I second that emotion!
Thanks, Ian Bremmer
Category: Crime
Keeping score…
❝ As of Aug. 4, we were 216 days into 2019. In the US over that time, more than 1,300 people have been injured or killed in mass shootings, according to data collected by the Gun Violence Archive.
Click to enlarge
Welcome to back-to-school shopping day in America…El Paso
At this moment, in one shopping mall in El Paso, Texas, the death toll reported is 19…with 40 injured.
Mark Lambie, El Paso Times
We are saddled – I would say politically crippled – by an institution called the 2-party system. In many ways, those two parties are equally corrupt. When issues of life-and-death are left to political hacks who only count the number of votes they can sieve through an electoral process designed centuries ago, ordinary people haven’t any voice at all.
I’d be happy to throw them all out of office and start with a blank slate. Toss Congress and all our state legislatures out of office. Call a continental Congress to rewrite federal and state election law on the basis of one person, one vote. We can survive weeks of turmoil to put an end to a system that refuses to do a bloody thing about controlling the opportunity to murder hundreds of men, women and children every day of every year. That one sleazy industry, controlled by a few corporate thugs, hands out enough dollars to our politicians to prevent regulatory measures that might slow down their profits…by making our families safer.
Every politician in Congress at this moment stinks on ice. You do not protect this nation. You just voted billions of dollar$ to fatten up the military machinery run by the Pentagon…and did nothing to protect families out shopping for back-to-school necessities for their children. You should be out of a job standing by the side of the road begging handouts for cleaning the windshield of my pickup!
I wouldn’t give you a quarter!
Lawyers for nutball MAGA BOMBER lay the blame on fake president and Sean Hannity
❝ The “MAGA Bomber” who mailed explosives to President Donald Trump’s critics turned violent on a steady diet of Fox News, Trump tweets, and Facebook, his lawyers claim.
❝ Cesar Sayoc, 57, previously pleaded guilty to sending 16 pipe bombs to news outlets and public figures… On social media, Sayoc promoted far-right conspiracy theories and threatened people who were critical of Trump. He faces life in prison for the mail bombings.
❝ But Sayoc’s lawyers argue he was just a man struggling with “cognitive limitations and mental illness” who was manipulated by conservative media and the president’s Twitter feed.
Sounds like the kind of defense that could be raised by the fake president after he’s out of office and fit only for the sort of work he ever qualified for: modeling an orange jumpsuit.
“They killed my mom & six brothers.” Trump replies, “Where are they now?”
That’s not a non sequitur. That’s a fake president paying absolutely NO ATTENTION to the woman trying to describe the pain and violence in her life.
From the MOTLEY NEWS blog down the road a piece from here – in Albuquerque:
❝ This video has brought forth so many feelings that I really am unable to express myself fully. The strongest feeling of all, though, is a complete and total sickness to my stomach. I want to scream so loud that the entire world would hear me. I want to cry so sorrowfully that my tears would fill the ocean. This is, in my opinion, one of the saddest moments in presidential history – and there have been many since trump took office. trump’s complete lack of empathy – total, 100% apathy – is completely visible in the matter of 15-20 seconds.
trump cares naught for this woman, Nadia Murad, who is pleading her case to him. And I’m quite sure he does not care for anything any of the other women in his office are there to present to him.
Imagine if you were Nadia. And, honestly, you could be a man instead of a woman. It doesn’t matter. It is completely clear that the only thing on trump’s mind is getting this interview over.
Click this link to get to the original post. Watch the video. Please.
Thank you, Michelle.
Two Hearts Beat as One
Thanks, gocomics.org
Tennessee coppers fretting about Meth-Gators
Daniel Kuykendall/Getty
❝ Police in Tennessee are warning residents to stop flushing methamphetamine, the drug more commonly known as “meth”, down the toilet for fear that alligators in the sewage system could ingest the drug to create hyped-up “meth-gators”…warning that “our sewer guys take great pride in releasing water that is cleaner than what is in the creek, but they are not really prepared for meth”.
The notice continued: “Ducks, geese, and other fowl frequent our treatment ponds and we shudder to think what one all hyped up on meth would do. Furthermore, if it made it far enough we could create meth-gators in Shoal Creek and the Tennessee River down in North Alabama.
Erm. OK. Not personally acquainted with any Tennessee speed freaks; but, if I bump into one, I’ll tell them The Man is worried.
Thanks, Helen
Going back to where she came from…
Thanks, gocomics.org
America’s new concentration camps
Paul J. Richards/AFP
❝ [In June], New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez referred to US border detention facilities as “concentration camps,” spurring a backlash in which critics accused her of demeaning the memory of those who died in the Holocaust. Debates raged over a label for what is happening along the southern border and grew louder as the week rolled on. But even this back-and-forth over naming the camps has been a recurrent feature in the mass detention of civilians ever since its inception, a history that long predates the Holocaust.
❝ At the heart of such policy is a question: What does a country owe desperate people whom it does not consider to be its citizens?…From the Fourth Geneva Convention protecting civilians in 1949 to the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, the international community established humanitarian obligations toward the most vulnerable that apply, at least in theory, to all nations…
In addition to the total of detainees held by Border Patrol, an even higher number is detained at centers around the country by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency: on a typical day at the beginning of this month, ICE was detaining more than 52,500 migrants. The family separation policy outraged the public in the 2018, but despite legal challenges, it never fully ended. Less publicized have been the deaths of twenty-four adults in ICE custody since the beginning of the Trump administration; in addition, six children between the ages of two and sixteen have died in federal custody over the last several months. It’s not clear whether there have been other deaths that have gone unreported.
RTFA. Please. It is a thorough and current essay on what has been done in our name, time and again.
Our state capital, Santa Fe, was the site of one of those so-called internment camps during WW2. It’s a lovely neighborhood, nowadays, with few remembering the political aberration of 80 years ago. What our politicians are doing along the southern border will not be easy for anyone with a conscience to forget.
Computing Genius And WW2 Hero, Alan Turing, Will Be On U.K.’s 50-Pound Note
❝ Alan Turing, the father of computer science and artificial intelligence who broke Adolf Hitler’s Enigma code system in World War II — but who died an outcast because of his homosexuality — will be featured on the Bank of England’s new 50-pound note…
❝ Turing was just 41 when he died from poisoning in 1954, a death that was deemed a suicide. For decades, his status as a giant in mathematics was largely unknown, thanks to the secrecy around his computer research and the social taboos about his sexuality. His story became more widely known after the release of the 2014 movie The Imitation Game.
❝ The Turing commemoration is the U.K. government’s latest public reevaluation of the genius who was convicted of homosexuality under “gross indecency” laws in 1952. By the time he died, Turing had been stripped of his security clearance and was forced to undergo a “chemical castration” regime of estrogen shots to avoid serving a two-year prison term.
The treatment of non-conformity by “polite” society over the centuries ranged from indecent to inhumane and cruel. Those who offended political pop culture and religion both – with their sexual preference – received the worst of it. Admitting narrow-minded stupidity of this sort is typically accompanied by “not on my watch” hand-wringing. And not much more. Still, the admission is part of the process of sorting out the dross remaining in our cultural brain.
