How are you holding up, Oregonians?

As a former resident of Oregon, and a frequent visitor to the lovely city of Portland, I was dismayed to learn that it is now war ravaged, and that our president is declaring Full Force war against the city.

At the request of Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, | am directing Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists. | am also authorizing Full Force, if necessary. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

War correspondents have been dispatched to the battle zone, reporting on the horror of the ongoing battles.

Earlier Saturday, there was no sign of any federal presence downtown, where people jogged along the Willamette River, relaxed by a riverside fountain or rode bikes on a sunny fall day.

“Where’s the emergency?” asked resident Allen Schmertzler, 72, who said he was “disgusted” by the president’s decision.

Another, John McNeur, 74, called Trump’s statement “ridiculous.” He pointed out that he was taking “a leisurely stroll” along the river on a peaceful, sunny day.

“This place is not a city that’s out of control,” he said. “It’s just a beautiful place.”

That sounds like the Portland I remember. Where are the Antifa sieges taking place? I remember a very nice donut shop near the OHSU school of medicine, I hope it isn’t being shelled or bombed. We used to take the kids to OMSI, are you able to get past the barricades to the museum any more?

I don’t want to care about Jimmy Kimmel, or Disney Corp.

It’s good news that right-wing broadcaster Sinclair had to reverse course on their attempt to get late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel fired, but I have to get real about this situation. Kimmel is an entertainer, not the leader of a progressive opposition party — he’s just a guy. He’s a court jester. What we should be aware of is the fragility of that position when an autocrat takes offense at relatively mild jokes and tries to destroy a person, and we also have to recognize that there are all these undeservedly wealthy people who will eagerly jump to do the wanna-be king’s bidding. If we get rid of Trump, Sinclair will still be there pushing propaganda for the very worst people in the country.

Is this a victory for free speech, though? Allow me to not-at-all subtly draw your attention to the real winners.

Facing the threat of lost advertising dollars, Sinclair said it “received thoughtful feedback from viewers, advertisers, and community leaders representing a wide range of perspectives.” Nexstar separately announced an end to its blackout of Kimmel shortly after this article published.

I hope I was clear…the ones who really control everything are the corporations with advertising dollars, that is, capitalism. There is a link between advertising and the will of the people, but it’s weakened by the reliance of those corporations on persuasive lies.

There is still some genuinely good news, though. Sinclair got nothing, their attempt to impose their rotten political beliefs on everyone was thoroughly repudiated, and they ran off whimpering with their tails between their legs.

I do wish this victory was over something more significant than propping up a media figure.

An American sickness

We have a chain restaurant that advertises with intimidatingly large flags

I don’t have any flags flying from my house, which makes me an exceptional American. OK, maybe not too exceptional — most houses don’t have flagpoles and aren’t waving their patriotism in everyone’s faces, but having been to Europe and Australia and Asia, I know that in comparison we tend to be a flag-happy nation. But really, the only places, other than official places like the county courthouse and schools, that display a flag also tend to be draped with MAGA nonsense, with pickup trucks covered in ugly political bumper stickers parked in front of them.

That’s fine, I appreciate seeing another visible signifier. But then, I was sent this tweet from Eric Daugherty, a Florida Republican nobody, who has somehow earned the approval of Twitter to send out mass notifications. He is shocked, shocked, shocked that some Americans might see no problem with other country’s flags.

How strange and peculiarly American. Mexico is an ally, and Mexicans are our friends, so she is showing support for an allied nation. We are not enemies, although MAGA seems to think so. It does not diminish us to exhibit solidarity with Mexicans and residents of Mexican descent, especially when an American regime is in power and trying to oppress them.

As for the cost, you can buy a pack of 25 small Mexican flags for less than $20 on Amazon. You don’t need to be George Soros to afford that. Also, people voluntarily attend these kinds of protests without demanding payment — I was at a couple of them earlier this summer. If I ever get out to another protest, maybe I’ll sink some pocket change into getting a few flags-onna-stick to hand out.

If I want to be daring, maybe I should get a bunch of Canadian flags, too.

Anything to counter this weird “patriotic” obsession with the American flag. Did all those years in school pledging allegiance to a stupid flag poison our brains?

It’s not the escalator that was broken

Trump gave an embarrassing speech at the UN, full of whininess and petulance and egotism, and on social media all you’ll find is conspiracy theorists inventing conspiracies about an escalator that stopped working and a faulty teleprompter. We need to stop funding the UN because they intentionally stopped an escalator! It’s the most petty stuff yet.

Except that the AP reports the actual causes:

Stephane Dujarric, the U.N. spokesman, said a videographer from the U.S. delegation who ran ahead of him triggered the stop mechanism at the top of the escalator.

“The safety mechanism is designed to prevent people or objects accidentally being caught and stuck in or pulled into the gearing,” Dujarric said in a statement. “The videographer may have inadvertently triggered the safety function.”

…
A U.N. official speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue contributed that one to his side as well, saying the White House was operating the teleprompter for the president.

That did not stop Trump from complaining about it in his speech, nor has it prevented the MAGA hordes from inventing scenarios where the minor incidents were contrived to afflict the president.

It’s a distraction. What everyone should be talking about is his rambling, incoherent, accusatory speech where he made up lies about stopping 7 wars and that he deserved a Nobel prize for each of them (he’s obsessed with prizes, like a 4 year old at Chuck E. Cheese), and went on to accuse every other nation of being failures who had fallen for the scams of environmentalists. It was absolutely deranged. This ought to be grounds for impeachment due to incompetence, except that all the Republicans believe that Trumpism is what will keep them in power, and we also dread seeing JD Vance elevated further.

I mean, really, his brain is broken.

Oh, and about that claim that he ended 7 wars:

And the Cambodian-Thai border crisis is still going on.

He’s done diddly-squat but he wants a Nobel peace prize for it.

I guess I’m in hiding

I’ve gotten a few calls from the university today — I was worried that something important had happened to my lab, but no, administrators were just concerned because of this event happening this evening.

Yeah, those a-holes are speaking at my university, led by Knowles, one of the negligible intellects at the Daily Wire who has been on the anti-trans bandwagon for a while now, and with little else to say. I imagine he’ll be on the stage at the Twin Cities campus trying to stir up a little hate this evening, and in an over-abundance of caution, the administration is asking to temporarily suppress my information on the university web site, with my consent.

I agreed. I can’t run away very fast nowadays, so better safe than sorry.

They should have called this the “American Go Away Tour.”

False idol

Republicans are insane.

Republican lawmakers in Oklahoma introduced legislation this week that would require every public university in the state to construct “a Charlie Kirk Memorial Plaza”, with a statue of the assassinated Republican activist and a sign calling him a “modern civil rights leader”, or pay monthly fines.

The proposed legislation comes as conservatives pay tribute to the murdered activist and podcaster, whose life will be commemorated by the president at a service in Arizona on Sunday, by comparing him to martyred political and spiritual leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr and Saint Paul.

The Oklahoma bill, sponsored by state senators Shane Jett and Dana Prieto, specifies that the memorial site must be in “a prominent area” on the main campus of every institution of higher education in the state system, and must include “a statue of Charlie Kirk sitting at a table with an empty seat across from him” or one of Kirk and his wife holding their children. Designs for the statue must be approved by the legislature.

A rendering, created with artificial intelligence, of what the Charlie Kirk statue at New College of Florida could look like (yeah, Florida is considering the same thing)

Each plaza must also include “permanent signage commemorating Charlie Kirk’s courage and faith and explaining the significance of Charlie Kirk as a voice of a generation, modern civil rights leader, vocal Christian, martyr for truth and faith, and free speech advocate”.

I hope they make provisions for an adjacent vomitorium, because I’d need to use it.

The only truth is that proposed signage is that he was a vocal Christian. I think he was the perfect representative of the modern Christian. If only they could look into the mirror.

Must-see TV!

He always looks like such a buffoon, even with a stupid crown

Donald Trump is visiting England, why I don’t know. I hope all my friends in Great Britain are prepared to boo and hiss and shout rude things at him while he’s there. It seems some in the media are prepared to respond appropriately to him.

More than 100 of Donald Trump’s inaccurate statements are to be dissected by Channel 4 to coincide with his state visit, in what it described as “the longest uninterrupted reel of untruths, falsehoods and distortions ever broadcast on television”.

Give him hell. That’s what our media should be doing but isn’t.

Maybe we’ll get it on YouTube or something later?

Never has a man’s own words so adeptly justified contempt for him

People are having a grand time digging through Charlie Kirk’s own words to show that he deserved being dragged.

He was killed on camera. No one’s family deserves to have to witness that. It’s unthinkably cruel that people would then go on the internet and use their platform to say about an innocent man that “l don’t care that he’s dead.” “He’s not a hero.” “He’s a scumbag.” “He shouldn’t be celebrated.”
I’m talking about George Floyd. You thought | was talking about Charlie Kirk? No, those are actual quotes BY Charlie Kirk about George Floyd. Outrageous that anyone would say that of the dead, right?

It’s tempting to sit down and just compile a list of all the hateful things the man said — I could spend the next few weeks documenting what a horrible little man he was. But that’s something that should have been done before he was killed, because what should have been assassinated was his reputation while he was cuddling up to racists and anti-semites and anti-gay and trans people, all that stuff journalists shied away from while he was living and building a movement. All we can do now is condemn him when it is too late.

When asked about mass shootings he said, “I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment.” Perhaps Kirk did not believe that his own life would be cut short by gun violence, but, like the rest of us, he has witnessed countless school shootings. When he said “some gun deaths” are acceptable, he surely knew he lived in a country where the deaths he deemed acceptable included those of children, some of whom were the age of his own. There is no inherent virtue in caring about your own children; that is the bare minimum requirement for effective parenting. Virtue lies in caring about the safety and well-being of children you don’t know.

On that front, I’m fairly sure Kirk did not care about my child. My child lives in Brooklyn, in a progressive family. His mother works and does not have a marriage where she is considered inferior to her husband or required to obey him, as Kirk arrogantly told Taylor Swift she should do after learning of her engagement. (“Reject feminism,” he said. “You’re not in charge.”) We also live in a Haitian immigrant neighborhood, and if you only listened to Charlie Kirk, you might be under the impression that my neighbors eat pets. You would also be encouraged to believe that, simply by virtue of being non-white immigrants, they were “replacing” white people—and that, since they are also Black, they are dangerous. “Happening all the time in urban America,” he said, “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact.”

Now is the time to talk about the evil being done by Trump and Steven Miller and JD Vance and Pete Hegseth and RFK jr (I’m beginning to see some open detestation of that foul creature) and all the billionaires backing the current political moment. I’m done with Kirk. He’s dead, good.

A great response from a Christian minister:

>

I am not surprised that the shooter was far right

I’ve been disturbed for the last day by all the unfounded speculation that Charlie Kirk’s killer was a far left fanatic, gay or trans, and that this was a hate crime against conservatives, which I had to recognize as a possibility. That was the constant drum beat from social media (and Donald Trump, and Nancy Mace, and all sorts of irrational people) at any rate, but suddenly, since late this afternoon, the drums have stopped pounding. The shooter has been caught. His personal history revealed. Suddenly, it has become apparent that he is a weird gamer from a right wing family who had criticized Kirk for not being conservative enough…and he may be a follower of Nick Fuentes and a groyper. The Serfs summarize what we know so far.

Oops. Don’t expect an apology, though, the right wing version of the story wasn’t based on facts or evidence, so facts won’t change their mind.