This is why I don’t talk to mammals anymore

It’s also why I avoid grocery stores. Jon Rosenberg recounts a perfectly ordinary encounter at the supermarket.

I am not a talking asparagus, but this kind of thing is going on all over the place.

By the way, another reason I shun the local grocery store is because, despite the state-wide mask mandate, the management of that filthy pesthole still allows customers to stroll around maskless. And they do.

It’s strange to be living on an alien planet

At least, that’s how I feel when I read an article on Midwestern politics in Harper’s.

In January, I sublet my studio apartment in Los Angeles, flew to O’Hare, rented a purring silver Audi A4 from an unmarked garage miles from the airport (this was somehow the cheapest option), and headed north to begin my winter in a little lakefront house. The night after the Packers game the weather warmed up slightly, and I went for a long walk along the crashing shore.

We are so barbarous that the big national publications need to fly in a journalist to cover the exotic perspectives of Kenosha, Wisconsin. Put him in a comfortable lake house with a nice car and let him make forays into wilderness of bars and cafes, like an anthropologist among the cheeseheads, and have him take notes on his interactions, which he then synthesizes into a grand thesis on why the middle class of the Midwest voted for Donald Trump.

You will be happy to know his answer fits comfortably into the extant ethnographic literature — it’s all about economic anxiety, you know, and the word “race” is only used in the context of the Democratic vs. Republican horserace, and there are more quotes from Grover Norquist than there are from black folk. The only black person mentioned, we are told, was a former drug dealer, while the author seems more interested in a cranky old white man who drives away customers in a bar by insisting that the television be tuned to Tucker Carlson. When you focus on the stuff you’re comfortable with, that you understand will fit your narrative best, it’s no wonder the story you send back is so lacking in insight. It’s not that I disagree with his conclusion, but that he could have sat in his office, enjoying his view of a tangle of freeways, and written it without making the dangerous voyage to a savage Wisconsin winter wilderness.

Still, the Democrats’ strategy might work out this November. Trump’s response to the pandemic and the protests has been so wanton and self-serving that enough Americans might be convinced to vote for a candidate offering steadiness. But tacking toward the middle will do nothing to sway the Kenoshans I met, among the many Americans who have decided that voting changes very little, and that both parties are more beholden to the elite than to ordinary citizens.

In the long run, a Democratic Party that wants to govern is going to have to respond to this feeling, not by offering incremental reforms in policing, or tweaks to existing health care laws, but by beginning a real transformation. It will require new structures—we have not yet tried to govern a metropolis without a police force, but we soon might—as well as a recommitment to things that the Democrats have abandoned, like organized labor. It will take admitting that the morass we’ve ended up in was not created by accident. It will take naming the people who brought us to this point, and it will take a willingness to confront them and to make enemies—something Republicans have long been happy to do. It will, finally, take a political project that can match the feeling of participation and excitement that the Trump movement has offered. Democrats picked a candidate who has promised to return the country to normal. That may end up being the most dangerous choice of all.

Yes? The Democrats will have to gather their courage and actually fight for things that matter to people in Wisconsin — and California and New York — in order to earn their votes and get them involved. But, you know, the lesson here is that the Trump campaign didn’t do any of that, yet somehow got the people of our benighted hinterlands, as well as Orange County, to vote for him. I still don’t know how to combat outrageous demagoguery with the bland vaguenesses that Harper’s offers us.

The Lincoln Project is not your friend

They’re just trying to Republicanize the Democrats, which way too many Democrats (I’m looking at you, Chuck Schumer) think is a good idea. I’m sure it is tempting, when you think only in terms of acquiring power, to argue that becoming more Republican will attract more Republican votes — and that’s true! — but it also means you’ve got no principles, and are just trying to swap places with the other party.

Cody explains it well.

The Lincoln Project is definitely putting out harder hitting ads than the Democrats are, which tells you something already: the Democrats are at the mushy soft stage of decay, and are over-ripe for takeover. Rick Wilson knows that. Why don’t the Democrats know that?

We can open the bars, but oh, no, we better delay the election

Donald Trump is desperate to cling to power for as long as he can, so his latest trial balloon is to suggest delaying the election because — wait for it — the pandemic. You know, the pandemic he’s been downplaying for months. The disease that he claims is controlled by hydroxychloroquine and prayers by a woman who believes it’s caused by demon semen. The coronavirus he and his advisors want to pretend doesn’t exist or is just a kind of flu so they can reopen the economy. Only now he’s claiming it is so severe that he wants to hold up the November election.

To which I’d say, vote by mail — that’s what I’m planning to do — but no, he wants to block that, too. Here’s what he’s really doing:

Trump appears to be doing everything in his power to undermine the credibility of November’s vote, in which a record number of Americans are predicted to rely on mail-in voting to avoid the risk of exposure to the coronavirus. He’s repeatedly made false and misleading claims about the reliability of the mail balloting and suggested broad conspiracy theories. Critics warn that he could be laying the groundwork for contesting the results – although the purpose may be simply to give him a scapegoat if he loses.

Trump’s Thursday morning tweet could also be an attempt to divert attention away from the truly dismal second-quarter economic numbers just released. He’s been relying on a financial turnaround to breath life into his re-election campaign, and instead the outlook appears exceedingly gloomy.

If you are optimistically confident that there will be a smooth transition in power in a few months, and that the criminal-in-chief will surely obey the law and quietly leave office in January, I’ve got news for you. We’re going to have to go into the Oval Office with meathooks and claw him out in pieces, while his partisans are waving AR-15s and shooting up federal buildings all over the country. He’s clearly beginning to panic.

So…you’re saying we’ve been living in a police state for decades?

This is an 18 year old trans woman getting violently arrested by a swarm of cops.

Nicki Stone, the woman being forced into an unmarked car, must be extremely strong and scary, because look how many men in shorts and t-shirts to control her. And then they need so many cops on bicycles to control the crowd.

But the real revelation is the NYPD using the ‘we’ve always been this way’ excuse.

The NYPD issued a statement on Twitter saying that Stone was wanted for damaging police cameras, and she was detained by the Warrant Squad, which uses unmarked vehicles to carry out arrests. NYPD Lt. John Grimpel told NBC News that the Warrant Squad has used unmarked vehicles to detain people for “decades.”

If we’ve been abused by bad cops and bad policing techniques for at least 20 years, isn’t it about time we got around to ending it?

How did we get here?

“Here” is a country where millions believe in loony conspiracy theories and vote for a fascist like Trump, and yet they close their eyes to black clad militarized police whisk citizens off the street into unmarked cars. We’ve become simultaneously hyperconscious of outrageous nonsense promoted on the internet, and desensitized to it. Well, most of us are desensitized — about 30% seem to have become the base of the Republican party.

There’s a lot of blame to go around. This documentary pins it on a couple of sources: Alex Jones and Roger Stone, and the conscienceless, manipulatory algorithms of YouTube and Facebook that enabled these terrible people, culminating in the election of Donald Trump. I think there are even more people responsible, but this is a good start.

Almost an hour of concentrated Jones and Stone is agonizing, but sit through it and bear the suffering. There’s a deep injustice here, that Noah Pozner’s parents get to suffer while Alex Jones got rich, and Trump got the presidency. Fox News is the mainstream version of Alex Jones.

Where da boaters at?

When Donald Trump beckons, the media fall all over themselves to answer. For instance, lately Trump has been obsessing over “boat parades” and how much boaters love him, so the Washington Post indulges in overwrought analysis and puts together some fancy data visualization to show that yes, people who can afford boats tend to be Republican. Whether the boater population is a significant slice of the demographic pie, and whether they will be a significant factor in the election, and whether it is at all appropriate or useful for a newspaper to focus a microscope on such a trivial question is an exercise left for the reader.

“A state where the dark-red slice of Republican boaters is larger than the light-red slice of Republicans overall is a state where the boating community is more densely Republican.”

I can’t afford a boat, and I have no interest in owning a boat, so I guess I won’t be cruising around Lake Minnewaska waving a big blue “Trump Sucks!” flag. Is this a meaningful datum? All it tells me is that wealth has a positive correlation with supporting an establishment party that panders to money. (Well, actually, both parties pander to money, but one is more overt than the other.)

By the way, the WaPo is at least willing to point out what a narcissistic flibbertigibbet Trump is. He had earlier announced that he was “too busy” to throw out the first pitch at a major league baseball game, then abruptly, to the surprise of his staff, announced at a press conference that he was going to throw out the first pitch for the New York Yankees…which was also a surprise to the Yankees. What prompted the about face?

He learned that Anthony Fauci was throwing out the first pitch for the Washington Nationals.

Trump was irritated that Fauci was given the honor, the Times reported, citing an official familiar with his reaction. Not to be outdone, he reportedly told his staff to get in touch with the Yankees and take Levine up on his offer, but then the president went ahead and threw a curveball at the coronavirus briefing with his claim that he would take the mound on Aug. 15.

Jesus. The country is run by petty high-schooler.

Only we call them “contract security personnel” rather than “mercs”

Marcus Ranum asks a really good question: who are all these mysterious masked strangers dressed in black armor who show up at the best of the federal government to crush protests? It’s not the lone ranger. They seem to appear out of an undocumented pool of semi-professional thugs. That suggests an answer.

I’ve been puzzled by the fact that nobody seems to be talking about where these “federal troops” have come from.

They’re not well-trained and they’re not particularly brave, but they have spiffy gear that someone bought them from an online Tactical(tm) store. They’re fond of hitting people, especially people who can’t defend themselves. They act like they’re an occupying force; Amerikkka come to the inner city to bust some heads. Sound familiar?

Where has Trump friend Erik Prince been, lately? Because the smell of Blackwater is wafting all around; it’s unmistakable.

Could our government be hiring mercenaries to put down citizens who don’t like injustice? As Marcus suggests, there is a good opportunity for journalistic investigation here.

Here’s how they operate: four thugs abruptly attack a 14 year old girl in Eugene, Oregon.

I guess she was a dangerous threat.

Minnesota has mandated face masks in public

Meanwhile, down at the Wal-Mart…

Stupid people will find a way to obey the letter of the law, while still parading their ignorance and hatefulness.

You know, I hate to tell you this, but if you merely want to be offensive you can buy “Make America Great Again” facemasks on the internet. I’ll still despise you, but I won’t think of you as an ahistorical idiot promoting genocide, mostly.

The feds are trying to saturate Portland with tear gas

It doesn’t seem to be particularly effective.

According to CripDyke, it isn’t, and neither are the leafblowers, which I can believe. Keep on fighting back, Portland!