Impeach Trump twice.
Stderr
All the unbuffered error messages
Impeach Trump twice.
WARNING: Violence
Surveillance videos of the bombing in Nashville are cropping up from all over. I’m able to keep a certain detachment from what’s happening by focusing my interest on the explosion and its effects, and hypothesizing how it was arranged.
Would you like to see a glimpse into the kind of embarrassing shit Americans are going to come up with as the climate crisis continues to bite? My prediction is: if you think our response to COVID-19 was lethally stupid, “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
I have added another book to my recommended reading list [stderr] Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. In the last few months, I have gone backward and forward through it, trying to make sense of how the facts it exposes fit with my historical understanding.
If you pay any attention to US history, you know that slavery and racism are one of the supporting institutions that have defined and shaped the United States. You cannot understand the United States without understanding slavery and racism. But, that understanding has always felt incomplete, to me; I knew there was more. Obviously, there are details, but what is the big picture?
This may be a bit scatter-shot; there’s a lot to cover, and I’m going to try to fold in some answers to comments on my previous posting on the topic. [stderr] I also want to predict the future, so I can say “I told you so!” when it happens.
To be frank, cybersecurity pisses me off so much whenever I think about it, that it’s almost painful to write about. But the questions are interesting and worthy of respect.
Some mornings, when your alarm clock fires off, you just roll over and slap the “snooze” button. If you do that long enough, you can get quite good at it; there have been mornings when I hit the “snooze” button 15 or more times in a row, pushing back my wake-up time by as much as 2 hours. I used to know someone who claimed that they could sleep-walk through their morning status meeting, effectively grabbing several extra hours of sleep.
The cries of “‘defund the police’ is harsh and may alienate potential allies!” are full-throated, and I am thoroughly sick of them. Police and police unions are manipulating politics shamelessly, and have demonstrated again and again and again that consent decrees and legislation are just something they will work around.
The last month has been eye-opening, indeed. Already a non-fan of representative democracy, I’ve learned that I was insufficiently cynical – when you have a system that has been designed to be corrupt, it’s rife with holes to allow corruption; such a system cannot withstand adverse gamespersonship. It is built-in.
Are you tired of this stuff? I’m sick of it, personally. It’s depressing. I feel like I’ve been wandering around blissfully ignoring how horrible nearly half of my fellow citizens and neighbors happen to be. To be fair, since I live in deep “Trump country” it’s more than half. What’s wrong with these people? [I actually have a fairly good idea but we don’t have time or inclination to do a class analysis of American history]
I made a posting the other day, about Rudi Giuliani and what a racist bastard he is. [stderr]
Doubtless, large swathes of this story are covered by blankets of classification; it’s one of the governments’ best tools for hiding incompetence. Because – not to mince words – the only way this thing could have happened is massive incompetence.