I’m Not Cut Out For Community Organizing

A lot of people want mob rule so long as it’s their mob that is in charge. Just wanted to get that out of that way because it has been on my mind recently.

Every so often I get it in my head to try something I have never done before. Saturday was that day because for the first time I manned a voter registration booth.

I reached out to KFTC (Kentuckians For The Commonwealth) and they asked me if I wanted to participate in a “new citizen celebration”. I thought that meant that immigrants would be taking oaths to become new citizens. I figured there would be a reception or something where, among other things, the new U.S. citizens could register to vote.

Me and another guy were given a box of voter forms and materials.  We didn’t register anyone.

Turns out they weren’t swearing in new Americans. This was simply a celebration for new citizens. The county clerk’s office sent someone to help people register, so we weren’t needed for that. There was a lady from the census office giving out information about next year, and some other booths I can’t remember for. They had a boombox playing Burmese music and snacks. It was sparsely attended, but relatively nice.

Me and the other guy ended up giving out some forms to some people who might need them in case they need an interpreter when they go to vote in November. So we weren’t totally useless.

I feel like it is important for us as citizens to do more beyond bitch about politics on social media. I was glad to be there at the event, yet I don’t know what I was supposed to do there. I thought I knew, but then I got there, and . . .

I felt the same way when the local MoveOn said they were having a protest at Rand Paul’s office in Owensboro a few years ago and I was the only one that showed up. Not even the guy who was the contact for the event made it. The security guards at the building looked at me like I had three heads. Then there was the time where I went to phone bank for the Democrats. I wrote about that. Five pages of numbers and I got through to six people. There’s a few more of these I blotted out of my memory because they are so embarrassing.

It’s not even like I tried to help on a policy measure like a fairness ordinance and failed. I never got that far. I couldn’t possibly recommend getting involved in community organizing based on my own personal experience.

To be fair, my comfort zone is about >>>>this<<<< big.  When I leave the house, I’m not comfortable unless I’m surrounded by at least a half-dozen people I know. So don’t listen to me. I take to things like a duck to baseball.

I don’t do this often because I don’t have the time or energy but I do it because I feel like everybody can do a little bit. I’m frustrated with the state of things right now. I don’t want to look back years from now and say I didn’t try at all. Even if I turn out to be bad at it.

 

 

 

 

 

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The Worst Queen Songs

In my last post, I wrote about my hatred of the stans, the fanboys, you name it. Toxic fanbases.

If there were anything I came close to fanboy-ing over it would be Queen. I’m hardly alone.

A lot of people love Queen, and some people wonder what the worst Queen songs are. The Queen discography is small enough to hash this over: fifteen studio albums. It’s hard to get a consensus.

A few people will say “all of them”. They can go to hell.

1982’s Hot Space is generally regarded as the band’s worst album, the one where they attempted to expand on their unlikely funk/disco success with 1980’s “Another One Bites The Dust”. That album gave us “Body Language” (a classic of ironic bad taste and actual hit single) but it also gave is the Freddie-penned “Staying Power”.

Let me show it to you yeah

See what I got, I got a hell of a lot
Tell me what you feel
Is it real is it real
You know I got what it takes
And I can take a lot

I’m not ready for any song about Freddie’s dick. Let me show it to you. No thanks. #Metoo

I could choose plenty of songs throughout the band’s career. Roger Taylor’s “Modern Times Rock ‘n Roll” from their debut album is under two minutes long, and sounds like it took less than that to both write and record. Brian May wrote “Sleeping On the Sidewalk” for 1977’s News Of The World. It’s a blues song, and though Queen are legally allowed to perform in the blues idiom doesn’t mean they should.

On purely musical terms, the worst song is “My Baby Does Me” from 1989’s The Miracle. They’re using a drum machine, which is never a good sign. Freddie sings as if he’s saving what remaining strength he has for better songs. The song is credited to the whole group but it sounds like a John Deacon song that everybody else said “fine” and helped out on just to be nice. I’m not linking to these songs because I care about you.

But the absolute worst song that Queen ever did is one that nobody ever talks about. It’s “White Man” from 1976’s A Day At The Races. Just listen:

I’m a simple man
With a simple name
From this soil my people came
In this soil remain
Oh yeah, oh yeah

We made us our shoes
We trod soft on the land
But the immigrant built roads
On our blood and sand
Oh yeah, oh yeah

At the start, there’s a Hollywood-esque Indian riff on guitar while Freddie sings with a trace of Tonto in his voice.

It’s written by Brian May, a white guy from England. The longer you listen, the worse it gets lyrically.

This is a song about the Native Americans and their suffering at the hands of the white Europeans who colonized North America, sung from the perspective of a Native American himself.

Famous white people assuming the voice of the repressed and the voiceless. Queen were hardly the first to do it nor were they the last, unfortunately. Like an actor assuming they truly understand what its like to be poor and impoverished because they played a poor person in a movie. It’s insulting and patronizing.

Musically, it’s a decent rock song. That’s not the issue. It’s Hollywood elitism by way of London, England.

“White Man” is the Washington Redskins of Queen songs and that’s why it is the worst one. “My Baby Does Me” is actually worse but y’know what I mean.

The band member most qualified to write that song was right there the whole time.

Y’know. The Parsi guy from Zanzibar who had to flee with his family from their war-torn homeland in his teens? What would he know about having his homeland taken from him?

Just to recap: never let your fandom get in the way of the truth. Sometimes your faves make shit. The sooner you realize that, the better you will be able to appreciate when they create something great.

I Hate The Stans

I got pissed off at a Lana Del Rey tweet because apparently I don’t have enough things to get annoyed about in life.

So don’t call yourself a fan like you did in the article and don’t count your editor one either – I may never never have made bold political or cultural statements before- because my gift is the warmth I live my life with and the self reflection I share generously.

— Lana Del Rey (@LanaDelRey) September 5, 2019

Lana Del Rey seems upset that Ann Powers of NPR didn’t give her the WordPress equivalent of a knobjob in print. If you want to read it, here it is. I can’t bear to finish it because I can’t bear to read thousands of words about Lana Del Rey.

Powers writes an appreciative, though not uncritical essay. She notes that Del Rey was largely regarded by critics and cynics as a bullshit, self-creation and (in Powers’ charitable view) that it took Del Rey time to find her artistic voice. Even I can tell that the writer is looking at her work in a greater context. But that’s not good enough for Lana Del Rey, apparently

“my gift is the warmth I live my life with and the self-reflection I share generously (sic)” Sure. Of course.

Does any remember her disaster of a performance of SNL, which went so bad even Brian fucking Williams felt like he could talk shit? What does that have to do with anything, you ask? Good for her on having blind, ridiculous faith in herself and blotting out the horrible failure that would have driven other performers out of showbiz. But we can’t rewrite history especially when it happened where everyone could see it.

Sometime after that, a friend sent me a link to “Gods & Monsters” and I swore I could hear the collagen and botox in Lana Del Rey’s lips and face. Like she went to get the injections right before going to the studio to record the vocals without waiting for it to settle.

See? That paragraph is the kind of thing that should hurt feelings. That is below the belt. That is not criticism. It’s sarcastic and mean.

Now it’s 2019. She’s critically acclaimed and sells out arenas on tour. She won, yet it’s not enough. Lay prostrate at the altar. Sadly, there are plenty of fans willing to do so which is pathetic. It hit me like a ton of bricks reading the replies.

END HER CAREER

— amber🍒 STREAM NFR (@streamborntodie) September 5, 2019

END HERRR pic.twitter.com/RyHN4QGWmL

— Nicole (@lanasiconiclegs) September 5, 2019

This article is so ugly and badly written what the hell, you are the most authentic and visionary artist out there and the best of our generation for sure! You are so gifted and truly one of a kind ❤️ Just ignore people like that, they wish they had 1% of your talent and wisdom x

— Manoela 🌹 (@dobadelrey) September 5, 2019

don’t listen to people, you know what you’re worth, you’re the best Lana💕 @LanaDelRey

— Lana’s venice bitch🦋 (@miranda_LDR) September 5, 2019

Sis, honestly, the start of this "article" seriously sounds like a Dean Koontz novel and the rest is simply garbage truck juice. It's like a sloth on oxycontin wrote it. Don't worry about it.

— Crying Crustacean (@CryingCrustacea) September 5, 2019

Ninety-eight percent of the replies basically read like that. In the interest of fairness, I will post one LDR fan who seems, I dunno, reasonable?

That's a strangely aggressive way to react to a glowing review.

— Mathieu Robitaille (@MathieuChauve) September 5, 2019

EXACTLY! The writer is a fan. But the writer isn’t a STAN. And that’s what Lana Del Rey wants! And that’s what all these artists want. They want a Beyhive. They want an army of fans to swoop in and defend them, kamikaze-style, against any perceived offender. Guess what? It works. Stans love to play the role. It gives them something to do, an identity. Like rooting for a sports team. Or MAGA but for. . . I don’t know, Chris Brown or somebody like that.

The only reason I’m picking on Lana Del Rey is because she’s the one who pricked my finger today. It could’ve been anybody else. It could’ve been Kobe Bryant stans, or Rick & Morty idiots, or WWE fans (aka Stamford wives) or LITERALLY ANY FANBASE OF ANYTHING EVER. Star Wars, The Office, Steven Universe, all sports, any and all video games, literally any movie produced by a comic book company. I can’t enjoy just Superman or Spiderman. I have to enjoy the entire universe of the company that produces them. I have to defend (video game manufacturer) with all my heart even though I have nothing to gain by fighting what South Park called “Console Wars”.

There’s the superfan. The stan. The fanboy. The attack dog. The person whose fandom becomes part of their personal identity. The person who will engage in a pissing contest even though they’re getting it all over themselves.

Why think critically when you can let yourself be manipulated by the thing you love so much? Do you think you’ll get a pat on the head or something? Lana Del Rey wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire.

Lana Del Rey wouldn’t even piss on you for her own amusement.

Coincidentally, I’m writing this on what would have been Freddie Mercury’s 73rd birthday. You know, the guy who wrote “We Are The Champions”?

YAAAAASSSS! WE STAN A QUEEEEENNNN!

We are the champions, folks. You, the audience and we, the band. More specifically, we who will be climbing into our limos after the show to drink champagne and party with gorgeous wo/men. We definitely are the champions. All of you who paid to see the show and bought the album and the commemorative t-shirt from the merch stand? You. . . uh, yeah. . . you too are the champions, just not as much. You’re like the minority shareholders of the championship.

Thank God that Twitter didn’t exist in 1978 because the Queen stans would have been insufferable. Probably would have been named “The Royal Family” or some dumb shit. Thank God the band got their asses kicked in the ’80s and were irrelevant for a while after Freddie died before social media. I wouldn’t be able to justify liking this band at all.

It’s a good song, though.

 

 

 

 

Truth Hurts: I’m Not Body Positive

The MTV VMAs were last week. I didn’t watch them but I had to hear about them through the magic of social media. I gave up on the VMAs around twenty years ago, but not all of my friends are as curmudgeonly as I am so they still watch the VMAs.

OH SNAP! I just searched Youtube and this came up.

Naughty By Nature, Queen Latifah, Wyclef Jean and Redman did a medley. They squeezed ’90s hip-hop into eight minutes. Was this show made for my generation? Who else performed? Pearl Jam? Soundgarden? Nirvana? Alice In Chains? The Beastie Boys? 

But I heard more about Lizzo than anyone else.

I knew about Lizzo before the VMA’s. The PR is strong, folks. If you look online there are naked pictures of her. She took them because she’s a body-positive person. I blocked her on Twitter because I’m sick of seeing them.

I have heard about Lizzo for years before ever hearing a note of her music, which is today. But I just watched that VMA performance clip and I have a few takeaways from it.

First off, I’m way more fat than Lizzo. I’ve lost over fifty pounds this year but it’s not enough. Not even close. And I think body positivity can only go so far.

As I watched that video, one of the things that crossed my mind was “how can I get this weight off my body as fast as possible?” because I don’t know if you know this but being fat FUCKING SUCKS. The quality of my life is diminished. My back hurts if I stand up too long, which is not long compared to most people. I walk slower than others because I have more weight to carry. Going up flights of stairs is difficult. Coming down the stairs is worse. My clothing options are limited. Clothes for people my size cost more.

There is nothing positive in any of that. I live in one of the fattest states in the country. I see strangers in the same boat I’m in and I know how miserable they are. I don’t accept it. I don’t love it. I’m ashamed of it and of myself and that’s why I’m trying to change it. How can I accept and love this thing that is so obviously unhealthy?

I don’t know what it’s like to be a black woman in America but I know what it’s like to be a performer. I know that breathing is a requirement for singing. Being really fat can make your breathing labored. Try doing a whole show like that. She has a 22-date tour starting next week. Good luck with that. Besides, people act like this self-love message is new but it isn’t. Ask Mama Cass. Ask Sophie Tucker.

No one is louder than the voice in our head. We are our own worst enemies, woman or man. Sad but true. We all want someone to validate us. Someone that we can look up to. But we’ve gotten burned so many times with so many celebrities. Why are we doing this again?

I don’t know how to end this so I’m just going to quote Mama Cass because a while back I was listening to “Make Your Own Kind Of Music” and it just hit me harder than anything has hit me recently. Because although it seems like a happy song, the second verse reveals a desolate nature.

You’re gonna be knowing the loneliest kind of lonely.

It may be rough going, just to do your thing, the hardest thing to do.

Mama Cass Elliot had the same idea of self-acceptance and defiance. But she fucking died way too young. Her heart stopped.

There’s no beauty in any of this and we have to struggle with it in our loneliest moments. And nobody saying you’re beautiful just the way you are is changing that.

 

 

Who’s The Cutest Girl In The World?

It’s been a long time since I last wrote about Japanese wrestling so I think I’m overdue. I’d like in this edition to write about the self-proclaimed “cutest girl in the world” who has become a cult sensation. She is cute, as in adorable. She is also a unstable mess of a human being. Yes, even for pro wrestling.

Maki Ito sings her own entrance theme on the way to the ring, all dressed up like Little Red Riding Hood. She also claims to have gone in debt spending the equivalent of $8000 U.S. to make her face smaller. It doesn’t appear to have worked and she’s not happy about that.

"All I had to do was get in debt to make the front page of Yahoo News.

Female Idol Wrestler Confesses Debt Caused by Plastic Surgery in Ring! (Battle News) – Yahoo! News: https://t.co/ybVzp02wm3" https://t.co/FAiyjaQExp

— Itoh Respect Army (@ItohRespectArmy) May 3, 2019

Maki Ito asks the crowd “Who’s the cutest in the world?” to which the crowd replies “ITO-CHAN!” No one wants to see what happens if they don’t say that. She gives the finger to opponents who are beating the hell out of her.

 

She rams her own head into the turnbuckle post out of frustration. When she loses big matches (which is often) she tends to steal the microphone so she can rant and cry hysterically and then sing a capella version of “Ultra Soul” by B’z while limping in great pain back to the backstage area. She is slowly learning English but all the wrong words first.

Words learned today，dick head pic.twitter.com/80v1Gewyuf

— 伊藤麻希(Maki Itoh) (@maki_itoh) July 11, 2019

chill🖕

— 伊藤麻希(Maki Itoh) (@maki_itoh) July 24, 2019

Words learned today，alabama hot pocket pic.twitter.com/lGaSFugIRk

— 伊藤麻希(Maki Itoh) (@maki_itoh) August 21, 2019

Maki Ito is 24 years old and has been wrestling for less than three years. Before that, she was an idol performer, learning how to sing, dance, and charm an audience. That training is part of her origin story as a wrestler.

(If you don’t understand, look up “Japanese idol” on Wikipedia because I don’t have the time or ability to explain it succinctly and I’d prefer to concentrate on Maki Ito.)

The talent agency that groomed her to be an idol judged her looks to be insufficient and fired her. Ito, not wanting to leave the world of entertainment behind, re-emerged in an unlikely way via the all-women’s promotion Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling (TJPW). Unfortunately, her rejection by the talent agency made her neurotic and insecure. To make things even worse for her, TJPW added a group of singing idol wrestlers called Up Up Girls (Puroresu) to the promotion a few months after she debuted.

BOO! GET OFF THE FUCKING STAGE!

Up Up Girls is a well-known Japanese idol singing group that has partnered with TJPW to form their own version of the group that starts each wrestling show with a song and dance routine. The wrestling version of Up Up Girls also competes in matches. Sometimes they compete against Ito. Sometimes there is trouble.

In order to bolster her self-esteem, she formed her own group called Ito Respect Army which consisted of her and basically one other girl.

Eventually she broke up the Army because she was jealous of the other girl winning more matches and being better than her at wrestling.

And that’s the other thing. As popular as Ito is with TJPW and with fans of wrestling online, she’s still not a great wrestler. Let me put it to you this way: imagine one of the guys from One Direction getting fired from the group and deciding his best way of staying in entertainment was to join a wrestling company.

How good could that guy possibly be after two years of training? That’s essentially what Ito is, a former idol singer/dancer turned athlete/performer. She’s done well considering where she came from but pro wrestling is very hard to do even if it is a form of entertainment.

I think that combination of being the underdog and laying it out there for all to see is what has endeared her to fans. Defiance in the face of certain defeat. She’s outclassed by superior wrestlers but she gives them finger anyway and refuses to give up. The opponent has to keep beating on her until she can’t get up anymore.

Besides, there’s always the next match and another chance for victory. And she definitely gets her fair share of wins. Especially against those cursed Up Up Girls.

Recently, she had a Twitter AMA. It went well.

 

I don’t think we should take life advice from a neurotic 24-year-old pro wrestler who seems to be flirting with nihilism and financial domination. But that’s just me. Let’s at least wait until she gets a few more years of life experience and a better grasp of English. And she has a good point. . . give me money.

No, not her. Give me money. I’m not the cutest in the world. Not even close. I could use the help.

I Worked The Phone Bank And Regretted It

I was going to meet the next Governor of Kentucky yesterday but things happened and I couldn’t make it. One of my tires had a piece of metal in it and I had to pay $15 for the privilege of having it taken out. By the time my tire was ready to go, it was too late to make the drive to the Daviess County Democratic Party HQ in Owensboro in time to meet Andy Beshear. Too bad, because I wanted to get a picture with him. I haven’t posted anything on Instagram in over a month, which is an ice age in Instagram time.

I’ve been in the Daviess County HQ before. It’s where I went for my brief foray into phone canvassing for Beshear and the Democrats. I volunteered for it. Why? Because I’m a glutton for punishment.

This happened a few weekends ago because I e-mailed a local political action group about getting involved in something somehow. I’ve been incredibly frustrated with. . . well. . . everything. Look around us. Watch the news. It’s infuriating. The Democrats represent the best chance we have to do anything to address this current shitstorm we’re living in.

I was contacted and offered the chance to do work at the phone bank. The gubernatorial campaign in Kentucky is done in an off-year which means 2019 is the one. Campaigns rely a lot of volunteer help so I’m glad help even a little bit, which in this case meant volunteering to work the phones on a Saturday afternoon.

I don’t know if I can go through with it again.

It’s a small office but since it was Saturday there weren’t very many people there. The guy in charge introduced himself to me and gave me the basic how-to and then let me at it. A nice older lady was already on the job when I got there. That was it. Just the two us, trying to convince Daviess County to swing to the left in 2019.

I was given a flip phone and an alphabetical list of names of people who lived in Knottsville. Name, age, sex, phone number. I called the number on the top and I got a voicemail. I hung up and then I had to key in on the sheet that they weren’t home because I got the voicemail. They had a key for everything. If the caller wasn’t home, if the phone was busy, if the phone was disconnected, yada yada yada. 98% of my calls went in those categories. It would have been tedious had it not been the first time I was doing it.

The guy in charge informed me that this would happen a lot and that I should come back on a night when they do computer calling. Because the computer filters out all the people who don’t pick up. No, I’ll pass on that. I actually prefer the indirect rejection of a voicemail. In the event I got to talk to a live human being, I was given a sheet that I could read from to introduce myself and talk about Andy Beshear and the Democratic ticket. Somebody (or some people) had probably been paid a lot of money to figure out what should be on this sheet. I decided to make it my own and just roll with it. The people who came up with this stuff got paid either way.

I began to feel what I imagine someone who goes out fishing feels like. Out on that boat, rod in hand, just waiting for a bite. Hours on end, just waiting for a little excitement. It’s boring, almost tedious, until it’s exciting. I don’t fish, in case you can tell.

Some people said no and I thanked them for their time. Some people recoiled in disgust and hung up. I keyed them all on my little sheet: REFUSED. Meanwhile, the nice old lady? Doing way better than I was. Some people have the gift, what can I say?

In the end, after five pages of names only six people deigned to talk to me. Three of them said they would vote for Beshear, three for the other guy. One of the Bevin voters actually sang to me like a lunatic, in a sing-songy way. I wasn’t even mad at her. I was almost starved for human contact by that point. All of that information gets keyed in as well. The people who say they’re voting for Bevin? Their info is taken off future lists, as well as the info of the people who refuse to talk and those whose phones are disconnected.

I presume their information is sent straight to hell.

While I’m no political consultant, I have to presume that late Saturday afternoon is no good time to call people and ask them how they feel about politics. Is there a good time to do that ever? Especially in this day and age when people get anxious whenever they see an unfamiliar number on their phone? Even if they offered up their number voluntarily, which I presume they did. It’s one of those things you do and then forget about until you get a strange call and then play the voicemail after. “Oh yeah that’s right, I signed a petition. I gave my contact info to the Democrats. Goddammit.”

 

 

 

 

Blue Pilling Myself On Jeffrey Epstein

Today I learned what a JFK truther must feel like.

In the early morning hours of August 10, 2019 the notorious pedophile and financier Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide. That’s the official explanation.

It is incredibly easy to go down the conspiratorial route. A giant part of me is incredibly skeptical. It would be foolish not to be, especially in this day and age. There’s a strong public sentiment that goes against the incredibly rich and powerful. There’s a wild fantasy running out there to guillotine the rich who have conspired to tilt the system entirely in their favor and keep the multitudes miserable.

There was a tenuous hope that the court proceedings of Jeffrey Epstein would reveal a trove of misdeeds by the privileged elite so grotesque that the public would rise up and demand justice. Epstein in addition to his own crimes stood accused by others of running a child sex trafficking ring, with links to royalty, political figures  (including the current US President) and titans of industry. Not only was this to be an indictment of Epstein but of the capitalist system itself.

It was just too much to ask for. A desperate pipe dream, and it drained away along with the last futile pumps of blood in Epstein’s heart in that lonely Manhattan cell.

Occam’s Razor is the philosophical theory that assumes the most likely scenario is probably the correct one. Since this concerns a famous suicide, I’ll let you make your own razor joke now.

In 2008 when Epstein was convicted of prostitution and NOT sex trafficking and child sex abuse, he was given an incredible sweetheart deal. He was held not in a prison like most inmates, but in a jail in West Palm Beach. He was allowed to leave the jail six days a week as part of a work release program. He was allowed to go his office for twelve hours a day. His cell door was not even locked. Thirteen months later he was granted release, after which he integrated back into high society.

Now eleven years later, his many offenses had caught up to him with a vengeance. He was sixty-six years old. The authorities had found everything he possibly had. Every little video and picture. All his computer discs. Now he was locked in a Manhattan cell with no possibility of being released on bond. A judge found him to be a flight risk. He had a Israeli passport with a fake name and $70,000 worth of diamonds in a safe at his mansion. He couldn’t be trusted to stay home as part of a bond deal, even though he offered to put his entire mansion up as bond. He had to stay in jail until trial.

For the first time in his life, Jeffrey Epstein was confronted with the reality of what he had done and the potential of facing the consequences. He stood to face up to forty-four years in jail. He would never see another day of freedom ever again.

He had only been in jail for five weeks.

In life, he was a coward. What else can you call a child predator? No surprise he would choose to die the same way. Scared to live in a world where money and power could do nothing for him, could not bring him control over his environment. Where his powerful associates could not vouch for him. So that’s where the conspiracy buffs come in. Because it’s too easy to fall into the trap of whodunit. We have questions, naturally. We want an investigation and we want it NOW! IMMEDIATELY! THIS INSTANT!  It can’t be as simple as the scenario I just laid out, can it?

A man put on suicide watch after his first attempt tries again successfully after being taken off that watch while a guard is away or inattentive. It can happen, right? To be fair, there’s never been any prisoner quite like Jeffrey Epstein with the connections quite like he had.

But. . . but. . . but he never got to flip on those people! All those royals and politicians and businessmen! What’s going to happen now?

The President’s former personal lawyer is in prison for campaign finance fraud. Before he went to prison he flipped on his own client, who is still in the White House. We’re eager to see the powerful flip on each other. We want to see them punished for their crimes. If they have to eat each other, so be it.

But I ask you this: what was he going to say? The authorities took everything he had. All his videos, photos and saved files on computer discs. Hundreds or even thousands of pictures of underage girls. What more could he have to negotiate with? Unless he had actual visual evidence of other people in flagrante delicto with underage girls, he had nothing more to negotiate with? Not to mention what could he possible ask for in return? To be put in a nice prison? Club Fed, if such a thing exists? Prison is still prison, especially when you’ve never known a world when you’re not in control of your own life.

And even if any of this true, we will never learn about it. Like we will never really know what happened with JFK. Was there a second shooter or a third? Or if it was the Mafia or the Cubans or the Soviets or the FBI? And what the hell happened with Jack Ruby?

Fifty years from now, when our children are complaining about our grandchildren like we complain about those damn millennials, we’ll get a big data dump about the Epstein case. Except entire sentences and even whole paragraphs will be blacked out. Names will be redacted. It will still be too soon. We will never learn the whole story. It will remain partially classified forever. So we have to go with the most plausible explanation. Anything else will put us on a wild goose chase or guessing game and drive us mad. The world drives us crazy enough anyway. Have you watched the news lately? Sometimes the real conspiracies are right there out in the open for you to see every day.

So go back to bed. Everything’s okay. Our best interests are being protected even as we speak. We’re safe and sound and all the things we worry about will work themselves out eventually. We’re going to be just fine.

Certainly

Moscow Mitch & Two More Candidates

Last month I wrote what will be the first of many posts about the 2020 U.S. Senate election, in which Kentucky Democrats will attempt to unseat longtime Republican incumbent and Senate Majority Leader… oh I don’t want to fucking say his name fuckface fuck this guy I hope he fucking chokes on soup.

On the bright side, Mit-I mean fuckface fractured his shoulder in a fall over the weekend. Good, hope it hurts. Unfortunately, he did not choke to death on soup. You have to take what you can get. Since my last post, fuckface has picked up a new nickname. . .

“Moscow Mitch”

A lot of this came from fuckface’s refusal to allow bills on the floor for a vote regarding national election reform. This also goes back to his refusal to acknowledge Russian interference in the 2016 election, despite President Obama’s wish to issue a bipartisan statement.

And he fucking hates it.

Fuckface actually went on the Senate floor and complained about “modern-day McCarthyism” because everybody started calling him Moscow Mitch. You know who popularized that nickname? Fucking Joe Scarborough, that’s who! Of all the people in the world, that guy. But it took off. The Kentucky Democratic Party started selling Moscow Mitch merch, which you can see some of in the first video. You can get a wool hat, a beer can coozie, a t-shirt, the works. They’ve sold a shitload. Who wouldn’t want an awesome Cossack hat?

There is another lesser publicized element to the nickname and that is the Rusal aluminum mill. From Salon:

Former McConnell chief of staff Hunter Bates and former top McConnell adviser Brendan Dunn, who now work at lobbying giant Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, pressed Congress and the Treasury Department to allow the Russian company Rusal to invest $200 million to develop an aluminum mill in McConnell’s home state.

Rusal was only allowed to make the investment after the Treasury Department lifted sanctions on the company when sanctioned Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska reportedly agreed to give up control in the firm. Deripaska, who was owed millions by former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort and received internal campaign information from him, was sanctioned for helping the Kremlin seize land in Ukraine, ship weapons to the Syrian military, and interfere in foreign elections. 

After Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin lifted the sanctions on Rusal in December, McConnell blocked a bipartisan effort to stop the sanctions relief in the Senate in January. 

McConnell claimed in May that his support for the sanctions rollback was “completely unrelated to anything that might happen in my home state.”

I’m sorry but there’s no way this guy doesn’t let this happen without getting his beak wet. Count on it. He’s a fucking crook. Vote him out. I don’t care who wins the Democratic primary. A puddle of rainwater could win and I’d vote for it.

Speaking of the primary, there are two more candidates running for the Democratic nomination. Steven Cox is a 33-year-old from Bremen who actually preceded Amy McGrath’s splashy campaign rollout. Since he didn’t have a professionally produced three-minute video and national coverage, a lot of people missed it. After McGrath’s day-one blunder on Brett Kavanaugh, Steven Cox took advantage as best he could pushing himself as the true progressive option for Kentucky voters (the main planks of his platform according to his website are Medicare for All, supporting women’s reproductive rights and ending Citizens United).

He also appears to be the most online candidate.

Look through his interactions on Twitter. He doesn't support Medicare for All.

Also -Saying you're a Kentucky Farmer is a LIE when you aren't from Kentucky.

Mike is a guy who happens to farm in Kentucky.

It's a huge difference, and it is intentionally misleading.

— StevenCox-KY.US.Sen.Candidate (@StevenCoxUSA) August 6, 2019

Read a little deeper. The man is against Medicare for All, and has a wierd hard on for Reagan. Just read some of his tweets.

If he talks like a Mitch, and quacks like a Mitch then he can't be any better.

— StevenCox-KY.US.Sen.Candidate (@StevenCoxUSA) August 5, 2019

The “Mike” that Steven Cox is referring to is Mike Broihier, who announced his candidacy last month. Like McGrath, Mike Broihier is a retired Marine who has a professionally produced campaign video.

 

Unlike McGrath, Broihier’s well-produced video does not have as many views (just under 10,000 on Youtube) nor does he have anywhere near the $3 million that McGrath has raised nor does he have the social media reach (under 4000 followers on Twitter). Even Steven Cox has more followers than Broihier. But what both Cox and Broihier have that McGrath doesn’t have is a platform on their websites. If you go to her website, you get no information whatsoever. Just an invitation to visit the online store and to make a donation to her campaign and only these words as to what she stands for:

ANTI-CORRUPTION

ANTI-OBSTRUCTION

ANTI-B.S.

 

Cox has criticized both McGrath and Broihier for not being progressive enough and hammers Broihier for not being a real Kentuckian (he moved here in 2005). For his part, Broihier wants to improve ACA by adding a public option to compete with private insurers, legalizing marijuana, and closing the gun show loophole (which seems particularly relevant right now). Although to be fair to Cox, there is also this:

Mike agrees with President Reagan’s vision of America as a shining city on a hill whose “doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.”

In any event, Cox and Broihier have the slimmest of chances of winning the primary unless Amy McGrath unexpectedly dies between now and next May. She’s the only one running TV ads and Cox has only has one-ninth of her Facebook following. Meanwhile, Mike Broihier has fifty-three subscribers on Youtube.

Although there could be another candidate. Or two. But I won’t speculate. That’s for another day.

 

We Need To Step Our Game Up

There are so many problems in this country that one doesn’t know where to start. But sometimes things are brought into laser focus. A pair of mass shootings in one day will do that, one at a Wal-Mart in El Paso, Texas, the other in downtown Dayton, Ohio. This ended the same week as another shooting at a festival in Gilroy, California and another Wal-Mart in Southaven, Mississippi. Nearly 40 people are dead and nearly 70 people are injured after this week’s shootings.

It all seems overwhelming, doesn’t it? You start to think you could be shot for no reason simply because you were in public doing what you were out to do, going about the business of your day. You went to Wal-Mart (I know it is Walmart now, but I’m old school and it will always be Wal-Mart to me) or the movies or a festival or anywhere people congregate. You’ve been told that the tree of liberty must be refreshed with the blood of patriots but you didn’t take that to mean innocent people.

Some people (like Greg Abbott, governor of Texas) believe mass shootings happen because America has a mental health problem. And believe it or not, he is right but not in the way he intended. Because when you have white nationalists who feel like the United States is under threat of falling under sharia law, that is fucking crazy. When white nationalists believe that America on the verge of white genocide, that is fucking crazy. When a subsection of the internet believes that Hillary Clinton is running a child sex ring out of a pizza place in Washington, D.C., that is fucking crazy.

These people are crazy enough to try something. We’ve seen it over and over again. Somebody brought a shotgun to that pizza place in order to rescue the child sex slaves. We’ve seen a man attempt to mail bombs to real and imagined opponents of Donald Trump: CNN, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and at least dozen other people and entities. So yeah, there is a mental health problem because no sane person would believe this stuff in the first place. There are a lot of crazy people who are willing to attempt crazy things because they want to fight for. . . Trump? The white race? Who can tell?

But crazy, racist conspiracy theories cannot kill people by themselves. You need weapons for that and heavy duty ones too. And that is something we should stop. Because fixing the mental health of this nation would take a long, long time and there’s no guarantee. But the gun problem? That would still be hard but it would be easier.

I want you to think about what happened recently in Puerto Rico. The governor was just forced to resign because the public protested for ONE week. Do you know what he did? He was in a vulgar group chat with members of his cabinet. They mocked their political opponents. They joked about the fatalities in Hurricane Maria. This all came out LAST MONTH. Literally less than a month ago.

A half-million people flooded the streets on July 17. Within a few days there were a million protesters, enough to block all eleven lanes of the PR-18 freeway. The P.R. House of Representatives considered impeachment and on July 24, the governor announced his resignation. It took ONE WEEK to make the Puerto Rico governor resign, all over his comments in a group chat.

Now think about all the wretched shit that our leaders have done. And how little we hold them accountable. A million Puerto Ricans outside the governor’s mansion calling for his job.

Son of a bitch, I wish we were like that. I wish we gave enough of a damn to stop what we were doing to protest ANYTHING until we got what we wanted. On any issue. We’ve been complaining for years and years about this gun issue. We have the numbers. We know people are fed up with this shit. We want some sort of national gun control. We want a solution. We want our elected officials to do something about it. We just. . . we can’t fix it in a weekend or with a vigil that lasts a few hours. They won’t let us.

We just have to go to Washington. We have to stay there until they do something. We have to put ourselves on the line. Block the roads. Stop traffic. Shut down as much of the city as you can. Bring everything to its knees until you get what you need. It’s not easy. Otherwise you’re just propping up the system that you could uproot and change if only you took the time to protest.

You know it’s over ten hours from where I live to the White House? That’s a long way. I don’t have air conditioning in my car. Could I make it that far? Could my car make it? I don’t know. Maybe I could share a ride. How much am I willing to inconvenience myself to try to make things better, before I even get to the place where I want to protest? I want gun control. I want Medicare for All. I want a national living wage. I want our nation’s elections protected. I want the families out of the cages at the border. I want all of it and more.

This makes me realize that Puerto Rico will never be granted statehood because the people of Puerto Rico care too much about how their government is run and that is too much of a threat to the rest of this shithole country.

 

Closing The Book On The July Debates!

I just had three fillings replaced today and the right side of my head is still numb. Seriously. My right nostril is numb. Oh my god. My right sinus feels stopped up. Holy shit. I’ve never been numbed up by a dentist like this before, even when having a tooth pulled. Might as well talk about the debates.

Shoulda been numbed up for the debates. woulda been better ya know?

Inslee was alright.

My leg’s doing better, y’know? I’ve been doing physical therapy for three weeks now. Already getting some of that good flexibility and strength back. It’s still hard to get out of furniture because it’s soft and low to the ground but I’m good getting out of stuff like chairs. I have regular exercises that I’m required to do every day. I generally do them. One of them is medieval. I take a bedsheet and tie it around my ankle, then I get on my belly and pull the bedsheet over my shoulder pulling my leg. It hurts like hell.

There’s no good way to have twenty people debate over two days. It’s ridiculous.

Marianne Williamson is a joke but four years ago Trump was a joke and look where we are now. You people are sick enough to vote for her. Obama got the “why not” vote. Trump got the “why not” vote. Who in 2020 is going to get the “why not” vote? That’s the question. Marianne is the most “why not” candidate. She is also the most the “wtf” candidate.

Seriously, my gums are going to hurt like hell for the next few days because of these goddamn fillings. You know I have to get more fillings replaced? I had bad teeth as a kid. What can I say?

Wednesday I went back to the Healthpark for the first time since May. I missed that place so hard. I got back in that pool and oh my god it was like so much. There’s a lady who works the front desk named Cathy who looks like she hates me. She saw me Wednesday and I told her what happened to me with the leg and she said “I thought you gave up.” Every time she sees me she gives me the evil eye. You know what, Cathy. I got enough problems on my own. Stop looking at me like I’m the devil.

I heard they have Spanx for men now. That’s crayyyyyyzeeeeee.

My top two are Bernie and Elizabeth Warren. Everybody says Joe Biden can beat Trump but that’s everybody putting on their expert hat and as 2016 showed us, nobody is an expert anymore. Watching him in two debates, I wasn’t impressed but do debates even matter when you’re going up against Trump? Can you even debate Trump? There’s no conventional way of dealing with him one-on-one that I can see. The best thing Hillary did in 2016 was point out things that caused him to show his raging temper and she rarely did that. You can point out all the bad things Trump has done and continues to do and it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t care nor does his base. What does he do that affects his base either positively or negatively? That’s what matters.

Do I have a third choice after the second round of debates? Nah, I have a lower tier of guys I’d like perhaps as vice-presidential candidates. Perhaps Julian Castro or Jay Inslee? Apparently, seven candidates have qualified for the September debate(s) and three more might qualify and I don’t know if those two are going to make it. June and July was a clown show and several political careers are dead now (Delaney, Gillibrand, Beto). Tom Steyer never made the debate stage so at least we can be thankful for that.

My face is still numb but my teeth are starting to hurt. The dentist told me that my mouth would be sensitive to cold liquid. Guess what? He was right.