One Unified Ireland Must Be The Republic's Primary Agenda

The world reflects on the loss of John Hume today, so this overdue post is ready. The Irish people, and the Scots as well, need to thoroughly  rethink their relation to the United Kingdom. After the world struggles with the COVID-19 pandemic, the issue of what happens to the United Kingdom will be taken-up as a major project. There will be a binding referendum on Irish Unity before 2025. Breaking up the Union is no longer fringe talk, rumblings, murmurs or radical fantasies. It seems to to be on the verge of happening.

Gerry Adams repeated it so well a few weeks ago on his blog. Partition has to go. It no longer serves any logical political, cultural or economic purpose. Major events cause gradual significant change. The UK deciding to leave the European Union on the eve of a devastating pandemic will lead to Northern Ireland and Scotland leaving the Union.

Buckle Up. It's Another Trump August.

Two out of the last three Trump Augusts have been incredible. They have been traumatic and somehow crazier than Trump’s crazy baseline. The madness begins tonight, with the airing of Trump’s interview with Axios reporter Jonathan Swan on HBO.

The scenario and the agenda seems to have been set by the news media in a traditional way. Reporters are writing that Trump has to turn things around before Labor Day, or he will lose the 2020 election. The history is clear. George W. Bush failed to turn things around in his summer of 1992. Jimmy Carter effectively lost support by the spring of 1980. Gerald Ford never had a chance in 1976.

Although Trump gets away with destroying rules and laws, I can’t see him winning re-election without cheating. So the news narrative is that Trump has to turn things around this month, right now. But there is more history at play, and it is Trump’s history. His track record in August is one of cascading disasters. We saw Charlottesville. We saw El Paso and Greenland. We also know that some of his crazy August behavior last year could be attributed to his knowledge that someone would file a complaint about his July 25 phone call with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky.

Trump has to change his tone, but he won’t. He has to smile and soften his attitude. But he won’t. He has to be competent. But he never was. The game is up. Prepare for a meltdown this month. The really bad shit starts now. Yes, life has been terrible since February. I’m saying it’s about to get much worse. It’s August. It’s what August does.

No One Challenges Andrew Cuomo

Andrew Cuomo’s new reputation as a calming, rational leader is not earned. He’s still a conservative Democrat. He is still a bully. He is still corrupt. He is still cruel, with his cuts to state Medicaid being a good example. And he is still ruthless in his management style. He holds grudges. He’s like Michael Jordan, only more destructive, since he wields state-wide policy.

Trump knows that he has escaped scrutiny by the New York Attorney General's office for decades. There have been eight Attorney Generals in Albany since Trump took over his father's business, and all of them had opportunities to put an end to his business and political career, including Andrew Cuomo (2007-2010). Now New York is playing catch-up, ready to charge Trump and at least two of his adult children with crimes once he is out of public office.

New York needs a new Democratic party. The current party machine gave us such greats as Andrew Cuomo, Joe Crowley, Rubén Díaz Senior and Junior, and Eliot Engel, just to name a few. This state’s Democrats are particularly awful given how educated and how far north it is. It’s embarrassing. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez is the role model for the future. We need many more like her elected into office.

Trump Is Bad At Controlling The News

Aside from destructive tweets, Donald Trump can't create news like Ronald Reagan could. Remember (if you're old) Reagan going into the Eire Pub in Boston for a beer and that made news for days? It was a late example of a president "having a beer with regular [white] folks." Bill Clinton also went there and couldn't match the attention it got.

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Wasn't Trump's pose with the bible strange? He held it like it was an alien artifact. He was experimenting with awkward poses in front of his all-white staff. And where did they get it from? The church? A hotel? Trump didn’t answer a reporter’s question about the bible ownership. And that was supposed to send a strong message to his base that "he's got this," and "he's a real christian"? The White House later called the images of a strongman holding a bible to be “iconic.” No. it was very bizarre.

Trump’s attempt to control the news cycle has only supported what we already know. Trump is a failure of a leader. This nation doesn’t have a president. But not just that, the vast majority of our leaders have failed us. We are a failed state.

All Local Governments Are Broke

Back in 1975, New York City almost went broke. Quite a few people, myself included, thought it did. But actually, New York was able to narrowly avoid a city bankruptcy in a famous 11th hour move that is still studied by urban scholars today.

However now, in 2020, as we reel from the first wave of the global SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, we find that the vast majority of city and state governments across the United States are running out of cash. As I see it, it’s not a matter of if municipalities and states declare bankruptcies, but how soon. Once in a while. Democrats remember this looming crisis. and ask for bailouts. But just like the looming collapse of the US Postal Service, it is quickly forgotten.

The COVID-19 crisis is only beginning. Most of us escaped death in the first round. Nearly 40% of us lost their jobs. Some of us are on the brink of a mental breakdown. Now our governments are running out of cash as a second wave of the pandemic creeps closer.

We’re in a world of hurt, and the pain is going to get worse. And very few outlets are reporting it.

The Most Explicit Example Of Extrajudicial Murder In Some Time

I didn’t think we’d see a video more explicit than Eric Garner but here we are. There are some striking differences here. First, there was the extended interaction between the police and the witnesses. It went on and on. In the Garner murder, the cops did not interact with witnesses at all. Second, there was no attempt to save Mr. Floyd’s. The arriving medics knew he was expired, and I think the medics and the cops wanted him to stay that way. Third, that’s urine. We see a man pee his pants and die while under the full weight of a law enforcement officer, funded by the city of Minneapolis. And fourth, there wasn’t one instruction from the officers to Mr. Floyd as to what he had to do to make the torture stop. Usually, cops will be brutal, but they will also bark orders. Those orders help protect them from prosecution and lawsuits. Incredible that didn’t happen here. This was murder. It was like the end of Do The Right Thing. It didn’t seem real until everyone noticed that Mr. Floyd had stopped breathing. As the Asian cop (Officer Tou Thao) put it, they tried to get him into their cruiser for 10 minutes, so they were going to snuff the life out of him for 10. This was murder. And I have no expectations of either of these officers ever losing their freedom or their pensions.

We need to demand radical change. We need to show up in numbers and threaten to burn City Hall down. In every city. We need full civilian control of the police. Here in New York. Over where you are. And in the Twin Cities.

Trump Will Be Sued

Trump has a lot of things to worry about when he leaves office. New York wants to prosecute him and his children for state tax fraud and other types of fraud. Foreign banks want him to pay his debts. Now he can add being sued for defamation or even negligent deaths to the list. I’d like to see the high courts weigh in whether a president is immune from lawsuits after he leaves office.

No More Civility

No mas. We will not allow Republicans and Right Wingers to clutch pearls and call for civility. Not when the sitting president insults people using very harsh terms. A former president threw a soft, almost diplomatic criticism at the current White House, and that’s outrageous? Think about that. Would *you* respond to 100,000 dead with a soft, “the people in charge here aren’t even pretending to be in charge”? Not even raising your voice. You would, I hope, be furious, ready to set fire to every state house that didn’t take the pandemic seriously. I mean, this is the Obama Anger Translator sketch, right? He is so calm and so chill. He can sleep well at night. He’s not quite as chill as “Stoner Mom” Alicia Keys, but he’s close. And he took the courageous step of making a compliant about the current White House losing tens of thousands of citizens seem calmer and friendlier than a typical compliant launched inside a crowded DMV office.

I get it. US Presidents are not human. They are aliens. And once they are in the club, they act like no other human beings, and they protect each other. But Obama could have been a little more pointed in his remarks. He could have said that those in change are responsible for the US death tool being more than double what it could have been. He could have expressed sadness over the number of our dead. He could have assured us that incompetence will not prevail. Instead, he gave us nothing, as he almost always did. His reaction to the Sandy Hook massacre is still the most human he has ever been as president or in the years since.

My Long-Delayed 2010 In Cinema Post

Her’s another post purged from the draft dungeon. 2010 was a very good year for movies. And I’m not including the movies most people think about when discussing 2010. I haven’t seen Inception, so it is not on my list. The King’s Speech is terrible, and yet it won best picture. I should also admit that I will never watch the Toy Story series, even though I understand the third film (released in 2010) takes a horror movie turn. 2010 had solid genre movies set in eastern Massachusetts with The Fighter and The Town. Both are watchable. Both have good performances and set pieces. But I want to drill down to the really good stuff.

In my book, 2010 is the fourth year in a row ending with a zero that had a really good year in global cinema. It didn’t blow people’s minds like 2007 did (a future post). But there was enough greatness to go around. I really liked 2010. Like 1980, 1990 and 2000 before it, it’s a year in cinema I can return to. Here’s my list, in alphabetical order.

Animal Kingdom: The first of several new crime dramas from down under, which includes The Snowtown Murders (2011).

Another Year: Mike Leigh is a master of the British Social Realism genre along with Ken Loach. In Another Year, he makes his most successful film since Secrets and Lies (1996). It’s a team effort, as all characters and dialogue are developed by Leigh and his actors through research and improvisation. For me, the film was a reunion of some of Leigh’s best actors, including Lesley Manville, Jim Broadbent, Ruth Sheen and Peter Wight, who I had seen last in Naked (1993). It was also the first film I watched that starred David Bradley. The film takes a while to build its central theme of loneliness, but each loneliness subplot it introduces has a payoff, with the biggest saved until the end.

Carlos: Was it made for television, the theater, Cannes, or the Criterion Collection? Perhaps all four. And like another epic made-for-TV project, Das Boot (1981), Carlos is an engrossing, accurate portrayal of the most famous terrorist in the world before Osama bin Laden. For acclaimed director Olivier Assayas, dramatized history and biopics are not his thing. But this exception is one of his five or six great films in his expanding filmography.

Certified Copy: It took a lifetime of making movies, but Abbas Kiarostami finally got to make a film outside his nation of Iran. He made it in France, with MK2 productions (which I always associate with Olivier Assayas) and his good friend, Juliette Binoche.

Greenberg: I was going to do a separate blog post about Greenberg back in 2010. I was going to pitch it as a ‘Five Easy Pieces for Generation X.’ I think it’s great, and ten years later, many agree. I didn’t fall for Noah Baumbach right away when The Squid And The Whale was released in 2005. The comparisons to fellow Brooklyn native Woody Allen seemed too much on the nose. And while Greenberg has a snarky, jaded, and even unlikable New Yorker as its protagonist, it’s a remarkably good drama in which not much happens, similar to Another Year. And yet I think both films top my list for 2010 for their quality, excellent pacing, intentionally awkward (realistic) scenes, and honesty with uneasy themes like loneliness, betrayal, regrets and abortion (yes!). Greenberg gets the edge for a marvelous soundtrack. We X-ers have known for decades that Duran Duran’s ‘The Chauffeur’ is a sublime, perhaps accidental masterpiece. So thanks Noah Baumbach for reminding us. Greenberg is a fine American drama about responsibility, fucking up, and reducing the number of people you hurt while you try to resort your life. I know it can be a love it or hate it movie, but I love it. It encapsulates much of the essence of my generation, as ugly and as unproductive as it seems.

Meek’s Cutoff: Where are the female directors, we ask? Kelly Reichardt has been a consistent feature director since 1994. Marketed and praised as a “feminist western,” it’s a stripped-down drama about peril and getting lost. It’s both an original western and one of very few features made about the pioneers of the Oregon Trail.

Never Let Me Go: I liked the novel better. But Mark Romanek’s film adaptation delivers most of the themes and impact of Kazuo Ishiguro’s work, with the emotional punches to the gut not as hard-hitting. Still, we get an icy and creepy performance from the underrated Keira Knightly. This film also stars Andrew Garfield, proving that 2010 was he breakthrough year as I think he stole the show in The Social Network.

Shutter Island: It’s a solid genre film directed by Martin Scorsese based on the novel by Dennis Lehaine. It’s a third Hollywood feature set in the Boston area in 2010! It’s very faithful to the source material thanks mainly to Mr. Lehaine’s involvement. And for its production values and stellar screenplay and cast, it belongs on this list.

The Social Network: The film that should have taken home the Best Picture Oscar. How does an established auteur like David Fincher follow-up the best film of his career (Zodiac)? He applies what he learned shooing his last film digitally and keeping a well-organized screenplay (something he has done since his second feature). I didn’t think that The Social Network was great when it came out. I was still high from Zodiac, one of the best movies about obsession ever made, and the first all-digital film to look beautiful on the big screen, opposed to looking like a really polished video game or television show. David Fincher and his cinematographers took his flat, sometimes smoky visual style and transitioned it from film stock to solid state drives wonderfully. As for the film, The Social Network is about the talented, well funded, privileged assholes who helped to ruin our world further. And it was only appropriate that an asshole wrote the screenplay. And yet it is engrossing and rises to the equal Fincher’s best work thanks to his always-grounded direction. It also has the best score of the year courtesy of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

Somewhere: Sofia Coppola made the companion film to her breakthrough, Lost In Translation (2003). While I am not a fan of either Elle Fanning nor Stephen Doriff, they both deliver in this low-key meditation piece on boredom - yes this is a good movie about Hollywood boredom. It has no right to be any good, but it is. Plus, Coppola got rather unprecedented access to her real-life location, the Chateau Marmont. It really helps that the photography was done by the late, great Harris Savides, who also shot Greenberg, as well as David Fincher’s all-digital Zodiac.

Winter’s Bone: We now know that she’s flirting with retirement, but Jennifer Lawrence’s star-making debut in this movie will live forever. It’s a tiny, dark depressing drama. Also starring Dale Dickey and John Hawkes, this little film has quite the stellar cast.

Failed State Status

Almost a year ago, I wrote that the Republic died when William Barr took over as Attorney General. Now, with Barr retroactively covering up Trump’s crimes while in office, the Republic is a failed state. Trump is now a de-facto dictator. And there are no checks and balances left in his way. Today was the worst day for the DOJ in nearly 50 years, if not ever.

Another Reason Rhymesayers Entertainment Has he Best Artist Roster

Prof: Squad Goals (2020). Explicit lyrics below.

Rhymesayers Entertainment has such great artists as Aesop Rock, Brother Ali, Dilated Peoples and Atmosphere. Prof is less serious, but his rhyming here is quite good. The video is excellent.

I got guns, hoes, money, dro
Cars, boats, you should know
Dogs, bros, squad goals
Hold up,  whoa
You name it

Guns, hoes,  money, dro

Cars, boats, you should know
Dogs,  bros, squad goals
Hold up, whoa
You name it

I’m throwing money off balcony into the crowd because I want to

God damn I feel good
Sure that you already know
One things understood
Ain’t nothin that can stop my glow
Mmm dog gonit
Can’t I just take my time?
All these clout chasing motherfuckers rushin all around me I’m like
Bitch hold your horses

(Prof you’re the best)

I’m like true I am
Rosario Dawson know who I am
If it’s cool with you, girl I could move right in
You do not understand just how cool I am
Like see, look at me, look at me
I’m on a beach
Don’t try to holler cause I’m out of reach
I got no service, I’m out on the keys
A couple woman
My dollars and me
Bout to go swimming
Thank god I’m a G
One shot for me
Un bebidas para ti
Let’s skinny dip in the sea

(You know what I’m saying
I’d rather do things we remember later
You know what I mean?)

I got guns, hoes, money, dro
Cars, boats, you should know
Dogs, bros, squad goals
Hold up, whoa
You name it

Guns, hoes, money, dro
Cars, boats, you should know
Dogs, bros, squad goals
Hold up, whoa
You name it

I’m throwing money off balcony into the crowd because I want to

Oooh, seriously, look at myself
Condom model over here
Oooh, seriously, look at my flow
Colder than a polar bear
Oooh, straight up I’m an awesome person
Oooh, you ain’t ready for this sauce I’m serving
Oooh, straight up, I’m an awesome person
Oooh, you ain’t ready for the sauuuce

Young Pookie, your highness
Gone find the finest vaginas
From China to Thailand
Got ‘em whinin
Why not combine ‘em?
Pardon me let me chime in
But there’s science behind my conniving
I’m refined and violent
Throw the lime in, fine dine the hyman

Swag
Swag
(aaahh)

I got guns, hoes, money, dro
Cars, boats, you should know
Dogs, bros, squad goals
Hold up, whoa
You name it

Guns, hoes, money, dro
Cars, boats, you should know
Dogs, bros, squad goals
Hold up, whoa
You name it

I’m throwing money off balcony into the crowd because I want to

(Hey)

Fuck it up, fuck it up, fuck it up, fuck it up, fuck it up, fuck it up

(Hey)
Swear to god, if you could throw it at me that I’ll grab it and fuck it up
(Hey)
Fuck it up, fuck it up, fuck it up, fuck it up, fuck it up, fuck it up

(Hey)
Swear to god, if you could throw it at me that I’ll grab it and fuck it up

Oooh, how bout that drink
You gonna finish that?
If your bro talking shit I’m gon’ get his ass
I got two hands that gon’ fit his ass
Knock him out cold, he gon’ shit his ass
Talk on the phones up in Trinidad
Bout to make films up on SkinaMax
Oh you just jealous because my bedroom sounds like
It’s a fucking womens tennis match
(aaahh)

I feel good
(ooohh-ahhh)
I feel good
(Yeah)
I feel good
(ooohh-ahhh)
I feel good
(Alright, yeah, alright)
(I feel good)

I got guns, hoes, money, dro
(Feel good)
Cars, boats, (oooh I feel good) you should know
Dogs, bros, squad goals
Hold up, whoa (heyyy)

Trump Is Broken

The insanity of this. We know Trump confused Nobel Prize with Pulitzer Prize. Also, we know that the authors of this weekend’s New York Times story are not Pulitzer winners, so he was referring to the organization having won Pulitzers. Also the story mentions Diet Coke and french fries in the Oval Office. It makes no mention of what he eats in the executive residence (although that might be an admission). It was actually a pretty respectful piece. I'm sorry he deleted these tweets. They are a window into the mind of a delusional and very angry old man.

It is well past time to pretend that this president is normal. He is not. He’s unfit for office. He’s mentally ill. How many times has he used the “I was joking” excuse a day after saying or doing something that would make previous presidents take the rest of the week off, or consider resigning?

Enough.

We must all say it: Enough. 

It's Time For New York State To Own Its Electric Power Grid

Here’s another post that sat for months as a draft. No reason to sit on it, other than being distracted and engaging in video game playing and beer drinking.

I have always felt that utilities should be public. Healthcare should be nationalized and treated as a public utility. Internet access should be a public utility. And I think residential and commercial electric power should be owned and maintained by taxpayers. I think it’s incredible that New York Governor Cuomo flirted with that idea last summer after a poorly handled transformer fire caused a localized blackout on Manhattan’s west side.

In this no-longer-young century, we have had several pandemics and several failures in our infrastructure. We need a new commitment to rebuild, and that includes making important pieces of infrastructure public. That includes our power grid.

Does Con-Ed know where the bodies are buried? How in the world does this corporation keep it's license? And by the way, wasn't Trump going to spend trillions on a massive infrastructure program, which would, at last, give us a 21st century power grid, among other modern wonders?

15 Months Later, She IS The Thing

Claire McCaskill’s comment last year questioning why Ocasio-Cortez is “the thing” was and remains stupid. I think establishment democrats are nervous because maybe (fingers crossed) young liberals are not satisfied when all democratic politicians seem to offer voters is "at least we're not Trump.”

Chuck Todd made several errors in his criticism of Ocasio-Cortez. The largest is his conflation of concentration camps with death camps. People die in concentration camps of course, but usually as a result of disease, or malnutrition, or neglect. During the insurrection in Cuba in the 1890's, the Spanish put thousands of civilians in what they called re-concentration camps, so that the army could then sweep through a rebel province in pursuit of guerrillas who were operating among the peasants, and using them for cover. What the Spanish forgot, or didn't realize, was that by putting thousands of men, women and children in overcrowded detention camps, in a tropical climate, they were guaranteeing an epidemic of preventable diseases, which cost hundreds of lives, and brought the McKinley administration closer to confrontation with Spain. The "yellow press", led by publishers like William Randolph Hearst, and Joseph Pulitzer, published story after story highlighting Spanish atrocities, and demanding a U.S. response. The result, eventually, was the Spanish- American War. The US, as we speak, is currently holding more than 53,000 peaceful refugees in concentration camps.

In another episode, Fox News found Ocasio-Cortez’ low net worth to be very funny. Remember, the Republican Party and it's obsequious acolytes at Faux News, can't imagine a struggling working class politician. After all, the Republican base, so called, consists of aggrieved middle and upper middle class whites, who view the poor and the near- poor as both dangerous and unworthy. The notion of such a declasse person actually winning a place at the table of power strikes them as radical and alarming. How dare she presume to occupy a position of authority! As for not having enough to afford an apartment in Washington DC, of course that's  hilarious. Such a thing is contrary to natural law good manners.

The Right Wing is downright obsessed with Ocascio-Cortez (and they will never show her respect and call her by her full last name). Anything she does, from going to a hair salon to making margaritas at home, they pay attention and spend their time attacking and obsessing.

Ocascio-Cortez is a Democratic Socialist. The DSA is the fastest-growing political party in the US. Nearly every candidate she has endorsed has won. So yes, she IS the thing. The old machine that runs the Democratic Party will one day be replaced by young progressives. It might come too late for the nation, but the Democratic party is due for an upgrade. If we Democratic Socialists stay focused and committed, we will change this party.

Governing By Owning The Libs

The crisis this nation is going through is a good time to grab a draft post and finish it. Here’s a simple one. Donald Trump is only the president of his base. Everyone else is, by definition, the  "other", the enemy, the un-Americans, who should go back to where they came from.

His base adores him, in large part, because his enemies are theirs. Anything he does, no matter how ridiculous or harmful to his voters, is fine with them, as long as it irritates Democrats, liberals and progressives. Irrational? You bet. But his supporters have always known that most of his policies are bullshit, that he really can't govern in any traditional or even rational sense of that term, but all that's beside the point. These people don't believe that the hated government can solve problems or get the nation through a crisis in any case. So what if he's a clown, and his administration is a scandalous embarrassment to the nation? They love the show, and the impotent fury of the liberals and the few serious minded conservatives. And, it goes without saying that the paymasters of the Republican party may hate his oafishness, but they couldn't be happier with his tax policies, his anti-unionism, his deregulation of their companies, and his pro-corporate judges. For the one percent, this jerk is manna from heaven!

The Democratic Party Has Shifted. It's Leadership Is Standing Still.

Just a quick post that the reason Joe Biden is the presumptive DNC nominee is because the party leadership and its network of pundits and consultants have decided to carry Joe Biden over the line. The candidate can’t carry himself. So the party flexed its muscles to shift all significant endorsements to Biden’s column to secure a Super Tuesday victory. The typical Democratic voter hasn’t seen Joe Biden much, so they are voting for the Joe Biden they remember. I really do think that’s what’s happening. If Trump supporters imagine their man being an actual billionaire, who got fantastic deals done, and has the expertise and ability to run our massive Federal government, then Biden’s voters think he is still Obama’s attack dog - the man who pumped iron at his desk in 2015 and was nearly gifted a C7 Corvette Z06 by workers at the Bowling Green plant.

Let’s look at that White House Correspondents Dinner clip because I really do think that there are millions of Americans who think that Joe Biden looks and acts the same today as he did here in the spring of 2014:

This is the Joe Biden in millions of voters’ memories. It is this Joe Biden who is running against the ‘strong man’ Trump that his base worships.

And just today, there is more standing still, as Congressman Jim Clayburn announced that his Select committee into the SARS-CoV-2 will not be investigating the 8 weeks Trump wasted in response to the pandemic. Incredible.

Which brings me to the point of this post. While the Democratic leadership has decided to freeze in-place, a small, growing number of progressive Democrats are reflecting the ideological shift at the voter / constituent level. When asked about the differences between her and Joe Biden, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez said it bluntly. She said that in any parliamentary democracy, she and the six or so other progressive representatives would be in their own party. There’s no way they would be in the same party as Joe Biden.

People are getting mad at her for saying it, which is stupid. The establishment Democrats are mad that she's too liberal and attack her from the left, as Nancy Pelosi has, and then the same Democrats are mad that she says she wouldn't be one of them in a different country. Well, which is it, idiots?

Why Is he Still In Charge?

Since the 2017 Boy Scout Jamboree speech, we haven't had a president. We've had an angry man who wants to be the most powerful man in the world, but cannot lead. He wants to pretend to be president, but can't do the hard work of listening to advisers, showing empathy, and taking responsibility.

The press conference on Friday March 20 was the perfect representation of why this man has absolutely no business being president. The country is  on the precipice of a  tragedy, and our national  leader takes umbrage at a reporter's perfectly reasonable question,  and goes off an irrational rant. Trump will continue to become more angry and more unhinged as thousands of Americans die.

SARS-CoV-2 Is Exposing What And Who Is Bad In The USA

Promulgating  and enforcing petty, even absurd rules, is a time tested way for the tin pot dictators who claim to govern us to exercise  their  arbitrary power. As this author explains,  it's  also an effective way to convince us that a system that transfers more and more money and power to the top of the social heap is simply the way the world works, and we all must simply  accept it. It's  been said that in France, the government is afraid of the people. In this country, the opposite is true. 

SARS-Cov-2 has exposed all the unfair, stress-inducing rules and laws in the US that should not come back if and when we get through this pandemic. And it has also revealed our worst people.

We're Surely Doomed

This is a post about climate change. But it is also about pandemics, as we are now living thorough a major pandemic.

My argument is simple. We are all doomed. And I don’t have to go far outside of Congress to make my case.

Here is US Senator Mike Lee, denying climate change, and also advocating that we make the problem worse by reproducing more.

Logic would dictate that if a government accepted the fact that burning coal and other fossil fuels had to stop, they would adjust their policies to discourage consumption. In fact, they would have started to change their policies in 1990, with the groundbreaking, first IPCC report. But instead, the governments of the world -both democracies and autocracies- subsidize the fossil fuel industry to the tune of $5 Trillion annually.

Human-driven climate change has irreversible effects, such as the acceleration of species extinction, which in turn threatens human life further.

And what threatens human life further are governments that deny the science and do not govern. That is the contemporary GOP in a nutshell. Since the Reagan era, they have been destroying our nation and the world. The Trump administration simply denies the science and dismantles the government offices charged with tracking threats to human existence.

Which brings us to the Trump administration’s utter and unforgivable incompetence in failing to keep this nation prepared for a deadly pandemic. By my casual count, COVID-19 is the fifth major viral pandemic of the 21st century, and the first one that will kill a significant number of Americans.

Here is Congressman Matt Gaetz wearing a gas mask on the House floor, mocking the pandemic as well as violating the rules that prohibit costumes and being a general asshat.

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And here is how the US president reacted in the first month the virus was in our nation.

Before thousands of Americans die due to COVID-19, here is a new defining moment for the Trump presidency. It isn’t my fault. It wasn’t me. I didn’t know.

Today, our president took some more questions. They start at 10:47 in this video. His lies are more transparent than ever. He acts like a child who’d been caught doing something bad. And then explains that his handshakes and touching is expected from a tough guy like him. Someone has to touch the microphones. I expect his test to come back positive tonight.

Now That Rudy Won't Be Indicted, Here's The Rudy Opposition Research From 1993

Happy Fearful Friday.

Last month I wrote that I would try to finish my draft posts. I pushed hard in late 2019. But now it is 2020, and I will push to finish my drafts this year. It seems like I will have a lot of time indoors to wrap them up. One is a piece about Obama and the Democrats that dates back to 2014. That’s 6 bloody years! But the longer I wait, the easier it gets to write. I just have to be like Jim Sterling. Tackle that big subject. Write it. Finish it.

I have 20 drafts to either finish or post, not including this post. This post is an update about Rudy. I had long suspected that there was opposition research out there on him. So here it is, from 1993, when he ran for mayor against David Dinkins.

Four months ago, Rudy looked like he was in very serious trouble. He was being investigated by the DOJ for foreign agent and possibly other financial crimes. Rudy’s media appearances, from September to December 2019 were incredibly incriminating. But by this month, his imminent indictment seemed to disappear, presumably thanks to the intervention of AG William Barr. Roger Stone will walk. Michael Flynn will walk. And so will Paul Manafort and Rudy Giuliani. Only Michael Cohen will serve his sentence. That’s not just. But that’s life under the iron fist of Donald J. Trump.