eVille Times

Feb 18, 2019

Trae Redux

Trae Crowder from a year ago - worth repeating:

Feb 17, 2019

Blue Jeans

NYT, Eric Curran (3rd year, Temple Univ Med School):

PHILADELPHIA — I remember the first time I saw a teenager die. He came to Temple University Hospital in the back of a police cruiser with three bullet holes in his chest. He was wearing bluejeans that had turned red.

The nurses cut them off and threw them at the end of the bed. The bluejeans that were no longer blue dangled for a while, eventually falling into the puddle of blood collecting underneath them. After nothing more could be done to save him, the bed that held his thin body was rolled away, leaving streaks of blood across the floor.

As a first-year medical student, this image haunted me. I think it always will.

Over and over, young Americans from Parkland, Fla., to North Philadelphia are carried into ambulances and the back seats of police cars and rushed to a hospital. The emergency room nurses and doctors lift them onto stretchers. If they are awake, they may ask if they’re going to die. The doctor tells them no.

Once inside, the trauma team yells out locations of holes in their body. The medical student tapes paper clips to each bullet wound so that they’re visible on X-ray. If the heart stops, doctors break through the sternum with a mallet and a chisel.

Two gloved hands hold the heart and start to squeeze. More nurses and more doctors help inject medicines. They place paddles on the lifeless heart. If God or luck or physiology allows, it beats again. And then the wheels on the bed spin toward the operating room and leave those horrible red streaks on the floor, red shoe prints all around them.

In the wake of the struggle to save a human life, a silent, splattered room remains. Gauze, tubes, shirts, gloves, pants, tape and sneakers lie scattered. Hospital workers come in and wash away the blood. They bring mops, towels, brushes and trash cans, and work with respect and grace, on hands and knees. The room must be cleaned quickly because another young victim could be wheeled in soon.

I started photographing this room out of the helplessness and despair I felt about these senseless deaths. I wanted the violence to stop. I asked if I could hold a camera. Not to capture the dead and dying. They deserve privacy and respect. But I wondered if capturing and sharing the moments after lives are saved and lost could help Americans understand what is happening.

I place plastic covers over my shoes. Sometimes I hear screams — the loved ones receiving news that their son or daughter, brother or sister, spouse or partner, has been shot to death.

Temple University Hospital treated 481 patients with gunshot wounds last year, and 97 died. In this one hospital in one neighborhood in one city. As a country, we lost nearly 40,000 lives to guns in 2017. These images are here to show you what happens. And to inspire change. Because here, in America, shouldn’t bluejeans stay blue?

So far, in 2019: 40 mass shooting incidents (most recent = yesterday, 16 FEB 19), 72 dead, 121 injured - as reported by Gun Violence Archive.

Today's Tweet

Libertarian Paradise - free of the government's tyrannical stop signs.

When you keep postponing simple but important solutions .. pic.twitter.com/sc32II1f0P
— Sakhavat Mammadov (@s_mmmdv) February 16, 2019

Change Gonna Come

Part of "The Vulnerability Series," a collection of paintings by Syrian artist Abdalla Al Omari.

World leaders - somewhere not too far down the very road we're on.

They all had more than a few chances to "make it right". Some tried harder than others, but the likely results will render those differences moot.

Obama

Ahmadinejad

Merkel

Cameron

Erdogan

Kim

al-Assad

45*

Putin

I'm anything but some kind of God-Knobbin' Jesus Pimp, but this tune has one of my all-time favorite lines: "On the 31st floor, a gold-plated door won't keep out the lord's burnin' rain."

Sin City -- The Flying Burrito Brothers

Today's Quote

It probably will not be long until the churches divide as sharply upon politics, as upon theological questions; and when that day comes, if there are not liberals enough to hold the balance of power, this Government will be destroyed. The liberty of man is not safe in the hands of any church.

-- Robert G Ingersoll

A Cousin Replies

Via the twitter feed of Anthony Philipson (@APhilipson):

Someone on Quora asked “Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?” Nate White, an articulate and witty writer from England wrote the following response:

A few things spring to mind.

Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem.

For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed.

So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.

Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever.

I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman.

But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty.

Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers.

And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.

There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface.

Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront.

Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul.

And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist.

Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that.

He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat.

He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.

And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully.

That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead.

There are unspoken rules to this stuff – the Queensberry rules of basic decency – and he breaks them all. He punches downwards – which a gentleman should, would, could never do – and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless – and he kicks them when they are down.

So the fact that a significant minority – perhaps a third – of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think ‘Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy’ is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that:

• Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are.

• You don’t need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man.

This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss.

After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum.

God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid.

He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart.

In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws – he would make a Trump.

And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would clutch out big clumpfuls of hair and scream in anguish:

‘My God… what… have… I… created?

If being a twat was a TV show, Trump would be the boxed set.

Stealing It

Call me crazy if you want - hell, everybody else does - but I think maybe taking care of all the shit we've been neglecting the last 20 years or so is a little higher priority than 45*'s Horizontal Phallus Project down on the Mexico border.

CNBC:

When 2nd Lt. Lance Konzen got his first military assignment, the Air Force recommended he and his wife Megan Konzen move into housing right on his base at Laughlin Air Force Base in Del Rio, Texas, to help them adjust to military life.

But the Konzens didn't know their new home had mold growing in the vents, which gave Megan respiratory problems and led to several emergency room visits, she said. The family said the private company managing their home didn't provide preventative maintenance or clean the home thoroughly once mold was discovered.

The Konzens are one of several families highlighted in a report from the Military Family Advisory Network published Wednesday, which found that military families living in on-base housing face dangerous conditions including mold, vermin and poor water quality.

The military uses private companies to provide and maintain on-base housing for families, but the report shows that substandard living conditions are widespread.

"Private companies" - the supremely stupid notion that outsourcing is always better than letting Da Gubmint do it themselves. The only thing worse than government waste fraud and abuse is private sector waste fraud and abuse.

It's all at taxpayer expense, and privatizing this shit costs us more.