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Dorchester County Maryland

It's Climate Change. It's fucking obvious it's Climate Change, but notice the one guy who just can't bring himself to say it, so he calls it "erosion".

Tech Shit

Once upon a time, I was Mr Technology - or thought I was anyway.

I hope I didn't sound quite like this, though I fear I must have.

Off The Radar

So, quickly, about that Greenland thing: Trump wasn't just being his usual stoopid self. He wasn't just fuckin' around trying to create a distraction - even tho' all of that is part of it.

He's seriously talking about annexing territory. He intends to expand the empire, possibly because John Bolton &/or Mike Pompeo &/or the joint chiefs put a bug in his ear about growing concerns over Climate Change and the increased "strategic threat" posed by clear water in the Artic Ocean etc etc etc. But mostly because he's Putin's boy in more ways than one.

Anyway - in the meantime - happening out of sight:

The Independent is reporting on more shitty behavior at CBP.

At least three migrant children being held in detention centres have died after suffering from flu, but US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has said that it does not plan to vaccinate detained immigrant families as winter approaches. 

Further reports suggest children are being molested in some sites while in the care of the government.

“In general, due to the short-term nature of CBP holding and the complexities of operating vaccination programmes, neither CBP nor its medical contractors administer vaccinations to those in our custody,” a CBP spokeswoman said in a statement emailed to the CNBC news channel.

People you take by force into your custody are to be treated humanely.

And let's be clear - they are people.

The shitty things going on are intended to be shitty things so they can be used as propaganda; as a warning to potential immigrants that not only are they not welcome here, but that we'll do shitty things to them and their kids if they come here.

Cult45 is turning us into that which we claim to despise.

It Can't Be One Way

Tim Wise via Medium (this is the whole banana):

Much has been said about the need for liberals and progressives — or at least Democrats — to understand Trump voters. We are told we should learn to listen to their fears and insecurities. We are supposed to respect their deep sense of anxiety, born of job losses, dying small towns, and cultural transformation occurring at a pace with which they find it difficult to keep up.

Missing from these calls for civility and compassion are any comparable entreaties for the same from the other side. No demands that Trump voters seek to understand, or even respect the essential humanity of black people in large cities, asylum seekers fleeing violence, or immigrants from the global south seeking a better life for their children. For these, calls of “send them back” or “build the wall” will suffice, or perhaps endorsements of stop-and-frisk so as to catch the presumably dangerous criminals responsible for what the president calls “American carnage.”

We are to empathize with white folks in small towns suffering the ravages of the opioid crisis, in ways they were never expected to — and certainly did not — when the crack epidemic was wreaking havoc on urban communities of color. The very same white people who called for stiff prison sentences and three-strikes laws in the latter case now plead for rehab and treatment options for their cousins, their children, themselves. Meanwhile, they stare wide-eyed at the lack of such programs, oblivious to the irony: namely, it was their calls for a ruthless prosecution of the war on drugs that has left them, as with people of color, bereft of such options now.

These one-way calls for compassion infect 2020 election analysis. Democratic candidates are expected to pander to small-town whites and sit with them in diners across the fruited plain to mine the depths of their despair. Why? Because these are, or so we are told, the swing voters without whom they cannot cobble together an electoral college victory. Republicans, apparently, need not appeal to the so-called middle, or moderates, or swing voters. They need not find out what black folks are talking about in the barbershop, what Latinx folks discuss at the bodega, or what members of the Unitarian Church are thinking. No, outreach is only for liberals.

Enough of this.

As the administration launches ICE raids on hard-working parents in Mississippi, ripping them from their kids on the first day of school, all talk of compromise with these people is perverse. To speak of understanding those who sanction such evil is a sickness.

I need not sit around and discuss politics with people such as this as they wolf down their biscuits and gravy or sop up their toast in a cholesterol pond of runny eggs, while adjusting their dirty trucker caps and holding forth about the Mooz-lims or the Mex’cuns who have come to take their jobs. Especially when those they’d be griping about would already have been working for three hours while Billy Joe Jim Bob sat there telling me about how he can’t work anyway because of his disability. For which he receives a check, along with his Medicare. But he wants me to remember that he’s tired of people living off the government.

What. The. Fuck. Ever.

I understand these folks all too well. There is nothing more to learn.

They are scared, simple-minded people who believed, against all historical evidence to the contrary, that the world would stand still for them. They are people who assumed their coal mines would never close, that the economy would never globalize, that jobs would always be there for them, that their norms and beliefs would always be paramount in the culture, and that they would forever and always remain the very floor model of an American. In short, they fell for a lie that only they, as white people, could ever have managed to believe. And while that must be tough, I find it hard to cry tears for them now.

After all, what they have only recently discovered — that the system is a scam, that companies move jobs overseas for their own profits and don’t give a shit about you, or your diners, and that you can take nothing for granted — is stuff people of color already knew. It’s stuff those people of color had been insisting upon from the beginning, but which white Americans could ignore, because after all, what do black people know?

I’m sure the folks on the middle-to-upper decks of the Titanic also wondered what all the screaming from steerage was about. Meanwhile the ones below thought to themselves: “Oh just wait, you’ll see.” Because steerage knew the folks on the promenade well, and knew how few lifeboats there really were, even while the middling classes thought there would always be room for them.

When manufacturing jobs began fleeing the urban core in the 1970s, leaving blacks who had moved north for good jobs unemployed, these white folks who now moan about job losses in their towns showed no compassion. They told black folks to up and move; to go where the jobs were. If blacks were out of work and unable to find new jobs, it was their own fault. It was their pathological culture, their dysfunctional family structures. It was surely not a systemic problem.

But now, as their own worlds crumble around them, they sing a very different tune. Now, these same people demand that politicians promise to bring the jobs back to them. No insistence that they up and move, as they instructed people of color to do. If job creation has occurred mostly in large metropolitan areas as of late (and it has), one might think it would be incumbent upon these Andy of Mayberry types to get up off their asses and go where the jobs are. But no. They like their little small towns and by God, intend to stay there, and we should accommodate them.

But then, when they don’t line up to take those jobs at the meatpacking plant, or picking strawberries, or roofing new home builds — and the people who do get rounded up like cattle and separated from their families — they dare complain about how things are changing?

Bless…

It is not necessary to pander to people like this in order to win elections. They are not the key to victory for Democrats. Donald Trump is not president because bunches of these people once voted for Obama but suddenly switched to the guy who told them Obama wasn’t even an American. These are not people who voted for Obama and then turned around and voted for the guy who promised to take away the very health care Obama got for them.

Donald Trump is president because the Democratic base did not turn out in sufficient numbers in 2016. Obama voters didn’t switch to Trump so much as they stayed home. In Wisconsin, for instance, Trump got fewer votes than Romney; but depressed Democratic turnout and a significant vote share for third parties catapulted Trump to victory in the state.

One does not need to kiss the ass of people who chant for the building of walls, for the deportation of congresswomen, or cruelty for cruelty’s sake.

One need not appeal to the worst this nation has to offer.

One need not negotiate with terrorists.

One need only trust that there are more of us than there are of them, and then act like it.

And then, once we win, we can drag the rest kicking and screaming to universal health care, affordable college, and a cleaner environment.

At which point, all we will need to say to them is: “You’re welcome.”

What We're Up Against

The Daddy State will simply change history when it suits them.

The Hill:

Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro said he wasn’t aware of “a single major Republican figure” that made claims of former President Obama being an illegitimate president, seemingly ignoring President Trump’s repeated assertions that Obama was not born in the U.S.

“Republicans impeached Bill Clinton in the 1990s, they never made a move to impeach Barack Obama despite the myriad of scandals that cropped up during his administration,” Shapiro said in a video clip reported Monday by The Daily Beast.

Shapiro did not elaborate on the “myriad of scandals” he is referencing.

“I’m not aware of a single major Republican figure who said Barack Obama is not the president of the United States," he added.

Trump help spur the "birtherism" conspiracy theory before he entered politics with unfounded accusations that Obama was not born in the U.S. He was among the most prominent figures to call on Obama to produce his birth certificate, not typically asked of presidential candidates, when he discussed a possible 2012 presidential run.

Trump finally admitted the fact that the then-president was born in the U.S. in September 2016, without apologizing or explaining the change in his beliefs.

Other prominent Republicans backed the conspiracy theory, including Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), who campaigned in 2012 saying he wanted to send Obama “home to Kenya.”

Obama was born in Hawaii.

Water

Companies "producing" bottled water, don't actually produce anything.

They buy plastic bottles and packaging machinery, then they practically steal the water from us, fill the bottles and sell 'em to us for a buck and a half each.

And they're making a fucking fortune at it.

In the meantime, with our ridiculous system of legalized bribery in government, the quality of the drinking water we get form our municipal systems gets worse and worse.

This is not mere coincidence.

Today's Homework

Our assignment for today is to plant the seeds in our brains that help us discern some of the truth about Manufactured Consent and the bullshit of what passes for Popular Opinion, General Consensus, etc.

Fun fact - as many as 60% of all Twitter accounts are phony.

UnHackTheVote:

Show 'em some love

Some History

Driftglass and Blue Gal remind us all the time that a liberal's super power is a functioning memory - which is aided greatly by healthy doses of skepticism and curiosity.

Homestead Act(s):

The Homestead Acts were several laws in the United States by which an applicant could acquire ownership of government land or the public domain, typically called a homestead. In all, more than 160 million acres (650 thousand km2; 250 thousand sq mi) of public land, or nearly 10 percent of the total area of the United States, was given away free to 1.6 million homesteaders; most of the homesteads were west of the Mississippi River.

An extension of the homestead principle in law, the Homestead Acts were an expression of the Free Soil policy of Northerners who wanted individual farmers to own and operate their own farms, as opposed to Southern slave-owners who wanted to buy up large tracts of land and use slave labor, thereby shutting out free white farmers.

The first of the acts, the Homestead Act of 1862, opened up millions of acres. Any adult who had never taken up arms against the Federal government of the United States could apply. Women and immigrants who had applied for citizenship were eligible. The 1866 Act explicitly included black Americans and encouraged them to participate, but rampant discrimination, systemic barriers and bureaucratic inertia slowed black gains. Historian Michael Lanza argues that while the 1866 law pack was not as beneficial as it might have been, it was part of the reason that by 1900 one fourth of all Southern black farmers owned their own farms.

Several additional laws were enacted in the latter half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Southern Homestead Act of 1866 sought to address land ownership inequalities in the south during Reconstruction. The Timber Culture Act of 1873 granted land to a claimant who was required to plant trees—the tract could be added to an existing homestead claim and had no residency requirement.

The Kinkaid Amendment of 1904 granted a full section—640 acres (260 ha)–to new homesteaders settling in western Nebraska. An amendment to the Homestead Act of 1862, the Enlarged Homestead Act, was passed in 1909 and doubled the allotted acreage from 160 to 320 acres (65 to 129 ha). Another amended act, the national Stock-Raising Homestead Act, was passed in 1916 and again increased the land involved, this time to 640 acres (260 ha).

I grew up on the plains of Colorado, and I don't remember a time when I was unaware of the simple fact that with very few exceptions, my grandparents and my immigrant great-grandparents were dirt farmers whose families staked claims under Mr Lincoln's Homestead Act.

We had songs and everything:

So it makes me a little extra nutty when I hear the MAGA rubes spoutin' off about their rugged individualism and how those dirty socialists are just lookin' to turn us all into a buncha moochers and blah blah blah. I fucking hate that shit.

I'm not saying we had nothing to do with building our lives and doing good things for ourselves, but we have to get back to where we can acknowledge that we stand on the shoulders of giants.

I didn't earn my birthright. I had nothing to do with being born into white middle class suburbia. I didn't earn my way into mostly brand new public schools. I didn't make any of the mortgage payments on my parents' houses.

And on and on and on.

We have to get the fuck over ourselves, and start understanding that cooperation and collaboration - and yes, the collective efforts of all of us - are not just important, but essential to our survival.

Today's Tweet

Fuck you
Fuck you
Fuck you
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You're cool, doggo.
...
Fuck you
Fuck you

VIDEO: This man does not like the Proud Boys. #PortlandProtest (video from Tim Gordon) pic.twitter.com/XTFe87CKe5

— DMM News (@corp_main) August 17, 2019

Now that's my kinda civil war.