Life List: Cackling Goose

Didja know most of the “canada geese” we see in Washington state are actually cackling geese, a smaller related species with fucken identical coloration?  There are two main tells: size, including a seemingly shorter neck they keep tucked closer to the body, and size of the group.  Cacklers mob deep.  Average group size of the canada geese I’ve seen is three to seven, average for cacklers six to a dozen or more.  I feel like these groups can come together and break apart with minimal fuss, and the larger the environment they’re in – say, a wide open field vs. the margins of a road – the larger the group.

It’s a good look for a beast.  Drab brown-grey body with an almost scale-like look where the pale margins of feathers create a pattern, contrasted with a head in full-on orca colors.  I have heard geese are violent and will mess you up, but I’d like to pick one up and hug it.  They’re one of those birds.  They look squeezably soft.

Geese are famous for shitting damn everywhere, slimy green-brown-grey.  I’ve read they make up for having less room in their guts than cows by eating their own feces to give the nutrients a second pass through the pipe.  Yum.  There’s supposedly only one species of bird that is functionally a ruminant, which is the hoatzin of Central and South America, so plant-eating emeffs gotta make do.

Still, respect.  Pretty animals make the world a nicer place, if a dookier one.

My question tho, do they really cackle?  I don’t think so.  Shit just sounds like the usual honking and squonking.  A proper cackle is the province of the Halloween witch.  Halloween witches say Ree Hee Hee, with optional additional Hees, like chickadees have a variable number of Dees.  Cryptkeepers are closely related organisms, but you can tell the difference if you listen closely.  Their call is more like Nyee Hee Hee, again with the optional gratuity of Hees.

There are birds that are proper cacklers.  I would’ve named these guys something else.  Junior canadas, maybe.

Happy Halloween everybody.  It’s time.

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Mellifluosity

Do you ever read some fancy old writing and wish you could express yourself in more lofty ways?  This feeling could as easily apply to reading old polemics by political activists and philosophers as to the art, the overly complex asides, the amusing constructions of somebody like Edgar Allen Poe or Henry James or Lord Byron.  On the other hand, I do suspect I lose some readers to such indulgences – and I barely dip my toe into those deep waters.

The thousand injuries of Fortunato I bore as best I could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.  You, who know so well the depth of my character shall not suppose that I gave utterance to a threat, or …   … That’s all I have memorized.  I should really get the rest in my dome.  It’s such a fun piece of literary spite.  But also.  I’d like to talk like that.  Sometimes, a little bit, and sometimes.

This reminds me of a discussion I had with a chatbot.  Chatbots can “act,” can speak in whatever manner you suggest to them, but they tend to forget or lose their bead on the character.  Before deepseek became too overwhelmed to function most of the time, I managed to tease it into talking like an overly erudite cowboy – think Sam Elliott’s narrator character in Big Lebowski – for a good length of time.  But to keep it in character, I had to speak in the exact same way.  It was too challenging, but I might post it here sometime for amusement.

Every once in a while a post crosses my social media about lexical gaps.  Have you seen these?  There are word constructions in the English language, comprised of prefixes, suffixes, and altered vowels or consonants, that change the meaning of the root word in prescribed ways.  purchase, pre-purchase, purchaser, purchased, etc.  There are many words suggested by these constructions that are never actually used in English, and some may have legitimate use; these are the lexical gaps.  They can also sound very funny.  I have a half-baked ambition to produce ten-thousand of these in an excel spreadsheet (or more likely force my husband to), and pore over them for the kind of usefulness that could go viral.  Like, if I start using those oddball words consistently, I can get others to spread them for me – change language on purpose.

I’m not going anywhere in particular with this, just expressing some related ideas and feelings.  If any of you should take the fancy to parlay in the manner of an over-educated cowboy in the comments, sidle up to the post and suit thyself, pardners.

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Vampire Fury

Had a pretty elaborate dream, nothing noteworthy about it except how well I could remember it at the moment I woke up.  Some weekend days are really good for this because I don’t have to launch myself into work mode immediately upon waking, more time to possibly go back to sleep, feel things out.

That white dude from f/x’s Legion and that white lady from fox’s Bones starred in a movie that changed tones and subject repeatedly.  Started out as a gentle buddy comedy thing with the white people as part of a circle of friends, where Bones knew Legion’s wacky secret – he was a vampire.  But all that meant, at this point in the dream, is that he couldn’t eat food and had to drink blood instead.  So at the restaurant there were mild hijinks while he pretended to eat his food.  No risk of a blood frenzy or need to pretend the blood he smuggled in was tomato soup yet; his appetite was under control.  Maybe she was a medical professional and helped him get a supply from the hospital?

But he needed some kind of surgery that would involve anesthesia, and didn’t realize until moments before he went under that this would cause him to become an undead vampire.  Heretofore he had been a living vampire; dead vampires were more powerful but more edgy.  This was one of the few times in the dream where it was less movie and more first person.  I was him as I tried to put them off the procedure with mild protestations, but they stuck needles in my neck to knock me out.

I don’t know why but at the same time a kind of vampire apocalypse happened.  Elsewhere in the hospital, people were getting turned into vampires who would in turn slaughter other people, some amount of which would also become vampires.  Shades of 30 Days of Night or  … that other one I reviewed on here.  Shit, forgot the name.  No worm tongues tho.  When Legion woke up, he was suddenly more grey*, sometimes with glowing eyes.  He slaughtered the doctor and nurses for blood real fast, and busted out the door of the operating room in the form of a blood mist that congealed into his humanoid form instantly, and went stalking the halls for prey.

The dream lost track of its own rules and situation a number of times.  This is one of them.  Presumably he was on a rampage to get more victims for bloodsucking, but instead he just went into edgy action hero mode against the hospital vampires, killing them with kung fu and bunches of knives that it made no sense for him to have there**.  As he ran down the halls he’d sometimes be on all fours, bouncing from floor to wall to ceiling and back, blood tentacles splatting into place and bursting free wherever he came to land.

Meanwhile the vampire apocalypse wasn’t totally mindless.  Either the first vampires who came in were directing the new recruits, or the new recruits had spontaneously developed a crude pack mentality.  They were methodically opening every hiding place to get people to kill.  One of them found Bones and tried to kill her, but she successfully defended herself.  Was she now a vampire as well?  She wasn’t leaping around and wilding out, so I think she was supposed to be in living vampire mode.

Bones had to get to Legion or otherwise escape or help defeat the horde.  Legion had to beat the horde and get out, and either forgot about Bones or didn’t expect her to be stuck in the hospital as well.  The homies would never connect, never meet again, as my waking destroyed their little world.

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*I wonder if grey murder-vampire mode was inspired by the episode of Count Duckula where one of his ancestors was resurrected and wanted to kill people, and the butler kept mixing up which one was which, even tho the murder guy was obvious to kids watching the cartoon because he was an all-grey version of Duckula’s design.

**Another obvious influence for this is a scene from Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror.

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Purple Pill Poppers

Red pill, blue pill.  Why so biney, Morpheoose?

I’ve gotten self-righteous about it from time to time, as have most of the people on this network – bloggers and commenters included – but fundamentally I am an atheist because it feels real to me, based on my predilections in combination with my experience of life, and not because I was moved to this position by Reason and Enlightenment.  In the Matrix metaphor, to me, atheism is the blue pill – the world that has been “pulled over my eyes.”  Comforting, tho often a cold comfort.

What then would be the red pill?  Anything that was capable of overthrowing that idea of reality, replacing it with something new.  In The Matrix that would be the Truth.  In my ill-conceived thesis, I’ll just treat the red pill as an alternative view of the world, different from what you’ve previously known and not necessarily true.  With that being the idea, red pills are rare things indeed.

We have a sense of what’s real built on the stuff of our lives.  For some people that’s jesus and paranoia, for others, well, there’s a lot of ways people can be, regardless of how polls aim to simplify it all.  But across the board, we are not easily convinced of anything that falls outside our biases.  Some of those biases are good and fine, even factually correct like atheism, but that doesn’t keep them from being biases.  The bias is the thing you are predisposed to believe.  What can overcome this?

Believers in society as a great discourse between rational minds, they’d say debate and discussion can overcome incorrect beliefs.  The truth will inherently emerge from a true socratic dialogue.  Does it though?  Seems to me we almost never change what we believe to something directly opposite.  Those who went from cookie-baking grandma to goose-stepping Q-creep were building on whatever their baseline was.  The flaw was there, waiting to be nurtured.

The gradual creep of US fascism over the last hundred years, while it involved intentional propaganda by malevolent masterminds, those masterminds themselves were thralls of propaganda they’d been fed, as much subject to manipulation as anyone they sought to manipulate.  We’re all just following a course of social entropy.

Within that, there are ways to bend people, to ourselves get bent.  Like that fascist grandma, take a pre-existing belief or point of view and elaborate on it, build it into something new.  Not a red pill because it’s not a total jailbreak of the original firmware, call it a purple pill.

In The Matrix, Joey tha Rat had the same choice about what to believe that Neo was given, chose red, then changed his mind.  Wouldn’t that be nice?  Change your beliefs on a dime, to whatever felt the best in a given moment?  Not to say I want to change my own beliefs, just using a lil’ reflection on my relationship to those beliefs as a way to understand some people whose thoughts are nigh unimaginable.  Do your own research, as they say.

What I’m interested in, like anybody else living in a society that isn’t living up to their ideals, is how to alter the beliefs of those who seem dead set on ruining everything.  They got purplepilled into that point of view, and maybe we can purplepill them into a point of view that is less ruinous somehow.  It’s not like looking for a “weak spot” to exploit.  Those that indoctrinated them into fascism did not seek to dominate, they fertilized the soil and watered it.  It’s a process of nurturing, I think.

What is left in a fascist that is good enough to build on, to encourage them to become something less bad?  I don’t know, but it could be worth thinking about.

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Superhero Violence Deux

Had another dream about being a violent superhero and dealing with the futility of it.  This time I was The Military Industrial Complex’s Northrop-Grumman-Raytheon’s Disney’s General Electric’s M&M-Mars’s Marvel’s The Avengers’s AOL-Netflix’s The Daredevil™©, but I don’t recall perceiving the world with a radar sense because my eyeballs were blindered, so maybe the disability was edited out of my dream to comply with anti-DEI policies.

A the Daredevil™©, in case you didn’t know, was the direct inspiration for R Batts’s excessive force, because the nutflex version of the MCU was mas edgy.  First thing he does when he vigilantes out?  Find some sex traffickers and punch them over and over and over and over again.  They go splut.  I dunno about you, but I couldn’t imagine the crime of sex traffick existing in the bright sunny New York where the Revengers fought norse god The Onceler and his disposable CG army.  But there it was, and he punched it a lot.

But there’s money to be made, and big bosses don’t care how many faces are messed up for life, how many TBIs happen to underlings.  You gotta punch the boss.  So he worked his way up to the boss, and they all lived happily ever after.  I liked it just fine.  But this dream…

Some wino stole my wallet and I wanted it back.  It was in the pocket of my hoodie when I lost that, and I found other things that were in the pockets, found the hoodie, but the wallet kept eluding me.  I kept punching guys until they “cooperated” sending me off to a different guy to punch.  Eventually I was in a cheap little warehouse of goods stolen by muggers and pickpockets, wallet still nowhere in sight.  Whatever malfeasance was going to happen with my RFID card from work or my debit cards, that surely had already come to pass, and I was just wasting my time.

Violence.  Not always the solution one would imagine it to be.

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Death to Squirrels: Shadow of the Colossus Edition

We’re not squirrel haters in this household, but perhaps we should be.  We have an outdoor storage closet in need of renovation, particularly something to make it so rodents can’t get in; it gets rodent feces.  Easily possible that’s nocturnal mice we’ve never seen, but we have seen squirrels around.  Furthermore, they’ve seen us…

My husband has been longing to grill for a long time, and we finally got the thing set up.  So we had occasion to be eating on our porch, which we usually are not.  A squirrel was digging in our neighbor’s garden a lot.  Didn’t look too destructive, more the endless burial and retrieval of nuts they are known for.  We had some walnuts on the porch and my husband went to give that squirrel one of them.

Bad sign.  The squirrel was brave enough to stay, instead of taking the nut and running.  It stood right by his feet, in effortless kicking range.  Somebody already made the mistake of teaching this thing humans are pushovers.  But my dude was charmed to see him doing his little squirrel things, and did it again.  This time, the squirrel put little hands on my husband’s black chuck taylors.  I thought to myself, that squirrel would think nothing of climbing him.

Back on the porch with our corn on the cob, the beast comes over.  My mother in law offered a bit of asparagus and some bits of corn, to which the beast turned up his nose.  It’s all about that nut, so he went to the source – climbing on my dude, as predicted.  He stood up and walked out into the yard so he could more easily desquirrel if necessary, but fortunately the rodent descended peacefully.

But he kept hanging out, knocking over garden gnomes and digging in violas and running up on people.  What in the hell.  At the peak of this chicanery, he climbed halfway up and back down my leg, and nipped my ankle with rodent incisors.  Not remotely hard enough to draw blood or cause pain, but seriously.  What in the hell.

We chased him off multiple times with sticks and brooms until he finally kept his distance.  Don’t give squirrel your nut.

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Life List: Snowy Egret

I don’t remember this well enough to be 100% on which egret I saw, but it was a cool encounter.  The kind of moment that makes you wish memory was a stronger thing.  It was in San Francisco which on cursory googling narrows it down to snowy or great egret, and it was a small bird.  Can’t remember the beak or leg color, which would be a better tell.

It was a blustery overcast day with random shafts of sun, and who knows why but we were the only people in the entire San Francisco zoo.  Maybe my brother could explain that; he was a regular at that time.  We walked the artificially twisty paths, in and out of areas with short trees.  We saw an interspecies lemur cuddle pile which was very cute, but the best thing was that the free birds – the ones that weren’t even part of an exhibit – were cool characters that I do not get to see in WA state.  Or can only see in glimpses at a distance.

There was a belted kingfisher just sitting on a branch, close enough to get a good look.  I haven’t been within fifty feet of one in the PNW.  Cooler still, there was a perfect and beautiful little white bird wading in a fountain, looking to my eyes like a pet-sized origami crane.  It had been eating frogs or koi, I don’t know, and didn’t appreciate our company.  Lucky us, that meant we could watch it fly away, see the whole beautiful mechanics of its body in motion.

Man I wish I could remember that shit better.  Human frailty sucks.

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Needs More Hoes

OK, at some point in life, we need to talk about Ludacris…  I kid, I kid.  Nobody needs to talk about Luda, and that is as it should be.  Look at this fucking video.  This is an unserious and inconsequential human being, whose celebrity shelf life was only extended by way of a film franchise that got perverse about maintaining the cumulative cast for as long as possible.  I still doubt we will see him again in Ten Fast Ten Furious.  The Luda Era is over.

I have frequently lacked TV or radio access for the current era of music, and missed out on big songs.  I had literally never heard this shit until years after it had its day.  I was working in the electronics section at malwart, with a new young man in charge of the department.  He was chubby with long dark hair and a full beard, thick black framed glasses to match.  Looked Oregonian.  My kinda guy.  Anyway, in an odd moment he just sang a bit of the chorus, and I was deeply amused.

Look at this silly young white man working a demeaning job for modest pay.  He has no hoes, regardless of area code.  He’s just amusing us with recitation of a silly song from when he was in late high school.  And I dig it.  This is a silly little song.  Probably too catchy for me to listen more than a few times per decade, or it’ll RFKjr my brains out.

Still, let us behold.  Let us listen.  Let us evaluate its merits.

Area Codes is a song about having hoes in various far-flung places.  Luda announces his intention to elaborate on this in the opening lyrics.  I’m worldwide, he says, not merely a local legend.  Good for him.  The women he’s involved with are all professionals tho.  Why is that?  I suppose he prefers NSA relationships.  Perhaps he’s aromantic, or is too afraid of rejection to approach women who would not say yes for money.  That’s valid.

He is a hip hop jester, mugging and flopping around lazily.  He couldn’t hack it as a stand-up comedian, but put music to his jokes, and it just might work.  In a song by West Side Connection, Ice Cube once said, “You know that it’s a hit if it’s got Nate Dogg singin’ on it,” and that holds true here as well.  It was a good time to be Ludacris, when this song came out.  Popular friends, ladies with numbers on their swimming apparel.  All was right with the universe.

My favorite thing about the song is the ho jokes.  But he makes so few of them!  I decided to rectify that with the rest of this post…

You thought this song was over?  We can keep things hoin’
Some birds and bees ho-ver, to keep ho-ney flowin’
Gotta garden hoe too
She grow a lotta ho-neydew
Whore-sradish for my hotdog
3-1-2 famous kielbasa
Payin for sausage or paying for cha-cha
4-1-5 pan-sexin’ on professionals
5-0-4 when i sex in confessionals
So ho’s your day been? Ho’s your main men?
I stay up in the ho-tel, service the 3-10
3-1-2, 3-1-3
Are you the ho or is it me?
I’m a john like They Might be Giants
Hookers should call me a number one client

7-1-8, 9-1-7, I died in Brooklyn and went to ho heaven
(the nate dogg impersonator begins)
I’ve got hoes, I’ve got hoes…

(me again)
On payin’ for love I am w-ho-lly reliant
Sell my ass to pay for more, deadly but silent
3-6-0, 4-2-5
They caught Ridgway so I’m still alive*
My hookers rule ass on fool serial killers
After we kill ’em we drink an ice cold Miller
5-0-9, 2-5-3
We ran out of codes and added 5-6-F’whore
Forgot my w-ho-le premise and fell into parody
Can you sing this to the music or am I just fooling me?
I hook like crochet to dirty old gays
Hook line and sinker makin’ em pay
Ho did it come to this, look at myself in a mirror
Trowel on the makeup and the image gets clearer
I’m Scorpion in Whore-tal Kombat
Get over here boy and be my mack, biatch.

(fake nate)
Is it ’cause I needed money to get by?
Is it ’cause I earned my degree at DeVry?
Is it ’cause they like my badonkadonk?
Is it ’cause they like to sunk my conk?
Whatever it is, they love it and they just won’t let me be
I handles my biz, don’t rush me, just relax and pay my fee
Whenever you call, I come runnin’
2-1-2 or 2-1-3
You know I’m a call girl, got you cummin’
But the sexing ain’t for free
I’m a ho, I’m a ho
In different area codes…

(me again)
I’m a ho
(a bunch of numbers here)
I hoes in different area codes, know that
W-ho-le Bible Belt, giving them welts
BDSM like Rihanna, Is it too late to plead the fifth ya honor?
Still won’t do biz at the rethuglican convention
A pound of cure saved by an ounce of prevention
Not sayin’ they got HIV
Just their politics and my thrussy disagree
I hoes to the left and hoes to the right
w-Ho wants to get it dirt cheap tonight?
I’m tragic like the love of Amlet and Hophelia
Played in the TV movie by Bonnie Bedelia
They say Die Hard is a christmas movie
This ho-ho-ho would have to agree
Whores-scorin’-whore years ago
Our whorefathers brought forth a ho nation
Conceived out of wedlock and dedicated to proposition
Me for $17.76, I’m the cheapest kick on Route Sixty-Tricks
Never want m-whore than a job on my back
Even tho I don’t need to pay for the crack
Ho-ly shit what a waste of time
But just bein a ho shouldn’t be no crime
Cuz I’m a ho and that’s a fact
Like Agnes Agatha Jermaine and Jack
R-I-P to Biz Markie
He wouldn’t ho rap with the likes of me
It’s hOkay I ain’t one to hate
And while I’m at it R-I-P Nate
Why these rap guys gotta die
Im-Ho-tep in the pyramid with a thousand guys
Ho boy it’s time to go, this rap went too long
Hookering lyrics for a prostitution song
Upload ho.txt, submit, and press send.
And like my big booty you know it’s The End.

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*hashtag noPJ

Life List: Eastern Kingbird

My favorite encounters with dinosaurs are the ones that are incidental to my life.  I was just out doing something else, and there they were.  But still, expeditions specifically meant for birding can be very productive and a good time in their own right, if you don’t fuck yourself up doing them.  I haven’t been on a ton of these trips, so I sound like a broken record when I recommend the Billy Frank Jr. Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge.  The paths will keep you from twisting your ankle like you would on an undeveloped hillside or a rocky beach.  I dearly hope orngdolf shitler and apartheid junior haven’t fucked it up too much yet.

My brother was living in Kansas and every time we went out was a chance for me to see something I can’t see where I live.  But he wanted to see things that were new to him as well, so he’d take me to some odd spots.  I don’t remember where this one was, but I remember the tableau.  We were on a path, might have been paved, like a regular walking park for dogs and joggers.  Down a grassy hill there was some kind of water out of sight, and a very small tree sitting alone just on the visible side of that crest.  Sitting in the tree was a single bird, maybe robin sized?  Dark on top, white on bottom.

Absolutely unexciting, uninteresting.  It did nothing interesting and made no interesting sounds.  I pointed it out and my brother said it was new to him as well.  Not too hard to ID, looking at passerines in the area for something with the right colors.  Eastern kingbird.  Woohoo.

What exactly is the point of paying this much attention to little creatures?  Sometimes, if you put your findings into publicly available data sets, it can be citizen science.  Sometimes, you may see something you didn’t know was there before, and be filled with a sense of wonder at nature.  Sometimes, I dunno, it’s just not that thrilling.

I have been posting these without googling the animals, trying to go off memory alone because it can be more fun that way.  I might make an ass out of myself, but I give readers a chance to siwoti at me for their own amusement.  But I caved on kingbirds.  I read the wiki, trying to find any connection to anything interesting.  Zilch!

They are part of a clade of passerines that is absolutely massive, the most speciose in the americas – tho much more variety below the US.  I skimmed those birds and had not heard of any of them.  Some looked like birds I knew but only because of convergent evolution; they were not the same guys.  What are kingbirds all about?  What do they do?  I dunno.  Eat a bug.  Have a nice day.

Even a drab and conventional bird can be a person’s fave if they have personal experience with them.  If you love eastern kingbirds, holler in the comments.

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Curtail Executive Power or Else

Obama should have done it.  Biden should have done it.  In Clinton’s time this would have been a little harder to see coming, but sharp people were already predicting some flavor of it.  If the dems ever gain power again, the hindsight should be bright as day.  They need to limit the powers of the president.  The executive branch in the USA has too much power, and it has caused direct, possibly irreparable harm to our standing in the world.

In a sense, who cares about our standing in the world?  We deserve to be taken down a notch or several.  It’s a market adjustment that is very long overdue.  But it’s going to be painful and ruinous to people all around the world, so perhaps best avoided?  Accepting this shituation is accelerationism, not my favorite flavor of change.

The issue is stability.  You’d think a dictator’s hand on the tiller would stabilize the country’s institutions, but that’s not how this is playing out.  Stability is the source of value in our treasury bonds.  Lose that stability, lose value, lose bargaining power, and there you are.

The system of checks and balances that we all learn about in elementary school, that thing that was supposed to make us so much cooler than other countries?  That was the stabilizer.  The oligarchs could play tennis in the legislature and pass the baton to the other guys every four to eight years, the supreme court could go one way or the other on any issue at any time.  Through this all, nothing truly radical could ever be accomplished.

That sucks when you want things to be radically better, but at least it keeps things from getting radically worse – when it’s working right.  If the democrats want to be moderate and responsible and not be radical and not rock boats, they should go for that moderation radically.  A Constitutional crisis calls for a Constitutional Amendment or several.  We had a bill of rights, how about now a Bill of Liberty, to save us from democratically elected dictatorship?

They will need to angle desperately to fight any vote suppression tactics in preparation for the outside possibility a fair-esque election can happen in two years, but they also need to have an agenda locked and loaded, ready to go, to force checks and balances back into government.  That executive power can be used to undermine itself at first, through careful use of executive orders, but it absolutely must be relinquished as soon as humanly possible, and locked out of future hands.

Tvfnp will pocket veto and otherwise stymie any legislation to that effect, but keep up the pressure and see what’s possible a few years after that, in the presidential election.  If, by some fucking miracle, dems get control of this trash fire again, it’s time to lock it down so this disaster can never happen again.  The next democratic president, hope to hell it’s four years from now, needs to gut their own power.  It’s a moral imperative, it’s crucial for the US to continue to have anything resembling the prosperous status quo it’s enjoyed for a hundred years.

Personally, motherfuck our prosperity.  Time for everybody in the world to come up and get a piece of our loser asses.  But dems, if you’re listening?  If you ever get another chance to do this?  Curtail executive power in any way you can.

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