SuprstitionAintthWay
SuprstitionAintthWay's JournalThe man blew 0.02% blood alcohol. That tells me right there this was a jam job by a park ranger
...with a hard-on to take Bruce Springsteen down a notch. I was a cop. Any idiot can tell that somebody with that little booze in them isn't drunk.
I find it telling it was during November 2020. Most LEOs (law enf. officers) are conservative, many of them very conservative.
Charging someone who blows an 0.02% with DWI anyway is, IMO, unethical.
All the rest is just chatter.
I'm attributing this to nobody on DU, but keep in mind there's lots of gaming the system going on.
The couple next door to me are both early 60s and in great health, yet both got their first shot 3 weeks ago.
Neither volunteered to me how that happened. But I have theories.
She's a counselor, a therapist of some sort, although she counsels from home over the internet. I'm thinking she most likely claimed to be an essential mental health professional.
He's a mostly retired lawyer. My speculation is his pathway to early vaccination was his elderly mother, who lives not far away. He visits her; I couldn't say how often. I think most likely he declared he was her primary care-giver. They have resources, so I'd be shocked if she didn't have an actual assisted living person coming in, but I'm not able say that he isn't her sole help. I just highly doubt it.
A lot of people are pursuing ways around their vaxx prioritization category, and many are going to find ways to do it, exaggerating, fudging, and falsely "affirming" their way closer to the front of the line.
We must of course strive for fairness in vaccine allocation.
But, it's America. Realistically, we must acknowlege we're falling far short in this, too.
Most of the AF officer corps is not radicalized, obviously, but...
...the AF has long had a higher % of its officers far to the right on the political spectrum than either the Army or Navy. Marine Corps, I couldn't say.
I'm not certain why that is. I'm sure somebody has studied it. My own speculation includes that it might have been a mistake to locate its Academy in such a bastion of conservatism and intense religiosity as Colorado Springs. That the AF Academy's isolation from the so-called coastal media and academia elites denied it the moderating effects against radicalization that the Army, Navy, and Coast Guard academies probably have benefited from.
All this being relative, of course. There is no shortage of far rightwingers in the officer corps of any branch of the U.S. military.
I also wonder if Air Force founding father Gen. Curtis LeMay's legacy plays a role. LeMay advocated for and applied our fire bombing of Japan's cities, burning to death many, many civilians in the process. And in the Korean War he was responsible for the flattening of every city in North Korea. A result of which was the death of 20 to 25% of North Korea's population... which is an astronomical rate of death in war. (And which, side effect, made the surviving North Koreans extremely susceptible to its government using intense hatred of the U.S. as its primary unifying principle.)
In short, it's probably fair to suspect LeMay, while an effective warrior, might have been okay with racial genocide. Does that history - the Air Force was just branching off from the Army in WWII - also affect its culture, and make it a bit different?
Just speculating. I'm sure, as I said, someone's studied all this.
I remember the "Oathkeepers" from when they formed in reaction to...
...there being a black president.
They were former military and police who tried to get active duty military officers and police to sign "oaths" that they would not execute laws or obey commands under this new president, whom they regarded as illegitimate, unless they, the military or police themselves, judged the laws or orders to be constitutional and legal.
And Oathkeepers weren't prone to regard much of anything from the new "Kenyan" president to be constitutional or legal.
From 1861-1865 the closest Confederates got to sacking the Capitol was
an attack by Gen. Jubal Early, who was repulsed I forget exactly where but I believe just a few miles north of the center of government.
Jan. 9, 2021, 21st century rebels finally did it, though. They got to wave the Stars and Bars inside the United States Capitol that they, however briefly, had captured. Something nobody else other than the British Army in 1812 has ever done.
The leader they worship exhorted them yesterday, to never forget the day!
And they won't. The deranged con-man and his true believers gave each other a moment I'm sure some af these spiteful, destructive men will cherish. In their own deluded minds I'm sure many of them will re-cast and elevate their crude mob action to something not unlike a Pickett's Charge.
The tinpot general uniform is an important touch.
Trump's going to pardon lots of his stooges and henchmen. Why did he single out Mike Flynn to pardon early?
From that act, plus after the election his firing the SecDef and Pentagon deputies and replacing them with even more loyal loyalists, I can only conclude Trump was setting up to make his coup attempt literally a military one, if he worked up the nerve to actually try it.
He'd have fired his Army Chief of Staff, or maybe the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and replaced him with the newly pardoned Flynn waiting in the wings.
Notice that post-election Flynn endorsed another loon's call for military takeover of the election result and the military completely re-running it under the control of the military's commander-in-chief... i.e., Trump himself.
Thankfully Cadet Bonespurs chickened out on that idea.
But he did make preparatory moves to set himself up to try.
No national borders anyone has ever drawn have been permanent
...and the United States' aren't either. We're not that "exceptional." This large, evermore diverse, populous, and quarreling nation is going to partition at some point. The real questions are when, into what, and can it be a peaceful partitioning?
"Peaceful" is gonna be tough, admittedly, whenever it happens, given the gun nuts.
Many of the people who get offended at the very thought -- plenty of them always jump in with both feet when it comes up on DU, which of course is fine -- tend to express short-horizon, often very personal viewpoints.
Maybe take a step or two back from it. It isn't happening next year. It's not going to be on Rush Limbaugh's timetable. It's a ways off yet. My guess - obviously it's only a guess - is that by the end of the century the borders of the U.S. aren't going to be what they are now, that there will have been a significant fracture by then.
When it comes, of course the countries that result are going to be very imperfect, too. But I'm certain they'll at least be able to function better than the United States government is able to.
Also, we could even strive to do it as sensibly as possible. If it's into two nations, we'd need a decade or more of everyone having dual citizenship in both nations, and choosing one or the other after the extensive transition period.
And we have this thing, the internet, on which there would be home-swapping sites, and Reds in Blue country and Blues in Red country could peruse each other's property and talk about trades. Jobs of course are not as easily tradeable, but similar sites could at least enable people to compare them and ageee to file applications to swap.
Ultimately yes, there would still be Reds choosing to stay in in Blueland, and Blues in Redland. Nothing's ever going to be perfect, or even close to it.
But it will at least be better.
We'll be able to amend the Constitution again, among other things. Allocate representation in the Senate based on population. Abolish the Electoral College. Wipe away all the far right's current weapons for their imposition of their Minority Rule. Make many badly needed changes that otherwise are going to remain impossible.
If anyone has any more realistic, plausible solutions to the irreconcilable differences that exist and just keep worsening, I don't believe I've heard them. And I have been listening.
Ideas On Any Last Bits Of Treason Putin Will Wring Out Of Trump?
I've believed Putin saw this ugly end coming 2 years ago and put out a "hurry up on the deliverables" order a good while back.
Some of the things on Donny's long to-do list from Boss Vlad have been:
* Your campaign manager will be this American I own, Paul Manafort.
* Your National Security Advisor needs to be my man Mike Flynn.
* Your Secretary of State needs to be a guy who can get us our deal with Exxon back for help drilling our Arctic oil.
* Remove Obama's sanctions.
* Give me back our spyshacks in America that Obama took.
* Get me me back into the G-7.
* Recognize Crimea is now Russian territory.
* Deny I had anything to do with 2016.
* If anybody tries to investigate 2016, head it off.
* Help me frame the new Ukraine govt for every freakin evil thing Russia's done recently.
* Get the U.S. military out of Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Africa, Turkey, Poland, and as much out of Germany as you can.
* We're paying bounties for dead American soldiers. Ignore that.
* We're permanently neurologically injuring your State Dept and CIA people abroad by microwaving them in their beds. Ignore that.
* We murder our own people whenever I want, and we murder people in your allies' countries frequently. Ignore all that.
* Join our worldwide autocrats club... as an apprentice member. I'll sponsor you.
* Help me break up NATO.
* Help me break up the E.U.
* Help me divide Americans, topple American democracy, and break up the U.S.
There's more. That's just a sampler.
Putin's hurry-it-up orders bore some fruit, but nothing approaching what he'd been hoping.
Trump has tried as hard as a scared poodle can... if that poodle is much dumber than average. Putin realizes he's been ordering an incompetent buffoon to do things that are just beyond him. But as disappointing as bootlicking Little Donny has been, he's the only sock puppet American president Vlad's got. It's not like he could just replace him.
Trump still has to obey Putin, and will need to after he's no longer in office, too. Russian intelligence agencies have all the documentation, and communications including the phone calls, on every dirty ruble Trump's ever laundered for a Russian through one of his grossly overpriced properties. And that's been a lot of dirty rubles. January 21 Putin could hand over just a piece of it and have Trump doing a perp walk within hours.
But 99% of the value to Russia of all those reams of incriminating kompromat disappears at 12:01 on Jan. 20.
Putin may have health issues. Other things on his mind than his collapsing fool in the Oval Office.
Is he presently squeezing some last traitorous juice out of his Agent Orange? If so, what?
Or is he as fatigued of the noisy idiot as we are, and doesn't care about this final month of control over the most powerful squalling manbaby in the world?
A Nonprofit Needs To Build A FB Alternative That For A Nominal Annual Fee...
...delivers 90+% of the positive, useful benefits Facebook does, but as few as possible of the social pathologies FB delivers with it, whether by FB's abuse of its users and their data itself for profit, or by its enabling the endless malicious actors of the world to prey on others.
Facebook's billions of users wouldn't shift over to the nonprofit platform rapidly, obviously. But I believe a very large portion would over time, preferring a non-profit, far less predatory, and safer setting for online social interaction.
Facebook itself is irredeemable. Break it up and regulate the pieces, yes. But the bottomless greed of the stock market guarantees that it cannot be salvaged as anything less than an overall malevolent presence.
"I'm not a fan of court packing."
... and just leaving it there, no further response, is, I think, my favorite response by Joe so far to badgering on... just about anything sensitive. (It's so good I'm pretty sure - no offense, Joe - somebody else wrote it for him.)
Let's take a quick 4 or 5 month time jump to a better future in which weve taken back the White House and the Senate in addition to the House.
Republicans and our excruciatingly "balanced" media are all screaming at President Biden: "BUT YOU SAID...!"
Joe's reply - here, I'll write it for him -- will be:
"I'm not a fan of needing surgery or chemotherapy either. But when a cancer is killing me, or my family, ...OR this country... we're going to do it anyway."
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Member since: Mon Oct 1, 2018, 11:21 PM
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