Six little piggies

 I want to say something, apropos of nothing. I just wanted to say it. You know, to get it off my chest and share it with the world:

Fuck the conservatives on the Supreme Court.

Not for anything new. They have earned this already.

Just... fuck them. Fuck the feckless Roberts, who couldn't manage a Blockbuster video, let alone the court. Fuck that rapey drunken frat bro douchenozzle Kavanaugh. Fuck Pope Alito and may he burn in Catholic Hell. Fuck Clarence "Uncle" Thomas, in his RV, and with Ginni's crazy eyes. Fuck poisonous Mr Cellophane, Neil Gorsuch, who I am told is a person on the bench. And fuck court stenographer Coney Barrett, whose presence on the court simply baffles me.

Not for anything new, mind you. 

I just wanted to say, you know, fuck those assclowns.

Fuck them.

Food for thought

Think about this for a moment:

From announcement to election day, Harris' campaign will have effectively been a 100-day operation. Now, you can argue that her campaign, as the BIDEN campaign, began farther back in time, and I would allow that argument, while not necessarily agreeing with it.

See, I consider the change from Biden to Harris to effectively mark the start of an entirely new campaign, as it has been marked by the usual starting point of defining and introducing the candidate. While Harris was known before, she was second banana, and effectively just along for the ride on the Biden train.

But since the switch, the shift in gears has been so dramatic that I consider it to be a presidential campaign that only started two weeks ago. Considering how gangbusters it is going for her, such that she looks to be even to or surpassing Trump in the polls, I think this tells us something dramatic, with great import to the entire nation.

To wit: campaign season only needs to be about three months long. We don't need the continuous beatdown that wears out the nation. We could do what many nations do, and limit the legal campaigning period to three months. An ancillary benefit of this would be that less money would need to be raised for a three-month stint, as opposed to a two-year slog.

I, therefore, aver that a dramatically truncated campaign period is not only possible, but would be as effective, if not more effective, than the current multi-year battle we put ourselves through.

We don't need to run a marathon. We only need to make a short sprint and we're done.

Think about that.

Jello with glass shards, or a shit sandwich, Mr. Trump?

Ah, Don the Con. Don the Coward. Don the Cow-weird.

That fat treasonous sonofawhore wouldn't know a policy point if it smashed a teleprompter and sent a small piece of plastic flying to scrape his elephantine ear in a minor way.

What was the problem with the last debate, is one person showed up to debate policy, and the other showed up to spray the stage with copious amounts of his own shit. Policy never had a chance.

I have said this elsewhere recently, but I do think we are watching Agolf Shittler flame out (some have described him as having entered the "Fat Elvis" stage of his political career). It won't happen overnight, but he is no longer able to mount an effective offensive. People are getting tired of him and many are looking for the next shiny object. Harris is rightfully framing him as a goddamned chickenshit limp-dick.The couch meme about Vance is sticking. Oh, and speaking of Vance, he seems unable to fend off the accurate depictions of his weirdness, because every defense he mounts is, well, weird.

The real milestone (or millstone, for Mango Mussolini) will be the ABC debate. Because Harris WILL show up. Trump will be faced with the Hobson's choice of staying away (making him a demonstrable coward, running scared from a multi-ethnic, powerful, successful woman), or showing up and having the same woman hand him his ass in multiple, tiny, trowel-sized chunks (making him a demonstrable loser). He has backed himself into a scaredeecat corner, and there is no way to get out of it without shitting himself.

And then, Vance, again. It is known that Trump regrets the choice, but, again, he has a limited selection of bad choices to make: keep Vance, and smile while that boat anchor around Trump's neck drags the campaign down to Davy Jones' locker, or dump Vance, and very effectively admit that he, Golden Boy Donnie the Sphincter-breathing Coward, made a huge m i s t a k e. Again, there is no escape hatch through which he can run without coming out covered in shit on the other side.

And Harris will continue to taunt him and rightfully call him what he is: a convicted felon guilty of fraud and sexual assault, which we have SEEN he does NOT like, at all.

So, yeah. He is a feral beast which has been backed into a corner, and there is no good option left for him but to stand there like a deer in the headlights, shouting racist diatribes into the wind, while SOME Trump-exhausted Republicans simply stay home from the election, and SCORES of young people and previously disinterested or dejected voters (at which he has aimed his venom) flock to vote for Harris.

This could be a landslide to rival Reagan's. The only question is by how much, and will there be felonious shenanigans by MAGA election supervisors. I think her win would be a solid 10 if she chooses Buttigieg, but otherwise somewhere between a 6 and an 8 with one of the traditional stodgy old white guys (which would make her job harder, I think, because that would be fighting a modern battle with inefficient, old-fashioned tactics).

That is my take. This is why I am bullish on Harris.

A giant landslide is heading for Trump, and his escape routes are all blocked. I can't think of a better person to be roundly and soundly humiliated before all 8 billion of us on Earth. Because lose he will.

Toilet, thou art full

Now, I am no Protestant (thank the Universe), but, it seems to my understanding of it, that members of that particular strain of painful religious fervor ought not to be defending a painting as if it were the Lord himself.

It is basically their thing.

I never thought I'd see Protestants defending Catholic imagery.

I guess they must be completely full of shit.

Go figure.

Pearls are to be clutched

American Christians are offended.

Sorry, let me narrow that down: American Christians are offended, this week, by the Olympic opening ceremony, which they all assumed was an attack on Christianity, even though none of it had jack and shit to do with Christianity.

Why is it ALWAYS about the poor, fucking Christians?

<SIGH>

American Christians (tm) are in a constant search for something to be offended over, reading offense into the most mundane things, and from a completely shallow and self-centric worldview, as if no one in the world is allowed to be anything except carbon copies of the offended.

Anyone with any shred of understanding of anything outside that man-edited book of fables and tall tales knows this had nothing to do with Christian anything, period. You're offended? Fine. 99.99999% of the world isn't. Let it, and the pearls, go.

Do you complain about the decorations when you attend someone else's party? Because that is what this consternation is: I don't like the decorations at your party.

Well, then, go home and leave the party-goers be.

This only offends offense-driven Americans who have absolutely nothing else going on. It is almost fetishistic.

Alright, I happily relent!

I think we may be seeing the break-through of a trend that has been obvious for many years now. Specifically, America being saved by a woman of color.

I have noted many times (elsewhere), how it often seemed to be women of color who come in and clean up the absolute mess made by white men. No matter what, you could always rely on these women to make things right, or as right as a disaster can be made to be.

They have toiled under the repressive and oppressive actions of establishment white men and women throughout our history on these shores. And yet, so often they manage to rise above the bullshit and straighten things out in the community.

Now, we see (through what may have been an incredible quirk of fate), a white man realizing he has no path to the finish line. A finish line he has been pursuing for forty years. His record has not always been a good one, with regard to how women of color were treated, but he made up for this, somewhat, by selecting a woman of color to be his VP in 2020.

And, now that he can read the writing on the wall (and got some lectures from fellow pols), he is stepping aside to clear the way, allowing that woman of color take the baton going forward.

I was pessimistic for the last few weeks about how things would play out, but I have to confess that I am somewhat giddy that Kamala Harris will be the Democratic nominee (sure, it isn't official, yet, but give it a week or two for the convention to rubber stamp it, most likely with unbridled enthusiasm).

Harris is in the most unique position of any politician in our history: a woman of color who has risen to the second-highest elected position in the nation, and is now running on her incumbency to attain the top job.

It won't be a cakewalk, but she is in an incredibly well-positioned place to take the election. Perhaps by a large margin, as the polls are up dramatically in key demographics since the baton was passed, showing a desire to see her win. The enthusiasm is historic, and even I have been unable to avoid it.

She is just getting started, but with this now becoming a race between a felon and a career prosecutor, her opposition is reduced to the sad caricature of a man we always knew him to be. And she looks larger by the day, towering over him. I look forward to her cross-examination.

Meanwhile, HIS chosen running mate has immediately become a drag on the ticket (even earning the moniker of "Shillbilly," which tickles my heart). HE initially backed out of a scheduled debate, because of the new, scarier opponent, only to waffle back into considering one because of the shame he was made to feel for cowering before a black woman. And his continual jabs at his prior opponent's age have, as happens whenever a fool pisses into the wind, come back at him.

Suddenly, a race that was fraught with trepidation and worry has become one of hope: Kamala is coming to put things right.

If she chooses Pete Buttigieg as her VP, all bets are off, and they may as well just give them the keys to the White House without the complication of an election.

But I want that election, of course. Not solely to see her win (which I fervently DO), but to see Donald Trump absolutely humiliated and tossed on the ash heap of history (although I would be content to see him thrown into a prison cell).

We may finally see a woman of color show the nation just what is possible when you pass the torch of leadership around equitably. We may see the ultimate in cleaning up white men's messes. This will be nothing new, of course, but it will be a glorious smashing of the glass ceiling, and the ultimate manifestation of the greatest struggle our nation has ignored for centuries: a woman of color asserting her rightful place as an equal partner in our great experiment.

In order to clean up nearly 250 years of white leadership's mess.

And I am SO here for it.

About that funny little picture on the blog

So, I have a picture for the blog that resembles a Federation outhouse from the Star Trek universe. I thought I'd explain where it came from and why I use it. It is nothing complicated: I am a lifetime fan of Star Trek TOS, and I have a strange sense of humor and aesthetics. All the follow-on series have been meh, but give me TOS any day, man. I am a Kirk-Bones-Spock man.

When I was young, I had the Enterprise blueprints. I had the Star Trek compendium, with its graphics and charts, depicting vehicles, Federation organizational charts, etc. I was a true Star Trek nerd. I even showed up to fourth grade with a Star Fleet dreadnought I had fashioned out of cardboard, which elicited a response from someone who would later become a friend, and which I often chuckle about still: "That ain't no Star Trak!"

Anyhow, when I was starting back up to writing here, I happened to also be playing around with image-creating AI. Given my warped sense of humor, I asked it to show me what a United Federation of Planets outhouse would look like. It went through a couple of refinements, but I finally settled on the image currently in use. I was quite happy with it, too. I mean, you can look at it and know what it is, without reading this explanatory post.

I was tempted to caption it with "Where some men have gone before," but that seems like a cheap laugh. So, I leave it there for you to see, and to create your own internal dialog, explaining how it came to be, and what adventures have taken place there.

It is a bit of levity in a troubling time.

Frankly, I'd give almost anything to be on that other planet, looking at that outhouse, rather than on THIS planet, which is turning into an actual outhouse.

Be good to each other, and remember to wash your hands before returning to work.