Once upon a time, there was a very good idea concerning police reform that centered around the utilization of unarmed professionals to diffuse situations involving non-violent law-breakers. Wherever it’s been implemented, it has shown remarkable results in terms of effective de-escalation and, of course, a 100% reduction in lethal force. Nobody has a gun, so nobody get’s killed. (more…)
One might think that the top brass in the Republican party would move to eject Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert from Congress. Maybe the GOP has lost all sense of shame, but do speaking at white supremacist conventions and heckling the President of the United States throughout his State of the Union address jibe with the party’s mores of today?
Here’s a commencement address given by Australian comedian/intellectual Tim Minchin. He says he’s not an inspirational speaker, but in fact, it’s hard not to be inspired.
Not to give anything away, but he shares my existentialist view of human life, i.e., that we live in a cold and dispassionate universe that is utterly devoid of concern for us. Our lives have no meaning, but that doesn’t mean we’re condemned to purposelessness and the listless sense of dissatisfaction that accompanies it.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen one of these refrigerator magnet games.
Before the vast dumbing down of the United States, their subject matter was confined either to love and positive messaging, or to absolute silliness.
Given the current zeitgeist, this conspiracy theory theme sounds like a good idea.
“Lethality Jane” makes an excellent point here, though it’s one of those cases in which decent people don’t need to be told, and it won’t deter the pigs.
As much as we admire the courage and guts of the Ukrainians, we need to be realistic, and acknowledge that Russia has a 40-mile long convey of weaponry on its way to Kiev, a city already under siege from the air.
On the other hand, the rest of the world is doing everything in its power to weaken Russia, including the divestment of assets, like the one described here.
In truth, it’s hard to know exactly how much Trump has control of the geopolitical world. When he was in office, we commonly heard from his staffers how little interest the former president had in briefings, even on critically important matters.
In truth, however, what Trump understands or doesn’t understand about the world is immaterial. What counts is his understanding of his voters, and the dynamics by which this core base of morons affects the behavior of congresspeople in red states.
What matters to Trump is not how decent and intelligent people around the world respond to the most outrageous statements, like the one here. It’s all about coalescing a group of hateful, gullible, and undereducated working class Americans around this one cult figure.
With all the bad, there are quite a few good things that can be said about the MAGA crowd. For one, they cannibalize, they devour one another.
Here’s a group of thugs accepting donations to build the Armed Forces Brewing Company, a military tribute craft brewing company.
Is it fair to use the word “thug” here? I don’t know, I’m trying to think of the last time I was given a tour of a company’s inventory led by a guy carrying an assault weapon. The buxom woman in the skin-tight black leather adds a nice touch.
The kicker is that the company is looking for a brewery to buy. The photo was staged somewhere. Their products don’t exist and their prospects for success are nil.
But will I lament the loss of the suckers’ money? Not in the least.
My wife believes, and I think she is correct, that what made Trump such an enormous danger to our country and the world in general is that no one ever stopped him. He got away with everything–the lies, the impeachments, the fraud, the opposition from within his own party, and now, so far at least, an act of treason, i.e., an attempted coup.
In short, he got “on a roll,” the momentum of which convinced him that he was invincible.
The author of the meme here is suggesting that the case with Putin runs in parallel. Suppose Trump hadn’t been elected, and Putin had remained a figure of only moderate importance in world politics. It’s a sure bet that he wouldn’t have conducted a blatantly illegal invasion against a sovereign country and found himself leading a nation of suffering people whose army of dejected soldiers is getting spanked by a relative speck.
The meme here exemplifies what we’ve been hearing out of Ukraine, i.e., that their proud and brave citizens are being surprisingly effective at fighting off their aggressor to the east. (A similar cartoon portrays a salmon’s sharp teeth chomping down on the nose of the bear that had just snatched him out of midair as he was making his way upstream. I’ll add it below if I can find it.) (more…)
