Cry of the poor

If you close your ear to the cry of the poor, you will cry out and not be heard. 

- Proverbs 21:13

Jesse Duplantis Appeals for $50million private jet

This despicable cur wants to take the very pennies from widows' pockets, uncaring on the financial harm people do to themselves so he can buy a $50 million dollar plane.  See you in hell, preacher.

41 Jesus sat down opposite the place where the offerings were put and watched the crowd putting their money into the temple treasury. Many rich people threw in large amounts. 42 But a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins, worth only a few cents.

43 Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. Mark 12:41-43

Oh Jesus, breathe compassion unto my country

Abuses occurred. Just happened. Regrettable, yes. 

[Beginning in 2011, with soaring murder rates and narcotics crime spreading across Central America, there was a surge in unaccompanied minors — mostly teens — trying to cross the border. Many of these children were apprehended by Border Patrol, and the U.S. obviously didn’t have a good plan for what to do next. Some of the kids were placed with family members, but others ended in foster care or more ambiguous situations. It was a system with a high risk for abuse — and abuses occurred. 

Under pressure, the HHS agency stepped up its efforts to keep track of what is happening to these migrant kids, and so last month top officials in the department made a stunning admission to a federal hearing: When officials tried to follow up from October through December of 2017 on the whereabouts of roughly 7.500 kids the federal government had placed with sponsors, it was unable to find out what happened to 1,475 of them, or roughly one in five.

The agency tasked with placing thousands of kids — the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement — clearly wasn’t up to the task of vetting potential sponsors. An AP investigation found in 2016 that “more than two dozen unaccompanied children had been sent to homes where they were sexually assaulted, starved or forced to work for little or no pay.”]  http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/attytood/trump-immigration-policy-border-patrol-separating-families-20180527.html

Tesla Oops: Tesla car crashes into police cruiser

One of the most important rules in Handbook of Drunk Driving states to never run into a police cruiser.  Cops tend to hate that.  In this case we had driving while automated rather than driving under the influence of unrealistic expectation rather than, you know, several shots of scotch.

Of course, Tesla wants drivers to keep their hands on their wheel at all times and pay attention also, which begs the question how that differed from "real" driving.

A Tesla sedan in Autopilot mode crashed into a parked Laguna Beach Police Department vehicle Tuesday morning, authorities said. 

The collision happened at 11:07 a.m. at 20652 Laguna Canyon Road, according to Laguna Police Sgt. Jim Cota. The officer was not in the cruiser at the time of the crash. The Tesla driver suffered minor injuries, but refused transportation to the hospital.

"Thankfully there was not an officer at the time in the police car," Cota said. "The police car is totaled."  (Emphasis added)  http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-tesla-collision-20180529-story.html

When it comes to drunk driving, Just Don't Do It.

Voting right revocation among last bits of legal apartheid in Florida

"To infinity and beyond!"

https://www.space.com/40672-spacex-launches-grace-fo-iridium-satellites.html?utm_source=notification

GRACE mission rocket launch.

He's a minority; she's a minority; don't you want to become a minority too?

When you come right down to it, every person makes up a minority of one, withh different dreams, hopes, fears, fetishes, plans and hopes.

Well, Godammit, guess I'm an "Incel"

Had to read several paragraphs i--and really resent that--to find definition of term in headline of article: "The Rage of the Incels."  Incel means involuntarily celibate.  Must number myself in that number as, first, nursing homes offer few chances for privacy, and, two, most people view persons in wheelchairs as pitiful and not as sexual beings.

Dammit, just my legs don't work; everything else works tolerably well, for a sixty year old male.

Nevertheless, what ought my personal ad convey?  Should I write, "warm hearted, humourous male seeks genetic female for relationship?"  Here, my prejudice shows, because despite my anger at getting shunned, I let that conflict show with my hypocrisy by shunning trans females. 

Yet, "I yam what I yam."

And who knew so many sexual variants exist among humans?  Sure, I know what LGBTQ means from research, but things have gotten even more complicated.

Incel stands for “involuntarily celibate,” but there are many people who would like to have sex and do not. (The term was coined by a queer Canadian woman, in the nineties.) Incels aren’t really looking for sex; they’re looking for absolute male supremacy. Sex, defined to them as dominion over female bodies, is just their preferred sort of proof.  (Link above)

Apparently, Incel stands for a whole political and sexual ideology:

"Incel, the online community of “involuntarily celibate” men radicalized by their shared mistrust of women, has existed on the internet for years. But it wasn’t until Monday, when a man drove a van down a street in Toronto and killed 10 people, that many people knew of its existence. 

What makes the attack different from many other forms of terrorism is that incel isn’t an organized militant group united by political or religious beliefs — its main grievance is with women’s ability to choose their own sexual partners. An explainer on the movement from our sister site Vox quotes J.M. Berger, an expert at the International Center for Counter-Terrorism in the Hague: “Misogyny isn’t new, and ideological misogyny isn’t new. Having a distinct movement that is primarily defined by misogyny is [fairly] novel.”

Then, just when I think I have a handle on these roles and definitions, I find this tidbit: "The terms and definitions below are always evolving and changing and often mean different things to different people."

"Evolving and changing," gotta have a damn PhD to keep up with this sex stuff.  Guess we have more issues than just my situational celibacy.  Nevertheless, my boring straight life remains relatively uncomplicated.  Hats off to my other than standard gendered brothers and sisters.  If you can keep your life straight, you got no problem with me.  (That's a pun, dammit, meaning straight as in ordered, not "straight" straight.)

LGBTQIA...B, C D, E, F, H....indeed.

Humans, infinitely entertaining.

Addendum:

The term "incel" is an acronym for the phrase involuntary celibacy, which was coined rather innocently by a queer female blogger in 1993 but only began representing a movement of male supremacist ideology in recent years. In 2014, Elliot Rodger went on a deadly rampage in Isla Vista, California, using a knife, a gun and his car to kill six people and wound 14 others before taking his own life. In a lengthy video Rodger uploaded to the internet before his murder spree, he blamed his rage on being rejected by women — that is, being involuntarily celibate — and stated his intention to exact retribution for his loneliness on the women who had rejected him and had chosen to have sex with other men. (The incel community refers to such women as Stacys and such men as Chads.) 

Like many mass killers, Rodger attracted a following. His attack and accompanying manifesto brought together similarly misogynistic men, such as members of the Pick Up Artist and Black Pill, Red Pill online communities, under the name incels. These self-identified incels tend to be sexually frustrated and believe the world perceives them as beta males. They share a powerful anger toward both the women who reject them and the men who are more sexually successful. Like Minassian did in his Facebook post when referring to the Supreme Gentleman, incels revere Rodger. 

According to researchers who follow the movement, the social media platform Reddit's incel subreddit contained 40,000 members before it was shut down in November 2017 because of hate-filled and violent rhetoric that frequently called for the murder and rape of Stacys and Chads. Many incels have relocated to the website 4chan (as Minassian mentioned in his post), which is known for hosting shocking and controversial content.  https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/why-it-matters-yet-doesnt-incel-toronto-attacker-terroristhttps://worldview.stratfor.com/article/why-it-matters-yet-doesnt-incel-toronto-attacker-terrorist

Politicians and people, meet climate change in CA.

[Now a new report by the state’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, part of the California Environmental Protection Agency, tallies the environmental losses California has sustained.

The data points to the blistering conclusion that severe climate change has already arrived in California, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

“Climate change is not a conceptual or theoretical challenge. The evidence is overwhelming — universities and scientists worldwide agree — that climate change is all too real,” Matthew Rodriquez, California secretary for environmental protection, said in a statement.]  https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/california-climate-change-effects-report  (Links in original)

Sustainable fishing increases fish catches

Critics of conservation often portray as a zero sum game, saying trying to conserve stocks of fish will diminish the catches of most fishermen.

Nevertheless as Bubba Cochrane said, depletion of red snapper fishing stocks just a few short years ago threatened the likelihood of all who relied on the snapper for a living.

A catch as catch can system with seasons made captains race to catch as much and as quick as possible as they could.  This glutted the market and actually depressed prices.  With a new quota system captains could plan their seasons and hopefully get their catch.

Just 15 years ago, over fishing threatened to wipe out red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico.  This pained me personally because my mother's standard restaurant order was red snapper.  You can find few things more delicious than broiled red snapper.  They be damn good.

Conservation and common sense saved the fish for all of us.

Under the old management system, commercial fishermen raced to catch all the snapper they could during the government mandated seasons, which some years lasted only a few days. That resulted in a lot of dangerous fishing, wasted fish and huge market swings for customers. Sometimes fresh Gulf snapper was available only a few weeks a year. 

The new approach allows commercial fishermen to pace themselves throughout the year, putting less stress on the stock and injecting some predictability into the market. Now, Gulf red snapper are more plentiful than ever, and customers can find fresh snapper at the seafood counter or on the menu nearly year-round.
https://www.sharethegulf.org/stories/77

Update: "Often, commercial fishermen are perceived to be a group of people focused on taking as many fish as possible as quickly as possible. This simply isn’t the case. We are business owners, we are problem solvers, but at heart, we are conservationists."  (Emphasis added)
https://shareholdersalliance.org/who-we-are.php

"Impossibly Corrupt"

ON how I weep for the red, whire, and blue of the USA: 

[Oh, didn’t you realize our country is impossibly corrupt in ways likely too entrenched to ever fully overthrow? Aw, bless your heart; not everyone can be a PLAYBOOK INSIDER (sponsored by BP).    

To be fair, it’s not just Playbook playing the smug “Oh, didn’t you realize?” game: Politico’s Josh Gerstein tweeted that “Much of the dudgeon and pearl clutching on [Michael] Cohen selling access to the new admin is feigned or groupthink....]  https://splinternews.com/politico-playbook-can-fuck-right-off-1825951911 

The banality of Trump

Just a few years left, please God, and President Dump will become ex-Preznit.

What will we have left of our US constitution?

Most of us are shocked in real time. But the existential question is whether the Low-Bar Presidency ends when Trump’s tenure does. Or will our expectations forever be lowered because of what he has managed to do less than 18 months into office? Will we assume, from here on out, that our politicians lie so cavalierly to us? That they misuse our taxpayer funds for the betterment of their private lives? That they are incapable of meeting the challenges of  governance? If so, the costs could be horrifying.  https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-damage-of-trumps-low-bar-presidency-is-worse-than-you-think