Category: Humor

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Riggin’ in the Friggin’ Solstice 2021 – Wisdom and Betrayal

Riggin’ in the Friggin’

Solstice 2021 – Wisdom and Betrayal

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

December 21st 2021

When it came to observing the Winter Solstice, the Nordic gods were first and foremost. Makes sense, given that they lived in the land of ice and snow, and the midnight sun and noon darkness. Observing the Solstice didn’t make them better behaved, mind you; even compared to the pantheons of Rome and Greece that came later, this was an exceptionally unruly bunch, with amazing sexual antics. Loki alone could add four more letters to the somewhat overworked acronym, LGBTQ.

Perhaps the best-known of all the legends of the Aesir is that of Baldur, son of Odin and Frigg. Baldur was what could be considered “the nice one,” for a given value of ‘nice.’ Like most Nordic gods, his hobbies included murder and mayhem. But he was politer about it. Certainly all the other gods loved him, save one, and all living creatures, again, save one. You can’t have a story like this without a little bit of the Joker and Kryptonite, right?

Baldur was associated with wisdom, knowledge, and light. As with most such deities, he was born on the Winter Solstice. He was the local version of Prometheus, and like most other light-bringers, he met a bad end. Getting born around Winter Solstice is something of a warning sign amongst gods.

For all his wisdom, and for all that he was loved and admired by pretty much everything, Baldur began dreaming of his death. He mentioned this to Frigga, who like most mums, decided to ensure safety for her son. Death is something of an option with gods, and so Frigga decided to ensure his immortality by making him invulnerable to everything. So she went to nearly very plant and creature on Earth and asked them to vow never to hurt her son.

Since Baldur was, as noted, loved and respected, everyone agreed to this. Obviously there were no Republican Senators in those days, showing how far we’ve fallen. It wasn’t until later that Frigg got around to realizing that she forgot to ask the mistletoe not to hurt Baldur. She shrugged it off, concluding that mistletoe was a harmless enough plant, good only for unwanted sexual advances at office parties. Mistletoe routinely kills mighty oaks, and could probably kill Yggdrasil, the Nordic tree of life, if given a crack at it. Perhaps Frigg lived above the treeline. She was certainly no arborist.

But she was something of a blabbermouth. She mentioned this omission to Loki, the one god who didn’t like Baldur. Sibling rivalry or something. Frigg’s sake, woman, what were you thinking?

Loki made a spear from mistletoe and convinced a blind old god, Hodr, to throw it at Baldur. Hodr didn’t have any reason to think this was an odd request; the gods had made a pastime of throwing spears, maces, cats and low-yield nukes at Baldur because his invulnerability tickled them pink. A twig’s as good as a Nord to a blind Hodr, right? So Hodr tossed the spear, it hit Baldur, and Baldur dropped down dead.

The pantheon petitioned the goddess of Hades, Hel-Half-Rotted, to release Baldur. Hel said she was fine with that so long as the gods got a unanimous vote on it. Which they did—almost. One Frost Giant refused. Given that the Frost Giants and Gods were mortal enemies it’s not real clear why they had a say in the matter, but in this instance the Giant was Loki in disguise, adding yet another letter to his personal LGBTQ designation.

So poor old Baldur went to Hel, and Loki ended up strapped by his own entrails to a table while a poisonous snake dripped venom into his eyes. But he got over it.

Light bringers come, and light bringers go, usually in horrible fashions. We have a streak in us that likes to tear down the thinkers and the optimists, and make some sort of ersatz “moral lesson” from them. Baldur seems the exception to that rule; there’s no homily that he deserved to die for any number of (usually) demented reasons. If there’s a lesson here at all, it’s that popularity and civility can’t protect you from the random vagaries of the universe or even a malignant plot with unlikely odds of working.

But here’s the thing; Baldur dies, as do light bringers, and are gone from this world. But the world keeps on turning. The next day following solstice, a ship stationed exactly at the Arctic circle might see a brief glint of sunlight to the south before seconds later, the sun sets again. The nights get shorter, and eventually, the days get warmer. The equinox—twelve hours of daylight—will inevitably come three months later. No matter how many light bringers die, the light returns, on its own, and in its own immutable pattern. It’s one of the few things in this world we can absolutely count on.

It is also the first day of winter, and even as the light slowly returns, the storms and the cold hold sway. The return of the light isn’t a solution. It is, instead, a promise.

It’s dark now. But Earth has made a promise to her children, one that even Loki can’t thwart.

Don’t lose hope. Never lose hope.

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Pearl Harbor — And other attacks on government facilities

Pearl Harbor

And other attacks on government facilities

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

December 11th, 2021

I wrote a piece the other day about the burning of the Christmas tree in front on the Fox News New York headquarters that was mildly sympathetic to Fox.  I pointed out that they could turn the arson into a positive by reaching out and helping the homeless man accused of setting the fire in the spirit of the holiday. OK, we both know that was never going to happen.  I like teasing fascists.

Instead, Fox went into breast-beating and garment-rending mode.  They gave it more air time than they did the Jan. 6th attack on the Capitol.  They praised themselves for having the courage to stand up to this assault on everything is good and decent and pure.

Then they tried comparing it to the attack on Pearl Harbor.  Inspired, perhaps, by the fact that the man accused of setting the blaze is Hawaiian.

If you have a sufficiently depraved mind, one capable of pulling up phrases that would make Satan blush and Trump avert his eyes awkwardly, then you can guess at what my attitude toward Fox News is now.

Pearl Harbor.  Christ…

OK, the arson did occur on December 7th. Going by that logic, if I sneak into one of their loos and drop a cherry bomb in the crapper, blowing it up, that would be comparable to the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima if I did it on 6th August? My mum was born on January 6th. If word gets out, will QAnon make her a saint?

If we want to mess with these people, we could dump a bunch of ladyfingers under Mar-A-Lago along with a picture of Amy Comey Barrett on November 5th. Just have some rando Englishman explain it to you. Make sure it’s a real Englishman and not just some Brit. You want the full piquancy of the arched-eyebrow condescension.

OK, moving on…

What? You wanted a dissertation on the morals and ethics of Fox News? Well, they don’t got none. Finito! Moving on. Delivered in the tone of an archaeology professor explaining for the fifth time why the story of Noah’s Ark isn’t in the syllabus.

We done with “My dog is plotting against me” type nuttiness. Now we’re going to Kesey’s ever-loving bull goose loony assortment. But which I mean, a version, perhaps THE version, of the 32 page Power Point memo the GOP were passing around on how to overthrow the government and destroy the United States. The official title of this document, dated January 5th 2021, was “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN” If you want to read it for yourself (and it’s actually about three typewritten pages long) then you can find it at Archive.org 

The talking points show the direction this is headed. “The Chinese systematically gained control over our election system constituting a national security emergency – The electronic voting machines were compromised and cannot be trusted to provide an accurate vote count – To restore confidence the “failsafe” of counting the paper ballots must be used to determine who won the election for President, Senators, Congressional Representatives – Hand counts reported by the media are not really hand counts and easily subverted.”

Got all that? The Chinese Communists (who are actually capitalists), headed by that noted Chinese Leader Hugo Chavez (who was at least a socialist, but still not a communist) subverted the election by using Chinese voting machines made in the well-known Chinese province of Canada.

It goes downhill from there.

Back in 1954, there was a book, How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff. The title is pretty self-explanatory. Someone needs to write a similar book, “How to bullshit with charts.” The FF, FI & O tries strenuously to do just that. On slide 5, for example, there are charts purporting to show huge Trump leads in states he subsequently lost, alluding to a “pause” in the counting. There’s nothing to show where the charts came from, when they were tabulated, or what the “pause” was. But boy-howdy, they shore looks like real honest-to-gaw charts. A series of charts purporting to show “fixing the vote” follows, all with official looking and undescribed synoptic lines beneath to make it look like someone was using actual arithmetic. This is followed by “The Algorhythm” which is a more complicated chart designed to awe and impress Republican Congressmen smart enough to know what a chart is but not what it’s supposed to do. This is followed by “Where and How It’s Done” which would look right at home on a corkboard in a basement, with random paper clipping and scribbled notes connected by red yarn with a big box saying “Illuminati” in the middle. This is followed by a page, ironically advising, “One Tactic that is part of a larger Strategic Plan. Other tactics include riots, threats, censorship, looting, etc.” Eek! Scary! “Riots, Threats, Censorship, Looting, etc.,” you say? Oh, what’s a poor Republican to do! Summon the Proud Boys! They’ll protect us!

It then dips back into the tin-foil helmet zone. “China has leveraged financial, non-governmental and foreign allies including Venezuela to acquire INFLUENCE and CONTROL US Voting Infrastructure in at least 28 States. KEY Issue in 2020: Critical Infrastructure control utilized as part of ongoing globalist/socialist operation to subvert the will of United States Voters and install a China ally.”

Well, here you were, all fat, dumb and happy, and you had no idea your will had been subverted by Hugo Chavez. Pretty smart for a dead guy! You have to give him credit.

It rants about perfidious Venezuelans, Chinese and Canadians for a bit, noting that like all commies, they have for-profit corporations (eek!). Then it gets around to “Perpetrators” Those are: “•Local Zealots –illegal ballot harvesting, illegal voter roles, counterfeit mail-in and absentee ballots, and illegal adjudication changes •Electronic Voting machines that shift votes from one candidate to another either through an algorithm or adjudications •Foreign Actors that shift votes and/or add votes all across the country either through adjudications or outright database overwrites •In this election, all 3 demonstrably occurred, but not necessarily in a coordinated fashion.”

Good thing they weren’t in a coordinated fashion. If only those zealots knew how to speak Cantonese, or even Mandarin!

You get the drift. This may not be the exact copy of the one shown to Republican congressionals on the 5th of January, but I’ll bet that copy is essentially the same. And they were advised to hunker down and expect a serious effort to stop the electoral college vote.

Psst! Think we should teach them how to spell ‘algorithm’?

It’s easy to laugh, but remember this: Hitler’s Nazis were widely seen as ineffectual, too nasty to get elected, and really, really ridiculous.

This lot are the same. Laugh, but don’t dismiss the threat they pose. These are the same people.

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Doug LaMalfa — What it’s like to have an embarrassing GOP drone

Doug LaMalfa

What it’s like to have an embarrassing GOP drone

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

November 17th, 2021

Back in December 2020, Doug LaMalfa, Republican Congressman from California’s first district, was the sole Republican to talk to the press after a frivolous and essentially idiotic lawsuit by Texas to overturn the election was dismissed out of hand by the Supreme Court.

In his interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo, the interview quickly turned weird.

“You got any proof that anything was done that was fraudulent in any election?” Cuomo asked.

“You know, I don’t have proof that men landed on the moon in 1969 because I wasn’t there,” LaMalfa replied.

“Really?” an incredulous Cuomo asked.

“Yeah,” LaMalfa shrugged.

“Do you believe the world is round?” Cuomo pressed.

“I think we’ve proven that,” said LaMalfa.

OK, at least he knows the world is round. That’s a start, I suppose. He makes his living growing rice in one of the most drought-stricken places in America, so you kind of have to expect that he’s going to be a little out of touch about stuff like moon landings or budgets or things like that.

In the same interview, he said he would not “’recognize Biden’s victory until he is formally sworn in on January 20th.’ LaMalfa’s comments seem to suggest the House GOP is planning on disrupting the ratification of the electoral college results on January 6, which is their final chance to contest the election before the inauguration.” Lo and behold, they did. I guess that qualifies as insurrection-light. Dougie is kind of a boutique revolutionary.

While LaMalfa doesn’t enjoy the notoriety of a Marjorie Taylor-Greene or a Paul Gosar, that in part is because he is from California’s First District. (Look it up. It’s the area on the map that’s covered with the cartographer’s sigil and a sign saying “Hyere bee dragons.” Before LaMalfa, the area was California’s 2nd district, and from 1987 to 2013 it was represented by Wally Herger. The region has a history of electing rural non-entities who fail to make any marks on the House.

After five terms, his committee membership is, to put it mildly, a bit thin: House Committee on Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry subcommittee Ranking Member, Commodity Exchanges, Energy, and Credit subcommittees, House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, Highways and Transit, Railroads, Pipelines, and Hazardous Materials, Water Resources and Environment subcommittees

He’s the primary sponsor of three bills that were enacted, one of which was the renaming of a post office.

At that, he’s doing better than Herger, who didn’t even get his first committee chair until his seventh term. Herger voted with his party 94.4% of the time, which by GOP standards made him a screaming dissident. (Seriously—in party line votes he ranked 46th.)

On the listing of liberal/conservative votes, LaMalfa is in a flat tie with Paul Gosar (and now has more committee assignments than Gosar, provided he doesn’t threaten to shoot the President or something.) As a goosestepping GOP fascist, he is extraordinarily good at his job. In recent years, he voted for Trump Care, which would have stripped over 100,000 of his own constituents of medical coverage under Obamacare, and has voted loudly against every bill designed to allow the government to negotiate the prices on drugs they buy for Medicare. He has voted against raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, even though a majority of his working constituents would be making less than that had the State of California not already gone ahead and raised the minimum wage on its own. It would not have cost him a dime to support a federal law doing the same thing—it was just gratuitous cruelty on his part.

He toes the party line on all votes, often contradicting the wishes of his own constituents and sometimes even his own supporters.

His votes often come with a large helping of hypocrisy. He voted for Trump’s financial stimulus package in 2020 ($1.7 trillion) but against the subsequent aid packages put forth under Biden, even though America’s situation had worsened (a lot of Trump’s bill was allocated for employers to continue paying employees idled by the pandemic, but of course most of them just pocketed the money and screwed their workers over.) But he voted against the Biden stimulus package, $1.9 trillion, which would have funneled an estimated $4 billion into his district, supporting workers, families, and small businesses—including his own. (He’s been whining loudly about how the pandemic and subsequent shipping problems means he can’t sell his rice to China.)

On the infrastructure bill, he voted no because everyone knows the ungrateful peons in his district don’t need roads, schools, water works, sewers or family support of any kind.

On that last vote, taken last week, he had a characteristically strange take on it. KRCR, a Sinclair broadcast station that is one of the biggest in this district, interviewed John Garamendi, the Democrat representing the 3rd district, adjoining LaMalfa’s. Garamendi gave the station a list of the benefits and projects the infrastructure bill represented and what it would mean for Northern California.

So it made sense to get LaMalfa’s take on the just-passed legislation. This is what KRCR reported: “LaMalfa, speaking with KRCR’s Dylan Brown, responded that President Trump has not spoken to him about the matter.”

OK then. Never mind that LaMalfa is on the Infrastructure committee and might possibly know something about it—anything about it. But what’s this “..President Trump has not spoken to him about the matter.” crap? Trump has no role in this; he’s an ex-president almost certain to be in prison by the time the next presidential election rolls around. Is LaMalfa one of the loony and ignorant morons who thinks Trump is somehow still president? Is he expecting a Trump/JFK, Jr ticket in 2024? What’s the story here?

Meanwhile, LaMalfa voted twice to acquit Trump of impeachment charges. He voted to not censure Marjorie Taylor-Green, and just today, to not censure the evidently insane Paul Gosar. He does support censuring the 13 Republicans that supported the infrastructure bill, which kind of destroys his claim that it is unwise to censure frivolously.

With his lockstep support of fascist GOP policies, he is not representing his constituents. With his support of Trumpism and people like Taylor-Greene and Gosar, he isn’t even representing humanity.

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Spook Says Early Fall — Cat’s in the cradle and silver moon

Spook Says Early Fall

Cat’s in the cradle and silver moon

August 25th 2021

We have a cat named Spook. She’s ten years old and looks to be a medium-sized black cat until you pick her up. That’s when you realize she’s mostly fluff. There’s maybe four pounds of cat inside that black cloud. When she feels like it, she’s a very sweet-natured, affectionate little kitty.

That’s when she feels like it. Much of the time, she’s just plain nuts.

I got my first inkling of this when she was a year old, in late spring. I walked in the bedroom where she was curled up at the foot of the bed. She jumped to her feet, an expression of clear horror on her face, and scrambled under the bed.

I started at the hole in the air where she had been. “What the hell did I do to you, cat?” I grumbled. I didn’t think much of it. It was evening, and most of our cats sometimes get the “evening crazies” where they dash madly about the house and swat at no-see-ums. Kittens—which Spook still was at the time—are particularly susceptible to this. So I just shook my head and muttered “cats.” I wish I had a dime for every time I’ve done that.

Only evening crazies only last for 15 or 20 minutes and the cat calms down and curls up and goes to sleep. Spook stayed out of sight the rest of the evening. And the next day. And the day after that. When I did see her, she fled.

My wife reported the same behavior. And the first time we held the back door open for an indecisive other cat to come in or out, she would see an opportunity and dash past.

We didn’t worry about that too much. The yard is fenced, there are a dozen hidey-holes where a cat can escape any would-be predators, and she had survived basic training by the fierce and terrible Mac, our feisty old orange tom who didn’t take shit from any coyote or raccoon foolish enough to cross his path.

She would hide, and when we let one of the other animals in or out, she would make a mad dash. That would usually be the only time we would see her.

Even though she acted like were were hungry ogres who lived only to feast on cats, we knew she was around, even though she otherwise stayed invisible, and we usually didn’t know if she was in or out. I sometimes thought of her as Schrödinger’s Joke.

But there were times when none of the others were in transit, and we had no reason to open the back door. In which case, she would stand as far away as she could while maintaining line-of-sight eye contact, and wait for one of us to open the door for her. Except at first she wouldn’t work herself up to approaching while we were looking right at her, and we both would end up frustrated.

I finally figured it out, which was amazing when you consider that I am under the considerable handicap of being a human being, a balding monkey if you will. I had to Avert My Gaze. If she wanted out, I had to gaze longingly at the back fence while she worked up the courage to make a wild dash past me. If she wanted in, she would wait at the bottom of the steps while I memorized the features of our stove at the other end of the kitchen, until a puff of air near my shins told me she was in.

Then, one crisp October night, I was typing at my computer and heard a meep. I glanced down, and there was Spook! She reared up and put a paw up on my knee, gave me a direct look, and meeped again. I very slowly reached down, and she gently head-butted my hand. It was the first time I had been allowed to touch her since that night in April. I got up and she scrambled back, but I was only going to check her food. She had to be starving to dare approach me, I reasoned.

Nope. Food supply was fine. And I went to the door and averted my gaze, and she didn’t take me up on the offer. She just wanted to say hi.

After that, she was a normal cat, if a bit timid. She even let me pick her up to examine her. We had come to think of her as a peripheral cat, a semi-feral who came in only to eat. She was in remarkably good shape, considering. She even let me run a brush over her and put some flea stuff on her neck.

At least once a day she would come in just to say hi. She loved having her tail tugged and would strop back and forth, waving it invitingly.

Then, one spring morning, she stared at me in abject horror, and made an insane dash for it. She had just SEEN me eat breakfast, and I hardly ever eat cats right after a meal. Trying to lose weight, you know.

And just like that, we were back in frenzied paranoia mode.

Until six months later, when she reverted to affectionate little house kitty.

The pattern became clear. She would revert to Spooky Spook when the nighttime lows were reliably above freezing and the last of the snow had melted. She would become Warm and Fuzzy Spook when the frost was on the pumpkin. Her affection for us was measured in Fahrenheit.

Normally we’re deep in Schrödinger’s Joke mode this time of year. When it’s baseball season, you don’t see Spook, or if she has to be seen, she doesn’t like it. This past year we added an enclosed front porch with a cat-sized portal next to the screen door and a cat flap in the bedroom window facing onto the porch. It didn’t take her long to figure out the implications. Unbridled access, inside and out! We usually didn’t see much of her in the summer. Now we barely saw her at all. The one good look I got at her was last month, one morning when I went out on the porch to read the news. A neighbor came by on the streets with her corgis. Now, the corgis aren’t a particular threat. Or any threat. Neither could manage three miles an hour with a tailwind, they liked cats, and what’s more, they were on a leash. Just a pair of nice old dogs.

Nonetheless the simultaneous appearance of me and the dogs threw the two cats that happened to be in the front yard into wild panic. TK, our Korat, darted for the porch. She understands that humans mean safety. Spook, who knows better, dashed for the large lilac bush that is her summer home. Both were staring at the affably harmless dogs with deep loathing, fear and disgust as they ran.

They collided.

It was so quick it nearly didn’t happen at all. Showing uncharacteristic wisdom, I decided it didn’t happen. Cats know when you’re laughing at them, and they can be vindictive. The corgis and their owners were clearly enjoying the show. No head-strops for them. Not from those two particular cats.

So last night I was in bed, doing some reading before going to sleep. I felt a cat jump up on the bed behind me and absently reached back to scritch kitty ears. After decades of cat exposure, I can reach back without even looking and accurately scritch between the ears. The cats agree that it’s my most useful, indeed only useful talent.

I figured it was TK. She likes to be hand-fed kitty crunchy treats. Spoiled rotten. I petted along her back. Not TK. Korats have thick, short pelts, silver and grey. This felt more like cotton candy, only not sticky.

I rolled over and blinked in amazement. It was Spook, not only letting me touch her, but inviting me to pull her tail! I glanced at the thermometer. It might go below 50 that night, but only a little. Frost was not in the forecast.

She let me pet her, which served as a thinly-disguised opportunity to check her weight, her pelt, and check for any injuries or tender spots. She seemed fine. She jumped down and trotted off to the kitchen to see if we had done anything lately to justify our existence.

But it’s only August. Schrödinger’s Joke isn’t supposed to be Warm and Fuzzy for two more months!

It can only mean one thing: an early fall. Frost is rare in the California mountains in August, but not unheard of. Rain is also seldom seen. But something has persuaded Spook that I am preferable to the Lilac Bush.

So I am bracing for an early fall. I would prefer not to see frost for another six weeks because backyard garden, but early rains in this fiery and smoky year would be cause for deep ecstasy.

Spook probably knows. But that is cat knowledge, and us balding monkeys are not worthy.

Hope for rain.

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The Master Race — A Nice and Precise Historie of Britain and its well-known suburb, Europe

The Master Race

A Nice and Precise Historie of Britain and its well-known suburb, Europe

April 17th, 2021

Marjorie Taylor Greene and a couple of the more ignorant racist oafs in Congress have decided that what America really needs is an “Anglo-Saxon” caucus in the government to represent the needs and wants of the poor, downtrodden Angles and Saxons. Yes, Greene is the new White.

I guess the first thing they need to do is tell the Normans to get out. They invaded Great Britain, quite illegally in the eyes of the Britons, back in 1066, and proceeded to subsume the regional culture over the ensuing 400 years until “Anglo-Saxon” was a quaint (and inaccurate) term used by historians to give a blanket description of the people who lived on the islands prior to and for a while after the invasion.

When William the Conqueror finished consolidating his takeover in the ensuing twenty years, the culture of the country had been utterly transformed. The dominant language was now the more-or-less Germanic Anglo-Norman, and the largely French-based Saxon tongue was relegated to peasants. Slavery was abolished, a new currency established, and the Angles and Saxons who had the resources to flee had left, most to the Byzantine, and a handful to Gaelic and Celtic regions, where they weren’t particularly welcome.

The Scots and Irish term for Saxons to this day is “Sassenach,” broadened to include all English people, and it is not a term of affection.

One of the weirder things the racists embrace is the notion that “Anglo-Saxon” is basically a Scots and Irish culture. It’s a bit like saying the dominant culture of the United States is Cherokee, and will offend respective groups in much the same way. English relations with the Scots and the Irish ranged from uncomfortable marriage to flat-out rape. Telling the people to the north and west of England that their culture is based on a group that got their asses kicked and obliterated a thousand years ago and replaced by non-Sassenach Sassenachs won’t win you any friends.

Assuming Scotland and Ireland are just suburbs of England is a dire mistake. Trump gave a good demonstration the day after Brexit won, warmly congratulating the Scots on voting for it. Scotland voted heavily against it, and is likely to leave the UK as a result, and Americans widely broadened their vocabularies in a unique and dark way by reading the Scottish responses to Trump’s blunder.

When racists talk about “European culture” they don’t know what the hell they are talking about. Italy and Norway, to pick a random pairing, do not have much in the way of cultural homogeneity. You may as well say that the Serengeti and Keewatin are pretty much the same climate. Most individual countries in Europe have several different and often conflicting cultures. The Basque and the Normans (yes, the Normans, they’re still around) both live in France. And are none too happy about that. And despite having invaded Britain in the 11th century, present day French Normans feel little affinity for the resulting dog’s breakfast of a land they call Angleterre. Yes, that means “land of the Angles.”

About the only definition of white supremacy that is sillier than “Anglo-Saxon” is “Caucasian.” This refers to the Caucasian range, which separates European Russia from Asiatic Russia. The majority of the inhabitants of the region are called Caucasian, but they aren’t the Hitler wet dream of blond hair and blue eyes. Most look Turkish or Semitic, having interbred cheerfully with both groups with whom they share the region. Most of them have been invaded and massacred by the Russians (and others) over the past few centuries, particularly the Chechens, the Armenians, the Kurds, the Semites and the Georgians.

When racists say “Caucasian” they usually refer to people some 1,500 miles north and west, such as the Danes, the Swedes, the Germans…basically, the Vikings. Except DNA evidences show that even amongst the Vikings, brown (or black) hair, brown eyes, and copper skin were abundant. There is no common tongue amongst these groups. Nor a common culture, or a common religion, or even agreement on what “Nordic” means.

“Nordic” bears the same relationship to Europe that “Los Angeles” does to Californians: the further away you are from it, the wider its borders, and the less desirable a neighbor it becomes. I live in far Northern California, and LA is seen here as beginning around Bakersfield/San Luis Obispo and going straight to hell from there south. From Rome, “Nordic” is pretty much anything they didn’t invade back in the glory days of the Empire. What they did invade includes large chunks of what the racists like to call “Nordic” now. Including Angleterre, but not Scotland or Eire.

In other words, the whole “white heritage” thing is nothing but a bunch of bloody nonsense. They are celebrating a history that didn’t exist, or if it did, existed thousands of miles from where they like to pretend it was. The mythology raises the level of subjugated and subsumed cultures to the level of movers and shakers on the world stage. Nobody has even seen a Pict in 300 years, and nobody can pronounce a single word of their language. Nonetheless, they are seen as an apotheosis of white supremacy.

Well, Hitler pretty much invented the history and culture of “the master race,” and he was a whole lot smarter and better educated than the right wing clowns who are trying to puff themselves up into a position of superiority today.

And Hitler was a vicious and self-defeating fool. These clowns won’t do any better.

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Prejudicial — Cowardice breeds contempt

Prejudicial

Cowardice breeds contempt

March 25th 2021

When people hear the term “prejudice” they usually think of the cowardly and despicable practice of bigotry; the deliberate denigration of a group of people, usually for social and economic unearned advantages. It is the recourse of a fretful and unconfident population, this need to systematically cheat and harass people who are guilty of no crime but easy to target. It isn’t courageous—quite the opposite. Systematic bigotry is the province of cowards.

There is a second type of prejudice, and with this as well as the first, the American South is all too familiar. It is the type of prejudice that people have against bigots, those cruel small authoritarians who cheat and steal from the weak.

It’s often as unfair and capricious as the first type of prejudice, and the fact that there is a basis for some of it doesn’t excuse it.

But for years it was applied to white people in the American South. The world noticed the systematic and cruel exploitation and subjugation of what were then called “coloured people” and recoiled in disgust. Segregation, Jim Crow, Bull Conner, fire hoses, the Freedom Marches, all of that. All this in a country devoted to the notions of freedom and equality.

And for years the South was subject to scorn, contempt, and ridicule. If you were white and from the South, you were presumed to be a backward and hate-filled moron, a toothless hick whose own sense of self worth lay upon blowing up children and denying people the use of bathrooms and drinking fountains.

The number of Southerners who deserved that sort of contempt were far outnumbered by the millions who didn’t support Jim Crow and segregation. Many of them did so silently, subject to intense social and economic pressure from their neighbors, their town councils, their churches. Yes, Christianity played a fundamental role in the more disgraceful practices of the Old South.

It took the South over half a century to partially claw its way back from the self-inflicted black eye its behavior in the 50s and 60s caused, to the point where it wasn’t automatically assumed that a southern white male was a moonshine-guzzling unkempt yahoo who burned crosses on the weekend. Part of it was a lot of good-faith hard work by people in the South to turn the page on a disgraceful past, and part of it, in the wake of Boston and Watts, the realization that racism and vicious bigotry wasn’t limited to the South.

But now, in the wake of the corrupt and unAmerican Brian Kemp and the GOP of Georgia, that image of the South being a bastion of racism and vicious cruelty is being resurrected by new voting laws that Joe Biden called “despicable” and which are draconian, deeply unfair, and against all American values. It’s so vicious and overreaching that a large majority of Georgians across the entire spectrum oppose it.

It will dawn on the country over the next few months that it isn’t just the Southern disease resurrecting itself. It’s a national problem with voting and Democracy under attack in a large majority of the States, not just in the Bible Belt but in the West, the prairies, and the Midwest. It isn’t a Southern thing, this vile paroxysm of bigotry and cowardice: it’s a Republican thing.

The Republican Party has two main sides these days: the mainstream fascists who put corporate power and Ayn Rand ahead of people, and the Nazis and Nutzis of the Trump movement. Neither side has the faintest interest in holding office with the consent of the governed; they simply want to rule, and are willing to crush anyone who stands between them and that goal.

But it is first manifesting in Georgia, a state that has, for a decade, been the bloody Kansas of the cold civil war being fought between Americans and Republicans.

Which means the South has lost much of the good will it worked so hard for. It adopted Republicans when they opposed civil rights legislation, they stayed with Republicans when they tried to make themselves the avatars of patriotism and godliness, and they are doggedly clinging to them even after they’ve gone fascist—and worse.

They don’t want Americans to vote. They are changing voting laws wherever they can, and with no regard for deliberations or democratic process. Georgia passed their voting law today, savage as it is, in the space of six hours between introduction in the lege to a ludicrous shout of approval in the Senate to a behind-closed door signing by the reptilian Brian Kemp (whose own election was one of the most corrupt in American history) even as a Democratic legislator was dragged away and arrested by Georgia state thugs for demanding to witness the signing.

Republicans don’t want Americans to vote. They don’t want Americans to have any say in how they are ruled. They pass laws against peaceful assembly, make it a crime to insult a cop, anything they can in the cause of turning the world’s second-oldest Democracy into a authoritarian shit hole.

If they succeed, they will fail. John F. Kennedy once said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

If Republicans want to suppress Americans, it will blow up in their faces. And the toothless bigots of the old South won’t be able to save them. Nobody can.

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Reigny Night in Georgia — The Trump Dump Continues

Reigny Night in Georgia

The Trump Dump Continues

December 5th, 2020

Trump is in Valdosta, Georgia tonight, still insisting he won and the Democrats cheated. Yes, in Georgia, where the governor, Brian Kemp, is one of the most notorious election cheats in America. Between 2010 and 2018, he purged 1.8 million names from Georgia voter rolls (about 18% of the total population of the state, and in a state that has gone red since 1976, the majority were Democrats. What are the odds that a party that makes up about 30% of the population could result in 12% of the names being purged? That’s over a third of the Democrats in the state! Quite a few of the names were reinstated when it turned out the individuals involved were not dead, in jail or fled to the Maldive Islands. He also managed to prevent between 55 and 85 thousand votes from being cast in 2018, when he was both one of the candidates for governor and the guy overseeing the election. Most Democratic voters, of course.

I laugh at the bozos running around saying Kemp stole the election. Certainly he tried, but it was FOR Trump, not AGAINST him.

This, supposedly, is the evil genius who stole the election for Biden in Georgia.

So if you’re Donald Trump and you think this man stole the election from you, what do you do?

Why, you go to him and secretly ask him to steal the election back! Makes perfect sense, right?

According to the NY Times, “He began the day with a telephone call with Gov. Brian Kemp, ostensibly to offer his condolences to the governor about the death in a car accident of a young man who was close to Mr. Kemp’s family.”

Nothing like exploiting a personal tragedy for political gain. This is the sort of vileness that makes Trump such a fine humanitarian in the eyes of his deplorable followers.

Maybe Kemp was confused, and thought Trump was the Democrat and Biden the Republican, and he was just being loyal to his party. Just a silly typo on one memo, and once Donald convinces Kemp that he’s the Republican, Kemp will flip the Georgia vote and Trump will be King of the Confederacy?

Turns out that Brian Kemp wasn’t interested in committing an act of treason so egregious that he would be at serious risk of being seized by an angry mob and thrown into a dumpster and set on fire, so he politely demurred. He did, however, make a point of leaking the conversation to the press.

The White House declined comment, which was a curious stance for a White House to take when a governor from the same party says that the president in effect asked Kemp to commit several felonies in order to stage a coup against America. Granted, if they did deny it, only the ignorant morons who still support Trump would believe it, or at least pretend to believe it.

The Washington Post did a survey of Republicans in Congress and found that 27 of them admit that a) Biden won and b) should be President on January 20th. Trump’s response, in part, explains the cynical cowardice of the GOP; he demanded the names of the renegades who admit Trump lost the election. In a hilarious response, NewsMax celebrated the spineless dishonesty of Republicans with the headline, “222 Republican Congressmen Won’t Say Biden President-Elect.” OK, granted, Newsmax is a trash right wing website and nothing more, but they don’t realize that come 2022, Democrats will be using that headline to show how morally and ethically bankrupt their Republican opponents were in this time.

Kemp didn’t have authority to audit the vote, let alone override the slate of electors, and I’m sure that entered into Kemp’s calculations. If he did have such power, he would have groveled to Trump and screwed the country. He’s just that kind of dirtbag.

Trump did what he always does in this sort of situation: he lied. “Your governor could stop it very easily if he knew what the hell he was doing,” said Trump. “Stop it very easily.”

Well, you know, Republicans have rigged the vote against Republicans, so there’s no point in voting, and be sure to go out and vote in the Senate run-off races next month.

It’s fun watching Trump screw Republicans because he’s having a hissy-fit. Really, I could watch that all day. I don’t have any sympathy for the Republicans Trump is now attacking—most are corrupt, venal, amoral scumsuckers, no better than Trump himself, and they created this monster for their own gain.

The trouble is, if you hire certifiable lunatics to do your dirty work for you, eventually you lose control of them. And sure enough, we have a party civil war now, crazies against fascists. May they do one another great harm.

I fully expect the extremists supporting Trump to try something awful between now and Inauguration Day. Blow up a school, maybe, or try to arrest the Supreme Court, at least the ones who aren’t religious nuts. Trump seems to be putting stiffs in the Pentagon with an eye to paralyzing the incoming Biden administration, or perhaps to force the Pentagon into an ill advised military action, such as a wag-the-dog operation in Iran, or a fuck-the-libs operation in Portland Oregon.

It will (most hopefully) fail, and that will be the end of the Trump movement aside from some whirling nuts in the right wing sections of the web.

Some part of the GOP might survive, but it is tainted with Trump and won’t escape it.

Further, if Biden is humane, determined, competent and compassionate, the GOP will find their usual mix of ersatz moralizing and declamations of fiscal irresponsibility no longer work. Most of America is fed up with that bullshit after four years of craven Republican silence under Trump, and won’t have it.

Keep the countdown going. Forty-six days until Inauguration Day.

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The Abyss Stares Back – If Friedrich Nietzsche wrote comedy, America 2020 would be it

The Abyss Stares Back

If Friedrich Nietzsche wrote comedy, America 2020 would be it

October 17th, 2020

Well, nobody said the home stretch of the 2020 election was going to be boring. OK, so we all thought the polls would be a lot closer now than they are, portending as they do an utter bloodbath for the GOP. And of course we all worried about how many dirty tricks Trump and the GOP had. Some were predictable: the Hunter Biden “bombshell” in which a computer turned up at some repair shop on which there was supposedly a whole bunch of emails that said stuff like “Hey, my dad wants you to have a bunch of military secrets if you’ll just fire this one judge.” Some of the emails were tracked back to a Russian disinformation outfit, but what really made the whole thing moot was that the right-winger truther who owned the repair shop said the computer, along with two others, were dropped off by someone who could have possibly been Hunter Biden on April 12th, 2019, but the firmware on both the computer BIOS and the hard drive showed that the system had been manufactured on April 19th 2019, a week after Hunter dropped it off. My god, the man can TIME TRAVEL! He’s an existential threat to the entire universe, and you libtard sheeplings are just sitting around making Guiliani jokes!

Voting fuckery is widespread, of course. Abbott, the fascist running Texas, arbitrarily decreed that each county should only have one dropbox. Other GOP states reduced the number of polling places, resulting in line of voters in scenes one expects in fascist banana republics. Like the sort the GOP wants to turn all of America into. In California, GOP outlaws set out phony dropboxes.

Trump has openly said that one reason he wants the godstruck vacuity Barrett on the court by the election is in case he needs the court to rule that those silly old votes don’t matter, and the GOP gets to appoint electors in order to ensure a Trump victory. Given the size of the popular blowout the polls forecast, such a move would result in a popular revolt and even possibly a civil war, but Trump figures he has command over the military, and should the Pentagon decide that they promised to spend some quality time with their cats rather than gunning down Americans, he also has a pack of heavily armed street nazis.

It’s not clear what the military would do in the face of a coup. Trump is commander in chief; but his orders would be illegal if not flat-out treasonous. The street nazis would be faced with a situation where even if they did prevail, they would have absolutely no popular support, even among most Trump supporters. And a hundred million or so people looking for ways to ambush and kill them. They might be vicious crazy bastards, but they aren’t stupid. The leaders know they can’t possibly hold power with a coup that has absolutely no popular support.

Trump himself may be aware of that, or at least suspect it. He joked the other day about leaving the country if he lost the election because losing to “Sleepy Joe” would be so embarrassing. Trump very famously does not joke, but he does have plenty of reasons to flee if he loses. There’s a tidal wave of criminal and civil proceedings awaiting him the minute Biden is sworn in as President, along with many angry creditors, including quite possibly organized crime.

He may well owe hundreds of millions of dollars to Russian interests, and it’s not outside the realm of possibility that Putin has assured him that if he defects with most or all of America’s military and strategic secrets, Putin would take care of all those nagging debts and set him up in a dacha on the Black Sea. Trump would certainly be willing to entertain such an offer, especially if Putin assured him he would be a hero, nay, a GOD to the peoples of all the Russias, and they would praise him and lionize him for the rest of his life. Oh, and think of all the American liberals who would be sooooo pissed off if he did that!

That would leave Mike Pence as acting president, and he would be an extraordinarily unpopular leader of a country in chaos, head of a party reviled by 70% of the population as traitors. Pence will try to present himself as an expression of God’s Will, and when that falls apart, he’ll resign. The Senate will note that Trump didn’t formally resign, and vote that treason and fleeing the country are not impeachable offenses. It’s not like the GOP will have anything to lose at this point, and chaos might result in a long-hoped-for corporate takeover of the country. Except the country would be disintegrating at that point, with several powerful blue states voting to secede. The Senate will then convict Trump, accept Pence’s resignation, and dump the whole mess in Pelosi’s lap. That may be enough to avert collapse, assuming the Qanon nuts don’t just assume that Pelosi is an intergalactic lizard with a taste for human babies who wants to take their guns. Which she is, of course. The tail is a dead giveaway.

Now, people have said that I’m too conventional, too cautious in my political forecasts, and that may be true. I didn’t even mention North Korea invading the state of Washington, or proof that there is no such thing as COVID-19 coming out. Those could muddy the waters, sure. But I live and die by Occam’s Razor, and manage to look unshaven despite that.

So there’s your immediate future, America. Jokes by Friedrich Nietzsche, screenplay by Garth Ennis, directed by David Cronenberg.

Get a good night’s sleep, folks. You’re gonna need it.

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Trump Hits the Wall — Flacks find defending his record…difficult

October 7th 2020

Every once in a while, one of those endless screeds that right wingers love to pass around comes across my screen, and I think, “Oh, what the hell. Let’s blow this ignorant dirtbag out of the water.” I’m just a sucker for low-hanging fruit, I guess.

Here’s this week’s screed, which the author pulled down himself within an hour. I guess he had some regrets. Well, we all do.

ATTN LIBERALS: I call this the Biden Challenge!. I Am going to list 25 Things that Trump has done to improve all of our lives as well as the entire world! The challenge to you is to see if you can do the same for BIDEN!.. And you can even use Biden’s whole 47 years as A base!. As well as what you think he will do as Pres, So here we go!!… 1) Lowered Taxes for all of us ( Not just the rich ). 2) Killed Solimantie 3) Killed Al Baghdadi 4) Defeated 100% of ISIS 5) Moved our embassy to Jerusalem 6) Rebuilt our military 7) Got us out of the paris accord 8) Got rid of NAFTA 9) Replaced it with a new trade deal the USMCA ( Much Better for the USA ) that required a deal with Mexico And Canada 10) Got out of the IRAN Nuke deal 11) Has made the EU And Germany pay there share for defence 12) Cut regulations to allow our economy to boom 13) Made the USA #1 in Gas production in the world 14) Broke records on the stock markets almost daily 15) Best unemployment rates for Blacks ever 16) And Asians 17) And Mexicans 18) Is building the wall and securing our southern border 19) Little rocket man is Not Testing Nukes and more ( For Now ) 20) Has been tough on China And has made the USA hundreds of Billions in Tariffs ( 1st Pres to do so) 21) Gave Billions from the tariffs to our farmers that were targeted by China to make them right !!. 22) The Trump tax cuts allowed large co, to return to the US an build there new factories and businesses here. Creating good paying jobs. 23 ) wages are up under Trump !!. 24) Created a new branch of our military The Space Force 25) And pre Covid19 we had the best economy ever and had no signs of slowing down. And he can do it again. There is the 1st 25 I can come up with another. Lets see what you can do with Biden . I bet none of you will. But look forward to see if you even try !!

OK, I’ll take that one on:

1) Trump lowered taxes 93% for the top 10%. He greatly reduced benefits for the rest of us, exploded the deficit to quadruple what it was under Obama. Biden led the task force that guided Obama in lowering the annual deficit over his last five years. 2) Soleimani was engaged in talks with US when Trump ordered his assassination. It was a cowardly act by the US. 3) Biden was part of the task force that killed Osama bin Laden 4) ISIS is still quite alive and just as dangerous. Taking the cities didn’t kill the movement or the philosophy, and only a daft fool would think otherwise. 5) Moving the capital to Jerusalem was a Netanyahu-inspired bit of political theater that guaranteed no peaceful ‘two-state’ solution in the middle east. 6) The military didn’t need rebuilding, but it does after three years of Trump. Morale has never been lower than it is now, what with Trump sucking up to US enemies and disrespecting the troops. 7) The Paris accord will go ahead without America, and guarantee America will just be left behind economically, outside looking in. 8 & 9) Replaced it with NAFTA II which had only minor cosmetic differences 10) Trump violated Iran nuke deal which allows Europe to assure that Iran is not developing nuclear weapons, and now America has no say in a process to prevent trouble there 11) Utter nonsense. Trump weakened NATO, to Putin’s delight. 12) Cut regulations on environment, health and safety. Regulations that saved Americans over a trillion dollars a year in health costs and personal safety. 13) Fossil fuels are the answer to climate change, or so Trump would tell us. 14) We know the billionaires and big corporations made out great. At our expense 15, 16, 17 & 18) Black unemployment briefly was good, but nothing to do with Trump. It was only a hair better than it was the day he took office, but it’s in the crapper now. Unemployment is well over 8% overall now, and not likely to improve until the US is ready to deal with COVID. The wall (the 2,500 mile wall that Mexico was going to pay for) is all of thirty miles long, and some of it is already falling down because the contractor was crooked. 19) North Korea tested a nuke earlier this summer. Kim Jong Un regards Trump as a cheap date—which he is. 20) Tariffs are a tax American consumers pay. Anyone with a high-school education knows that. 21) Farmers got a few billion in aid, but lost hundreds of billions due to protectionist programs. They are not happy. 22) Nobody forced manufacturing to leave—they just wanted cheap labor and no health and safety regulations. They screwed America, not the Chinese. And they haven’t come back. They’re parasites, and America isn’t a good host. 23) Wages are stagnant under Trump and now dropping overall because of unemployment. The bottom half of the working community only got 20% of the raises back when they were still happening. 24) Space Force is a joke. 25) Economy grew faster in the final three years of Obama/Biden than it did the first three years of Trumppence. Again, Trump was just riding Obama’s coattails.

I’m guessing you’ll run away now, but I just refuted every single one of your talking points.

I won’t play the silly game of “What did Biden do with his presidential powers” because Biden was never more than one of a hundred Senators and then Vice-President, a notoriously powerless position. But I will note some other things Trump has done that Biden has not done in 46 years—or ever.

Things Biden hasn’t done that Trump has:

He’s never had to pay off porn stars to cover up sex affairs with them weeks after the birth of his son.

He’s never had to pay out a settlement for swindling black people out of fair access to rentals.

He’s never had to settle for a billion dollars for a class-action suit for swindling people through a fake university.

He’s never been banned from ever running a charity again because he swindled a children’s charity.

He’s never killed over 150,000 people pretending that a national health crisis isn’t real because that would be bad for business.

He’s never turned America into a pathetic joke by sucking up to filth like Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un or Rodrigo Duterte.

He’s never tried to blackmail, extort or subjugate the American people.

He’s never threatened to “lock up” his political opponents, or found a corrupt lackey to investigate political opponents in hopes to locking them up.

He’s never been impeached.

He’s never been accused to cheating the government out of hundreds of millions in taxes.

He’s never made a media circus out of cheating on his wife.

He’s never called for the execution of young men even after their innocence was proven.

He’s never tried to get government employees to sign NDA’s to cover up his criminal acts.

Biden is a decent person who, at worst, will be an average president.

Trump is utter filth and he has been an unmitigated disaster for and to America.

 

So: That’s what I can do with Biden. I bet no Trumpkin will dare challenge it!

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Let The ShitShow Begin! — America, Get Ready To Vomiiittt!

August 22nd 2020

I mentioned on Facebook that the lineup of speakers for this week’s Republican National Convention would consist of Republicans who had made bail, weren’t institutionalized, or hadn’t endorsed the Biden/Harris ticket. That, at least, would keep the proceedings brief, which is another way of saying it would give Trump more time to rant at us about how we’re all a bunch of ungrateful swine who don’t keep our forests raked.

At this point, I think more Republicans have endorsed Biden than have endorsed Trump. No, really. There are thousands of never-Trumper Republicans involved in the Lincoln Project and the Meidas Touch and on and on. Several progressives I know noted sourly that the Democratic National Convention had more Republicans endorsing Biden than they did lefties.

Now they point out that a lot of these Republicans, bright enough to realize that Trump is too much of a good thing and while fascism is good for business, Nazism is catastrophic, have simply jumped ship and hope to have influence over Biden and continue many of the same policies that led to Trump. Others recognize Trump and his crowd as an existential threat to America and are actually motivated by a sense of patriotism and decency. And of course, most are an admixture of either. But one statement applies to all of them: they are Republicans who realize that Trump was a horrible mistake.

The Democratic Convention was a marvel of concision and planning, two hours each night, nary a glitch, capped by a home-run by Biden, who eliminated any doubts about his vitality and mental acumen with a roaring, heart-felt acceptance speech.

The Republican Convention? Well, nobody quite knows where Donald is going to give his acceptance speech. He was planning to speak all four nights, but rumor has it they got him to back down to three cameos and then the acceptance speech. Maybe. Donald’s ego probably isn’t happy about that.

Other speakers: Vogue described it this way: “Melanie Trump, the first lady, will speak on Tuesday night, perhaps from the revamped Rose Garden that she recently announced was her latest project. And though the days and times have not been confirmed, all three of Trump’s adult children from his first marriage – Donald Jr., Eric and Ivanka – are expected to speak, as may Tiffany Trump, the president’s daughter with Marla Maples, wife number two. And don’t be surprised if speaking slots also go to Jared Kushner, Ivanka’s husband, who reportedly has taken over much of the convention planning in recent days; Lara Trump, wife of Eric and a frequent commentator on Fox News; and Kimberley Guilfoyle, Donald Jr.’s girlfriend, a former Fox News host and now the national chair of the Trump Victory Finance Committee 2020.”

What, no Mary Trump? Gosh, and her book about the family was the best seller of the year. Good book, too. You would think Donald would love the attention.

Just imagine how much damage one federal marshal with a fist full of arrest warrants could do. He could wipe out the whole bloody nest of Trumps in one evening.

Virtually nobody in the higher echelons of the party will be there. None of the Bushs. None of the Cheneys. No Ryan. No Romney. No McCains. (Cindy, John’s widow, did speak at the DNC convention).

All three of Trump’s 2016 campaign managers are either in jail, pardoned, or indicted, so they won’t be there. Several of the more noisome hacks from the House will be there, all eying a potential nomination in 2024 assuming the GOP even still exists then. None of them will be there because they love Trump. Nobody loves Trump. But they want to lay political groundwork either to advance their careers or avoid being shipped to the Gulag. McConnell was finally persuaded to give a brief pre-recorded speech.

Patricia and Mark McCloskey, the disheveled clowns who pointed their guns at peaceful demonstrators in St. Louis, will be there, presumably to protect Trump from any marauding Negroes who might be delivering mail or walking their dogs or similar nefarious activities. Nick Sandmann, the kid who caught flack, probably unfairly, for seemingly mocking a tribal elder will be there, probably to orate about the fake media. The usual collection of no-choice fundie nuts will be there. If there’s anyone from the NRA not in prison or at least under orders from lawyers not to talk in public, they’ll be there.

Beyond that, just 55 hours before the convention starts, it’s all chaos. Nobody knows who speaks when, or even who speaks period. There are reports Ted Nugent is on the speakers list. They better hit him with a trank dart first, or he’s liable to go in front of the cameras with a loaded fully-automatic rifle and offer to rape Kamala Harris with it. The My Pillow Guy is supposed to be there. Will he still be flogging Oleandrin, a supposed cure for Covid-19 and well-known toxin?

Will Vladimir Putin put in an appearance on Donald’s behalf? I hear his English is quite good, and he will be offering free tea to all Democrats.

Between Donald’s gift for shooting himself in the foot, and his gift for shooting everyone else’s feet, this might be the first convention since 1968 to actually cost the party votes. It will be fascinating to watch, in the same way the Hindenberg and the Challenger were fascinating to watch. Happier outcome, though.

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