As discussed ad nauseam one of the bad things about being black in a society that runs on the idea of white supremacy is that not only the police but everyday whites feel entitled to question or to reject black presence in what the white person considers to be a "white" space or at least the "wrong" space for that black person to be occupying. This can be something minor such a secretary mistaking the new black manager for custodial help, something major like a self-appointed neighborhood watchman murdering a black teen and everything in between. There is evidence that the resulting continual lifetime "fight or flight" response is not good for black people. This response may be implicated in everything from higher rates of hypertension to higher infant and birth mother mortality rates to higher rates of strokes and cardiac arrest. In short it's not healthy to be stressed out and under attack all the time. There was recently another reminder of how when information is processed through a racist mindset even the most innocuous behavior becomes life threatening. This incident also displayed how some whites do not view blacks as adults worthy of the respect granted to adults. MILWAUKEE —An Uber driver says someone pointed a gun in his face in Milwaukee on Saturday, but it wasn't a robbery. He captured the encounter on video and said it's a symptom of Wisconsin's concealed carry law. In the video, a man is seen with a large, silver gun as Uber driver Darnell Smith records the confrontation near 40th Street and Mill Road early Saturday. "Just because you have a conceal and carry license doesn't mean pull your gun out if you think something is happening," Smith said.
The problem with voting is that there are a lot of stupid, gullible, or downright hateful people who vote. Their vote counts just as much as yours does or mine does. To be fair they may very well think of me or you in the same terms which I just used to describe them. That's politics. That's never going to change. If we accept that every citizen has a right to vote and pursue his or her own interests as he or she defines them then we also must accept that sometimes people will make objectively sub-optimal decisions. This brings us to the impact of the Trump tax cuts. You may recall that the majority of economists across the political spectrum predicted that the tax cuts would not create enough growth to shrink the deficit. The tax cuts would increase the deficit. And just about every economist or political theorist on what's rather broadly defined as the left, argued that that once the increased deficit became obvious Republicans would smartly pivot and without missing a beat argue that programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security had to be cut in order to bring down the deficit. Republicans would weep copious crocodile tears as they congratulated themselves on their willingness to cut benefits to people who weren't invited to the tax cut party in the first place. It's classic bait and switch. It's one of the oldest cons in the book. With ever increasing frustration Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman has been warning about the tax-cut/deficit con and predicting the Republican response since before the tax cut became law. This isn't new. It's what Republicans do-or at least what the upper class/business class Republicans do. The middle-class/lower-class Republicans aren't necessarily supporting the party for its dedication to cutting taxes and slashing social programs (at least those used by whites) so much as they are supporting the party for racial and cultural resentments.
This is a doorstopper of a novel that is just under seven hundred pages. I'm not sure it needed to be that long. It starts quickly but sags a little in the middle. You can make up your own mind about the ending. It is of course a collaboration between Stephen King and his son Owen King. I could not tell which man wrote which part. Obviously the talent runs in the family. It's a good story. It imagines a dystopia in which half the human population goes to sleep and doesn't wake up. Like all good dystopic fiction the authors are using their fictional creation to make some points about real life current human behavior. The book was dedicated to the memory of Sandra Bland, which in some respects shows the reader what points the authors are trying to make. I occasionally thought that some points were a little heavy handed. An older woman I know thought that both Kings missed some rather obvious points about female existence, perspective and desire because they were men. Hmm. I don't know about that. Some writers can very easily create realistic characters that differ from their own particular nationality/gender/race/sexuality/etc combination. After all some would argue, and Stephen King would definitely be among them, that such creative imagination and journeying is the entire point of writing. No writer should limit himself or herself to barely disguised author avatars. I didn't find the female characters here, unrealistic. But I am not a woman. Women may feel differently. There have always been strains of frustration that each gender shows with the other. Currently we're seeing some female supremacism and chauvinism leak through in the #metoo and #timesup or #futureisfemale hashtags. One could argue that this is all just a reaction to a long history of male chauvinism and supremacism that in "Western" culture goes at least as far back as the Biblical Creation story in which Adam, being queried about God about why Adam ate the forbidden fruit, turns around and tells God that it was the woman God gave him who gave him the forbidden fruit (So hey like don't blame me dude, it was all her fault).
I love animals, well pets anyway. I admire some wild animals, especially wolves. I abhor hunting and/or people who kill animals for fun. I don't view animals as assets to be cancelled when they cost too much. Down south I certainly wasn't the fellow tasked with taking the old faithful dog behind the shed and dispatching it with a mercy shot. Not me. But I still maintain that there is a qualitative difference, both moral and physical, between animals and humans. Humans shouldn't be needlessly cruel towards animals. Humans should accept that animals are not human. I love my dog. But my dog is a dog. It is not a human. Not every space is appropriate for a dog. Dogs possess viruses, parasites, and bacteria that are best left to dogs, not humans. Even the best behaved dog has some pretty nasty habits by human standards. I am generally skeptical of people claiming that they need emotional support animals at all times. I accept there might be a few children with serious medical issues who get some advantage from constantly having their animal around them. With a few exceptions I think that most adults who claim to need an emotional support animal would do better with a kick in the butt. And I feel that way about grown people who say that their dog is an emotional support animal. When it comes to adults arguing that their squirrel (!) is an emotional support animal, I have no sympathy. I don't want to be around rodents. And a squirrel, despite its fluffy tail and good pr, is a rodent. It's a rat with a press agent. So no, don't come to my house claiming that you just can't bear to be without your pet squirrel. That's nasty. I won't let you enter. Frontier Airlines apparently feels the same way.
The woman who was escorted off her Frontier Airlines flight Tuesday after bringing her emotional support squirrel on board is speaking out against the airline. Cindy Torok told FOX 8 News Wednesday that she called the airline ahead of time to get clearance and even made it through TSA with her 11-week-old squirrel, Daisy, before the airline forced her to leave the plane.
Even before the Trump directed zero tolerance illegal immigration policy in which every person who unlawfully entered the United States would theoretically face prosecution, some people, usually those who were sympathetic to illegal immigrants or illegal immigrants themselves were calling for the elimination of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In terms of immigration law, ICE's primary responsibility is interior enforcement. But with Trump's cruel misstep and resulting horrible images of desperate parents separated from their children more and more people have called for the abolition of ICE. Luminaries such as Keith Ellison, Pramila Jayapal, and Mark Pocan, presumptive US Representative to be, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, US Senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Kirsten Gillibrand, and NYC Mayor Bill DeBlasio have all recommended eliminating ICE. Some politicians, intellectuals, and activists have been coy about what they see as ICE's replacement. Others are pretty straightforward that they don't want to deport anyone. Not One More Deportation is what they believe. So they don't want a replacement for ICE. Some people claim that they don't believe in borders. They argue that citizenship is an unfair caste system that should be eliminated. They say that because the United States was born in conquest and genocide, the US has no right to restrict entry for anyone. I don't believe that everyone clamoring to abolish ICE has thought everything through. Some politicians who scream the loudest about abolishing ICE don't want to actually vote to do so.
Game Night directed by John Daley and Jonathan Goldstein
This black comedy is in some ways an extended riff on some classic Three Stooges comedy routines (mostly lacking the slapstick) in which the protagonists are either mistaken for someone else or enter an arena or game under mistaken pretenses. The Three Stooges weren't the first or last to use this trope. They may not even have been the best to use such routines. They just happen to have been the first people I saw use the routine. So they were the first to come to mind. You may recall several other movies or books which use this theme. It's not as easy to pull off as it looks. For this to work over the entire running time of a feature length film, you need to believe that the protagonists aren't utter morons. That's boring. Rather the heroes and heroines are just fish out of water. Some of them will be quicker on the uptake than others of course. Much like the similar walk on the wild side comedy, The House, Game Night invites the viewer, who presumably doesn't have lots of experience with shady activities, to imagine himself or herself thrust into some dodgy situations with some had hombres. Unlike The House, Game Night was consistently funny without much grossout humor.
I don't watch a lot of television so I didn't know that Stephen Colbert was a fan of Chance the rapper, Gilbert and Sullivan patter songs, and J.R.R. Tolkien. Good man. You really should read The Silmarillion if you have the time. There's a lot of good stories contained within, including a fictionalized reworking of how Tolkien met and fell in love with his wife.
