George Floyd, Democracy, Slavery, Stagecoach Mary, Trump Riot & Golf

  • driftglass is not willing to accept just ANYone as an ally in the fight to save American democracy. He laments the terrible treatment toward those, like himself, who were warning from the start about the evil of Republicans, including Republicans who are now wanting to fight what the Republicans have become.
     
    driftglass is insistent. They must pay prices first. But they don’t.
    Just. isn’t. fair.
     
  • John Scalzi at Whatever shares observations from shopping in the local IGA and adds his post-COVID hopes about the great UnMasking.
     
  • News Corpse listens in awe at the latest Fox network argument against vaccinations: they will increase crime.
     
    Yup.
     
    The theory is that criminals who are currently fearful of COVID will come out of hiding as death rates from the pandemic go down. So crime will skyrocket.
     
    Fox logic: Criminals hate COVID. The enemy of your enemy is your friend. So COVID is your friend.
     
  • Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged watches video of Marge Green a while back arguing for statues glorifying Confederate fighters. Marge explained that she would not want to remove hypothetical statues of Hitler or Satan because she wants her kids to know who they were. Vixen suggests the wild-eyed alternative of maybe …well… books?
     
    I liked the part on video where Marge admits to having some disagreements with Hitler.
     
  • Frances Langum watches Marjorie Taylor Greene compare masking against the pandemic to Jews put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany, then watches Marjorie Taylor Greene later say it was all okay because she didn’t actually say the word Holocaust.
     
    Well! That settles that.
     
  • Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara points out that the best agument for owning a gun is self-defense. Well-l-l-l yeah.
     
    From talking with gun owners, I suspect the most common real reason is not self-defense itself, which argument would be that it increases the chances of long life without injury. Statistically, that isn’t so. You double your chances of being murdered if you have easy access to a weapon. Um…huh?
     
    Makes sense, as I think it through. Brandishing a gun makes it instantly clear that you are the main obstacle between a criminal and his freedom, which also makes you a high priority target. And accidents are more likely in daily life than midnight criminality.
     
    What seems anecdotally true from talking with gun owners, so take it for what it’s worth: Becoming a victim of violence is not the greatest fear. The big fear is becoming a helpless victim of violence.
     
    Is that legitimate? Why the hell not?
     
    Still, it seems like social wisdom to require steps that reduce the chances of waking to the noise of an intruder, then discovering you have executed a teenager delivering your morning newspaper.
     
    Also seems worthwhile to restrict access by criminals, children, and those likely to inflict harm.
     
  • M. Bouffant at Web of Evil has a good example of why we have police. Guns don’t kill people. Maniacs kill people. Especially those for whom ideology is more important than lives.
     
  • Imani Gandy points to what may finally be the SCOTUS ruling that ends abortion rights. She finds a years-long strategy originating a few years ago with a conservative Christian legal group from Arizona.
     
  • tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors has news from Pennsylvania of new regulations on pregnancy. Any woman who suffers through the trauma of a miscarriage will be required to fill out an explanatory form reporting details to government officials. She must also obtain a death certificate and see that burial ceremonies are performed.
     
    The sponsor of the new regulations explained at a hearing that women in the room must understand how men feel.
     
  • At The Moderate Voice Dorian de Wind reports on the fate of Afghan interpreters as American troops leave. Turns out they will not be left to the tender mercies of the Taliban. Good to have a responsible President. As opposed to, well, you know.
     
  • We all know about unreasonable search and seizure, the constitution being against it. Julian Sanchez goes to podcast with a couple of Cato Institute buddies on what happens when the government doesn’t spy on you, actually, but just purchases private spy type data with which to prosecute you.
     
  • The Propaganda Professor searches out the liberal media, ripping aside the curtain to find …well… nothing. Turns out the great divide in the media is the same as in the nation. And it is not right v left.
     
  • Will Louis DeJoy go postal again? Ant Farmer’s Almanac has the headline as our current Postmaster General gets set to impose last minute changes before being ousted.
     
  • In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, former pastor and ex-federal prisoner Jim Bakker now says his wrongful conviction on fraud charges was the result of his being cancelled by heathens. The reduction of his original 45 year sentence was an exoneration. See? He was innocent after all.
     
    SOOoooo… Bruce chronicles the crimes, the mega-fraud, the multi-charge conviction, and ironic reason for the overturning of the sentence (the conviction itself on the many charges was upheld).
     
  • One long running philosphical dispute has been whether consciousness is proof of a plane of existence that supercedes the purely material. I participate in this to the extent of confessing a failure of imagination. Infidel753 contemplates the argument, then sensibly dismisses it. There is, he says, no ghost in the machine.
     
  • Nojo is ready to help us watch the news, this time with six useful products to contain your screaming.
     
  • Reductress tells how to recognize your negative thoughts and at least hear them out.
     
    Okay, I can see that. I know the voices in my head aren’t real. But they do have such great ideas. Don’t be concerned at the wild look in my eyes.
     
  • Max’s Dad honors Lee Evans, who just died, a true hero of the 1968 Olympics whom protestors had to talk out of sacrificing, for social justice, his athletic dreams.
     
  • SilverAppleQueen reminds me of how I enjoy Robert Frost. 94 years ago, he versed our antecedents on the experience of walking through the timelessness of night.
     
  • The Onion has the photograph of a once-in-a-lifetime, astonishing baseball pitching accident.
     
  • The Journal of Improbable Research goes to the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom for a study of the electrical charge of a typical bumblebee.
     
  • Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit becomes more favorite as Mr-Fast-Hands hits the transporter control.
     
  • Nan’s Notebook develops a perspective on life from gazing out an airliner window. I have really got to fly again.

– Podcasts –
 

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