Good morning from my Hunker-Bunker overlooking the Puget Sound from West Seattle. Ordinarily, I would be at my office perched between two stadiums today, but I’ve decided that I need to hunker down here for the next three days so I can work on my SQL-Server project without being called away ever six-and-a-half-minutes for some stupid thing or another. Coding takes time and concentration — especially since I am trying to learn this as I go along — and every time I get pulled away from the project, it takes me another half an hour to get back in the groove again. And I’m not ‘groovin’ at the office at the moment. So I’m “telecommuting” with my phone off and staying incommunicado, which is pissing the wife-unit off a bit.
It is currently 45° F with a forecast of showers and a high of 55° F. Oh, and it is currently quite dark outside at 0512 hrs.
The news is pretty cray-cray this morning. (as the kids say, of course…) There’s the Israel/Gaza/protest bullshit going on, Donald Trump is snoozing and farting his way through trial, and other absolute lunacy to mention. I will attempt to bullshit my way through the headlines for you…
UPDATE: I just discovered that the Rott is down again, so I can’t repost this there this morning. I will try to find some time later to find out what the problem is there. Sorry.
I will try to do this in sections this morning.
Headlines That Caught My Eye This Morning
Item 1: ISRAEL/GAZA PROTESTS
• Gaza protests grow at US colleges, thousands demonstrate in Brooklyn
• Google fires more workers for ‘disruptive’ protests over contract with Israel
• Who’s Behind the Anti-Israel Protests — OP-ED
• GOP senators urge Biden to mobilize National Guard to protect Jewish college students
• Post-WWII order on ‘brink of collapse’: Amnesty head
First, let’s see a typical image of Gaza today:
Oy vey, what a fucking mess, huh? This image is typical of what’s left of the infrastructure of the Gaza strip. To say it is “uninhabitable” would be an understatement. This is enough of a disturbing image to begin with. I could have posted the image of ten dead children, or the one with six dead children, or the one of the dead pregnant mother who had a post-mortem cesarian only to have the child die in a second bombing of the hospital.
There have been constant reports of thousands of Palestinian civilians — mainly women and children — being killed supposedly as ‘collateral damage’ — in hospitals and other supposedly designated ‘safe zones’, and it was only going to be a matter of time before people started raising a ruckus about it.
Well, that time has come. Any sympathy and/or support of Israel following the horrific Hamas attacks on October 7th 2023 has faded away, only to be replaced by utter horror and disgust that is targeted directly at the State of Israel.
These protests aren’t ‘anti-Semitic’. This isn’t “hatred for the Jews”, although there is probably an element of the protesters that are part of the usual anti-Jewish groups that are common in the Far Right environment who are taking advantage of the protests.
I’ve been listening to the voices of the student protesters, the Jewish students who feel ‘threatened’, and even a few Jewish students attending — and being arrested at the protests. I’ve listened to people who don’t really know what is going on, and also the politicians who are either for or against student protests.
It makes me want to bitch-slap everyone. Repeatedly, and uncontrollably, until someone forcibly stops me.
“You get a bitch-slap, and YOU get a bitch-slap. EVERYBODY gets a bitch-slap!”
I feel like the Oprah of Bitch-slapping…
I’ve got some uncomfortable news for some of you:
It is possible to be completely against any and/or everything the State of Israel is doing and NOT be anti-Semitic. You can hate the United States Government and not be anti-American. You can be against Donald J. Trump and still be a Republican.
Also, war is a shitstorm. It is almost impossible to conduct a war and not inadvertently kill innocent people sometimes. But as a general policy, where you don’t give a flying fuck about ‘collateral damages’? That is hard for a lot of people to accept. Shit happens in war sometimes. We can get upset or mad about it, but if it is an isolated thing people can easily let it go. But not if it is happening as part of the plan. THAT’S where people start getting upset.
Do you not understand any of this?
I’m Jewish by birth. I also hold an Israeli passport, being a citizen of Israel. I am NOT pro-Hamas or pro-Palestinian, nor am I pro-Israel.
I am a secular human being who happens to be American, Canadian, and Israeli. It is MY firm belief that religion is for the weak-minded, and has about as much relevance in reality as Casper the Friendly Ghost and The Road Runner.
While Israel has a right to exist and defend itself, so too does the people known as the “Palestinians”. Whatever Hamas did on October 7, 2023, does not mean that 2 million innocent Palestinian men, women and children need to be brutally wiped out with prejudice, and their homes bombed into rubble.
THIS is what most people are protesting — the POLICY of Israel, not the PEOPLE of Israel. We (and I now include myself in this protest) are against the current government of Israel, not the Israeli citizen, Jewish or otherwise.
Are there people on campuses or — checking notes — Google (?) who are ‘anti-Semitic’? Sure. Of course there are. These freaks are everywhere, but up until the Trump era, most of them were pretty much hiding in the background. But they’ve been there all this time, they’ve never really gone away. Trump just gave them permission to come back out of the shadows.
Do we need the police and/or National Guard to step in and ‘restore order’?
Not just NO, but FUCK NO. It would only make things worse, and would only add to the narrative that requires even MORE protesting. And just let one of these students get killed by a National Guardsman and we would have another Kent State, which you could easily argue was pretty much the end of any remaining support for the Vietnam war.
Item 2: THE TRUMP MAGA SAGA – The Pecker Checker Chapter
• A secret pact at Trump Tower helped kill bad stories in 2016
• Tabloid publisher says he killed stories to help Trump politically
• Trump faces potential punishment for violating gag order as hush money trial resumes
• Marjorie Taylor Greene makes wild claim that Democrats want Trump to be ‘murdered in jail’
• Michael Cohen says he’s reformed. Will America buy it?
The first three headlines has been treated more as ‘speculation’ than fact up until this point, where it has now become official fact. What I didn’t know up until know was that the National Enquirer was the sole source for Trump’s unhinged accusation that Ted Cruz’ father was connected to Lee Harvey Oswald. Up until now, I thought that was just a brain fart of Donald Trump’s.
Moscow Marjorie’s claim that Democrats want Trump to be ‘murdered in jail’?
I’m going to let you in on a little ‘secret’: Donald Trump probably never get sentenced to serve time in jail or prison. Even if he got convicted of all 88 felony counts against him in all four jurisdictions — he won’t get a jail or prison sentence out of any of it, and you heard it here first. Not one day, as far as a sentence goes.
Could he be jailed for contempt? Sure, and he very well might be, for at least a few hours in a holding cell, just as a ‘wake-up call’. But no, he will never serve a gen-pop jail or prison sentence. Period.
But he could receive a sentence on home confinement, with an ankle bracelet. If he gets murdered at Mar-A-lago, then that’s on him.
Michael Cohen reformed? Sure, why not? We tend to let people off the hook once their sentences are complete and enough time has passed. I would give it another five or ten years though, before I call him ‘cured’.
Item 3: DeSantis blames congressional Republicans for failure on U.S. southern border
Wow. Something that I can actually agree with!
The relevant part of the article:
But after former President Donald Trump said he wouldn’t support the measure — while simultaneously campaigning on the issue – it was abandoned by Republicans.
Republicans had ONE chance literally handed to them by Democrats and they royally blew it — all because Donald Trump needed the issue to run on.
Do you know what this proved? That Republicans really have no desire to fix the problem at the border. They NEEDED the issue to continue so that they would have an issue — any issue, actually — to run on.
I mean, the economy is going strong. Unemployment is historically low, we have enough time in our lives to complain about ourselves instead of some war we are involved in. The only real issue we have is homelessness, and a lot of that is visualized by the mad rush of migrants at our Southern border.
Democrats literally tried to give Republicans everything they’ve been demanding about the border and Immigration, without including ANY of the Democratic ‘wish lists’. There was nothing in the Democrats gift that included Dreamers, or path to citizenship, or any of the other stuff that Liberals have demanded over the past forty years or so. But because Donald Trump needed an issue to run on, they turned down the bi-partisan Senate bill on immigration.
If you think that Democrats are going to give that gift again, then you’d be waiting a VERY long time.
SILLY QUESTION: Why are the power grids and water infrastructure on the fucking Internet in the first place?
Item 5: ‘Old Age’ Begins At 75
The idea that a person turning sixty-five is suddenly ‘old’ and in need of ‘retiring’ from life is outdated. The government arrived at the magical retirement age of “65” for actuarial purposes of setting an age for retirement benefits. Sixty-five was the average age of death at the time. The idea of Social Security was that if you made it past the age of 65, then the likelihood of your death was near and you would probably need some kind of income to keep you alive and comfortable for your ‘final days’. In other words, they didn’t want to toss old people out in the street any more once they were no longer able to provide for themselves. But you weren’t really expected to live on for another twenty or thirty years like we are doing now.
Item 6: How Republicans castrated themselves
This is from someone from the former Republican leadership in the House. I’m fairly certain it wasn’t Gingrich. McCarthy maybe?
• Never before has the party in control of the House of Representatives knowingly and willingly castrated its own power so thoroughly as today’s Republicans.
• “When you give this many nihilists … this kind of leverage, this is what’s going to happen and it was just a matter of time,” they said.
The perfect storm. There were a handful of truculent, loud-mouthed, low-intellect “Freedumb Cockulusi” who, in cahoots with Donald J. Trump, were seeking “party purity” in the House. What they, and a lot of other people have never been able to understand is that the House is made up of people from many different regions of the country and that while they might belong to one of the two major political parties in this country, they are representing people who are different from people of other regions. Their brand of ‘Republican’ might differ a bit from a Republican from somewhere else.
This is one of the reasons why we don’t often see eye-to-eye on certain issues — our view of them could be slightly different from where we are from. Our Democrats may not agree fully with Democrats from say, California, or New Jersey. Republicans from Mississippi may not agree fully with Republicans from New York, to randomly pick locations.
We may have the same common issues. But maybe our priority is different. This is why it is almost impossible to achieve ‘party purity’. People are not robots.
Democrats learned how to get what they want passed into law. Republicans seem to have a big problem with this because they are more interested in being on the same page instead of trying to get something actually DONE.
To get things done, they need to reach out to the opposition in some way, shape or form and enlist their help. Often, it takes bartering on issues.
Until Republicans figure that out again, they will continue to flounder and fail.
If this turd wasn’t a billionaire, or rich at all, what do you think he would be doing right now?
Billion Dollar Babies – Alice Cooper
“Challenges”. What a strange choice of words, when “Disputes” or “Detracts” would be a much better description.
Need help with substance use disorder or mental health issues? In the U.S., call 800-662-HELP (4357) for the SAMHSA National Helpline.
Recommended Podcasts for Today
The Daily Blast – The New Republic
The Daily – The New York Times
The Journal – The Wall Street Journal
Post Reports – The Washington Post
Global News Podcast – BBC News
Memes From the Meme Box
