-term wet-dream of a big military parade
that would put Macron’s Bastille Day effort in the shade and show his besties
Kim and Putin that he’s just as strong as them (and, NGL, one of the drivers
for “No Kings”), turned out to be…quite the damp squib. Putatively the
celebration of the US Army’s 250th anniversary, TACOman was ecstatic
that the day was also his 79th birthday, and what tinpot dictator
doesn’t love a lot of military hardware and big, manly men in uniforms marching
past—all for him?
The weather forecast had predicted the possibility of
thunderstorms, which would have probably ended with cancellation—rain okay, but
lightning is problematic for crowds. I confess I was praying for thunder,
lightning, tornados, frogs, locusts and possibly even a very localized
earthquake, but what we got was even better.
So much better.
Because it turns out that the big parade was pathetic in
every possible way. The systems set up to manage access and egress were amateur,
resulting in a huge bottleneck at one security point while another was utterly
empty. Fortunately, tho, not all that many people showed up. Maybe 20,000? A
far cry from the 250,000 confidently predicted. Those who actually showed up
were markedly listless; I suppose it could be the delta between what they’d
been led to expect and what they got. Turns out that Americans don’t get all
that revved up by military hardware and marching soldiers in cammies who don’t
appear to have mastered the basics of drill.
(Look—this is not representative on the US Army; we all
know they deliver the goods. But honestly—they’re going to be living this
fiasco down for generations, and it’s, sadly, a self-inflicted wound.)
If you think I’m exaggerating, watch this video; you can
hear the tank creaking because the onlookers are silent. No cheers, no oohs. If
the videographer had panned to the audience, you’d probably see them playing
Candy Crush on their phones.
It was so bad that even TACO and his inner circle were
dazed. I mean—look at these faces:
The contrast between the joy, energy and purpose of the No
Kings rallies everywhere and this limp, ideas-above-its-station, amateur-hour
narcissistic exercise is just stunning. And I’m grateful for it all.
