Not an Easy Question

Posted on by Dale

My email to my congresscritter, Brian Jack:

Whoever had control of the “AUTOPEN” is looking to be a bigger and bigger scandal by the moment. It is a major part of the real crime, THAT THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2020 WAS RIGGED AND STOLEN! Millions and millions of people knew that, but the Radical Left Democrats waged a campaign on inoculation [sic] and innocence like none that had ever been waged before. THIS IS WHY THE UNSELECT COMMITTEE OF POLITICAL THUGS, WHO WERE GIVEN A FULL AND COMPLETE PARDON BY THE PERSON WHO WIELDED THE NOW ILLEGALLY USED AUTOPEN, DELETED AND DESTROYED ALL EVIDENCE AND INFORMATION FROM THEIR CORRUPT AND VICIOUS WITH HUNT AGAINT ME, AND MANY OTHER PEOPLE, WHOSE LIVES WERE COMPLETELY SHATTERED AND DESTROYED BY THIS HISTORICALLY CRIMINAL EVENT. Remember, it all began with DIRTY COP James Comey, Obama, a hapless and cognitively impaired Sleepy Joe Biden, and my now very famous ACCUSATION that, “THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN!” Whoever had control of the…

This is who you support and — indeed — worked for. Why?

As usual, your reply will be posted on my blog and on Facebook. Thank you for your attention.

I don’t know about you guys, but I’d fake my own death to avoid answering this for my constituents.

Tempus fugit

Posted on by Dale

I’ve been under the weather for the past week and a half, just pitifully unable to rise to any occasion. The only productive thing I’ve been able to handle is 1) going back through all my Liberal Rant posts and tagging the ones that need it with a new Propaganda Studies tag; and 2) going back through every post for the past twenty years and making minor edits where necessary. Also, just to recap the past 20 years of my life.

Well.

It’s been a journey for sure, as one project or another, one rant or another, one cocktail or another, bobbed to the surface and sank again. Some posts were very very depressing; others validated my existence. (Some of my Liberal Rants from the 2016 election have proven to excruciatingly predictive.)

I’ll do a little profiling of one or two posts that jumped out at me, but this one took me aback. Feel free to go read it, but here’s the gist:

Reality TV show called The Mimeograph Kitchen, in which three generations of a family are presented with a fairly unappetizing dish (see above) from one of those mimeographed cookbooks so beloved of church groups back in the 1950s/60s — each generation is then challenged to go home and update the recipe to their tastes, bring them back to the studio and compare notes.

Why producers weren’t shoving wads of cash at me for the rights to this idea is still a mystery to me, but you know what, producers? You blew it. It is no longer possible to make Mimeograph Kitchen.

I realized this with a shock as I read this paragraph:

So our reality TV show is called Mimeograph Kitchen, and it will feature besides its host three couples: 1) someone our parents’ age, 70-80, i.e., the generation that produced these things; 2) someone our age, 50-60, the generation that grew up eating this stuff; 3) someone our kids’ age, 20-30, who have never known what it’s like not to have fresh salmon with dill cream sauce and a side of roasted broccoli.  The recipe is presented and discussed by all three couples (reminiscences, reactions, etc.) , and a sample is provided for a tasting.

::sigh::

I wrote that post in 2014, eleven years ago. We are now the 70s–80s generation, and our parents are either no longer with us or are in their 80s–90s — none of whom could rise to the challenge of considering, adapting, and making a completely new recipe. So, no: Mimeograph Kitchen will never be.

So, producers, let that be a warning not to sleep on our other idea, Mama’s Stuff. That one will never die out, for lack of a better phrase.

Hey, MAGAts, I sympathize with you

Posted on by Dale

No, really, I get it. The fear and anger with which those of us on the other side are reacting to the rapid, overwhelming Nazification of our country should feel familiar to you — it’s exactly the way you reacted during the Obama years or the Biden years, with panic and anger over the RADICAL LIBERAL TAKEOVER OF OUR GOVERNMENT KENNETH.

I am not mocking you. I get it. Your world was rocked because the Democrats were giving you affordable healthcare, infrastructure funding, alternative energy support, family medical leave, etc, etc, etc. It must have felt as if the wheels were coming off your Cybertruck. No wonder you revolted and ran straight into the arms of the Big Daddy to protect you.

However.

You were afraid of affordable healthcare, etc, because you were told it was SOCIALAMIZM KENNETH. You scorned alternative energy support (even though most of it went to your states) because WINDMILL CANCER KENNETH or DRILL BABY DRILL or something. You screamed with irrational rage at the two Democratic presidents even as they fixed the broken economy left to them by their Republican predecessors, raging about actions which neither man was taking nor was even considering, and not just allowing yourselves to be lied to by Fox News and the Republican Party but lapping it up like mother’s milk without any skepticism at all. (Receipts upon request; I got links, I’m just venting.)

We are afraid of the Gestapo, the crashing of the world economy, the wrecking of the post-WWII alliances, the blatant bribery and corruption, the dismantling of our social safety net, the dismantling of the agencies that keep our food, our water, our cars, our airports safe, the targeting of minorities, and above all, the arrogant incompetence of the Republixanazi Administration.

We are not the same.

Easy Answers: Habeas corpus

Posted on by Dale

Nazi ghoul Stephen Miller has stated publicly that the Republixanazi Administration is “considering suspending habeas corpus.”

Because of course they are.

What is one to do but contact one’s elected representative, right?

—————

Dear Rep. Brian Jack:

I see where Stephen Miller is actively pursuing “getting rid of habeas corpus.”

You are my elected representative. Do you support this?

I expect an answer that does not involve your getting your office organized seven months after the election.

As usual, I will post your answer on my blog in my Easy Answer series. (So far, you haven’t answered any of my questions.)

—————

I do not, of course, expect an answer. My congresscritter was Turmp’s political director during the First Reich, so my presumption is that he completely on board with the Nazis.

The Wax House

Posted on by Dale

Over on the Facebooks I have dedicated the last six months or so to exposing the stupidity, grifting, and overall malevolence and incompetence of the Republixanazi administration. I know it’s not pleasant, but if I can make a few thousand people aware of the issues we face, so be it.

Of course, I occasionally wonder how many of those people have muted or blocked me because OMG it’s relentless, and I’m pretty sure all the MAGAts fled long ago.

Except for one.

This person is not stupid and is fairly well read, but their head is so far up MAGA’s ass that they can hear a hamberder coming a small intestine away. They were regularly chiming in on my posts, spouting the most baseless crap ever, just the usual MAGAt shibboleths and bUt BiDens and Whataboutisms. After a week or so of this, I simply challenged them to put up or shut up: Names, dates, headlines. Give us facts, yo, not just snide MAGAt “comebacks.”

(Yes, I am using the singular ‘they’ to halfway shield their identity, which will enrage them even more when they eventually come across this post.)

You will be astonished to learn, I’m sure, that they have failed to provide any actual documentation of anything they’re sure is true. Not once. I even started tagging them to goad them into reacting, but no — they don’t got the goods. In the last week or so, they haven’t even made the effort to snark, because they know they don’t got the goods. I wondered if they had unfriended me, and I checked; no, we’re still ‘friends,’ so I decided to check out their page. Maybe, just maybe, they weren’t snarking because they were having an existential crisis discovering that their God Emperor was, shall we say, flawed?

Alas, no.

First, a metaphor: the Wax House.

If you build your house out of wax, because, hey, it’s beautiful with all the golden sunlight illuminating your walls and everything, you’ve committed yourself to a lot of work to keep it that way. That same sunlight might melt your home, or a casual tree branch or rock could crack your foundation.

So you add another layer two of wax. You build a wall around it. You construct a large dome of wax over it for extra protection, but that just creates more work, doesn’t it? But you keep at it, adding more and more layers to your protection, until the house no longer receives that golden light but you have to protect your Wax House, and on it goes.

Hold that thought. Here’s what I found on this person’s feed.

Oh my. Right off the bat, accusing “the left” with the right’s prime shibboleth “Ooh, look at the tolerant left.” This is exactly their position, that free speech means that they should be able to spout the most repulsive racist, classist, ablist, keep adding the -ist’s, crap imaginable, and if we point out they’re being dicks they scream YOU’RE THREATENING MY RIGHT TO FREE SPEECH.

::snork:: Good old Maggie. You could always count on her for a viperish, peevish lie. (See here.)

This one almost made me break my cover and comment with:

Something about Democrats always having to fix Republican economics, and that over 25% of our current debt is due to Turmp’s insane tax cuts for the rich. And he wants to increase them.

So let’s revisit our Wax House metaphor. Our friend has built a wax house of right-wing beliefs, and they are forced to contort themselves into gigantic pretzels to protect that wax house from anything that doesn’t make the wax house happy. This is a “closed belief system,”  in which people cocoon themselves in whatever makes them feel… important? better than? and then shut the door, ignoring the actual real world of sociology, science, economics, whatever — because even the tiniest sliver of reality is enough to start melting that house.

Let’s see some of the other things that this person clings to:

I love this one. It encapsulates the MAGAts determined deflection away from any cracks in the wax. The country isn’t “squealing,” of course, we’re screaming at the destruction of our government by right-wing psychopaths: agencies, grants, support, departments, research, history — all gone. Our screaming is not what is destroying our democracy. (Our guest MAGAt of course cannot keep from ejaculating that aMeRiCa iS nOt A dEmOcRaCy KENNETH, one of their top ten shibboleths.)

Also: See the poor signs of UNITY and CIVILITY strewn among the wreckage? That’s an insidious weapon the MAGAts use whenever we start attacking them: they clutch their pearls and whimper about CiViLiTy! KENNETH. It’s as if they’re kicking the rest of us and if we object they start whining that they hurt their toe and cAn’T wE aLL gEt AlOnG KENNETH HENNGH?

These are fun. Rhetorically, this is known as a Gish Gallop, the right’s preferred strategy for talking at anyone who disagrees with them: You simply yammer on and on, flooding the air with one specious argument after another so that when you’re done, your respondent has very little way to respond, since 1) you’ve thrown too many topics into the conversation, and 2) for each of those topics, they have to deconstruct your lies and fallacies before they can even begin to address the actual topic.

But we’re not having to do this with a yammering MAGAt in the room, so let’s deconstruct this.

1. baby

Dear MAGAts: It’s an embryo, not a baby. A baby is a human you can hold in your arms and love. An embyro is something different. bUt ThE hEaRtBeAt KENNETH — let’s kill this shibboleth right off: THERE IS NO HEARTBEAT. There is an electrical signal from a clump of cells that will become a heart, but they are not a heart. bUt YoU cAn HeAr iT oN tHe uLtRaSoUnD KENNETH — no, you can’t. You can hear the synthesizer sound medical engineers have decided to add to those electrical impulses, because it’s a lovely sound, isn’t it — BUT IT ISN’T A HEARTBEAT.

Maybe this helps:

2. how much money you should earn

LOL wut? I’m not sure what this one is. Probably something to do with taxes, which drive the MAGAts insane. How dare they be required to contribute to the welfare of our nation and — quelle horreur! — OTHER PEOPLE KENNETH! Or it may be about that outrageously generous minimum wage of $7.25/hour that hasn’t been raised since 2009, 16 years ago. Thankfully, costs have not risen in the least in those 16 years. [N.B.: The “minimum wage” is now officially below the U.S. poverty level. See also. And, MAGAt friend, this is what I mean by names, dates, headlines. Evidence.]

3. what energy source you should use

This is their tired old “drill, baby, drill” shibboleth. All of Turmp’s bizarre whining about shower heads and toilet flushes and forest management and windmill cancer is part of this idiocy. Listen up, MAGAts, no one is telling you which “energy source” you must use, and the only reason anyone is telling you you should use renewable energy is just trying to keep you from perishing in an apocalyptic wasteland. But you do you.

4. what words you can say

Yeah, kind of like kindergarten: “Billy, you can’t use those words in class. Mrs. Jones, Billy absolutely cannot call Susie a shithead.” (See “free speech” above.)

5. what they can do to your kids without your permission

Like what, bubba? Is this the old “my kid went to school a boy and came home a girl” bullshit? Is it a sideswipe of any school activity that threatens to expose their kid to… oThEr PeOpLe KENNETH? Run away! Run away!

6. how you must refer to what a person wants to identify as

Syntactical fluidity is beyond the average MAGAt. Let’s translate that garble to “how you must respect another person’s identity,” because that’s what actually torques them. We call it politeness; they call it unpardonable coercion, fullscale communism if you wanna know, as if they knew that that meant.

7. who can own a gun

And then every MAGAts favorite hill to die on — because guns, get it? — the Second fupping Amendment. Do I think that people who need psych evaluations should have a gun? No. Do I think that abusive spouses should own a gun? No. Do I think anyone who has proven to be dangerous to themselves and others should own a gun or even have access to one? No. I’m not at all sure why our MAGAt friend thinks they should.

Having fun? One more and we’re done.

It has somehow become gospel that when Ron DeSantis illegally flew some undocumented immigrants and dumped them in Martha’s Vineyard (because take that, libtards, how do you like them apples har har), the very rich and liberal residents of the Vineyard clutched their pearls in horror at those, those filthy illegals </BlancheDuboisVoice> (because that’s MAGA’s reaction) and immediately “deported” them to Somewhere Else to dispose of them.

Only that’s not what happened. Yes, DeSantis did put these people on a plane, lying to them that they were being taken somewhere where they’d be assisted in getting settled, with job training, shelter, appropriate paperwork, etc. When they were delivered to the Vineyard, no one knew they were coming and it took a moment for everyone to respond. Which they did by… providing food, shelter, clothing, counseling, transportation to somewhere that actually had the resources to support these people, unlike the island of the Vineyard, and — wait for it — a fast-track to citizenship, since they were now victims of a crime, DeSantis.

For a fuller, and funnier, report, see Wonkette.

There was more our friend’s feed, and I had a hard time making myself look away from the wreckage of a mind like that, but Jebus H. Cthulhu, the appalling messiness of the thought processes, the whole closed belief system, was compelling, pathological even. But I got away safely, I think.

In summation, our MAGAt friend has put so many protective barriers around their wax house that they can no longer see the sun, but that’s okay because everyone knows that SoLaR pOwEr iS a HoAx KENNETH, HENNGH?

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

Don’t make it an ‘us’ problem

Posted on by Dale

In her column today, Heather Cox Richardson examines DOGE, NASA, FAA, and Musk and how they’re destroying — I almost used “disrupting,” but no, it’s destruction —as much of our government as they can.

One sentence jumped out at me. After being fined over $600,000 by the FAA for “safety and environmental regulations,” Musk whined,  “The fundamental problem is that humanity will forever be confined to Earth unless there is radical reform at the FAA!”

No, Musk-Boy, the “fundamental problem” is that technocrats like you think that protecting our home here on Earth is “unreasonable and exasperating” and that those regulations “undercut American industry’s ability to innovate.” Get over it: only you and your little DOGE boys think that it is necessary to pollute our planet in order to escape the eventual death of the sun… in 5 billion years.

Here, have a picture.

This is 1 billion years, depicted as a 10×10 grid of 100 squares. That means that each square = 10 MILLION years. See that tiny little red dot in the upper left corner?

That red dot is one  pixel, far too large to  represent the majority of human history of 300,000 years. It should be .00003 of that little square (3/10,000ths!).

See, the math is already beyond our ability to grasp with our monkey brains.

So that one square is 1 billion years. Musk wants us to rape our planet so that he and his Muskyteers can flee to Mars before the sun explodes in 5 billion years.

So this demented creature has created this fairy tale in his head that he is the one genius who can lead us to a glorious future… on a completely inhospitable planet that we don’t really have a way to get to — only 12 humans have ever even been to the moon — and the project will just go swimmingly if we the people would just stop making him follow the rules, stop littering space with satellites that are designed to have a short lifespan so he can make more money launching more, stop subverting safety regulations so his trucks can explode without government interference, stop firing federal employees who rein him in and shutting down investigations into his businesses on all fronts.

Someone should stop him.

—————

UPDATE: Jeff Tiedrich, in his weekly The Week in Stupid column, pointed out a simple fact that I am embarrassed to admit I hadn’t thought of: When the sun goes and obliterates the poor fools who were so foolish as to ignore the GENIUS of MUSK KENNETH, it’s taking Mars with it as well. Duh.

Easy Answers: Parade or nah?

Posted on by Dale

My email to my congresscritter Brian Jack this morning:

I know you are deeply committed to the “president’s agenda,” but surely even you can see that the Pennsylvania Ave birthday parade is not only a huge waste of money but also a finger in the eye to anyone who believes that the U.S. is not ruled by a tinpot dictator.

Question: Have you done anything to dissuade the Current Regime from doing this or introduced legislation to stop it? Do you still believe that Congress controls the purse strings?

Thank you for your assistance in my “Easy Answers” blog series, where I will post any reply you send me.

Hope the office organization is going well.

He stopped sending out the boilerplate emails claiming he’s been busy getting his office organized (months after the election). My past couple of emails he hasn’t replied at all.

Got it? He’s not obligated in any way to consider his constituents’ feedback.

Which tracks for the kind of man he is.

But wait, you say, aren’t you being unfair, Dale? Your emails to him are nothing more than provocations about the incompetence/evil of his Republixanazi Party. You’re taunting him. You’re a liberal, and do not support him. You didn’t even know he was the White House political director for Turmp I until after he was elected because you didn’t need to know anything about him other than he was “ENDORSED BY TRUMP.”

Yes, and?

He is still honor-bound to represent me in Congress.

Here’s a pro tip

Posted on by Dale

Context: The Republican Regime’s plans to impose worldwide-economy-destroying tariffs on our economy. Turmp himself said, ‘“I’m just saying they don’t need to have 30 dolls. They can have three. They don’t need to have 250 pencils. They can have five,” Trump said, acknowledging the prices of such items could also go up.’

I don’t know about you, but this kind of thing makes parts of my brain fall off. In what part of America is this supposed to be an encouraging message?? I find it incredible — in its original sense of ‘unbelievable’ — that Bessent would go on Fox News (even) and say such a thing.

However, here’s my pro tip: Believe him — because he believes it. HE HAS NEVER HAD TO TELL A CHILD THEY WEREN’T GETTING CHRISTMAS.  He’s a deep-dyed Puritan: life must be earned; food, clothing, shelter, all must be earned. If you don’t have them, you’re being punished by a benevolent deity and you deserve it.

Scott Bessent believes this with all his heart because, as a centimillionaire, he has no idea what real life is like for us peons. It’s like “Let them eat cake,” only the reverse of that: “Let them have less cake!” (Or as Dmitri Shostakovich put it in his biography Testimony, the message of the last movement of his iconic Symphony No. 5 was claimed to be “triumphant joy,” but he said it was “‘actually… clear to everyone what happens in the Fifth.  The rejoicing is forced, created under threat, as in Boris Godunov.  It’s as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying, ‘Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,’ and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, ‘Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.'”)

So of course Bessent has no moral qualms about advising parents to lecture their children about having a better life through having your childhood dreams stomped into a bloody, pulsating pulp. As far as he’s concerned, that’s Life.

(But if you asked him to specify how the little girl’s life would be better for it, you’d get nothing but facile generalities.)

P.S. My blog post about Shostakovich’s Fifth and other works has some serious warnings for us today.

About that Cardamom Peach Shrub…

Posted on by Dale

You will recall that back in December I invented a tasty cocktail called the Citrine and even updated it so that you could make it even if you don’t have a neighbor making plum vodka for you.

What I didn’t do was get around to providing a recipe for making the Cardamom Peach Shrub, so better late than never, as they say.

Cardamom Peach Shrub

1 lb peaches, chopped
¾ c cane sugar
1 c water
5 cardamom pods
1 cinnamon stick
1 c apple cider vinegar

  • Combine the peaches, water, sugar and spices in a small pot and bring to a simmer. Cook over low heat until the fruit is tender and soft, about 15 minutes.
  • Strain the mixture (keep the fruit for ice cream or oatmeal, it’s not needed anymore). Combine the fruit syrup with the apple cider vinegar, and chill.
  •  The syrup should last in the fridge at least a week.

You may use canned peaches, of course. I cannot remember whether I rinsed them before using them; the sweetness of the packing syrup might throw the whole thing off. I rather think I did rinse them.