My heart

I cannot believe that it’s 2023 and I had to go Googling for “poems about mass shootings”, because another fucking one this week. On top of the one last week, and the week before, and every bloody week in this lunatic asylum we call the United States.

You can’t go to a concert, hotel, church, dance hall, university, mosque, office, supermarket, synagogue, bank or garden shop without having to work out an escape strategy because God forbid the NRA-funded Republican Party should take even the most miniscule step toward reining in the free sales of military-grade weaponry.

When I was a child, we had duck-and-cover drills in school, because for sure crouching under a wooden desk was going to protect us from nuclear attack. It was fantastic, and we knew it was an exercise in pointlessness.

These days, children are regularly run through active-shooter drills. And they’re real because the threat is real. Republican congressmorons send out family gun-totin’-Christmas card photos and smirk to reporters that their kids aren’t in danger because “we homeschool”, so God’s in his heaven and all’s right with their world.

Know what? Instead of sending thoughts and prayers, get into those banks and synagogues and classrooms and supermarkets and churches and everyfuckingwhere else, get down with a bucket and rags and clean up all the blood, bits of bone, fecal matter and the rest of the aftermath of one of these weekly events. There's bound to be one in your district.

Today’s entry for National Poetry Month is appropriately “Thoughts and Prayers”, by Alissa Quart. The appropriateness is that the poem is composed entirely of the public statements of politicians and public websites.

Yay.

“Thoughts and Prayers”

Designed and executed. Us gun owners,
Our thoughts our team’s banner; our assault-
style thoughts and

#Prayfor

Praying impacted terrible
prayers on the scene
15 kids AR-15 pure evil
John 16:33 / horrific / my prayers / 1st responders

We continue to keep the victims

Kingdom of God. Columbine. Thoughts and prayers fireside basket.
The thoughts and prayers clear mount stamp

No child, teacher: There’s just no other way to describe it

Our hearts break for all the victims and families affected by today’s
terrible

satiation semantic civil religion common spiritual language shooting responders

The whole country stands

My heart is with Las Vegas we continue to keep the victims

My thoughts and prayers are with

$30 million in
donations. Thoughts
and prayers memes
Thoughts and Prayers: The Game,
Thoughts and Prayers tater
tots, A Thoughts and Prayers make-
up tutorial with invisible cosmetics.
Fantasy red blusher: “Blood of Our Children.”
Lifting up in prayer

all impacted by last night’s despicable

armed teachers

relatives affected

The thoughts and prayers stamp. The thoughts and prayers handcrafted
wood card.

The thoughts and prayers angel pin.

#Prayfor

“The science” of Thoughts and Prayers.
The ostensibly mixed
research about Thoughts
and Prayers.

My heart is with Parkland. My heart is

running down the hall

shooting
our prayers

 

 

Is your money that good?

Watching the House impeachment managers’ making their case against the twice-impeached ex-president this week, I’ve had a hard time restraining myself from driving into DC and bitch slapping every damned R senator. I mean—how they can view footage of them missing by seconds being caught by a rampaging mob that wouldn’t have cared whose blood they shed barely a month ago in the very Capitol in which they are sat right now and stick to their pre-determined acquittal vote is just beyond me.

A bigger pack of jellyweases—morals of a weasel on the spine of a jellyfish—you would be hard-pressed to find anywhere on the planet.

So when I went fishing for something musical to express my contempt for these empty husks of humanoids, the piece that came to mind was Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War.” He wrote it about the military-industrial complex (which still exists today—yay!) of the Vietnam War era, but his description of the slimy, cowardly, bloated fat cats living off the taxpayers’ dollars and blood certainly applies to the likes of Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, John Kennedy, Mitch McConnell, Josh Hawley, Rand Paul, Rick Scott and all the rest of them.

I’m giving you Eddie Vetter singing it at the 30^th Anniversary Tribute concert for Dylan. That rage-howling you hear in the background is me.

 

 

Gratitude Monday: paying the bill

We live in parlous times for democracy, with an ignorant, corrupt, venal, narcissistic kleptocrat in the White House, supported by GOPig and Evangelical Taliban sycophants who hand out mulligans for his every violation of the ten commandments and seven sins, as long as he shows signs of implementing their dreams of white supremacy and suppression of women.

It was clear from the 2016 election that Cadet Bone Spurs views the men and women of our armed forces as his own personal collection of toy soldiers to be deployed in whatever way will amuse him most at the moment—whether it’s missile strikes in Syria or a $30M military parade “bigger than Macron’s”, the Bastille Day parade (an annual event that honors France’s independence, not an individual head of state—whether competent or not) he fidgeted through last July.

Thirty million for a parade while 40,000 veterans are homeless.

And whether or not our draft-dodger-in-chief takes time out from golfing, watching TV and tweeting to show up at Arlington National Cemetery today, thousands of people who were not raised by rabid wolves will be there (and at other military cemeteries), communing with friends and comrades, or just honoring the fallen.

You know—those whose sacrifices over the centuries paid the bills for our Constitutional freedoms and our political follies, extremists and moderates, reactionaries and progressives alike. They lie in their tens of thousands around the globe, where they fell, and where they were returned home. I’m grateful for them all, for the graces they bought for us all.

My brothers and sisters—I give you heartfelt thanks, I apologize that we’ve made such a hash of it, and I live in hope that we will find our way back to the democracy you served with such devotion.

Sign language

There’ve been some interesting things to come out of the March for Our Lives last Saturday. Some of them, of course, crawled out of the woodwork with their conspiracy theories and flinging all kinds of lies about the kids who got hundreds of thousands of people out into the streets.

Fear does that.

Anyhow, there’ve also been amusing things. Including this:

Mockery gets up their noses, so I’m down with it.

Emergency preparedness

It’s probably a coincidence that my company—located in Downtown D.C.—scheduled what they called training sessions in emergency preparedness (in reality, just presentations by various representatives of local agencies) yesterday. Yesterday being the day of walkouts by elementary to high school students across the country highlighting the most recent round of mass shootings at schools and demanding that our leaders take action on gun control.

I mean, I’m sure the awareness sessions were planned some time ago, but in addition to the usual disasters—hurricanes, earthquakes, cyber attacks, bombings, floods—we had something new: what to do in the event of an active shooter in the building.

Turns out you’ve got three options: run, hide or fight, as demonstrated in this video we saw:

(My office door doesn’t have a lock on it, but I could jam my visitor’s chair against the handle. I also have a bottle of Virginia cabernet someone gave me, which would probably be my weapon should the shooter decide to try to enter. That’s assuming that I can’t get to the stairs and run down the nine flights to the ground, which would of course be my first choice of strategies. People in those open-plan offices so favored by the tech industry are stuffed.)

I suppose if our schoolkids have to undergo active shooter survival drills, we should, too. But it pisses me off that the NRA and its bought-and-paid-for GOPig stooges at every level of government are making us go through this instead of actually solving the problem of easy access to guns.

And I’m glad that the kids are showing more backbone than our elected officials.

Gratitude Monday: FTS

Here are a few thoughts about the events in Charlottesville over the weekend:

White supremacist neo-Nazi thugs showed up in military-manqué cammos, with their tiki torches and assault weapons, industrial-strength CS gas and riot shields, to proclaim their outrage at the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from a public park. 

(The angry white racist to the right, Peter Cvjetanovic, 20, a student at the University of Nevada, Reno, has since told media repeatedly that he's not an angry, shouting white racist, but a white supremacist who "as a white nationalist, [he cares] about all people."

Underlying their outrage is the Make-America-White-Again Weltanschauung that life is a pie, and that any part of that pie that goes to someone else means less for themselves.

They waved Confederate and Nazi flags proudly, apparently unaware of the irony that the last flags raised by both Confederates and Nazis were white, and represented unconditional surrender.

Anti-racist protestors showed up carrying hand-made signs.

So, when violence broke out, including the ramming of chanting, sign-carrying anti-fascist marchers by a car, killing Heather Heyer, 32, and injuring many others…

…what would a reasonable observer conclude about where responsibility lies? On “many sides”?

(At the time of writing, there are three dead: Heyer, killed by the car driven by James Alex Fields, Jr., and two Virginia State Troopers, whose helicopter crashed into trees near the city  on Saturday afternoon.)

Also: if a few hundred non-white people showed up—just showed up, not carrying weapons of any kind—in any city in the nation, what are the odds that police forces from multiple jurisdictions would have been deployed to arrest them at the slightest misstep (“Littering, Joe—they’re tossing their gum wrappers in our streets! Round ‘em up.”), probably before they’d got a couple of hundred yards?

Assuming they were even granted a parade permit.

So, why were Charlottesville (and Albemarle County) cops so notable by their absence? Starting with the tiki-torchlight parade-and-rally Friday night, and into the appalling events of Saturday—what, exactly, were they doing?

(Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe has since defended the [non-]actions of the police by saying they were outgunned by the Nazis. Which is a load of crap. Outgunned, assuredly, but why? You knew these thugs were coming, and you knew they would be armed to the teeth. Have you never heard of preparing? Badly done, Virginia. Badly done.)

Well, it’s Gratitude Monday. They say that the very act of trying to find something to be thankful for (even if you fail) is a key to happiness. So here’s what I’m grateful for:

Those fat, pathetic, losers with compensation issues in their paramilitary dress-up clothes limited their willie-waving to spraying CS gas, beating people with poles and killing only one person (may her memory be a blessing); at least they did not start firing their weapons into the crowds.

This time.

DOI: Declaration of...Ignorance

As my readers know, I love the Declaration of Independence. It’s such an inspiring document, taking just a single page to enumerate the faults of the British sovereign, the colonists’ numerous—unsuccessful—attempts to seek redress and their reluctant decision to sever the parent-child connection with Mother England, and it concludes with the signers’ pledge of mutual support, backed up with their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor.

And I love the annual rendition by NPR of the Declaration, sentence by sentence—sometimes by their correspondents, sometimes by random people on the National Mall. Because it is a people’s document.

Well, this year, NPR tweeted the Declaration, because it’s 2017, and SoMe is how you reach the people. But oh, my stars and garters, you would not believe the blowback they got from the, er, the crowd that decries the “mainstream media” as the enemy of the people.

No, seriously—the responses were kind of horrifying. Because apparently there’s a considerable segment of the population (either humanoid or bot) that does not recognize any passages from one of the seminal documents of our history. And there’s another segment—which may or may not overlap with the first one and may or may not also be part bot—that doesn’t care that it’s the DOI; if NPR is involved, it’s bad, #FakeNews and really, really infuriating.

Viz.:

Sanchez may be a bot—this appears to be his/her/its only tweet.

But Human Being took up the cause.

Dear Human Being is interesting: for having a profile claiming to be a fighter for humanity, you’d think s/he would have recognized one of the Big Ones when it comes to declaring unalienable human rights, but she just kept doubling down.

Since being outed as, uh, somewhat less than on top of things, she deleted those pig-ignorant tweets, but of course you cannot escape screen shots. This was only one of the many incredulous responses that probably drove her to run for cover:

Then there was this person:

After a few responses along this line, Cave Creek Deb deleted her account, which was probably a good move.

And then there was this fellow:

Who appears to have a hair trigger; he also responded to a tweet by Senator Mike Lee of Utah:

Old Jason doesn't seem to grasp words in the abstract, as in the entire nation being an experiment in self-government. According to his profile, Jason Talbot is from Arizona and has ambitions to holding office. In Arizona, he might indeed get elected.

Now as for this guy—he started out strong, inferring a call to violent overthrow of government from NPR’s series of tweets:

But after many responses pointing out the origin of these fightin’ words, he actually apologized:

However, his exculpatory statement—that, really, no one could be expected to recognize the source document—does not fill me with confidence for the future of this state.

All-in-all, this was a truly enlightening exercise. Scary AF, but enlightening. And I believe this tweeter has it right:

Replacement parts

Well, after about six years of pissing, moaning, ranting and raving about the ACA, the Repugnants of the House have hawked up their hairball of a replacement scheme. I’m not even going to try to deconstruct it in all its steaming awfulness.

No, Imma let Twitter do that for me, one thousand-words-meme at a time.

I’ll leave you with one last take, which I think is absolutely brilliant.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

It's 2016: do you know where your money is?

Here are some numbers from the Wells Fargo & Company widespread fraudulent practices that brought CEO John Stumpf to Capitol Hill yesterday.

- Phony accounts created without customers’ knowledge or permission: 565,443 credit cards, 1.5 million deposit accounts.

- Fees charged to customers/victims over a period of years: $400,000 and counting (including annual fees, interest charges and overdraft-protection fees)

- Credit scores lowered or ruined: unknown

- Fines assessed to WFC by the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: $185 million, which they’ll find between the cushions in the sofas in the executive lounge 

- Low-level bank employees fired…two weeks ago: 5300

- Senior managers (or even mid-level ones) who’ve had their salary, bonus or job security affected: bloody sod all.

Stumpf spent about an hour dodging questions at a Senate hearing, mostly from Democrats; Republicans may have been busy planning their next statement on why they’re not considering the President’s nominee to SCOTUS. Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., gave Stumpf an earful, as he kept maintaining that he and other executives knew nothing about the systemic practices, even after they launched a half-hearted “investigation” into allegations…back in 2013, and that it’s up to WFC’s board to make any, you know, decisions on whether anyone with a C or a V in their title should expect a lower bonus this year. Not his.

(Warren used words on Stumpf that he is probably and surprisingly unused to hearing. "You should resign. You should give back the money that you took while this scam was going on, and you should be criminally investigated by both the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission." Warren has a bigger set of brass ones than all 99 of her colleagues in the Senate have rolled together.)

No, he doesn't know anything about making monetary decisions, as the CEO of a major financial institution. “I’m not an expert in compensation,” he said.

But I’ll bet he checks his direct deposit notifications religiously and accounts for every penny in bonus and executive entitlements.

I wonder if his accounts are with WFC?

Stumpf’s disclaimer and crocodile apology (“I am deeply sorry that we failed to fulfill our responsibility to our customers, to our team members and to the American public. I want to apologize for violating the trust our customers have invested in Wells Fargo. And I want to apologize for not doing more sooner to address the causes of this unacceptable activity.”) follows the usual pattern for his ilk. He’s not sorry that his company of 265,000 employees embarked on a multi-year predation of the most vulnerable of its individual customers; after all, think of all those years he was raking in his salary and bonus. He’s not even sorry that they got caught at it. He’s only sorry that it’s looking like there might be some negative consequences to him personally.

He doesn’t give a rat’s about anyone else, up or down the food chain.

Those numbers at the top of this post? None of them is of the least concern to Stumpf. The only one that matters is that he keeps his $19.3 million annual package.

You know what’s really wonderful about all this? As in “I wonder what the actual fuck is going on”? That it’s 2016, nine years after all those too-big-to-fail banks and brokerages were first exposed as engaging in industrial-strength long-term fraud. (And, when caught, went all Uriah Heep in the company of their multitudes of attorneys.) 

And yet here we are again.

WTAF.

Charlie pleura

I have only a couple of things to say about yesterday’s attacks in Brussels.

The somewhat detached observer/analyst in me is thinking that, in terms of return on investment, the bombing of Zaventem airport and the Maelbeek metro station would please any VC. The vermin who planned these attacks—like the ones in Paris last year—are really quite clever, achieving maximum impact for the minimum of investment.

Think about it—for the price of a few mindless (but fervent) fuckwits and the latest in plastic explosives (available pretty much at any convenience store in certain parts of the world), you kill a few dozen ordinary infidels (because everyone who doesn’t subscribe to your particular belief set is an infidel), close down the airport and transport system for some indeterminate time, and then you sit back and watch your enemies do the rest of your work for you.

You get them to impose more and more authoritarian and intrusive measures while chasing their tail looking for you. And the ordinary people get less sleep, expend more energy looking over their shoulder and generally live their lives bowed under the weight of fear.

And it’s working. They don’t have to defeat armies, they can go straight to the hearts and minds of the people. Costs a few of their own followers—but they’re cheap, disposable and replaceable. Eat all you want; we’ll make more.

Their goal is to make the cities of the West look like Ramadi, Mosul and Derna. In every possible respect.

That said, the human being in me is just bone tired of all of it.

 

 

 

"Mistakes were made..."

So, after raking through news reports out of the UK, let me recap my understanding of this Rotherham thing: 1400 children sexually abused, for 16 years, THREE FREAKING PREVIOUS official reports submitted to authorities about gangs of “Asian” (UK-speak for persons from South Asia: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh) men handing girls as young as 11 around like party favors, and 1) No one did anything about it, and 2) No news outlet reported on it?

Oh—and now that it's been made public, five alleged perps are in custody, the Rotherham Council leader has "resigned effective immediately" and the chief policing officer offered "an unreserved apology" to the victims? But he’s not resigning. Apparently he’s not in fear for his life or property, either, which I don’t quite get.

I don't say this nearly often enough, but might there be a neutron bomb available to take out all the so-called human life forms in that area?

I mean—I hope to God that civil and police authorities are not trying to tell us that five men—the only ones in custody—are solely responsible for this? For 1400 girls being systematically raped and terrorized for the last 16 years? That there aren’t scores more of the bastards who should be charged with multiple felonies ranging from statutory rape and GBH to perverting the course of justice? Because I have not taken enough stupid pills to swallow that kind of crap without choking.

And here’s something I find extremely interesting about news coverage of this story: I had to read several reports before I discovered that all the suspects are South Asian. Seriously: it was the written equivalent of someone lowering his voice to a whisper to add, “And they’re of, uh, you know, Pakistani heritage. But you didn’t hear that from me.” 

Evidently the same PC fear of identifying a spade as, in fact, an implement for shoveling muck, which caused child protective services, police and civic officials at all levels to flap their hands and hope that the elves would come in during the night and make it all go away, is shaping the news coverage. Would there be such hesitation if the names on the booking sheet were Sobieski or Mendoza or even Patel instead of Hussain and Razaq? Really?

(And while I’m on this—why the hell did no news outlet report on any of the earlier official reports about this? Are they telling us that no one called the Rotherham Advertiser, or sent an anonymous note to the Telegraph or even tweeted something with the hashtag #childabuse; that there was no reporter on the Yorkshire police beat who followed up on the victim complaints that were actually filed; and there wasn’t one single newspaper, blogger or late-night public-access talk-radio host anywhere who was interested in breaking the story of alleged child abuse on an industrial scale? If so, this is systemic failure of media at all levels.)

I do understand the complication of the state-supported BBC’s reportage being weighted against believing the victims. The Beeb has its own problems with condoning and covering up high-profile long-term sex offenders, so they’re rather in a glass house on this story. Ergo the pay-no-attention-to-the-man-behind-the-curtain attitude.

But how’s this for summing up their complete lack of journalistic integrity: on Wednesday, John Humphrys, one of their premier “presenters”, interviewed one of the victims, who described being repeatedly gang raped at age 12, and then being told by police that there was nothing they could do to help her.

Humphrys asked, “Why didn’t you just stay indoors?”

Evidently Humphrys doesn’t fear for his life or property either.

Oh--and apparently one of the earlier reports of the abuse was thrust under a stack of order forms for office supplies, because those in charge "hoped it would go away as a one-off". Because, yeah, we can all live with a “one-off” instance of child rape, just a single, oh, week or month of only maybe ten or 20 little girls being abused by just a few adult males. Or, even just one—we’ll give you one rape of…well, anyone, really…for free; no harm, no foul. Because we all have little slips, and one hardly counts as a real crime.

Yeah, that'll wash straight off our consciences as banner-bearers for civilization.

So far (early days, I know) it doesn’t look like anyone in authority, either locally or nationally, is in any particular hurry to drill down into who was doing what in Rotherham ever since 1997, much less who was turning massive numbers of blind eyes when it was their job to protect these children on every level. They are starting to make me think of the tweedy version of Colonel Klink; all you hear is, "I knew nothing."

In the US, there would at least be squadrons of lawyers circling the town, briefcases flapping, ready to file lawsuits on behalf of the victims against the perpetrators, their extended families, their employers, their community groups, their mosques, the police, child services, the council and Her Majesty’s government (and probably others I’m missing).

In the UK, meanwhile, I guess they’re staying indoors and pouring tea.

God's hobby

Yeah, alright, you knew I’d have some questions about the SCOTUS Hobby Lobby decision. The majority ruling said it has limited application, but as near as I can tell, it’s actually opening such a sack of snakes that it’s going to keep several thousand law firms in Testonis for decades.

Not to mention filling campaign coffers for Congressmorons of every political stripe.

Because first of all, the decision (as written by Justice Samuel Alito) speaks of “closely-held corporations” as essentially humanoid and being entitled to run their business on the values of their closely-held owners, including claiming exception to Federal law by reason of closely-held religious conviction.

But you know—they’re talking about Christian religious convictions, because the Hobby Lobby owners were objecting to providing insurance coverage for several types of contraception that they believe (and it is belief, because scientific definitions pretty much refute their notions) these devices and medications are abortifacients. And they oppose abortions.

Well, maybe that’s indeed a limited application, because outside some parts of Pakistan and Africa where Islamist extremists have been murdering medical teams trying to vaccinate people against polio, it really has been only Christians who seem to object to 21^st Century health practices. Actually, they’re objecting to 20^th Century health practices.

(Although I imagine there are many aspects of sharia law that appeal to our Baptist Taliban, so there may be some accommodation down the road.)

I’m kind of spitballing here, that the Hobby Lobby crowd are getting their guidance in these matters directly from the Almighty, Who has somewhere decreed that these forms of contraception are somehow in violation of…well, the will of God.

So I therefore find it really interesting that Hobby Lobby (and therefore presumably God) is totally down with vasectomies. Oh—and Viagra.

Well, what’s up (um) with that? Because I’d have thought that erectile dysfunction was pretty much God’s way of telling you your shagging days are over. And therefore taking anything for it is interfering in God’s will. Big time.

(I worry that the God of Hobby Lobby seems overly concerned with a voyeur's view of women's sexual activities. Like some omnipresent-but-not-omniscient omnipotent-yet-impotent Hugh Hefner. Am I the only person creeped out by that?)

Or what about antibiotics? They screw with biological destiny, don’t they? They kill off little lives in their millions; how come they’re okay? Oh, only human life in its most rudimentary cellular form is of concern? Okay.

Well, what if you’re prescribed antibiotics because you have some kind of sexually-transmitted disease? Seems to me that curing the clap ought to be a clear no-no, because good Christians, engaging in “legitimate” sex (c.f., Todd Akin, R-Mo., and “legitimate rape”) surely would not be visited with an STD, right? So any kind of, you know, condition of questionable provenance is going to be on the non-coverage list.

And how long after that comes stoning adulterous women, honor killings and bride burnings? Because those are all deeply-held religious values also.

Tweeting holiness

Here’s someone you don’t expect to find on Twitter: the Dalai Lama.

Well, maybe that’s not strictly true—why wouldn’t you find him on Twitter? I understand even Pope Benedict XVI is now on the social media platform. Although I’m laying odds that he’s got some cardinal/minion posting the actual, you know, tweets.

Of course, it’s possible that there’s some Buddhist equivalent of a cardinal—an abbot or the like—tweeting for His Holiness of Dharmasala. I mean, I expect that living in the moment would kind of exclude tweeting about it, since nothing says monkey mind like Twitter uploads from your iPhone.

Whatever.

What interested me about the Dalai Lama’s profile is that—as of the day I found it—he had more than six million followers. And he was following no one.

Well—I suppose…whom would you follow if you were he?

On the other hand, His Holiness the Bishop of Rome only has around 1.5 million followers; but he’s following eight people.

Only it turns out that the eight people he’s following are…all himself:

Make of that what you will. And peace out.