Today's a sunny and otherwise swell day, and I was riding a bus to have a picnic in the park. What could possibly go wrong?
We left Spanish Jesus behind when the light changed, but a few blocks later we were at the bus depot, and another preacher was mid-histrionics. Everyone stepped off the bus and into another unwanted sermon, horrendously loud, this time in English. No thinking was allowed at the depot today, let me tell you.
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| CRANKY OLD FART #441 [archive] AUG. 1, 2024 |
My next bus came after only a few minutes, just as the headache began, and I started scribbling this before we were out of the sound of Christ.
Jesus can bite my big one, but free speech is a beautiful thing. It's OK by me if Christians want to babble their nonsense, any time, any place.
My objection is to broadcasting their nonsense over loudspeakers in a public space. Nobody's asked to hear it, but everyone within four blocks is battered by the gospel anyway.
When I'm the world's new benevolent ruler, it'll be illegal to use amplifiers on the sidewalk.
And now I'm at the park, eating the first of three cheese on rye sammiches, while still battling that preacher-induced headache.
A souped up car roars by, its idiot driver revving the engine, so let's also illegalize super-loud motor vehicles, under the same principle: You have no right to give people a headache.
From this picnic table, I can see the corner of a billboard for some brand of beer, so let's ban billboards, too. No business has the right to pollute people's eyeballs.
Still chewing the cheese, I'm full of good ideas...
Let's start solving the climate emergency, by going after the industries and businesses that make their profits strangling the world — making and selling plastic bottles and packaging, and stinking & polluting cars, and coal and oil and aeronautics and on and on.
Effective immediately, there'll be a 25% tax on all corporate income derived from making or selling anything ungreen. And that tax goes up by another 10% (maybe more) with the turn of every new year.
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Goes without saying, the funds raised by taxing these monstrous corporations go to public transit, and subsidies for alternative energy, and non-plastic packaging that lasts weeks, not lifetimes, etc.
Now my sandwiches are eaten, so are the corn chips, but the daydream continues:
Equal rights for everyone, and immediate expulsion from office for
any politician opposing equal rights. It's a violation of their oath of office: "I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States..."
Same for judges and especially Supreme Court Justices, so 5 out of 9 in the nation's highest court must be gone by tomorrow morning.
But wait, there's more. When legislation is found unConstitutional, any member of Congress who voted for that legislation is booted from Congress, and replaced in a special election within 60 days.
Hey, this is fun. What else?
America needs a bullshit fee: Any media that broadcasts or publishes inarguable falsehoods — the election was stolen! etc — gets fined 5% of their annual profits for every lie. In no time flat, Fox News and The Blaze and Daily Caller would be out of business, or start reporting the news.
All illegal drugs are legalized effective immediately, along with prostitution. "Land of the free," right? Well, we're not free if the law tells us what we can and can't imbibe, and which consenting adults we can and can't screw.
Free tuition for anyone, to any public college or university.
Free and universal health care, including dental and mental and definitely including free abortions, cuz abortion is medicine.
Also, universal health care for pets.
Universal Basic Income — a regular check for every adult, just for being alive.
Put public education under federal control, so every school everywhere teaches the same curriculum and has the same amenities. No more rich schools and poor schools, no more public money for private schools, and no more wingnut school boards banning books and subjects.
Unclutter the immigration process. Legal immigration should take weeks or months, not years or decades.
Free day care, available 365/24/7.
Safe and comfortable prisons, with genuine rehabilitation available. And we'll fill those prisons with the highest-ranking executives of criminal corporations.
Let's have fast, frequent, and affordable Amtrak service between all cities of 100,000 or more, and stations in every city of 25,000 or more.
And gosh, all this will be expensive, so we tax the hell out of the rich.
Welcome to a new improved America.
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Meanwhile, in the shit-hole here and now...
Climate activists glue themselves to a taxiway at Cologne-Bonn Airport, flights suspended
Glued humans had the desired effect of briefly interrupting business as usual, and if you're sane and decent and worried about the world, you gotta respect that.
Still, almost any other strategy would be less painful and dangerous for the activists. Imagine being stuck to a tarmac, unable to defend yourself from the cops in any way. Dunno about Germany, but in America the cops would kick you in the balls, boobs, and/or head.
"Not Donald Trump" is still what I like best about Kamala Harris, but from reading this article, Kamala Harris's approach to criminal justice, I've gained a better understanding of her time as San Francisco's District Attorney and California's Attorney General, and I'm happier to be voting for her than I was fifteen minutes ago.
On the issues, there's no knowing whether she's a fraction of an inch better or worse than Joe Biden, but she's better on presentation, saying the right thing for this political moment. If she keeps it up, she might be able to squeak out an election win against the dumbest, meanest, most flagrant, flamboyant asshole who's ever been president of these United States.
• Harris goes on RuPaul's Drag Race to urge viewers to vote
• Harris calls Sonya Massey's family (recent black person killed by cops)
Republicans don't have a monopoly on being cruel bastards rotten to the core.
Teenagers are accused of boosting $1 million from a Texas Walmart
The only bad news in that headline is that they got caught. Again I'll say, it is morally impossible to 'steal' from a giant corporation like WalMart. They have no right to exist, so they have no moral claim to own anything.
Tommie Smith's famously raised fist at the 1968 Olympics is now a work of art
Courts close the loophole letting the feds search your phone at the border
Elon Musk's daughter has serious balls
A wonderful example of the blistering stupidity of "growth for growth's sake"
Michigan outlaws the 'gay and trans panic defense' in criminal trials
Climate emergency:
• Germans combat climate change from their balconies
• Warning of a forthcoming collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation
• The four hottest days ever recorded on Earth were all in the last week
• California still has no plan to phase out oil refineries
... but there's nothing to worry about, la di da, la di da.
The Republican road to fascism:
• Trump doubles down on ominous election threat in creepy Fox interview
• The violent implications of the "Jezebel" attacks on Kamala Harris
• University of Alabama shutters diversity offices to comply with anti-black state law
• Trump posts bonkers conspiracy theory the FBI knew about — or even ordered — assassination attempt
• Texas woman's lawsuit after being jailed on murder charge over abortion can proceed, judge rules
• Kevin Roberts, architect of Project 2025, has close ties to radical Catholic group Opus Dei
• Yes, yes, says Trump — Harris's husband is a crappy Jew, he's a horrible Jew!
• Inside the two-year fight to bring charges against school librarians in Granbury, Texas
• JD Vance endorsed book calling left "unhumans," written by Pizzagate conspiracy theorist
• At Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal, it's all about pushing the right-wing agenda
• JD Vance called for "federal response" to block women from traveling for abortions
• Texas sues Biden administration over confidential contraception for teens
All cops are bastards:
• Police officers sure do fuck a lot of kiddies
• Police recruit who lost both legs in "barbaric hazing ritual" sues Denver, paramedics and officers
• Hemet police shot 100 rounds when they killed an unarmed civilian, attorney says
• Families seek answers after inmates' bodies returned without internal organs
• Former FBI agent avoids prison time after pleading guilty to destroying evidence
• LAPD officer pleads no contest to falsely identifying people as gang members
• Former Utah sheriff's deputy kills himself after arrest for sexually abusing boys
⚡ LINKS FOR THINKS ⚡
• Unpleasant design, on purpose
• How the Sports Bra kicked off a women's sports movement
⚰️ DEAD PEOPLE ⚰️
Ismail al-Ghoul
journalist
Rami al-Rifi
cameraman
Junro Anan
baseballer, Hiroshima Carp
Erica Ash
comedian, The Big Gay Sketch Show
Bobby Banas
dancer, West Side Story
Bob Booker
writer, The First Family
Ayden Rose Burt
teacher
William Calley
The one war criminal they caught
Eddie Canales
activist
Grace Davis
forgotten person
Randy Kehler
Pentagon Papers
Lewis H Lapham
writer, publisher, Lapham's Quarterly
Kevin Eugene Lively
forgotten person
Francine Pascal
author, "Sweet Valley High" books
James C Scott
anarchist
Damon Spiller
forgotten person
Lorenzo Tobin
party-boat worker
8/1/2024
Cranky Old Fart is annoyed and complains and very occasionally offers a kindness, along with anything off the internet that's made me smile or snarl. All opinions fresh from my ass. Top illustration by Jeff Meyer. Click any image to enlarge. Comments & conversations invited.
Tip 'o the hat to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, Atomic Raunch, Bleepity-Bleep, Breakfast at Ralf's, Dirty Blonde Mind, Ensalada de lengua de pajaritos, Jesus Is My Hostage, Lemmy.world, A Sudden Violent Jerk, Mr Souza's Happy Place, Voenix Rising, and anywhere else I've stolen links, illustrations, or inspiration.
Special thanks to Linden Arden, Becky Jo, Wynn Bruce, Joey Jo Jo emeritus, Jeff Meyer, John the Basket, Dave S, Name Withheld, and always extra special thanks to my lovely late Stephanie, who gave me 21 years and proved that the world isn't always shitty.
“I Will Not Cut My Conscience to Fit This Year’s Fashions” . . . Lillian Hellman
ReplyDeleteHammett and Hellman wrote a movie together, and it's on my list. Neither named names.
Delete. . . and Hammett was quite ill at the time and died fairly shortly after release. Hammett didn't know the names of the contributors to the organization of which he was Honorary Chairman, but he made a point of refusing to name names anyway. Prison finished him off. He died in the care of Ms Hellman. Neither was a perfect person nor a perfect writer, but when the chips were on the table they both told HUAC to go fuck themselves.
DeleteJohn
I've been reading about Hammett for no particular reason, and he was an interesting dude. Lots of people love biographies, and you're one of them as I recall, but I'm of a mixed mind. Reading a full-fledged biography would feel intrusive, unless he wrote one himself.
DeleteOr maybe it's projection — I'd sure be posthumously hacked off if someone researched me and wrote my biography after I'm dead.
I'm a history guy. I don't read much of "The Life of . . . " but read a fair amount of "The Life and Times of . . .". Sixty years of serious reading, and I'm just beginning to understand the 20th century. My dad stopped serious reading at 90 and died at 92. I'm not counting on anything like that, but I keep reading just in case.
DeleteJohn
Pre-internet I read about a book a week. Now I read about eight books a year. Thus I don't understand much and never will.
DeleteAin't proud of that, but also ain't ashamed enough to quit looking at memes and read The Decline and Fall of the American Empire.
Why did your dad stop serious reading?
Dad lost sight in one eye and partial sight in the other. He could never adapt to audiobooks, although we bought him some and he enjoyed a few of them. He could read OK, but his working eye got tired pretty quickly and he became discouraged. But, oddly enough, I have a story. . . Mom died 14 years before Dad, and they had a great relationship, beginning to end, although Mom had dementia for a decade before she died and rarely knew who Dad was for the last five years of her life. So when Dad moved to a care facility five years before HE died, he met a nice lady and they ate meals together in the facility cafe. AND she had a car at the facility although she couldn't quite see well enough to drive. The facility was about two miles from Point Defiance Park. It was actually on the same road (North Pearl) so no turns. Dad had given up his car because of his eyesight, but he was probably a better one-eyed driver than most people who have the use of both eyes. OK, pretty close, anyway.
DeleteThe facility management asked for a meeting with my sister and me. They told us that Dad and his lady-friend had been sneaking out to drive to the park when neither had a current drivers' license. Sis and I decided that if he couldn't see well enough to drive, he wouldn't drive and asked the facility managers if they could look the other way when Dad and the lady snuck out. Let them think they were getting away with it: make it a caper.
They kept visiting Point Defiance on nice days until the lady got sick, then sicker, then died. We never told Dad we were aware he was dating without a license. Older people ought to get away with shit too, and Dad loved capers.
Point Defiance is a beautiful place: 760 acres of old growth forest and a few acres of manicured gardens, a nice family restaurant, a boat house, a wonderful beach, trails for hiking, and hundreds of views of Puget Sound. I will never go there again without thinking about Dad, enjoying the scenery on an illegal caper with his new friend, together, absent without leave.
John
John oh John, how you can tell a story. Anything you write is good, and anything you write about your dad is great. Seems to be a rule.
DeleteI agree with all your "If I were King" proposals. Bring it on! In fact, this whole post is on fire today. Bravo!
ReplyDeleteHear Hear!
DeleteWhy thank you both. Kinda thought I was being silly, but it sure was easy to write. All my political crankiness in one page...
Delete"My family were all Nazis."
ReplyDeleteLaurence Rees made several really good documentaries about the Nazis, catching these guys during their last few years or so before they began to die off. One thing he said always floored me: "I never met a poor former Nazi."
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2005/aug/24/secondworldwar.broadcasting
Wow. Straight from the participants? This I gotta see.
DeleteAs for "never met a poor former Nazi," sometimes I kick my own head when I've missed something obvious. Yeah. Nobody seized everything the genuine German Nazis owned, and it takes some serious funds to emigrate to South America.
You've probably seen his docs — big multipart series for the BBC like "The Nazis: A Warning From History" that cleans up a lot of past mythologies and new ones. They're incredibly good, not in a "here's what happened in 1942" way, but explaining how this shit happened.
DeleteThe interviews are remarkable in supporting the points being made. A housewife reads a letter she sent to the Gestapo tipping them off that her neighbor was possibly a lesbian, and many of her strange visitors seem to be Jewish. She laughs through the whole thing, a little granny saying "Ah, I was wondering when you'd bring this stuff up ha ha ha." The wider point being explained is that the Gestapo was contrary to expectations massively understaffed and relied extensively on ordinary people like this.
The rich ex-Nazis were very much in Germany and not the ones that fled. By the '60s much of the state apparatus was staffed run by former Nazi party members, the highest echelons of industry even more so.
I grok that lots of Germans joined the Nazi Party for the same reason businessmen join LinkdIn, but everyone in mid-level Nazi management and above should've AT LEAST had their property and bank accounts seized after the wat, and probably should've been imprisoned for a few decades. If they'd done that, there wouldn't be many rich "ex" Nazis.
DeleteReminds me of America's cancerous mistake from the Civil War — instead of punishing, humiliating, and breaking the Confederates for their treason, they were wrist slapped and allowed to keep everything and pass along their mythology of Southern Glory and "good old days." I don't think we'd have a Southern problem today, if the USA had seized everything the Confederate leadership owned and imprisoned every damned one of them.
So yeah, A Warning From History is the one I put on my playlist yesterday. Looking forward to the ordinary participants' perspective, which I expect will look familiar to here and now. Can't even count the number of people I've known who'd write that lady's letter if there was a Gestapo to send it to.
> They're incredibly good, not in a "here's what happened in 1942" way, but explaining how this shit happened.
I rarely say this, because it's too easily misunderstood, but the Holocaust bores me. I grew up with the Holocaust as a history lesson and Nazis as bad guys in movies and books and TV, so "Nazis are bad, m'kay," is a lesson learned long ago. Seeing and hearing again that "Nazis are bad" is of no interest to me. I understand THAT such shit happened, what I'd like to understand is HOW such shit happened.
"Reminds me of America's cancerous mistake from the Civil War"
DeleteThese are directly linked! One of the most remarkable things I've ever learned is that the hoax that made rehabilitating Nazis possible — the "myth of the clean Wehrmacht" which held that the army was mostly a professional fighting force and not the most revolting extermination machine in history, creating a slave economy and almost all of their crimes happening outside of concentration camps — was a direct descendent of the "myth of the lost cause" of the Confederacy. This is another of the bits of history too new for many to have learned in school but it's real:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_clean_Wehrmacht#The_%22Lost_Cause%22_of_Nazi_Germany
The entire article is top notch from the further reading I've done.
That's a potent piece. Seems very much the same strategy, to preach that perhaps "mistakes were made" but our side was entirely great guys fighting for a great cause, which we won't even mention except under the piffle "mistakes were made."
DeleteI've gone down a shallow rabbit hole of Edward J Davies and Ronald Smelser — shallow because I'm not going to read their books on the subject, but if you have, I gotta question I haven't yet figured the answer to. Did they say that the "Lost Cause" of Wehrmacht was *inspired* by the "Lost Cause" of the Confederacy? Like, was it an intentional rerun, or just two fantastically evil regimes getting their butts kicked and responding with similar mythmaking?
And also dang it, every time I think I've had an original thought or brilliant moment, it always, always turns out someone's had the same thought and given it much more than a moment and turned it into something serious or a frickin' school of thought.
I'm no expert, but I think it would have happened anyway. The big thing is that the Lost Cause had a forward-moving racist rationale — the right to continue to persecute black former slaves. The Wehrmacht myth was mainly about an elite consolidating power and thwarting prosecution. So the ex-Nazi officers had plenty of motivation to whitewash their crimes and would have done so anyway, I think, and Americans would have helped them if they knew anything about the Lost Cause or not.
DeleteThe real lost cause is humanity. The worst of us will always do the worst, then make a great effort at covering it up.
Delete"... unable to defend yourself from the cops in any way" reminds me of this video https://youtu.be/IWvfm1T3dMw (the one with the oil).
ReplyDeleteMostly it's the drivers who hurt the activists though, some news outlets here incite violence against them (the one that published the video above is one of the worst).
I don't know how German law and courts work, but in America it would be hopeless trying to find and prosecute the passers-by who smack the protesters. That cop, though, pouring the glue-dissolving chemical on protesters heads, ought to be easy to ID and prosecute. And I am assuming that was something more powerful than WD-40.
DeleteI've never heard of them being prosecuted, also most people really don't care about it (or are glad they did it).
ReplyDeleteAnd maybe I should've clarified, but that "chemical" is just vegetable oil(*). I don't think she got punished for it either.
I've also never heard the activists complaining about any of it; the tweet they show in the video was from the activists and it roughly says "oops, guess the oil bottle slipped."
The activists from this organization are doing a surprisingly good job with always staying peaceful and the (mostly pretty harmless) "violence" (pouring water/oil over them) is honestly probably helping their cause.
(*) Surprised me too that they don't have any better chemicals, maybe because they'd hurt the skin. In one case they carved out a good chunk of the asphalt with the activists hand still stuck to it, so they could at least remove them from the street. In rare cases, when they manage to, they just rip the hand off though before the glue fully hardenend (the activists hold off on the glue until the police arrive, so they can clear the street in case an ambulance has to pass).
Had to read "they just rip the hand off" twice before not being aghast. :)
DeleteVegetable oil, eh? Well, in that case I guess pouring it like that cop did is pretty much nuthin, seriously, but also ha. No, I wouldn't prosecute a cop for a vegetable oil drenching.
What these folks are doing and much more is justifiable vandalism. Almost anything climate-catastrophe protesters do has my full support, but it's rhetorical support. No way in FUCK would I glue myself to a tarmac.
I have a dream, of marksmen shooting holes in the tires of rich bastards' limousines, again and again and again. Loosening a few screws on their private jets. Blowing up their mansions. We're at war already, and we need to stop pretending we're not.
Re. Gov. Newsom's attack on the homeless:
ReplyDeleteThis is stupendously horrific...and coming from a major Democratic Party constituent. So California now leads the way with a ruling by an extremely right-wing Supreme Court. SHAMEFUL, especially in light of Kamala Harris's meteoric rise to power from the left-leaning Noble Opposition. Time to boot him outta office, he's turned into a mini-Trump! And I was so grateful he eliminated the atrociously unaffordable monthly share of cost for those of us on Medi-Cal...but now THIS?
- Zeke Krahlin
I have never liked Newsom, dating back to his time in San Francisco politics while I was there, and never understood why anyone does. He is merely yet another uninspiring and *uninspired* white guy in power, doing all he can to help keep things awful.
DeleteAs with most blah Democrats, this distinguishes him from Republicans, only in that they're trying to make things *more* awful. These are our choices: Awful under leadership dedicated to awful, or awful under leadership trying to make awful worse.
It's important that we vote for awful, and urge others to vote for awful, and register new voters for awful, because if we don't, we'll soon see that things could be worse.
Kamala is cut from that same Democratic Party cloth, but if you missed this link, I'll say again that her time as DA and AG wasn't as horrid as I'd been led to believe.