Say what?!

 

When I check out I want to be have my ashes spread over the Caribbean Sea off the coast of Falmouth, Jamaica.  I want a very small gathering, and very short goodbyes. 

Something about being buried in the ground just doesn't sit right with me. What if, for instance, there is some kind of life after death experience, and I wake up in a coffin six feet under? I have serious claustrophobia issues, and the thought of...lord I can't even think about it. 

So why I am I talking about how one chooses to be sent off after they say farewell to this life? Well, as you all might have heard by now, tfg's ex recently met an unfortunate end when she fell down a flight of stairs and said goodbye to this life. It was a weird way for her to go out, and needless to say some folks still have some questions. But the place her ex husband chose to bury her... Lord have mercy!    

Read what Matt Prigge had to say about the whole thing: 

"Donald Trump has a lot going on right now, but he’s somehow found the time to draw attention to one part of his empire in particular: his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. The former president has drawn fire from families of 9/11 victims for hosting a (sparsely attended) Saudi golf tournament at his NYC-adjacent course. But there’s more: When he buried his late ex-wife Ivana near the course’s first hole, he may have done so for tax break purposes.2022

As caught by The Daily Mail, Dartmouth sociology professor Brooke Harrington suspected something was up when Trump buried his first wife on one of his golf courses. So she did some snooping, and she discovered that in Jersey, there is no minimum number of bodies required for a plot of land to be designated a cemetery…and therefore be exempt from all taxes, rates, and assessments.

What’s more, tax documents reveal that the Trump Family Trust recently sought to designate a property only 20 miles from the golf club, in Hackettstown, to become a non-profit cemetery company.

So, did self-professed rich guy really use his late ex-wife’s death to save some money? He of course hasn’t addressed the matter. But as per Insider, he’s tried to turn his golf club into a makeshift cemetery before:"

No words. I mean this is beyond tacky even for the tfg. I have no feelings about Ivana one way or the other, but I know she deserved more than this. I mean, who wants to be buried on the first tee of a golf course? Hell Tiger Woods won't want to be buried on a damn golf course, and he made a billion dollars off the sport. 

I will never play Bedminster, but for those of you who do, please say a little prayer for tfg's ex buried below your tee box before you launch one down the fairway. 

Pic from bing.com news. 

Feeling the heat.

With all due respect to Nelly, it's already "HOT in herr". WTF is happening to our planet? It was 114 degrees in some parts of the West. One hundred and fourteen degrees! Let that sink in for a minute. Even Denver, the Mile High City, hit 100 degrees. That is not normal, people. 

I wonder if all those right- wingnuts and climate deniers who have been screaming hoax from the mountain- top still believe that this is the hill they want to die on.  And of course they will reappear in the comments after this post to give us all the usual talking points: This is just history taking its natural course. There is no consensus among scientists that climate change is real, Plants and animals can and will adapt. And of course the kicker: Climate change is good for us.   

All I can say is thank the good lord above for air conditioning. If I had known then what I know now, I would have gone to HVAC school and gotten my HVAC certs instead of law school. The guy with one of the largest homes in my neighborhood owns his own HVAC company. God bless him. But I digress. 

Over in the UK, those poor Brits are having a time of it. They weren't built for this kind of heat, and it shows. There were fires breaking out all over London today, and the poor folks were losing their minds. Today was the hottest day recorded in their history.   The ancestors are getting their revenge for all those tropical countries they colonized. Sorry, I couldn't resist that one. 

Look, I'm no scientist, but this feels different. I wish it wasn't so, but I am afraid that it might be too late to save the planet. We should have collectively focused our energy on saving the planet years ago, but instead, we listened to the right-wingnuts and played politics with our survival. 

To my friends in Texas, I hope the power grid holds up. If it doesn't, your senator will just run away to a cooler place, and your governor will blame something [or someone else], while he continues to take  money from the big power companies down there. 

Stay cool field hands, and enjoy the planet while you can.  

Caption Sunday.

 

What's the name of this movie?  

Hold the fireworks.

 

I regret to announce that the 4th of July will be canceled this year as the American experiment has been hijacked by Christofascist forces. 

Maybe next year.

More guns.

As the Supremes continue to take America closer to being a Christofascist state, it is important to read articles like the following from Tom Nichols ----writing for The Atlantic, to get a grasp of where we are heading as a country. I am afraid this trend will continue for awhile, because these Justices are still relatively young, and they have lifetime appointments. 

Just remember to vote next time. Elections have consequences. 

"I used to think of myself as a gun-control conservative—I supported both the right to own firearms and the interest of the state to limit that right—but America’s gun culture isn’t about rights. It’s about performative insecurity.

Back in 1959, the country singer Marty Robbins wrote a ballad about a murderous outlaw who met his well-deserved end at the hands of a handsome young Arizona Ranger who was carrying the “Big Iron on his hip.” (The song was supposedly inspired by a weapon Robbins saw in a shop, but there is some question about whether the Big Iron was a real gun.)

It’s a great song. But it wasn’t supposed to be a guide to life in modern America.

I don’t have the energy or expertise to debate whether the Supreme Court should have taken on the case of a New York State law that limited the ability to carry weapons around in public. Honestly, I just assume that many declines in the quality of American life for the foreseeable future will be announced with “In a 6–3 decision …” Elections have consequences, and with the current composition of the Court, this decision was inevitable.

The problem is not the Court’s decision. The problem is an adolescent, drama-laden gun culture, a romance with weapons that became extreme only in the past quarter century.

It didn’t used to be this way. I grew up around guns; my father had been a police officer, and we had two of them. My older half-brother, who lived a few streets away, was a police officer. Our next-door neighbor was a police officer. My hometown was a military town, and almost all of the men I knew were veterans who owned weapons and knew how to handle them. (There were some female veterans too. My mother, for one.)

What I remember about guns is that I remember almost nothing about guns. People owned them; they didn’t talk about them. They didn’t cover their cars in bumper stickers about them, they didn’t fly flags about them, they didn’t pose for dumb pictures with them. (I’ll plead one personal exemption: When I was a little boy, relatives in Greece once posed me in a Greek Evzone-soldier costume with my uncle’s hunting shotgun. I could barely lift it.)

Today, there is a neediness in the gun culture that speaks to deep insecurities among a certain kind of American citizen. The gun owners I knew—cops, veterans, hunters, sportsmen—owned guns as part of their life, sometimes as tools, sometimes for recreation. Gun ownership was not the central and defining feature of their life.

Don’t take my word for it that things have changed. Here’s Ryan Busse, a former gun-company executive who has now taken on his former industry, talking about the day someone showed up to a hunting party with an AR-15:

The unwritten rules of decency were enforced by firearm-industry leaders … I witnessed how this worked many times, including one occasion when a young writer brought his own AR-15 to a hunting event I was hosting in 2004. The senior figures there responded immediately. “That’s not the kind of thing we want to be promoting,” they said. The newcomer was shamed into locking the gun up for the rest of the event.

This kind of affirmation of cultural norms can be a lot more powerful than any law, and I suspect that the gun-culture extremists know it. They head off expressions of this kind of social disapproval by being aggressive and performative, daring anyone to criticize them for feeling the need to be armed while getting milk and eggs at the supermarket.

I have always trusted my fellow citizens with weapons. Now the most vocal advocates for unfettered gun ownership are men sitting in their cars in sunglasses and baseball caps, recording themselves as they dump unhinged rants into their phones about their rights and conspiracies and socialism.

The Supreme Court has now affirmed that all these guys can be the handsome ranger with the Big Iron on their hip. You can be angry with the Court for furthering and enabling this weirdness, but it’s not the Court’s fault. It is, as usual, our fault, as voters and citizens, for tolerating a culture that is endangering our fellow Americans instead of insisting that all of us exercise our constitutional rights like responsible adults." [Source] 

I have a slightly different take than Mr. Nichols, as I do put a little  more blame on the folks making the laws.  But I agree with his overall sentiment: This pseudo macho culture (mostly angry white men who want to make up for deficiencies in other areas, and young urban terrorist who measure their worth by the weapons they use) that has enveloped our society, will only cause things to get worse from here.  

 

 

Add climate change to our list of problems.

Still don't believe that climate change is real? 

Well, if you have been living in the FOX NEWS bubble over the past few years, you might still believe that it's all just a hoax. 

I hate to break it to you, but  if you do, you're in for a big surprise. 

The following is portions of an article from the Zinn Education Project: 

"If you have been reading the news or watching Democracy Now!, you have seen how climate chaos is crashing through the world:

Over 100 million people are under heat advisories in the United States as an early-season heat wave continues to break records from the Southwest to the Gulf Coast to the Great Lakes. According to the National Interagency Fire Center, firefighters are battling more than three dozen uncontained fires.

In Iraq, a massive dust storm hospitalized more than 5,000 people with respiratory ailments, in the latest of seven terrible dust storms to hit that country in just the last month. Temperatures in the Middle East and Central Asia have already soared to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.

In Montana, record flooding has forced the closing of all five entrances to Yellowstone National Park. Roads and bridges in the area have been washed away. Flood levels on the Yellowstone River are now beyond record levels.

Pakistan and India just suffered through their hottest April in a century of record-keeping, with temperatures reaching more than 120 degrees Fahrenheit in parts of South Asia, resulting in misery for millions in that region." [Source]   

As if we don't have enough to worry about. 

Thoughts? 

Image from the University of Exeter. 

Just in case.

 I practiced criminal law in Philly for a long time, and during that time I represented some... let's just say... people who who most of us would consider less than upstanding citizens. 

Lately I have been thinking a lot about some of my experiences. 

One particular memory has been standing out more than most. The time I went into a "rough" neighborhood--- even by Philly's standards--- to see a client and collect some cash from him. I never worried about how dangerous the neighborhoods I visited  were, because somehow I always thought that the people I represented, and the cred of being a criminal lawyer, would protect me. This time, though, I felt uneasy. It probably had something to do with how much cash I had on me at the time. A youngster (who couldn't have been more than sixteen) and his pal approached me before I got into my car. They didn't look particularly threatening, and, as it turned out, they knew who I was and just wanted to make small talk. "You a "lawyer, right?" He looked even younger up close. I told him I was. " You got your  fire with you?" I knew he was referring to a gun, and I told him no. I told him something to the effect that I didn't think that I needed one among my own people. He laughed and flashed what looked like a 9mm Glock so I could see it. "I always keep mine Mr Lawyer, just in case". He laughed again and walked off with his friend. I didn't even want to think about where his life was heading. I am pretty sure that he is either dead or in jail now.

The more I read and hear about the carnage on the streets of Philadelphia and other major American cities, the more I think about that encounter with that youngster in North Philadelphia some fifteen years ago. Guns are still everywhere, and every sixteen year old in North Philadelphia who wants a gun can get one. And not just any gun, a really powerful one; like a 9mm Glock.

There are a lot of reasons for these urban terrorists terrorizing each other and law abiding citizens. I could could go on and on about their broken homes, poor school systems, toxic masculinity, and societal failures that have done nothing to address the root causes of poverty. But the quickest way to reduce gun violence in the streets is to make guns less available. It's really not rocket science. And  I know that it's easier said than done, but we have to say it so that we can at least start somewhere. 

Philly made national news again for all the wrong reasons this past weekend.  Knuckleheads on South Street started brawling, and rather than fight with their fists, they chose to settle their differences with their guns. And of course, they all had their guns, because every young punk in Philly either has one, or knows how to get one. They are not in the NRA, and they were not trained in proper gun safety or how to shoot. So when they start beefing amongst  each other and reach for their "fire",  people die, and chaos ensues. 

"I always keep mine Mr. Lawyer, just in case".

*Image from www inquirer.com 

Where are our "allies"?

 

And now I bring you the following article from Candice McDuffie, writing for The Root. 

It's still relevant, although you would never know it, because it seems that Buffalo happened so long ago.

"It’s been nine days since 13 people were gunned down—10 of them fatally—at the Buffalo supermarket Tops in the heart of a Black community. The white male terrorist behind it, Payton Gendron, published a manifesto online outlining his hatred of Black people and every step of his plan to kill them just days before the massacre.

He drove over 100 miles to shoot up the grocery store Black residents fought to have for decades; those same people were executed in it for simply existing. Yet there have been no public cries of outrage from white America, no condemnation for a truly inhumane and monstrous act.

The same white institutions that posted Black squares on their Instagram feeds to prove that they stand in solidarity with Black folks after the 2020 murder of George Floyd have gone radio silent—and the silence is deafening. Those pledges to do better by Black folks quickly became obsolete once it wasn’t trendy or provocative or convenient to do so. 

Where is your anger? Do all lives still matter?

Will Smith hitting Chris Rock at March’s Oscars ceremony drew more ire from white liberal celebrities than the loss of the Black lives in Buffalo. Responses to the slap ranged from being “traumatized” by the altercation between the two men to saying that Smith could have killed Rock. 

But why has there been no damnation from that same group regarding the white supremacist who actually killed Black people? After George Floyd was murdered in 2020 by Minneapolis police on camera, the nation finally paid attention to the very real plight of this country’s most vulnerable group.

The ones who are most likely to be harassed, arrested, assaulted and killed by cops. The ones who are most likely to be on the receiving end of hate crimes—like the one that happened in Buffalo.

Gendron spelled out his motives in his writings and they blatantly mimic the far-right rhetoric used to oppress marginalized populations. There is no room for interpretation—his reasoning was racism and the fear that white people will become minorities in America. 

The same reasoning is used by Tucker Carlson and his Fox News cohorts on a nightly basis, by the Supreme Court to outlaw abortion, by Republican politicians to ban books and critical race theory. Black people have been marching, protesting and speaking up about our mistreatment because we never had a choice. However, the burden should not be on us to fix a system that profits from our brutalization.

White people should march in the streets, speak out against white supremacy, donate money to Buffalo relief funds, stop advertising on Fox news, advocate for domestic terrorism legislation and fight for gun control. In other words, they should be working to dismantle the structures in place whose sole purpose is to disempower people of color. Black people don’t need performative allyship on social media—we need actual, tangible change.

Those who died in Buffalo shouldn’t be forgotten in the rapidity of the ever changing news cycle. Their names are: Margus D. Morrison, Roberta A. Drury, Aaron Salter, Andre Mackniel, Ruth Whitfield, Katherine Massey, Heyward Patterson, Celestine Chaney, Pearl Young and Geraldine Talley. Their memories not only need to be honored but should galvanize those who “support” Black people into action.

White America, what are you going to do to prevent what happened in Buffalo from happening again?" {Source}

What Ms. McDuffie writes about echoes the thoughts of a lot of black people in this country. But it won't change how the Tucker Carlsons of the world choose to paint the narrative about black people night in and night out. 

 You will hear Chicago Chicago Chicago, every time something like this happens. "Hey, they kill each other all the time, so what's the big deal if a racists kills them?" Of course it misses the entire point, but here we are. 

Make no mistake, the urban terrorists who terrorize each other on the streets of American cities need to check themselves. But they are not going into Whole Foods Market and shooting a bunch of people because they are white. The are shooting each other in a sick war for turf, money, and power. And yes, we must do something about it, but in the mean time we have to think about our own survival in this country that we proudly call our own as well. A lot of folks, as Ms. McDuffie proclaims, sure aren't making it any easier for us. 

 

AGAIN!

 

 

How do we stop this madness?  

Thoughts? 

There will be more replacement theory killers. And no one will be held accountable.

One common theme throughout my blogging career has been well meaning people who read my blog admonishing me because I allow the most hateful and vile white supremacists to post comments after my posts. 

Frankly, it's something that I have struggled with as well: Should I even allow comments? Should I block all comments, or just the offensive ones? At the end of the day, I always follow my strong First Amendment instincts and allow everyone to comment. I also allow it, because it's important that folks who read this blog realize what's lurking out there. They need to know how the landscape has changed, and how white supremacists--- and the hatred that they have for folks who look like me---- have become emboldened.

We all know by now what happened in Buffalo, New York, yesterday. A lone eighteen year old gunman took it upon himself to drive hours to find a black neighborhood and kill as many black folks as he could (eight is the latest count) before surrendering to law enforcement and being taken alive (Of course he was.) I am not sure if they took him to get a happy meal or not, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did.

His name is Payton Gendron, and his manifesto on white replacement , as someone stated on twitter, reads like a job application to be a producer on one of those FOX nightly news shows. 

There will be more Payton Gendrons in the days to come, because the right-wing hate machine that profits off white fear and resentment of others will not stop cranking out their hatred for profit. And gullible poor and undereducated white people will continue to think that folks who look like I do are the root of all of their problems. 

In the coming days the main stream media will tell us what a "troubled" and "unstable" teen Gendron is, and how he was simply suffering from mental issues. We won't hear that he is a vehicle for hate that was used and weaponized by the right-wing hate machine to take out his hatred on the people they tell us are trying to replace them. We won't hear that he is the product of a climate of fear and hatred that has emboldened racists and xenophobes thanks to the actions of the former president and his sycophants on the right. These are the people who praise Kyle Rittenhouse, but vilify Colin Kaepernick. 

 The blood of those thirteen people who were shot in Buffalo yesterday are on their hands.  

*Image from WTVD television. 

 

  

Samuel Alito's tale.

 I feel very comfortable saying as a man, that if men could get pregnant there would be more drive-through abortion clinics than Chick-fil-A restaurants in every town in America. 

So here we are. Fifty years of stare decisis  is about to be shot down by five conservative Judges on the Supreme Court. Why? Because only women get pregnant, and men don't have to give up control of their bodies for nine months to bring us our little bundles of joy. 

Forgot social stability and order in society, forget legal precedent, and forget respect for long settled law. These are different times we are living in. Justice Alito cites Sir Matthew Hale for crying out loud! The same Matthew Hale who said that husbands can't be prosecuted for raping their wives, and who sentenced women to death for being "witches".  Yikes!

Sadly, we should all have seen this coming when we elected the former guy to the highest office in the land. Now, anything is possible. We thought hat the highest court in the land was beyond reproach and could not be compromised. Boy were we wrong. 

Liberals and folks on the left are going crazy with rage. They can't believe that America has morphed into something out of The Handmaid's Tale.  And, quite frankly, some of them should be upset. I say some, because some of these same liberals and left-wing purists refused to vote for Her. ----You know, the e-mails lady--- Now, looking back, they are having regrets. 

But how could they have not seen this coming? It takes incredible political naivety the likes of which is reserved for the Susan Collins of the world to believe that these Justices were not going to get on the Supreme Court and do exactly what they are apparently going to do. When they all sat there lying to those Senators during their confirmation hearings about respecting precedent and Roe being settled law, we all knew they were lying. But the political game is so rigged in America, and the feckless and inept democrats in congress are so powerless, that we all knew that there was nothing that was going to be done to stop the inevitable. 

Now we will see how committed folks in this country are to making sure that we don't go backwards when it comes to our individual rights. If a woman can be prosecuted and jailed for a choice she makes when it comes to her own body, just imagine what could come next. 

I recently saw the following quote from an article written for cnn.com back in November. 

"Here's the best-kept secret about the so-called abortion "debate" in the United States: It's actually not that much of a debate at all. A majority of Americans believe that the decision to end or continue a pregnancy should be left to a woman and her doctor, not the state. Most Americans oppose laws that make it more difficult for reproductive health clinics to operate. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments next month challenging Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion nationwide, but fewer than a third of Americans want Roe to be overturned. "

When you have autocratic and fascist leanings, the will of the people does not matter. Only those who are in power get the final word. 

Happy Mother's Day everybody.