DMV defiant

Actually—the reason I started paying attention to the renewal date stickers on license plates is that a friend of mine noticed that some of the vanity plates I post about were expired. That was explainable because I stockpile photos I take of plates and just post in batches. I still have some shots of cars from when I lived in California—that was nine years ago.

However, JQ’s comment kind of sparked something in my attention span, so that’s how I headed down the expired plate rabbit trail.

And lest you think it’s only Virginia owners who thumb their noses at renewing their registration, here are some of the out of state plates. 

(Allow me to say that whenever some driver pulls a boneheaded move, when I look at the license plates, they're usually Maryland.)

Washingtonians really don't give a toss. (Traveling Gun hasn't renewed since 2015.)

Pennsylvania and Texas don't seem to care about renewals? 

This North Carolina driver joined the expired temporary plate crowd. (I shot the photo in May.)

And I'm not sure where this one's from, but it's expired.

It’s like the People’s Republic is the vortex of vehicular scofflaws.

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

 

Scofflaws in the hood

Back in April, when I changed my walking route to encompass more city streets (as opposed to the W&OD Trail), I started to notice license plates of parked cars.

Specifically—I clocked so many that were expired. At first, it was a couple of months past renewal.

But then it went back years.

2023:

2021:

2020:

And it's not just the actual plates. Here's a temporary tag—the one the dealer gives you to hold you over until the DMV sends out the metal ones:

 This one I thought was giving an extra special thumb-nosing:

But then I realized they'd put the month/year on the front plate. (This is illegal in Virginia; these stickers have to go on both front and rear plates.)

This guy is really bolshie; but then...it's a Tesla.

This is just in about a one-mile stretch—and includes some real scofflaws in my own cluster.

I don’t know why the People’s Republic should be such a hotbed of vehicular outlawry, but here we are.

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

 

I lost my fun

There have been some interesting developments this week in various jurisdictions WRT the criminal enterprise that recently occupied the White House.

The Supreme Court ruled against the Kleptocrat in his lame attempt to block the National Archives from delivering documents requested by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6^th Attack (on the Capitol). This leaves a hole through which you could drive a Panzer division in the arguments of Steve Bannon, Mark Meadows, Gym Jordan and others as they try to avoid testifying before the committee.

The committee has also invited Princess Sparkle Pony to testify on details of the timeline on that day, as she was urged multiple times to get the bloated orange tick to call off the mob that was invading the halls of Congress. This appearance (if she shows up) will be different from the swanning around she did for four years as a “special adviser” to the tick and not the kind of attention to which she’s accustomed.

New York Attorney General Letitia James has subpoenaed Bonespurs, Scrump and Sparkle Pony to give depositions in her civil investigation of decades of alleged fraudulent Trump Organization business practices. (Scrump and Pony’s brother Gums invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 500 times when he was deposed last summer.)

Several states have referred forged slates of “alternate” electors committed to the twice-impeached loser (a key element of the attempt to overthrow the free and fair election of 2020) to the Department of Justice for prosecution.

And Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis has requested a special grand jury to formally investigate TFG’s personal and by-proxy (looking at you, Lindsey) attempts to get the secretary of state to “find” enough favorable (non-existent) votes to tip the state’s electors his way.

Man, I would not want to be a waiter at Mar-a-Largo today.

In recognition of this interesting shift, my earworm for today is The Clash’s cover of “I Fought the Law”. Crank up the volume.

 

 

Law & order

Yesterday I was in the midst of following a BuzzFeed reporter live-tweeting the Manafort sentencing, when I had to dash out to a doctor’s appointment. Forty minutes later I returned to work to find 12^th Street blocked at H by cop cars, and actual police-line-do-not-cross tape. Our building guard was in the space between the outer and inner doors, but when I asked her what was going on, she said she did not know.

So I hightailed it to my office and spent the next forty minutes or so alternating between U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson not buying any of the faux contrition Manafort was trying to sell her (I absolutely loved her remark about his lawyers claiming that other criminals convicted on charges stemming from the Muller investigation got shorter sentences because the other judges recognized that the charges weren’t from the core of the investigation: “It’s hard to understand why an attorney would write that.”) and the events transpiring outside my window.

Some flavor of mom-mobile had been stopped (my colleague from three floors above my office said it had started around 15 minutes earlier). By the time I commenced watching, all the doors were open and a clutch of cops were very interested in its interior.

Then I noticed that the cops were not DC, but Secret Service:

I don’t know about the bike police—does the Secret Service have bicycle cops? Also, another colleague tells me that the devices on the trunk of 0336 are license plate recognition thingies.

Whatever—they brought in a sniffer dog (sorry, no pix), who did not seem particularly interested in any part of the van.

And then I noticed there were three people (one man, two women) standing against the building across the way, with three cops. At first I thought they might be witnesses, but then I realized they were cuffed:

My colleague said that weapons had been pointed at them while this happened.

Back at the intersection, car after car approached the right turn onto 12^th, saw the lighted-up cop cars blocking and waited for the way to be opened magically for them. Because “I’m only going just there.” They were disappointed.

As Manafort got his partial just deserts, the cops uncuffed the two women. A female officer walked one of them around the van, pointing at the front bumper, and then at the sticker on the driver’s side windscreen. She also retrieved a mobile phone from the passenger side and gave it to the other woman, who made a call. When I next looked out, the two women were walking toward New York Avenue. But the guy had his jacket pocket contents emptied into an evidence bag, and he was patted down. Eventually a Secret Service van drove up, and he was transported somewhere.

Another set of cops showed up, pulled stuff out of the van, and photographed the living daylights out of everything. They also removed the rear license plate.

And then I had to go to lunch with my colleagues. By the time we got back, all the law enforcement crowd (there were more than 25 of them) had decamped, along with the mom-mobile.

According to their website, the uniformed division of the Secret Service protects the White House, the Naval Observatory (VP’s residence), the Treasury Department building and diplomatic missions here in the District They Call Columbia. And according to a WaPo story from January, “Secret Service officers, in uniform and driving marked police cars, patrol an area around the White House and can make traffic stops and intercede in other crimes.”

Huh.

Whatever this guy is charged with, he faces way more time than Manafort. He’s not an old white man who spent decades engaging in multiple frauds totaling millions.

Order in the court

We here in the US have our share of bizarre court cases, but I have to say that the Brits pretty much wipe the floor with, well, everyone when it comes to over-the-top, premier-league weird. Viz:

I mean, in most places a [male] lawyer apprehended in a G-string and fishnet stockings, in a random woman’s bedroom while loaded would be enough to make the evening news. But in Southwark (London), no, no, no—guy’s got to get off by claiming he thought the woman was a panda.

As one does.

I mean, the clipping doesn't say whether the defendant got done on the breaking and entering or drugs charges, just that he avoided the stigma of having a conviction for a sexual offense.

Small mercies, eh?.

Gratitude Monday: Civic right

After all the michegoss of my life last week, something arrived in the mail that perked me right up.

Yes, dear readers, my mail-in ballot arrived from the great State of California (which has overtaken the UK and now has the fifth largest economy in the world—suck on that, MAGAts), and I shall be casting my vote shortly.

As I wrote a while ago, I might have missed out, because the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters had moved me to inactive status. (It’s what I get for blowing off June’s primary election.) But I got it rectified, and I am now good to go.

Because every vote counts—every single one of them.

And, given the moves by Republicans at every level across the country emboldened by the Orange One to suppress voters suspected of not being right- (wing nut job) thinkers, I am grateful that I am able to cast my ballot. I hope to God that two years hence, we’ll still have enough of a rule of law left that I can do it again.

Raising our voices

My ex-manager and I had our regular catch-up session yesterday; our first in several weeks, what with one thing and another. At one point the conversation veered onto the Brett Kavanaugh…drama last Thursday, and he asked me my opinion on a couple of related issues.

One was ambient sexism, the double standard for male/female behavior. An egregious example was Kavanaugh’s drama queen performance, flouncing into the Senate chamber and alternating belligerence with sniveling and sobbing. The entirety of the Republican party applauded him and gave him full-throated himpathy, for having his life completely torn apart by not having the greased slide into SCOTUS that they’d all promised one another.

I reported that at GHC last Friday, Anita Hill mildly commented that no female nominee to SCOTUS (or any bench, I’m betting) would have the license to throw a meltdown even vaguely resembling that witnessed the previous day. And therein lies the ambient sexism.

In the business world (and politics, and pretty much everywhere), behavior that in men is considered strong, direct, no-nonsense and effective, in women is seen as strident, angry, unattractive and aggressive. If women don’t speak up they’re mowed down. If they do speak up, they’re too forceful. Performance evaluations will tell women that they’re not assertive enough, while at the same time they’re too bossy.

If a female nominee had pulled a Kavanaugh, Senators would be clutching their pearls and every news outlet in the nation would run banner headlines that include the words “hissy fit”.

Essentially what this ambient sexism does is tell women everywhere that we have no place in the greater world, so we should remain at home; behind; out of sight; silent.

We also discussed this exercise: a professor asked a classroom full of students what tactics they employ generally to avoid sexual assault. Here’s the result:

Men (outside of prisons, I suppose) never think about it; women pretty much always have to. (My manager made a good point: if the professor had gone back and asked white and black men what precautions they take to avoid crime, the white side would probably still be largely empty while the black side would be full. “The resulting table would be full on the black male and all-female sides, while the white male center would be empty. And therein lies white male privilege.”)

That came across my Twitter feed, and I tweeted that, while most of them have been in my arsenal, the one that resonated deeply was the one about never renting a ground-floor flat. I have always steered clear of them. Several people engaged on this, with one pointing out that you have a greater risk of dying in fires if you’re on upper floors. I said I’ve consciously considered that I’d hang from an upper window and drop—not jump—and take my chances.

(I also don’t even have my actual home address programmed into my sat-nav, and even entering it into Uber and Lyft creeps me out.)

But in response to my manager’s question, I said this kind of ambient sexism is like trying to walk in the ocean when the water is up to your waist. The effort to take even a few steps just wears you the hell out before you even get to your destination. And why the fuck are women having to weigh which risk they’d rather live with, death by fire or sexual assault?

Then he asked what my response would have been had Kavanaugh said something along the lines of, “Yes, I drank way too much in high school, and I did things I’m truly not proud of. I don’t recall the incident Dr. Ford describes, but if I did it, it’s an appalling thing, and I apologize profusely for the pain it’s caused her, both then and now in coming forward,” and then proceeded to itemize what he’s done in the intervening three decades to turn his life around and be a net-positive citizen. How would I respond to that statement?

Well, I’d be inclined to accept that acknowledgement and move on to considering other things, like his crackbrained notions about imperial presidencies and whatnot. Because here’s the thing: high school is when kids are supposed to do all kinds of stupid stuff (although you’d hope that assaults aren’t part of the repertoire). They push boundaries, and sometimes they push way too hard, especially where alcohol or other substances are involved. They commit crimes—sometimes felonies—and they make mistakes. Even in college that kind of shit happens, because 18-22 year olds are still trying to transition from children to adults. If every kid who did something lamentable during this time had to carry it around his or her neck forever, well, we’d very few of us escape.

It’s what you do after you realize what appalling choices you made (and what harm you've caused) that counts—how you turn your life around, make something good of yourself because of those experiences. If Kavanaugh had taken that approach, I think there would be a lot less derision and contempt, certainly from me.

I mean, I would definitely keep an eye on him, monitor his alcohol consumption and probably never share an Uber anywhere with him, but I’d move on from him being a prize prick in his youth to examine what kind of a putz he’s become since then. And he certainly does not disappoint on that count.

However, as I went on, it’s his arrogant denial that he ever engaged in any kind of non-choirboy behavior—despite his paean to beer—that I find reprehensible and unforgivable. For sexual assault survivors, the denial that the attack occurred (or that they were involved in it) basically constitutes a second assault. It denies us our experience, demands that we pretend it never happened, makes us less-than our attacker, assures us that we imagined it and that there’s therefore something wrong with us even bringing it up, even thinking about it. It also denies us the opportunity to heal fully, because that begins with bringing the pain and memories into the open for validation and when those loud bass voices drown us out, it’s just so much harder.

I did not speak in the first person with my manager, but I felt my throat tightening in anxiety and my eyes beginning to water, so I changed the subject, although I’ve not been able to shake the conversation.

I am grateful for Christine Blasey Ford’s courage, her steadfastness and her grace, which has driven a crack through the wall of belligerent denial and shouting, and released a tsunami of accounts from women of all ages, conditions, locations of their own assaults. As Anita Hill said to Ford, “You will feel isolated, but you are not.” Ford has freed us from our isolation. There are tens—probably hundreds—of thousands of us, and our voices are rising together. We will not be silent ever again. As for strident—these guys ain’t seen nothing yet.

Order in the court

I saw the news on the way home yesterday that Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement from SCOTUS. That means the Kleptocrat gets another seat on the court. He already had a free pass with Neil Gorsuch—that was the appointment that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Reptile – Kentucky) stole from President Obama by refusing to consider his nominee for the last year of his presidency.

McConnell—whose greatest ambition is to return us to those halcyon days of the Nineteenth Century, when women and darkies knew their place—has already announced that the Senate will be voting in the fall (i.e., before the mid-term elections) on whichever crack-brained right-wing nut job Space Cadet Bone Spurs nominates.

The Gorsuch Court has already done serious harm to America—upholding the Muslim travel ban, retaining blatantly gerrymandered districts… Another Nazi on the bench will overturn Roe v. Wade.

Not only are we totally screwed, but our kids and their kids are screwed.

Gratitude Monday: The rule of law

We’re 15 years on from the September 11 attacks, and it’s Gratitude Monday. It’s also the last two months of the most vicious and divisive presidential election I’ve ever experienced, so my prevailing emotions are disgust and anger.

So today I’m grateful that I recently came across this story in the Washington Post about a man the reporter calls a legal giant, Benjamin Ferencz.

Ferencz, who emigrated with his family to the United States from what’s now Hungary to escape anti-Semitic persecution, grew up in New York City and went to college at CCNY. He graduated from Harvard Law School and served the 3^rd Army from 1943, seeing action in Normandy and Bastogne, and present at the liberation of several concentration camps, including Buchenwald, Flossenburg and Mauthausen. He wanted to be a pilot, but at 5’2”, his feet wouldn’t reach the pedals.

After the end of the war he joined the legal team that was trailblazing international law with the concept of prosecuting war crimes. Telford Taylor was his boss. At age 27, he drove the investigation and prosecuted 22 Einsatzgruppen commanders. Einsatzgruppen were the units that followed in the wake of the Wehrmacht in Eastern Europe; their job was to eradicate Jews—and commissars, and gypsies, and some others; but primarily Jews—from the conquered territories.

In what the Associated Press called the “biggest murder trial in history”, and Ferencz’s first prosecution, he called a single witness, who certified the sheaves of ledgers that documented the murdered. All 22 were convicted. Ferencz told the judge, “If these men be immune, then law has lost its meaning, and man must live in fear.”

Take a few minutes to watch this video; Ferencz describes his work at Nuremberg.

From that very first case, Ferencz has worked for the rule of law; his achievements include the establishment of the International Criminal Court at The Hague. He’s 96 years old, now, living in retirement in Florida, and he’s given more than a million dollars (renewable annually up to ten million) to the Holocaust Memorial Museum for an international justice initiative.

This year we’re bombarded by politicians and their supporters strutting across the media stage proclaiming how the time has come to pursue our enemies with all our military might without regard to that pesky law. Carpet bomb! Take the oil! Lock them in camps! Anything is legal in war! And I am reminded of two things:

In A Man for All Seasons, playwright Robert Bolt gives Thomas More and his son-in-law Will Roper this exchange:

Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”

More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”

Roper: “Yes. I’d cut down every law in England to do that!”

More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ‘round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down—and you’re just the man to do it—do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”

And in 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower (who had been Ferencz’s ultimate ETO commander) warned, “In a very real sense, the world no longer has a choice between force and law. If civilization is to survive, it must choose the rule of law.”

As a civilized society, you don’t bomb them into the Stone Age, you hold them accountable according to the rule of law.

The day after our annual remembrance of 9/11 and in the fetid pool of the presidential race, it brings me to tears to know that there are some men and women like Benjamin Ferencz, who understand that if we do not live by the rule of law, we are not alive at all.