It really is like a movie where all the bad guys share a style so we know which ones to root against.

It’s the 21st century version of the full-face covering, the stormtrooper helmet.

The federal government really has been taken over by the Legion of Super-Villains

I wouldn’t hold my breath either.

Human society continues to careen towards multiple great filters it is ill-prepared to navigate, and the trillion-dollar propaganda machine that got Trump elected works. We just may not be evolved to cooperate at the level that gets us to community-based governments without monied interests interfering.

Mark Twain invested his money into the Paige Compositor, an automated mechanical typesetter, which had over a thousand moving parts in an era that lacked the capacity for precision molding. Babbage constructed the difference engine 2 which worked like a charm when built by students a century later, but he was defunded at the wrong time.

Sometimes we’re just not ready for good ideas, and not capable of implementing them at the time they are discovered.

All Cops Are Bastards, a sentiment that arises from the blue code of silence, so that even the well-meaning ones are obligated to lie in court to defend the violent ones, what allowed the loyalty-over-principle sector to rise into power, which is why there is such staunch resistance against publication of disciplinary hearings against police who misbehaved or broke laws, even though such documents are supposed to be public as per FOIA statutes.

When California passed a law reinforcing the notion that such files would be made accessible to the public, the precincts literally shredded or burned their files.

The institutions are corrupt through and through. It was especially evident during the Ferguson unrest, when the blue lines showed they had no trigger discipline for the military hardware they were wielding. It was laughable, except for the danger they were posing to the demonstrators.

Officers who seek to serve their communities quit. Some of them have publicly denounce police services and have become staunch police abolitionists. The only officers that remain are either violent killers, or the ones willing to cover for violent killers.

All cops are bastards.

It’s a long process, especially since people who have a lot of power really, really, really want to keep it.

For now the process is getting people on the same page. Or as a certain poet put it:

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope some day you’ll join us
And the world will be one

We need to pursue a society in which everyone has equal access to rights and resources, where no one has to worry about food or shelter from the elements, or whether their family will be ripped away from them due to circumstances. Where no-one is given exception, even when they are deeply in debt or committed heinous crimes, or are the most deviant of sexual perverts. We can include them and address the issues as well.

A society in which everyone has exactly the same amount of political power may not be possible but we can get closer to this than we are now. This is what that more perfect union bit is about.

We need to less follow ideologies which operate more like divine command theory as dicta or creeds, and more see societal models as exactly that: models. We know democracy on its own needs to be fine tuned. We know capitalism works only when well regulated and upper management isn’t allowed to behave irresponsibly. We know command economics requires a lot of deliberation and the willingness to listen to and address gripes from the public. The end goal is still the same: Everyone eats. Everyone is warm. Everyone is welcome.

This is my mission statement.

It was a fucking lie when it was written, having not included slaves or women.

Jefferson was an abolitionist when speaking hypothetically and invented the dumb-waiter so that his abolitionist friends didn’t have to observe the slaves that made their food when Jefferson had them over for dinner.

So when we create the new society, we need to assure – with ironclad language – that everyone has rights and is equal under law, down to the most heinous wrongdoer, the most crippled disabled person and the most squallid transient.

Let’s build a society where the poorest person lives pretty well, and has full access to their rights.

(It might also help if the richest person is limited in their wealth, say only a thousand times the worth of the poorest.)

It’ll take some work and deliberation.

I keep trying to formulate a plan in my head:

On one hand ACAB: They all promote the national security culture within the law enforcement sector that we civilians are the enemy. The departments are all corrupt through and through

On the other hand the non ICE officers hate being used as S𝑖𝑐ℎ𝑒𝑟ℎ𝑒𝑖𝑡𝑠𝑑𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑠𝑡 or Einsatzgruppen (German SD, or Death Squads, respectively) to pick on innocent civilians to be shuttled away to concentration camps. And I wonder if there was a way for the public to tell them we’re sorry they are being abused by being repurposed as general goon squads, and if that might encourage them to resist more than they do.

Also, ICE agents, either pre-Trump used to sometimes engage in action that at least had the appearance of legitimacy, e.g. tracking people with violent records. New recruits (post OBBBA Budget) were told they’ll be hunting the worst of the worst and then are picking up day laborers and ice-cream vendors, which is soul crushing for even MAGAs who wanted to be the hero.

We need to be able to take these sentiments and weaponize them against the system, and the policy-makers that are forcing them to be evil fucks for The Man.

I don’t know the specifics, but there’s a schematic in there somewhere.

💯

Full Goblin Mode.

In my defense, either I dress, or I turn out all the lights at night so no-one has to see my undressed form, except as a shadow.

In the summer here (July and August during heatwaves) my office goes between 80°F - 90° so no, I don’t wear a thing, hence the towels.

On my regular furniture, if I’m wandering around unclothed and need to sit down, I’ll drape something, often my briefs, before planting my butt.

Yeah, in my case ECT (shock treatment for the layfolk. Zapping my brain.) is on the table, and the research I’ve done on it is not reassuring that they know what they’re doing.

So I’ve thought about this at extreeeeeeeme length and with a philosophy background could probably argue before a judge… assuming the court wasn’t corrupt.

If they do I’ll regard it as suicide-lite: They’re destroying parts of my brain so that my behavior is less offensive. I’m sure I’ll love Big Brother will all my heart.

Ernest Hemingway and David Foster Wallace both got ECT, and decided they didn’t like who they were after the fact, eventually taking their lives. So if I go that route, it will be an absolute last resort.

I agree. As a vampire who immolates in the sun (well, gets sick after about an hour of light sun, or twenty minutes of August desert sun in 117°F) I’m not made to wave signs. Also I’m not great with crowds.

So for the No Kings rally, I figured: park me under a pavilion and I’ll hand out water bottles! Or put me on the cook line and I’ll stuff tacos! We are giving out tacos and water bottles right?

Not even water bottles in a major municipality. WTF?

With further research I found that the only food-centers mutual aid organizations are a couple of food pantries. In Sacramento, California.

Disappointment! Disappointment as far as the eye can see!

Personally I call shenanigans having had executive and standard office chairs made of leather, pleather and nylon mesh.

None of these are comfortable on the bare butt, and even will get sticky once you start sweating against them, so I’ve always had to drape towels between me and the chair.

Also do not get leather / pleather if you have cats.

If you can’t afford one, or rent, or wander around, travel bidets are about $20-$30 and are a water bottle with a hook-shaped wand-spout and an air valve.

My proctologist has a personal vendetta against wiping, and I messed up my piles from ages of wiping too hard. Bidet and dab to dry.

I had art I personally crafted accused of being slop (gen-AI free!). Dunno if it’s a compliment or a criticism.

I already suffer from psychosis

To be fair, I’ve already done something similar. In the aughts, thinking Miskatonic U’s Library restricted vault can’t harm me: I’m already crazy. Then thanks to Bush Administration efforts to consolidate power and persecute minorities, I went and studied the Holocaust, and the process within the German Reich that brought it forth.

And that figures into my current psychotic break, as of November 2024.

Shotgun is an America thing, coming from the stagecoach era. The shotgun in question has a shortened barrel for reduced storage footprint.

The BMW R12 has a sidecar mounted with an MG 42 light machine gun. But no-one calls sidecar gunner

You can’t convert them. Fluid ounces are volume. Regular ounces are weight (which isn’t quite the same as mass, though they’re used interchangeably on earth).

1 fl oz = 1 oz when the substance is water (at slightly above freezing). Any other substance would involve a specific mass factor.

Bezos has tens of billions, if not hundreds. He could support development of heat-resistant microchips, which would have countless applications.

I suggest we also collectively recall CIA can be both, given it’s a pretty big institution. It’s also been an evil fucker, presuming commercial interests based in the US count as US interests, even when those companies have become large multi-national corporations who actively avoid paying taxes.

I agree that it’s gauche that surveillance companies will pass sufficiently saucy private pictures to their colleagues for a gander (a tradition since WWII that is still carried on in NSA deep-packet scans of internet communications. (That includes sext exchanges between teenage lovers.) Playing around with LSD (on each other, as a practical joke) sounds like it falls more into this category, which, I’ll concede, is unprofessional especially for a department that has to sometimes engage in unethical action for sake of US national security, but that’s different than incompetent

If I was going to be critical of them, it would be their propensity for assassinations (botched ones on occasion) when there were alternatives, abandoning liberation forces they had sworn to support and supply and putting down developing democratic regimes in favor of US-allied dictators. Or even that they fueled their budget by supporting and participating in major drug trafficking syndicates, but these things are not incompetent, they’re immoral.

CIA’s strength (in the 20th century, at least, was SIGINT, including codebreaking, and analysis (that is, developing accurate dossiers based on limited or scattered data), and CIA did a whole lot more of that than they did killing VIPs and supporting revolutionary force.

As a young adult, I realized being a field operative was dangerous, and besides I was better at research and analysis, which I wasn’t imagining at all as a kid. Then by the time I understood the more gruesome parts of CIA history, George W. Bush was in office and they were torturing folks.

My dad, once a brilliant rocket scientist is now a full-on MAGA disciple, and in the past few years (when I was still arguing politics with him) he started submitting FOX News talking points as if they were his own.

I’m on suicide watch this year.

Okay, I should clarify, so as not to scare:

To be fair, I knew he was a bastard in 2003 when evidence of the CIA extrajudicial detention and torture enhanced interrogation program was published and came to a head. Staunch Republicans were party-signaling by announcing that torture of terrorists was right and proper, and waterboarding wasn’t really torture. My dad made such assertions, and went on to say all CIA captives were organized terrorists and guilty of violence (entirely untrue, but we wouldn’t know that for a couple of years). At the time I didn’t know about the Scharff interrogation techniques that informed US methods since WWII (Named after Luftwaffe Master Interrogator Hanns Scharff). We haven’t yet seen the full U.S. Senate report on CIA torture, incidentally, and I’m still sore about it.

My father really does deserve a corpse of a son, and I’m still striving to choose other than giving him one.

I’m too old (and gentle, actually) to become Hugo Stiglitz once the civil war comes, but if my fury, resentment and disappointment were given material form, it’d look something like that.