Sep 11, 2021
Sep 10, 2021
Bounty
I hear there’s a bounty on my womb.
A high price in the currency
of power and control.
In the currency
of violence
and cowardice.
You want to make a home in this body.
Penetrate it with your power and lust
and demand I carry the seed you’ve planted
pretending to protect the sacred
when we both know
your concern is for birth
and not for life.
I’ve seen the way you watch
as young mouths go unfed
as young arms are torn from their mother’s embrace
as young bodies are raped and ravaged and locked away
in the land of the free
and home of the brave.
as young mouths go unfed
as young arms are torn from their mother’s embrace
as young bodies are raped and ravaged and locked away
in the land of the free
and home of the brave.
You read me ghost stories
from the good book
about purity
and innocence
and all the ways my body is wrong
and all the ways my body does not belong to me.
But I prefer different fairy tales.
The ones that were woven from an
ancient mother’s womb
whispered to her from deep in the earth.
The ones that teach me
that I am fire and water
that I am land and thunder
that I am holy and sacred
that I am the great creator and destroyer
that I belong to me
and only me
and I alone
will decide.
I hear there’s a bounty on my womb
but you seem to forget
that I am the huntress
and I can smell the fear
dripping from your cowardly words
and I dare you to try and hold my fire
in your bare, trembling hands.
COVID-19 Update
We keep hearing about how the monster won't stay on the rampage much longer, or it won't be so bad, or we'll get it more or less under control here pretty soon - if - if we play it smart and if we can get people on board and if we don't run into a lot more snags, etc.
Vaccine mandates will likely affect you and millions of other Americans. Here’s where they stand:
But this is not the country were stoopid goes to die. This is the country where Idiocracy seems to be the goal for some folks.
If the numbers stay on course, we'll see 700,000 dead Americans before mid-October, which puts us at 800,000 dead Americans right about New Year's Eve. Fake lord have mercy.
And while Biden's decision to push the mandates for vaccination will surely rile the rubes, the number of rubes looking for reasons to be riled seems to be shrinking - a little.
Here's (part of) WaPo's Morning Update:
Vaccine mandates will likely affect you and millions of other Americans. Here’s where they stand:
- Mandatory vaccinations for all federal employees.
- Mandatory vaccinations or weekly testing, plus paid time off to get vaccinated, for businesses with 100 employees or more.
- Mandatory vaccinations for health-care workers at facilities that take Medicare or Medicaid funding.
- Discounted at-home rapid tests for the next three months from Walmart, Amazon and Kroger.
- Los Angeles is by far the largest school district to take this step.
- Cases among kids and teens are surging as they go back to school.
Just A Thought
But the "smart guys" in politics know that they need the issue a lot more than they need the "policy success". They've worked the issue to great effect, keeping the rubes distracted form their real agenda (IMO: pushing for a top-down authoritarian plutocracy).
So if they succeed in overturning Roe, then they lose that issue (that distraction), which means they lose the donations and the support and the motivation to turn out the vote, and that means they lose even more elections than they've been doing the last few cycles.
It also means an awful lot of consultants, and ad buyers, and polling pimps, and foundation runners lose whole big bunches of particularly lucrative business.
They'd keep some of it in place, of course, because they just turn it around a bit and make the pitch about maintaining control over those slutty Democrat women and blah blah blah.
Here's a weird wrinkle that keeps popping into my fevered little brain though:
I think it's possible that the old guard GOP - the guys we used to call "moderate" - the guys I used to be able to vote for - guys like Nelson Rockefeller and John Lindsey and Bill Weld and Poppy Bush. Having been ignored during the aftermath and supposed introspection following Romney getting crushed in 2012, and then getting completely wiped out by the Trump steamroller, those guys have to be gnashing their teeth and rending their garments at a level that makes Mad Dog Vachon look like the very soul of serenity.
So maybe those smart guys aren't resisting - maybe they're actually egging on - the push for this horseshit abortion thing in an attempt to lash the bible-thumpers to the issue and throw the whole thing overboard - which obviously cuts the GOP down to a much smaller slice of the electorate, but ends up being worth it if they can finally shed themselves of the crazies who are scaring off most of the voters in the big squishy middle - the ones who decide elections.
We could be seeing the demolition of the GOP in preparation for a bigly serious rebuilding effort.
We can hope anyway.
Like I said - just a thought.
Sep 9, 2021
Bye Bye Job
We have the right to express our opinions, and others have the right to hold us accountable when we act on them.
A Joke
A nun heads off to work one morning, and passes another nun who says to her, "I see you got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning", and walks on by.
The nun is a bit confused, but ventures on.
As she's passing several of her students at the school where she teaches, one of the kids says, "Hello, Sister - looks like you got up on the wrong side of the bed today."
The nun gets the same comment several more times, and when she's finally headed out the door at the end of the day, she encounters Mother Superior who begins, "Oh my, Sister..."
The nun loses her patience and snaps, "Don't you dare tell me it looks like I got up on the wrong side of the bed!"
"No, dear", says the older nun, "I was just wondering why you're wearing the bishop's shoes".
COVID-19 Update
And up jumped the devil. I don't think taking a coupla days off for a holiday weekend is such a great idea.
Biden is set to tell us about his plan to deal with this new surge.
WaPo:
President Biden will outline a “robust plan to stop the spread of the delta variant and boost covid-19 vaccinations” on Thursday, the White House said.
It’s expected to be a significant speech at a turning point for the United States, where hopes that vaccinations would ease the strain on hospitals and allow more social freedoms were dampened by the spread of the highly contagious variant. Biden also plans to call for a global summit, to be held during the U.N. General Assembly later this month, to respond to the coronavirus crisis and boost vaccine supply to the developing world.
The pressure on Biden is increasing as the public health outlook worsens. The seven-day average of coronavirus deaths across the United States was 1,524 as of Wednesday, compared to 509 one month ago, amid lackluster vaccine uptake in many states and controversies over mask and vaccine mandates.
Out With A Whimper
For a while the "right" made a big noise about the removal of statues that honored the racist traitorous assholes of the Confederacy, but now that they're actually being taken down, the outrage seems to have faded rather abruptly.
And this one's the big one - the biggest baddest Confederacy-est general of 'em all being taken down and cut in half - removed from the snootiest street in the snootiest capital city in the snooty south.
But it didn't draw that much of a crowd, and if there was a presence of an outraged populace, it went unnoticed - most likely because it is now, and always was, all but nonexistent.
It's almost as if all that anger was kinda phony - another Astro-Turf movement pimped by shadowy forces that want us to squabble amongst ourselves so we'll be less inclined to see how we're being manipulated by people working on behalf of those shadowy forces who continue to fuck us with our pants on.
A statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee that towered over Richmond for generations was taken down, cut into pieces and hauled away Wednesday, as the former capital of the Confederacy erased the last of the Civil War figures that once defined its most prominent thoroughfare.
Hundreds of onlookers erupted in cheers and song as the 21-foot-tall bronze figure was lifted off a pedestal and lowered to the ground. The removal marked a major victory for civil rights activists, whose previous calls to dismantle the statues had been steadfastly rebuked by city and state officials alike.
“It’s very difficult to imagine, certainly, even two years ago that the statues on Monument Avenue would actually be removed,” said Ana Edwards, a community activist and founding member of the Virginia Defenders for Freedom Justice & Equality. “It’s representative of the fact that we’re sort of peeling back the layers of injustice that Black people and people of color have experienced when governed by white supremacist policies for so long.”
Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam ordered the statue’s removal last summer amid the nationwide protest movement that erupted after the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis. But litigation tied up his plans until the state Supreme Court cleared the way last week.
Northam, who watched the work, called it “hopefully a new day, a new era in Virginia.”
“Any remnant like this that glorifies the lost cause of the Civil War, it needs to come down,” he said.
The 21-foot (6-meter) bronze sculpture was installed in 1890 atop a granite pedestal about twice that tall. The sculpture was perched in the middle of a state-owned traffic circle, and it stood among four other massive Confederate statues that were removed by the city last summer.
A construction worker who strapped harnesses around Lee and his horse lifted his arms in the air and counted, “Three, two, one!” to jubilant shouts from the crowd as the crane prepared to wrest the statue away.
Some chanted “Whose streets? Our streets!” and sang, “Hey, hey, hey, goodbye.”
Once the statue was on the ground, the crew used a power saw to cut it in two along the general’s waist, so that it could be hauled under highway overpasses to an undisclosed state-owned facility until a decision is made about its future.
The job was overseen by Team Henry Enterprises, led by Devon Henry, a Black executive who faced death threats after his company’s role in removing Richmond’s other Confederate statues was made public last year. He said the Lee statue posed their most complex challenge.
Within hours, the pieces were gone. They were hauled away on a flatbed truck to cheers from the remaining crowd and claps of thunder from a midday storm. The pedestal is to remain for now, although workers are expected to remove a time capsule from the structure on Thursday.
The work proceeded under a heavy police presence, with streets closed for blocks around the area, but no arrests were reported, and no counter protesters emerged.
Those who opposed the statue’s removal often noted its artistic significance and Virginia’s centrality to the Civil War. They argued that taking the statues down would amount to erasing a key part of the commonwealth’s history. As recently as several years ago, key government officials argued for keeping it in place.
After a rally of white supremacists in the city of Charlottesville erupted into violence in 2017, other Confederate monuments started falling around the country. But at the time, local governments in Virginia were hamstrung by a state law protecting memorials to war veterans. That law was amended by the new Democratic majority at the Statehouse and signed by Northam, allowing localities to decide the monuments’ fate as of July 1, 2020.
Del. Delores McQuinn, a Democrat whose district includes Richmond and who sponsored the 2020 war memorial legislation, said she used to avoid driving on Monument Avenue because she found the statues so offensive. Seeing Lee come down Wednesday was “surreal,” she said.
“The fight, the struggle ... hopefully some of the ancestors feel vindicated,” said McQuinn, who is Black and has been an outspoken advocate for a better telling of Richmond’s Black history in public spaces.
State Sen. Jennifer McClellan, who represents Richmond and lives in the neighborhood, said the idea of the removal had long felt “impossible,” though that began to shift after Floyd’s murder, when the area around the statute became a hub for the growing protest movement and saw occasional clashes between police and demonstrators. The pedestal has been covered by constantly evolving, colorful graffiti, with many of the hand-painted messages denouncing police and demanding an end to systemic racism and inequality.
“I physically felt in the air hope, if that makes sense, because I saw multigenerational, multiracial people chanting to take it down and demanding change,” said McClellan, who is Black.
The changes to Monument Avenue have remade the prestigious boulevard, which is lined with mansions and tony apartments and is partly preserved as a National Historic Landmark district.
Northam, who after a 2019 scandal involving a racist photo in his medical school yearbook pledged to spend the rest of his term addressing Virginia’s racial inequalities, has tapped the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts to lead a community-driven redesign for the whole avenue.
Christy S. Coleman, executive director of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation and the former president and chief operating officer of the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, said she saw Wednesday’s removal as a historical moment in the city’s long-running struggle with how to tell its history.
That effort "is perfectly normal for communities to do — question who and what they are, what they value and how they want those values to be reflected, not only in the landscape, but in its laws,” she said.
And just in case you think I'm being as weird and foil-hat-ey as I know I'm sounding here, please remember: I may be paranoid, but that don't mean nobody's out to get me.
The Daily Progress (Charlottesville):
A statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee that towered over Richmond for generations was taken down, cut into pieces and hauled away Wednesday, as the former capital of the Confederacy erased the last of the Civil War figures that once defined its most prominent thoroughfare.
Hundreds of onlookers erupted in cheers and song as the 21-foot-tall bronze figure was lifted off a pedestal and lowered to the ground. The removal marked a major victory for civil rights activists, whose previous calls to dismantle the statues had been steadfastly rebuked by city and state officials alike.
“It’s very difficult to imagine, certainly, even two years ago that the statues on Monument Avenue would actually be removed,” said Ana Edwards, a community activist and founding member of the Virginia Defenders for Freedom Justice & Equality. “It’s representative of the fact that we’re sort of peeling back the layers of injustice that Black people and people of color have experienced when governed by white supremacist policies for so long.”
Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam ordered the statue’s removal last summer amid the nationwide protest movement that erupted after the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis. But litigation tied up his plans until the state Supreme Court cleared the way last week.
Northam, who watched the work, called it “hopefully a new day, a new era in Virginia.”
“Any remnant like this that glorifies the lost cause of the Civil War, it needs to come down,” he said.
The 21-foot (6-meter) bronze sculpture was installed in 1890 atop a granite pedestal about twice that tall. The sculpture was perched in the middle of a state-owned traffic circle, and it stood among four other massive Confederate statues that were removed by the city last summer.
A construction worker who strapped harnesses around Lee and his horse lifted his arms in the air and counted, “Three, two, one!” to jubilant shouts from the crowd as the crane prepared to wrest the statue away.
Some chanted “Whose streets? Our streets!” and sang, “Hey, hey, hey, goodbye.”
Once the statue was on the ground, the crew used a power saw to cut it in two along the general’s waist, so that it could be hauled under highway overpasses to an undisclosed state-owned facility until a decision is made about its future.
The job was overseen by Team Henry Enterprises, led by Devon Henry, a Black executive who faced death threats after his company’s role in removing Richmond’s other Confederate statues was made public last year. He said the Lee statue posed their most complex challenge.
Within hours, the pieces were gone. They were hauled away on a flatbed truck to cheers from the remaining crowd and claps of thunder from a midday storm. The pedestal is to remain for now, although workers are expected to remove a time capsule from the structure on Thursday.
The work proceeded under a heavy police presence, with streets closed for blocks around the area, but no arrests were reported, and no counter protesters emerged.
Those who opposed the statue’s removal often noted its artistic significance and Virginia’s centrality to the Civil War. They argued that taking the statues down would amount to erasing a key part of the commonwealth’s history. As recently as several years ago, key government officials argued for keeping it in place.
After a rally of white supremacists in the city of Charlottesville erupted into violence in 2017, other Confederate monuments started falling around the country. But at the time, local governments in Virginia were hamstrung by a state law protecting memorials to war veterans. That law was amended by the new Democratic majority at the Statehouse and signed by Northam, allowing localities to decide the monuments’ fate as of July 1, 2020.
Del. Delores McQuinn, a Democrat whose district includes Richmond and who sponsored the 2020 war memorial legislation, said she used to avoid driving on Monument Avenue because she found the statues so offensive. Seeing Lee come down Wednesday was “surreal,” she said.
“The fight, the struggle ... hopefully some of the ancestors feel vindicated,” said McQuinn, who is Black and has been an outspoken advocate for a better telling of Richmond’s Black history in public spaces.
State Sen. Jennifer McClellan, who represents Richmond and lives in the neighborhood, said the idea of the removal had long felt “impossible,” though that began to shift after Floyd’s murder, when the area around the statute became a hub for the growing protest movement and saw occasional clashes between police and demonstrators. The pedestal has been covered by constantly evolving, colorful graffiti, with many of the hand-painted messages denouncing police and demanding an end to systemic racism and inequality.
“I physically felt in the air hope, if that makes sense, because I saw multigenerational, multiracial people chanting to take it down and demanding change,” said McClellan, who is Black.
The changes to Monument Avenue have remade the prestigious boulevard, which is lined with mansions and tony apartments and is partly preserved as a National Historic Landmark district.
Northam, who after a 2019 scandal involving a racist photo in his medical school yearbook pledged to spend the rest of his term addressing Virginia’s racial inequalities, has tapped the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts to lead a community-driven redesign for the whole avenue.
Christy S. Coleman, executive director of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation and the former president and chief operating officer of the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, said she saw Wednesday’s removal as a historical moment in the city’s long-running struggle with how to tell its history.
That effort "is perfectly normal for communities to do — question who and what they are, what they value and how they want those values to be reflected, not only in the landscape, but in its laws,” she said.
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