Those Deleted Text Messages

Justin King - Beau Of The Fifth Column

When you get to feeling frustrated, and you wanna bitch about why the Democrats and Merrick Garland aren't doing enough fast enough - uh - don't.

Jan6 was an inside job. Some of the things being uncovered show how deep and wide this shit river was flowing.

For decades, "conservatives" have been working hard to wreck American bureaucracy. 

BTW - bureaucracy is something that's absolutely mission critical for every civilization. Roads and seaports and street lights and education and money and garbage collection and cops and water works and all the other stuff we absolutely depend on for a decent quality of life are all dependent on the maintenance of a functioning bureaucracy.

 

Ain't it funny how certain people of a certain political stripe have done nothing but shit on our bureaucracies - telling us over and over how we should hate bureaucrats - and now, "all of a sudden", we've begun to notice a rather precipitous decline in the aforementioned quality of life.

Come to think of it, no - it's not funny. It's not fuckin' funny at all.

Anyway, when I stop to think about just how fucked up things had gotten before Trump was elected, and then I think about the damage his gang did in the 4 years he was in office, the enormity of the task of cleaning up this mess looks pretty daunting, especially in light of ongoing GOP obstruction and general fuckery.

So I'm gonna continue being antsy and prickly and impatient - and probably more than a little vocal about it - but I'm also trying to remember what a ridiculously heavy lift I'm expecting them to do for me, so giving the Dems a lot of wagon room on this project seems pretty reasonable.

It didn't get all

fucked up yesterday

And we're not gonna get it all

un-fucked by tomorrow

Standing In Line

Priority Queueing is anti-democracy.  I'm not gonna squawk about express check-in at a hotel or picking up the rental car or whatever a company wants to do with - or for - people who spend more money than I do.  But next time you fly somewhere, be sure to look for the TSA express line at the airport security thingie, and check out TSA's program. Pay to play was never more exciting.

TSA Pre✓™ allows select frequent flyers of participating airlines and members of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Trusted Traveler programs to receive expedited screening benefits during domestic travel. Eligible participants use dedicated screening lanes for screening benefits which include leaving on shoes, light outerwear and belts, as well as leaving laptops and 3-1-1 compliant liquids in carry-on bags.

Maybe it's a good sign - if TSA is saying they'd like to move towards not treating everybody like a criminal, demanding we all prove our innocence, then OK.  I still get a bad feeling though.  TSA's been in business for almost 10 years now, and while they've made certain claims in the past about thwarting terrorist attempts, we don't hear much of anything about them any more - and you know damned well they'd be all over the news jumping up and down celebrating if they could document anything even close to breaking up the next 9/11.  But instead, we hear mostly about the occasional oops when the FAA tests the system and an agent wearing an Allahu Akbar t-shirt manages to get a chain saw and a bazooka and 5 kegs of black powder past the Toll Booth School washouts at a security checkpoint.  So it'd be nice if TSA is getting closer to the point where they'll just go away, but knowing that no government agency ever just goes away, I guess we can look forward to a long relationship with airport security because somebody is busily figuring our how to make the whole thing very very profitable.

Only slightly tangential, give this one a listen (from 99% Invisible):