Bye Now

I make it a point never to celebrate the destruction of any of our fellow human beings.

That said, I won't even do the usual and customary "sorry not sorry" on this one.

David Koch is dead.

"It is with a heavy heart that I announce the passing of my brother David. Anyone who worked with David surely experienced his giant personality and passion for life. Twenty-seven years ago, David was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer and given a grim prognosis of a few years to live. David liked to say that a combination of brilliant doctors, state-of-the-art medications and his own stubbornness kept the cancer at bay. We can all be grateful that it did, because he was able to touch so many more lives as a result.

"In those bountiful years, he married the lovely Julia Flesher, had three exceptional children, while remaining dedicated to the long-term success of Koch Industries. David also made institution changing philanthropic commitments to hospitals, cancer research, education and the arts. The significance of David's generosity is best captured in the words of Adam Smith, who wrote, 'to indulge our benevolent affections, constitutes the perfection of human nature.'

"While this is a very sad day for us all, I want you to know that David was proud of the extraordinary work you all have done to make Koch Industries the successful company that it is today. He will be greatly missed, but never forgotten."

David retired as executive vice president of Koch Industries in 2018. He leaves behind his wife, Julia Koch, and three beloved children. David's family released this statement on his passing:

"While we mourn the loss of our hero, we remember his iconic laughter, insatiable curiosity, and gentle heart. His stories of childhood adventures enlivened our family dinners; his endless knowledge rendered him our 'walking Google.' His sensitive heart had him shed a tear at the beauty of his daughter's ballet, and beam with pride when his son beat him at chess. We will miss the fifth link in our family.

"Yet, we wish for all to celebrate the life and impact of this most generous and kind man. He believed he had a responsibility to a world that had given him so many opportunities to succeed. David's philanthropic dedication to education, the arts and cancer research will have a lasting impact on innumerable lives - and that we will cherish forever."

It Gets Worse

Here's a headline for ya -

El Paso hospital forced to call out Trump’s lie that surgeons left the operating room to see him

Raw Story:

President Donald Trump bragged that he got an overwhelming welcome from Ohio and Texas when he went to visit survivors of the mass shootings before his latest vacation. Now, however, El Paso’s University Medical Center is being forced to dispute the president’s account of events. 

“Not only did they meet with me, they were pouring out of the room. The doctors were coming out of the operating rooms. There were hundreds and hundreds of people all over the floor. You couldn’t even walk on it. So, you know, there’s a lot to happen,” Trump told reporters on the White House lawn Wednesday.

“At no time did, or would, physicians or staff leave active operating rooms during the presidential visit. Our priority is always patient care,” UMC spokesman Ryan Mielke told ABC-7.

The only survivor of the mass shooting who met with the president was the baby whose parents shielded her body, dying in the process. No one else wanted to meet with Trump.

It's been a lot of years since I hung out with any surgeons, and while I'm no expert, I think I can confirm that no clinician worth their scrubs would ever leave a patient in need of treatment just to meet some smarmy promoter for a photo op. EVER.

45* will literally say anything trying to boost his image and placate his own empty ego.

And the rubes will swallow it whole.

What's Wrong With The Evangelicals?

Y'mean, besides the fact they're a buncha pinch-faced blue-nosed puritanical assholes?

Daniel Schultz, Rewire News:

Late last week, my friend John Stoehr made a daring argument: “white evangelical Christian support for Donald Trump isn’t rooted in hypocrisy, contradiction or merely straying from the straight and narrow,” he said. “The reason they support a fascist president is simple: They’re sadists.”

You have to read the article to capture the nuances of what John is saying. The kind of sadism he’s talking about doesn’t have much, if anything, to do with sexual pleasure derived from the pain of another. Rather—drawing on the work of the philosopher Richard Rorty—”It’s about the pain, humiliation or even violence out-groups deserve by dint of being out-groups.” Sadism also includes the pleasure of seeing “justice” be done against those deserving punishment.

- and -

First of all, let’s clarify that it really is not all white evangelicals who have become sadists. About a quarter of that group is in fact liberal, and many of them are committed to various forms of social inclusion and justice. But conservative white evangelicals by and large believe, perversely, in a world of justice and order. Each part of that equation is important.

White evangelicals and other conservative Christians believe that God has ordained certain ways of being and doing in the world. That’s the order part. Daddies are leaders, then mommies, then kids. This is the traditional cis-het thing you’re familiar with.

Religion is authoritarian. That's why it always fits perfectly with the Daddy State.

Today's Tweet

"Free speech" is a guarantee that the government can't punish you for expressing your opinion...

James Woods says he's leaving Twitter 'until free speech is allowed' on the platform following suspension | Fox News 👍👋👏👍👋😁😁best thing that has happened to twitter in a long time! This pathetic has-been two bit “actor” will definitely not be missed https://t.co/DoPadqZbgQ

— Suzanne's Criteria68 (@criteria681) August 21, 2019

...but no rights are absolute or unlimited.

Worthless

"Conservatives" love to carp about how da gubmint don't do nuthin' worth doin'.

Is there anything worth less than a "president" gassing about how he's considering an attempt to repeal an amendment to the constitution that solidifies every American's right to be an American?

And how do the rubes think he'll accomplish this amazing feat? Does he simply wave his tiny hand, and 💥 poof ☁️ - it's done?

Raw Story:

President Donald Trump said that he’s looking at getting rid of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. 

In a discussion with reporters en route to Air Force One, Trump explained his plans.
“We’re looking at that very seriously, birthright citizenship,” Trump said, according to Foxs’ Chad Pergram.

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” the 14th Amendment reads.

To change an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, both houses of Congress must pass the law with two-thirds of a vote. Then, three-fourths of the state legislatures must approve it.
How stupid do you have to be to keep going along with this shit?

In the 2016 campaign, Trump made more than a few ridiculous claims about how Hillary would get rid of the 2nd amendment.

He has people around him who tell him about how our government works. He can't possibly believe what he says - so I think he must believe that the rubes will believe him, or he wouldn't keep saying this kinda shit.

How desperate must his devotees be that they insist on being so willfully ignorant that they go on thinking POTUS has the power to change the US Constitution on a whim?

And why the fuck do they never stop to contemplate the negatives that could accrue to themselves because of any given president's whims?

Today's Pix

click

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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.”