I was this many years old before I learned this extremely important civics rule (forgive me, I’m a little slow):

The laws don’t apply to the people on top.

Or, rather, the laws were written by the people on top to provide them with loopholes, but also the minions who enforce the law do so at the bidding of the people on top.

I know, it’s obvious, and has been obvious all of my life, but as a white man I have been given enough benefits that I could overlook that aspect of reality. Events of recent years have made it so conspicuously overt that it is an unavoidable conclusion. Why do you think so many white men are rushing to join white supremacy movements, or voting Republican, or writing desperate op-eds defending the latest horrific act? It’s because they’re panicking about losing their privileged status in the inevitable upheaval. They’re shoring up the dikes, but the waters are rising fast, and they’re afraid they’ll drown in the flood.

There are only two possible outcomes here: either we get a total fascist crackdown to armor up the inequities of the ex-Republic, or we are going to see the Ancien Régime demolished for its excesses. I’d rather be on the side of the latter process.

What finally hammered the lesson home to me? There have been so many things. The Supreme Court has become transparently political, and I can no longer regarded it as an impartial arbiter of the law. It’s stacked. It’s rigged. It’s laws can no longer be regarded as fair and just.

The police…I remember when they were portrayed as Officer Friendly in PR campaigns. Nope. They are militarized enforcers for the status quo, committing murder at will. Have you noticed that the blue of the boys in blue has become progressively darker over the decades, until now it’s just black? If this were a fantasy novel, we’d call it blatant, over-the-top foreshadowing. Any day now they’re going to redesign the badges to be just silver skulls. Oh, too late — the police themselves think that would be awesomely cool.

We’re only just now becoming widely aware that the US Senate is an undemocratic institution that privileges wealthy landowners. I know, that’s what it was explicitly set up to be, but all we were taught is that the power was distributed among three branches so no one could dominate. Well, the judicial branch is dead, and the Senate is a place where minority views by octogenerians get total power to block legislation.

We still have the house, right? Nice populist institution? Forget it. The House Speaker thinks it is a branch of the “free market economy”. The real reason Jimmy Stewart as Mr Smith goes to Washington is to sell out and get rich. He’s going to filibuster to make sure coal and oil companies can continue to destroy the environment.

We can still respect the distinguished office of the presidency, though. Ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Presidents make clowns look dignified.

Now we know that…

The Trump administration engaged in “deliberate efforts” to undermine the U.S. response to the coronavirus pandemic for political purposes, a congressional report released Friday concludes.

The report, prepared by the House select subcommittee investigating the nation’s Covid response, says the White House repeatedly overruled public health and testing guidance by the nation’s top infectious disease experts and silenced officials in order to promote then-President Donald Trump’s political agenda.

He is responsible for the deaths of thousands, and further, he helped sow the seeds of conspiracy theories and bogus quack medicine that will kill thousands more. He pressured the head of the NIH to endorse hydroxychloroquine and other quackery — fortunately, Collins refused (shockingly, there are some tiny specks of integrity in the political landscape, although Trump followers will probably be chanting about killing him now).

Trump still walks free, and is planning his next run for office. The media is eagerly awaiting the exciting, spectacular news and the frenzied PR circus that will follow along in the trail of wreckage it leaves behind. Everyone is dithering, because…because…because, well gosh, he’s the ex-president! We can’t arrest him for conspiring to overthrow the government and being so incompetent that he let citizens die for political gain! Why, if he fell, then congress would have to after their colleagues, like the rapist-enabler and the coke-snorting party boy and the incompetent conservative loony (I know, that one describes a lot of Republicans), and they won’t do that. That could disrupt the party money machine. And then, who knows, the UK might wake up to how wretchedly stupid Boris Johnson is, and the whole edifice that props up idiot privileged assholes all around the world might crumble.

That could lead to principled politicians taking office, and next thing you know, reform. The well-established money making game might get shaken up, the tables flipped, and suddenly everyone in office would have to work for a living.

I’ve resigned myself to the fact that isn’t going to happen.

Hey, remember the good old days of George W. Bush, when idealists would fantasize about how his crimes and corruption and wholesale murders would culminate in him being put in handcuffs and perp-walked out of the White House? It never happened. The war criminal is in a prosperous retirement in which the media occasionally publishes a puff piece about his cheesy amateur paintings. Henry Kissinger is still alive, has a net worth of tens of millions of dollars, and still has journalists begging for interviews. Donald Trump might just be the next president of the United States.

Burn it all down. The American republic is a failed experiment.

The world will sigh with relief when we’re simultaneously hollowed out by the pandemic (facilitated by our own idiot policies) and torched by climate change, which we will do nothing about.

Mark Meadows may go down in history as the corrupt political sleazemaster who assisted Trump in his coup attempt (which is still ongoing, unbelievably!), but I remember him as that loon who bought a dinosaur dig site, facilitated the transfer of a valuable Allosaurus skeleton (naming it Ebenezer) to Ken Ham and the Creation “Museum”, and put together a “documentary” about the discovery of the fossil in which he had his own daughter lie on camera and pretend to be the discoverer. It’s pretty damned vile, and just highlights how dishonest and creepy creationists are.

But here’s the icing on the cake: Ken Ham appropriated that fossil and mounted it in his carnival show “museum”, where it’s not even used for scientific research. It’s a prop.

But for all of this, the weirdest part of the story may be that – for all the desperate efforts on the part of creationists to secure this dinosaur skeleton, for all the brouhaha and AiG-hype surrounding “Ebenezer the Allosaurus” – the Creation Museum makes absolutely no use of the skeleton itself to advance the case for a young Earth and a global Flood. Referring to arguably the most relevant placard that accompanies the dinosaur fossil, we note in Righting America that

Given that this placard appears in the room wherein a truly impressive skeleton of a real dinosaur is on display, and given that this placard tells a story that seeks to link that skeleton to the Flood, it is surprising that the placard makes no mention of the skeleton itself. Not one piece of physical evidence from the skeleton is mobilized in any way by this placard. No inferences whatsoever are drawn from the skeleton about Ebenezer on this placard . . . In the end, Ebenezer-the-skeleton appears to make no contribution to an understanding either of his demise or any other creature’s (Righting America 93).

The only evidence provided by the Creation Museum in behalf of the claim that Ebenezer died in a global Flood is the story recounted in Genesis 7:21-23. That’s it.

When it comes to creation science, there is no there, there.

Now Meadows has something else to be infamous for.

The House voted Tuesday night to hold former President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, in contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack to appear for a deposition.

The vote was 222-208, with GOP Reps. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and Liz Cheney of Wyoming voting with all Democrats.

Meadows is now the first former lawmaker ever held in criminal contempt by Congress — and the first held in contempt since 1832 — when former Rep. Sam Houston was held in contempt for beating a colleague with a cane.

What a legacy. These are the charlatans the American people elect to high office.

Look at that smiling white man and his bag of killing tools!

That’s Cleveland Meredith, a right-wing asshole who drove to Washington DC in January to participate in treason and maybe, if he was lucky, get to murder a few Democratic politicians.

In other messages sent the following day – while Pelosi and Bowser were making public remarks about the riot – Meredith texted, “I may wander over to the Mayor’s office and put a 5.56 in her skull, FKG c***.” Meredith then sent a similar text about Pelosi, saying he was, “Thinking about heading over to Pelosi C****’s speech and putting a bullet in her noggin on Live TV.”

His defense was to claim he didn’t really mean it.

Meredith addressed the judge near the end of the hearing, saying he’d had “no intention” to act on his messages. He described them as “political hyperbole that was too hyper.” He apologized to Pelosi and to his family and was audibly tearful as he asked to be able to go home.

Right. He just packed up a pistol, a rifle and 2,500 rounds of ammunition in his truck, and drove more than halfway across the country, from Colorado to Washington DC, to commit an act of hyperbole. The judge sentence him to 28 months in prison. I don’t know if that was sufficient, but at least it may have slapped him into a brief awareness of his own madness. Brief. Because then he made the usual excuse:

Meredith says he apologizes to Speaker Pelosi, his sons. "I'm very embarrassed by this whole situation. It's not who I am."

Meredith is crying as he speaks

— Scott MacFarlane (@MacFarlaneNews) December 14, 2021

That’s not who I am, boo hoo. It was exactly who you are. He’s a grown man, 53 years old, and he was blustering misogynistic bullying abuse about murdering people, and he drove off giggling about the prospect.

Last week, I ordered some extra warm fleece-lined slippers to wear around the house. It gets cold around here! I did not consider the torments workers have to go through to keep my toes warm and comfy. They got to suffer through arbitrary, ridiculous rules that benefit the billionaires at the top, but mean they get to work in conditions that Dickens or Kafka might have imagined.

So this rule is incredibly petty, and it kills.

In Indiana:

Last week, a man shot and killed eight people at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis. Those people and others working on site couldn’t call or text their families to tell them what was happening because some FedEx employees aren’t allowed to bring their cellphones into work.

In Illinois:

An Amazon.com Inc. warehouse collapse on Friday night that killed at least six people has amplified concerns among its blue collar workforce about the return of the internet retailer’s mobile phone ban in work areas.

But why does such a ban even exist? These are workers who are constantly evaluated on their performance already, and that should be all their employer cares about: how many boxes do they move from Shelf A to Truck B during their shift. That’s demanding enough, especially when they also have these rules about how often you can use the bathroom, so why these additional rules that say you can’t even have a cell phone in your pocket? Isn’t it cracking the whip hard enough to say you can’t make personal calls during your shift?

I can’t imagine answering a personal phone call while I’m teaching, but I’ve got one in my pocket (in fact, my university requires me to use my smartphone to enable computers and projectors in my lecture rooms). I turn off the ringer, and if it starts vibrating during class I ignore it — I just know that someone is trying to reach me, and I’ll check the calls when I get a break. That seems sensible and humane, not just for college professors, but for anyone who has a job to do.

So why should Amazon and FedEx have the right to control every second of a worker’s life? Probably because people are desperate enough for work that they’ll take these lousy repressive jobs for $15 an hour, so the company knows they have the power to squeeze.

How much money is Jeff Bezos making again?

So we now have this PowerPoint document that the former White House chief of staff was sharing with select members of congress. It’s blatant, advocating overthrowing the government.

Rejecting the electors from “states where fraud occurred” — I think that’s Trump-speak for Democratic votes.

“Declare electronic voting in all states invalid”, so they were going to discard legal, recorded votes.

This was a threat to commit a coup. We have it in writing. We know who the principle players were. Trump is still holding rallies and planning to run for the presidency in 2024, and there are criminal conspirators in congress still serving on committees and passing laws.

This is absurd. These were the same kooks who were changing “lock her up” about a politician who had not committed a crime. Why aren’t these traitors being arrested, stripped of their positions of authority, and held for trial? Why are the Democrats just sitting there, doing nothing but having Nancy Pelosi spam me with email begging for money? I might make a donation when Trump is in jail and everyone who received that PowerPoint is fired.

I had to do some quick shopping to pick up a few winter essentials, and I thought, what the heck, I’ll give the local version of a big box store, one run by our terrible fundagelical brethren, another try. They can’t be that bad, can they?

Then I saw this wall of goods, and decided there was nothing I needed from them that badly.

Yeah, no, nope nope nopitty nope-nope.

If you’re a sick, warped pedophile, that is.The news is not good this morning.

Did you know that if you work for the CIA, or are even a contractor doing work for the CIA, that “the agency resists prosecution of its staff for fear the cases will reveal state secrets”? So you can get away with all kinds of evil acts if you work there (which, I guess, shouldn’t be at all surprising, given that it is the CIA).

Over the past 14 years, the Central Intelligence Agency has secretly amassed credible evidence that at least 10 of its employees and contractors committed sexual crimes involving children.

Though most of these cases were referred to US attorneys for prosecution, only one of the individuals was ever charged with a crime. Prosecutors sent the rest of the cases back to the CIA to handle internally, meaning few faced any consequences beyond the possible loss of their jobs and security clearances. That marks a striking deviation from how sex crimes involving children have been handled at other federal agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security and the Drug Enforcement Administration. CIA insiders say the agency resists prosecution of its staff for fear the cases will reveal state secrets.

It’s all rather horrifying, especially given that these secret agencies have been blacklisting homosexuals for decades and acting aghast at the very idea of a gay person acquiring a sensitive position. They might be blackmailed, don’t you know. But pedophiles…just a slap on the wrist and a dismissal.

Speaking of pedophiles, there’s new news about dead child rapist Jeffrey Epstein. New records, flight logs, have been unearthed that reveal hundreds of additional flights we hadn’t known about. Epstein was just happily flitting about the globe for years, doing…what? I don’t know. Maybe the CIA does, but they’re not telling. This jumped out at me, though.

Epstein owned a Gulfstream II (sold in November 2013), a Gulfstream IV (sold before his arrest), a Gulfstream GV-SP, and a Boeing 727 (nicknamed the “Lolita Express”) that notoriously ferried notable passengers and girls around the globe. According to flight manifests unsealed in a defamation case against Maxwell, travelers on Epstein’s planes included public figures from Presidents Donald Trump and Bill Clinton to the supermodel Naomi Campbell and the astronaut John Glenn.

Why? How? How does a guy without any kind of college degree, who started out as a math teacher at a private school (he wasn’t even very good at that), and then drifted into banking and finance, get such ridiculous sums of money that they can afford their very own 727? What did he do to earn that kind of money?

Don’t ever try to tell me that the wealthy worked hard and deserve all that money.

Paul Waldman has suddenly figured out that the conservative justices lied in their confirmation hearings. And now, just now, it’s time to admit it.

They lied.

Yes, I’m talking about the conservative justices on the Supreme Court, and the abortion rights those justices have now made clear they will eviscerate.

They weren’t just evasive, or vague, or deceptive. They lied. They lied to Congress and to the country, claiming they either had no opinions at all about abortion, or that their beliefs were simply irrelevant to how they would rule. They would be wise and pure, unsullied by crass policy preferences, offering impeccably objective readings of the Constitution.

It. Was. A. Lie.

We went through the same routine in the confirmation hearings of every one of those justices. When Democrats tried to get them to state plainly their views on Roe v. Wade, they took two approaches. Some tried to convince everyone that they would leave it untouched. Others, those already on record proclaiming opposition to abortion rights, suggested they had undergone a kind of intellectual factory reset enabling them to assess the question anew with an unspoiled mind, one concerned only with the law.

It is astonishing that the media took this long to realize what was obvious to everyone. The Trumpkins knew it, and were giggling behind their palms about getting away with it. Everyone else knew it, too, but felt trapped by an unwarranted respect for norms and knowing that the media was in the bag and would ridicule the simple words, “they’re lying”. It was a real emperor’s new clothes kind of situation and everyone went along with it.

What’s also appalling is that those fuckers knew that had to lie. That opposing the established law of Roe v. Wade would instantly scuttle their nomination, that the electorate would rise up and make it impossible for many politicians to support their nomination. So they lied. They misled everyone until they could hide behind their Supreme Court tenure. Now they get to wreck civil rights in this country, their aim all along.

They were ashamed of their position. They knew it could only be whispered in the darkness until they got power, and then once they’d brought down that veil of darkness on the land, then and only then could they shout it out loud.

You know what else burns?

But sometimes the right puts its purposes in the open. There was a particularly striking exchange between Laura Ingraham and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) on Fox News, where Ingraham grew inexplicably enraged over the mere possibility that Roe might not be overturned.

“If we have six Republican appointees on this court,” she said, “after all the money that’s been raised, the Federalist Society, all these big fat-cat dinners — I’m sorry, I’m pissed about this — if this court with six justices cannot do the right thing here,” then Republicans should “blow it up” and pass some kind of law limiting the court’s authority.

“I would do that in a heartbeat,” Cruz responded.

In other words: We bought this court, and we’d better get what we paid for.

Yep, we’re a third-rate banana republic where the law is for sale to the highest bidder.

“Endorsed by the Federalist Society” ought to be a huge black mark against any judicial nominee. Will our representatives see it that way? Don’t count on it.

It was all a lie, a scam, a con: the assurances that they were blank slates committed to “originalism” and “textualism,” that they wouldn’t “legislate from the bench,” that they have no agenda but merely a “judicial philosophy.”

Somehow that philosophy nearly always produces results conservatives want: undermining voting rights, enhancing corporate power, constraining the rights of workers, enabling the proliferation of guns, and now most vividly, allowing state governments to force women to carry pregnancies to term against their will.

From this day forward, no one should be naive enough to believe a word any conservative says on this subject, except for those few who forthrightly proclaim that the Supreme Court must read right-wing policy preferences into the Constitution. There was never any mystery about who these justices are and what they would do. There were only liars saying otherwise, and fools who chose to believe them.

Fools run the media in America, then.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is setting a new low. Here she is comparing the COVID-19 pandemic to cancer.

1. Every single year more than 600,000 people in the US die from cancer.

The country has never once shut down.

Not a single school has closed.

And every year, over 600,000 people, of all ages and all races will continue to die from cancer.

— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) December 4, 2021

Did you know that cancer is not generally contagious? Marjorie Taylor Greene doesn’t.

So she proposes that we should target fat people and take more ivermectin.

3. It’s time to take a different approach based on the facts.

Covid predominately targets obese & older people.

Shutdowns, masking, and vaccines are not stopping covid, that is just government control.

Ivermectin, monoclonal antibodies, & other treatments are saving lives.

— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) December 4, 2021

It seems to me that the effective solutions that she avoids mentioning — vaccines and masks and lockdowns — would be more direct in addressing the problem than vilifying fat people, taking useless drugs, or using relatively expensive post-infection treatments. But then, the stupid people run the country.