Just got off work. Good news! The pool where I swim is finally open and I can swim laps again. My eyes got all watery I was so happy. And the DNC is underway.
77 Days
Just got off work. Going to see what insanity the news cycle hath brought right now…
Nothing so far, will check again this afternoon when I wake up.
Here We Go at 78 days
While counter demonstrators accused the militia members and their supporters as promoting racism, a Florida militia member who gave his call sign as “Rick Rat” said his participation wasn’t “a race thing.”
“Everybody should come together and march on DC and get all the damn Democrats out of office,” he said. ”What I think they are trying to do is start a race war.”
Rick then launched into a version of a popular internet conspiracy theory known as QAnon and accused an unnamed group of Washington “elites” of being pedophiles.
“They are killing the kids and selling their organs,” he said.
Credit: Alyssa Pointer
Around 1 p.m., following an uptick in fighting between the groups, police marched through downtown with riot shields and dispersed the crowd. Behind the police, a unit of the National Guard waited in case they were needed, but the vast majority of protesters left peacefully. By 2 p.m., downtown Stone Mountain was quiet.
Stone Mountain police Chief Chancey Troutman said he told the groups they had three minutes to disperse.
”If they didn’t disperse in those three minutes, arrests would have been made,” he said.
Shaddi Abusaid contributed to this report.
Anti-vaxxers, QAnon, and the Alt-right are combining into a psychotic monster. It is accelerating which is exactly what the “Accelerationist’s” want. Waiting for judgement day? The day, “Der Tag” is a definite possibility. Especially with The Presidential Crimes Commission in the works. What better reason to burn down a nation than to avoid prosecution?
The three people I am most interested in hearing from this guys podcast are AOC, Chris Hedges, and…George Monbiot. I should start my own podcast. My daughter even said I should.
18:49 to 20:00 explains it all. Then 29:00 to 30:30. And…33:40 to 35:00.
79 Days to go
YouTube comment: We are so conditioned to Trump doing whatever he wants and getting away with it that putting him in prison does not seem possible. It is not going to be that way when he is no longer the President. Considering everything he has done and things we do not know about yet, and placing yourself outside of this alternate reality that is Trumpism, it would appear almost certain he is going to prison.
Timothy McVeigh was trying to make the Turner Diaries a reality. Every true believer white supremacist in the U.S., I will take a wild guess and say about a million of them, is thinking right now might be the only chance they will ever have to accomplish what McVeigh attempted- to start a race war. A war that will see death camps exterminating all minorities in the United States and making Aryanism the state religion. It seems crazy to even consider the nightmare scenario of a genocidal race war- but with the average age of whites at 58 and those of minorities 27, this is the only chance at any Rwanda-style ethnic cleansing the white supremacists are going to get and they know it. The numbers don’t lie.
Because it is possible Trump will try and wreck our fragile democracy in an attempt to stay in power the Neo-Nazis know this as one factor. That so much distrust has been sown with conspiracy theories like QAnon and the President branding the media as fake news, branding those fighting fascism like Antifa and branding social justice movements like BLM as “terrorists”, the Neo-Nazis know this is another factor. And of course the virus is the third factor and this all adds up to their big chance. I am scared.
It will not take much to light off something that will be very hard to stop. Russia and China know this.
She knows their secret- that a percentage of whites hate/fear non-whites and want non-whites disappeared. That is the true base of their power.
About 80 days to go
Here we are, waiting for this nightmare to end.
From the YouTube comments, veracity not verified:
- America is- 23 in education. 37 in healthcare. 34 in raising family index. No high-speed train. Highest number of homeless people. Highest number of incarcerated people. 78% of people live paycheck to paycheck. Stock market is not economy of Americans! Where 90% of money belongs to top 10% of the population, it’s a wallet for the rich.
- Oligarchy not democracy
- 2020, Greater China topped the list with a billionaire population of 799.
- 1 In corona-related deaths #1 In obesity #1 In gun-related deaths
- They’re going to sell off the USPS, the ONLY department mentioned in the Constitution, to private enterprise.
-
And they gave AOC one minute at the DNC.
Every day I am more and more disturbed by the confusion and disinformation degrading the credibility of any of those things we have always trusted. It is extremely serious- and Trump is the main villain.
82 Days Thin blue red green why
Well…my garage door opener is talking to me again. When it malfunctions I have come to believe God is telling me I am doing something wrong. It has become a kind of oracle to me. When there is some decision pending or drama going on I let the garage door decide. Crazy, right? Not really. Very human. Today it worked perfectly and that meant my inclination to let go of some emotional baggage instead of heading out the door with it is how to proceed. I feel better. And…I have a couple days off.
My neighbor is flying one of those blue green orange stripe not-a-U.S. flag and it is disturbing. I don’t like it. But if I was to go and tell him “that is not the U.S. flag” he would get very upset. America is in trouble. Same if I went and told the people across the street their motorcycles with no mufflers are absolutely loud and unacceptable. Their outlaw-motorcycle-gang-I-am-merica attitude would not tolerate that and I would have an even more serious problem than those damn things sitting there “warming up” at all hours. Same as if I told my neighbor in the opposite backyard their truly gigantic and always angry attack dog barks at me and mine over the fence whenever we show ourselves- and I actually have a handgun in a kitchen cabinet in case that monster jumps the fence. They would doubtless tell me attack breeds are misunderstood and theirs is not really mean, just a good watchdog. Right. My community is mostly conservative in this military midwest town and 400 horsepower pickup trucks and Trump stickers are common. Most of my coworkers own AR-15s or Kalashnikovs or some flavor of military weaponry.
Everything that is wrong with America. But they mostly think climate change is a hoax and the rich are on their side- and they are everything “right” about America. They certainly are “on the right” and likely believe everything said on the Fox News white power hour.
My comment from YouTube: “Doctors, lawyers, scientists, and engineers are the four “legs” of civilization and are the intelligent and hard working upper percentage of the IQ range. Most of us, the “average people” (no shame in admitting you are not a rocket scientist), are simply not capable of performing at their level. If academia had not been corrupted into the scam it is then the smartest and most driven among us would have credentials that we trust and this would be the qualifier for public office. That said, they are imperfect human beings exactly like the rest of us. Many of them are real creeps (and highly visible), while some of them are great people while the rest are some of both. In a democracy, the trick is the average citizen like me being able to think critically and pick the best representative. See how that is supposed to work? The mortal enemy of America right now is propaganda and straight up lies being almost all the citizenry have to work with.”
And…watch out for these nuts.
83 Days
Crazier and crazier news every day. Looks like the Post Office might finally be the end of America. Very possible though most Americans have other stuff on their minds. That is the problem with a spoiled self-centered population- they eventually get what they deserve. On the bright side Kamala Harris is the VP pick. If Joe resigns due to health problems we will have a black woman as president.
84 Days
Crazy that they are reopening the schools. People are going to die. How can anyone justify that?
On a different note, it may be that Mars is not going to be the place to explore. Time to get the mini-subs on their way to Ceres.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/dwarf-planet-ceres-ocean-world-150218644.html
It may seem…wrong…to go from the pandemic to another world but the future is waiting for us make it happen. The reasons for America’s failure to control the virus is obvious to most of us. Most of us will elect a new president on that issue alone. There is going to be life after this is over…except for those who die of course.
85 Days
Going back to work tonight without enough sleep.
The Super Corporation
20:20 “-we created a system a hundred years ago that said no one company can control society-” (actually, a hundred and thirty years ago)
From wiki: “In the 1880s, hundreds of small short-line railroads were being bought up and consolidated into giant systems. (Separate laws and policies emerged regarding railroads and financial concerns such as banks and insurance companies.) People for strong antitrust laws argued that, in order for the American economy to be successful, it would require free competition and the opportunity for individual Americans to build their own businesses. As Senator John Sherman put it, “If we will not endure a king as a political power we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life.” Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act almost unanimously in 1890, and it remains the core of antitrust policy. The Act prohibits agreements in restraint of trade and abuse of monopoly power.”
Railroads really enabled the modern era to begin in the early 1800’s. Think about it…before railroads the only way to move large amounts of material or people any distance was by water or by horse-powered wagon. That was it- since the beginning of civilization ten thousand years ago this had not changed. Most people never traveled more than ten or twenty miles from where they were born and almost everything used by people was locally manufactured. If you did not live by a river or on the coast you were a long long way from anywhere or any-thing. Because railroads enabled vastly increased industrialization and commerce the wealth associated with this was astronomical.
Greater concentrations of private wealth than ever seen in history…ever.
The railroad companies were the first to stop competing against each other and began cooperating in mergers and this immediately resulted in these large companies blatantly raising prices as high as the market would bear. This made for super-rich shareholders and the general population essentially paying every penny they had for basic necessities. Like selling bottles of water for 10 dollars each after a hurricane except all the time. The citizens went to their representatives and the government began throwing executives of these companies in jail and breaking up the corporations. This is basically admitting super-rich individuals are a threat to the nation and regulating the amount of wealth they can have. Really.
But some corporations were seen as “good” in their effects and if they presented themselves as doing a service to the public they were allowed to continue as super-large companies. The main reason this was allowed, under strict government regulations, were good business practices that created a high standard of living for workers. From wiki:
“Welfare capitalism is capitalism that includes social welfare policies.[1] Welfare capitalism is also the practice of businesses providing welfare services to their employees. Welfare capitalism in this second sense, or industrial paternalism, was centered on industries that employed skilled labor and peaked in the mid-20th century.
Today, welfare capitalism is most often associated with the models of capitalism found in Central Mainland and Northern Europe, such as the Nordic model, social market economy and Rhine capitalism. In some cases welfare capitalism exists within a mixed economy, but welfare states can and do exist independently of policies common to mixed economies such as state interventionism and extensive regulation.[2] ”
Any distinctions between “welfare capitalism” and “embedded liberalism” (The New Deal) are about what side of the aisle the economists and politicians discussing them are on. An example of this word salad is found in this forward to a book on the subject:
“The current globalization debate has revived interest in the viability of welfare
states in competitive market economies. Comparing Welfare Capitalism challenges
the popular theory of a downward convergence. It argues that there are at least
two varieties of capitalism: Anglo-American free market economies, and Rhenish
(Germanic or Japanese) coordinated economies; each variation in production
systems is embedded in a national welfare regime.”
A new term for me to think about: the “coordinated economy.”
In 2020 we have these billionaire founders with a controlling interest and their shareholders who are also lesser billionaires running Super Corporations presenting themselves as providing necessary services to the public. They are inferring they should not be penalized or broken up when they in effect “regulate themselves” in pursuit of greater profits. They of course want to present all of this in the most confusing manner possible so they can keep getting richer and richer. It is…corruption. Plain and simple.
Neoliberals do not, in any way, consider regulating themselves richer as corrupt or immoral. That is their ideology. They have invested mountains of money over the last half a century in propaganda to convince the working class the rich are “the good guys”; the wealth creators who raise everybody up with what trickles down. Those of us living paycheck to paycheck who understand history have a different opinion; we are the ones paying ten dollars for a bottle of water. Let me copy and paste what I wrote a couple paragraphs up again: “The citizens went to their representatives and the government began throwing executives of these companies in jail and breaking up the corporations. This is basically admitting super-rich individuals are a threat to the nation and regulating the amount of wealth they can have. Really.”
I am voting for anything that sounds like “A New Deal.”
Ice on the Moon 