Well, today was just a pain in the ass, dear reader.  Nothing dramatic, just a bunch of little stuff that could have just as easily gone smoothly or well, and didn’t.  I’m kinda spent, and it’s only Monday.  Alas.
Tomorrow will be better, I’m sure.  It better be, anyway.

N.P.: “Rainbow in the Dark” – Khemmis

For the first time, I’ve been thinking actively about leaving the United States for the last few months.  Hollywood people have been threatening to leave the country if their presidential candidate didn’t win for decades, which is about as stupid and childish as it gets (which they know…not one of them has ever followed through on their headline-grabbing promise.  I am a proud and loyal American, and I have always loved my country.  I’ve preferred some administrations over others, but I’ve always understood that whomever might be sitting in the White House has exactly zero impact on what I do with my day, or my life.  But I’ve never considered leaving the United States because of any politician…they are surprisingly easy to ignore.  But this summer, I’ve given it serious thought. A basic plan was thought up. Not because of the country or its politicians: it’s my “fellow citizens.”  On a truly depressing scale, I have seen cowardice, weakness, and egregious stupidity.  They tend to share a seemingly intentional ignorance which they flaunt, as if it somehow gives them more credibility.  Though I suppose that if one is trying to control The Stupid, they will put up less resistance if they think one is stupid too.
Ultimately, I know The Mob is an obscenely vocal minority, but they are a sizable minority, which is what’s most disappointing.  There have always been idiots here, but they have been allowed to reproduce, and now it seems like the fuckers are everywhere.

N.P.: “No Leaf Clover (Live)” – Metallica, San Francisco Symphony

Jacob Blake is a criminal who was resisting arrest during the commission of a crime and his shooting was absolutely justified.
Police were called by Blake’s victim when he violated a restraining order when he came to her residence, sexually assaulted her, then stole her keys.  The victim told police she had known Blake for 8 years and that he physically assaults her “around twice a year when he drinks heavily.”  So the police take her report, noting that she “had a very difficult time telling him [about the sexual assault] and cried as she told how the defendant assaulted her.”
They find this shitbag, who had just violated a restraining order and sexually assaulted his victim again, driving around with three small children in his backseat.  To the surprise of absolutely no one, he fights the cops. Oddly enough, people who violate restraining orders in order to commit additional crimes tend to seem to have a problem with laws and authority).  He didn’t just resist…he “forcefully fought” numerous police officers, at one point getting one of them in a headlock.  [Side note: Anyone who finds themselves on a street, having been pulled over, with a cop in a headlock who doesn’t expect to be shot immediately is an idiot that should likely be removed from the gene pool for that alone, never mind that he’s a serial sexual abuser.]
And but so anyway, this woman-beating, sexual-assaulting dickhead is whaling on the police, so he gets tased.  That doesn’t work, so they tase him again.  That doesn’t work, because Blake manages to shake off the cops, and starts walking to the driver’s side of his car where he has a knife on the floorboard.  The police command him multiple times to drop the knife, he failed (again) to comply and was shot repeatedly (seven times) until he ceased to be a threat.  Idiots have suggested that seven times was excessive.  It wasn’t.  It was the amount it took to finally stop someone who had just fought multiple police officers (and was winning), for one of them in a headlock, was tased, kept fighting was tased again, and still is going to his car to retrieve a weapon to kill the officers.
There is exactly zero evidence to suggest that any aspect of this was racially motivated.  Yet The Mob was sufficiently outraged to burn down the town.  And in The Mob, there is a remarkable number of guilty woke white women, just pissed off, screaming hateful shit about America.  Hundreds of them.  One in five women in the United States has been sexually assaulted or raped.  One in three the victims of some form of domestic violence.  So it’s statistically very safe to assume that at least 30 women out of every hundred there were or had been the victims of the very crimes this man was being arrested for just having committed.  And these victims are now in the street thinking what…that the officers should have just let this guy get his knife and finish what he’d already started.  Even if he hadn’t been armed, were the cops supposed to let a guy who had just sexually assaulted someone with a restraining order against him climb back in his car with three children in the backseat so he can drive back to where he just come from to shut her up for good?  I doubt these idiots would be taking to the streets to protest the treatment of their attackers during arrest.  And what if it had been their children in the car?  The pathetically  simple-minded gullibility of so many  of my “fellow Americans” has been what has disgusted me most this summer.

N.P.: “Ballroom Blitz” – 3TEETH

Bette Midler is an ignorant twat, and the worst kind of American.
I have had the honor of teaching and tutoring hundreds of immigrant students from grade school to college. For the last 27 years, I have seen some of the hardest working people I’ve ever met in these classrooms.  I, embarrassingly, am a monoglot, despite the fact that I’ve taken multiple years of classes in three different languages, I am not conversant in any of them.  And that was me having not a hell of a lot else going on in my life, just school.  And I still couldn’t do it.  For a while, I thought I knew how to speak Spanish.  But then I went to Mexico and stayed with a local family for 2 weeks…I do not know Spanish.  But these people, these legal immigrants…imagine it: you just managed to get yourself and your family out of an intolerable situation, you’re in a new country where you may have never been previously, you don’t read or write the language, you don’t know the money system, and you’re expected to take care of your family, find a place for you all to live, and find and keep a job, and, oh yeah, you also need to learn one of the most difficult languages on the planet, from the alphabet on up.  I don’t know that I could do it.  But they do.  In my classes they work their asses off learning the language, while many native speakers could be bother to crack the textbook.  But the immigrants don’t have that luxury: they need to learn the language to survive.  

What’s crackin’, dear reader?  I was working on some prime invective for you this evening, but then got a call from an old friend and ended up talking for hours.  Which was wonderful.  But you don’t get your invective tonight.  But tomorrow!  Yes, tomorrow I shall drain this pen of bitter ink.

N.P.: “My Sharona” – The Knack

The only people who believe that the United States is systemically racist or even just a racist country are those who have never even seen much less been forced to live under actually racist systems.  After a conversation today, I’m confident that they don’t actually know what the term means.  If some black people can succeed in The System (e.g., a two-term President or a middle-class state worker) then all black people can succeed in The System.  That they don’t cannot be blamed on The System.  Racism is binary: one either is racist or one isn’t.  So there cannot exist a racist system that is only racist in some of the cases.
Say there is a college class composed entirely of black males.  50 students.  And its a community college, so they are all from very similar upbringings.  Many of them graduated from the same high school.  This class and the instructor are notoriously difficult for everybody (yeah, I know…let’s pretend it’s some weird place where truly academically difficult courses are taught at community college).  Okay, so at the end of a very difficult semester, two students get As in the class.  Four get Bs, and four get Cs.  So 10 people passed the class.  Is the reason the other 40 people failed systemic racism?  If you think so, you’re going to need to account for (in a believable, realistic way) the apparent immunity to systemic racism enjoyed by 20% of black people in this example.  Racism cannot possibly be blamed.
But let’s say that the grades in the class were actually much better.  Let’s say instead of only 20%, a full 50% of the class passed.  Meaning that of the 50 original students in the class, 25 passed and the class and advanced to whatever’s next, while 25 failed and did not advance.  Why did these 25 fail?  We have no way of knowing, but we know for certain what didn’t cause them to fail: say it with me now: systemic racism.
The U.S. Census Bureau would have you believe that the majority of African American families are middle-class.  Which means that more than half of the students have passed the class.  Why didn’t the other half pass?  Again, we have no way of knowing, but we know for certain what it wasn’t.

N.P,: “Masquerade (Live)” – Berlin

Dearest reader, I don’t know how it’s going over there, but over here, every day is exactly the same.  This is causing Time to do heretofore impossible things, even accounting for its relativity.
Which is okay.  It really is.  Especially if it’s a good day that you keep having.  But it does mean that I don’t have a hell of a lot to report to you here.  A bit of invective has been building up, so I might spew that here this week.  Just to keep things spicy.  You know how I like to do.

N.P.: “DFCK” – Code:Manta

Moved a bunch of monitors and computers around, trying to get ready/make room for the new book-making monstrosity I’m building.  I’ve been busy as hell the last few days, but not writing nearly enough.  It’s been weird.  I’m going to get back to it and see if I can’t turn things around.

N.P.: “Diggin A Grave” – Micah P. Henson

“Attachment leads to jealousy.  The fear of loss is a path to the Dark Side.  Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.”  ~ Yoda

N.P.: “A Split Second” – Rigor Mortis