Pres, Dump: "No porn in White House"

Deportation Kills

Manuel Antonio Cano Pacheco should have graduated from high school in Des Moines last month. The oldest of four siblings should have walked across a stage in a cap and gown to become a proud symbol to his sister and brothers of the rewards of hard work and education....

Instead, Manuel died a brutal death alone in a foreign land, a symbol of gang supremacy in a country plagued by violent drug cartels. It happened three weeks after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement returned him to Mexico, a country he had left at age 3 when his parents brought him here without a visa.

More than anything, his brief life and gruesome death are a reminder of the heartlessness and counter-productiveness of our immigration policies and removal practices, which don't factor in the harm that people may face upon return.  https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/columnists/rekha-basu/2018/06/07/deportation-death-des-moines-high-school-dreamer-daca-mexico-drug-cartels/680234002/

Trump a stooge for Putin and Russia

"When you look at Trump's behavioral patterns, his unwillingness ever to criticize Vladimir Putin, his slow rolling sanctions, his unwillingness to create problems with Russia, even though, as he attacks NATO, disrupts relations with the E.U., how can you not draw the conclusions that Donald Trump, the president of the United States, is frightened of Vladimir Putin."
https://www.alternet.org/former-nsa-analyst-claims-us-spy-agencies-have-known-trump-was-russian-agent-2016

Anthony Bourdain: Still exploring Parts Unknown--RIP

“He was elegant, he was kind, he was a dude. Charming. That’s the kind of guy he was,” LeDuff continued. “We all have to go. Some of have to go in a hard way. I’m shocked like everyone else, he had everything going. I don't know why. It’s just sad.”

“Even the world’s most interesting man hurt.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/anthony-bourdain-dead-from-suicide-cnn-says

[Yes, Anthony Bourdain was American cool.

I say this as somebody who hates the word “cool” and all the contrived nonsense that it stirs up, but the man really was. He could hold court with gourmand French chefs in one episode, and then gut and cook a chicken on the Congo River in the next. I was proud to have my country associated with him—he was in that brash yet debonair American mold that foreigners eat up.]

https://www.thedailybeast.com/anthony-bourdain-was-american-coolhttps://www.thedailybeast.com/anthony-bourdain-was-american-cool

Even I, with my studied and callous indifference towards others, hurt today.  The death of Bourdain diminishes us all.

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline

Call 1-800-273-8255

Available 24 hours everyday

Baptizing Pastor killed by croc

[Pastor Docho Eshete was baptizing at least 80 members of his Protestant congregation at Lake Abaya, in southern Ethiopia, an area known to have a huge crocodile population, when one of the creatures leaped out of the water and grabbed him.

“He baptized the first person and he passed on to another one,” a local resident told the BBC. “All of a sudden, a crocodile jumped out of the lake and grabbed the pastor.”]

Remember the Afghan War?; We lost!

As Colonel Danny Sjursen notes in his Tom Dispatch article, history provides a primer into the future of our efforts to "win" the war in Afghanistan.  Hard to believe, but a collection of warring tribes and sects and villages and a religious movement (the Taliban)--who collectively despise and hate the government in Kabul--can fight and beat the greatest military in the world.  Despite the bravery of our US forces, they try to do the impossible: unify Afghanistan and create a central democratic government.  The tribes don't defeat the United States, they just have to reach a stalemate.

Nevertheless, the policymakers refuse to realize we can never win.  From Bush Jr to Obama to the current occupant of the White House--and the alternative, Hillary Rodham Clinton--all refuse to accept this difficult proposition: the US cannot win this war.

That’s right, the local “Taliban” -- a term so nebulous it’s basically lost all meaning -- had managed to drastically alter U.S. Army tactics with crude, homemade explosives stored in plastic jugs. And believe me, this was a huge problem. Cheap, ubiquitous, and easy to bury, those anti-personnel Improvised Explosive Devices, or IEDs, soon littered the “roads,” footpaths, and farmland surrounding our isolated outpost. To a greater extent than a number of commanders willingly admitted, the enemy had managed to nullify our many technological advantages for a few pennies on the dollar (or maybe, since we’re talking about the Pentagon, it was pennies on the millions of dollars).  Links in original.

Even Bloomberg News, no bastion of progressive politics has noted the negative trends going on: [Almost sixteen years after the U.S.-backed ouster of the Taliban, Afghanistan remains in the grip of a war with “shockingly high” death rates among security forces and a record number of casualties among civilians, according to the U.S. government watchdog monitoring the country’s reconstruction efforts.]  (emphasis added)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-01/afghan-deaths-soar-to-highest-on-record-as-u-s-weighs-strategy

US policymakers need to face these facts: operations in Afghanistan have a deleterious effect on the entire US military as reported in Business Insider: "

Years of complex operations and the ongoing demands of units in the field have left the armed forces struggling to maintain both operational capacity and high levels of readiness, according to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office."]  (Links in original)

So the time has come for our imperious leader to turn his eyes from the false promise of peace with the North Koreans--does anyone seriously think Kim Jong Un will give up his nuclear weapons?--and fix the mess in Afghanistan by getting the Hell out of there and saving lives of American men and women, husbands and mothers, sons and daughters.

Tour the Millennium Falcon

https://www.space.com/40696-star-wars-millennium-falcon-photo-tour.html

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

'Dignity of the office:" Trump hires hookers to play pee games

Not judging perversions but hiring hookers on Moscow to defile the very bed the Obamas slept in with piss play just sounds funny and reveals more evidence of Trump's deranged mind.

We regret to inform you that James Comey, the former director of the FBI, says it’s “possible” that a pee tape involving Donald Trump and Russian prostitutes actually exists. 

The most infamous section of the Steele dossier, which was full of salacious claims involving Trump and Russia, included a totally unverified claim that the now-president paid prostitutes in 2013 to pee on a Moscow hotel bed where Barack and Michelle Obama once slept.  https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-pee-tape-could-be-real-says-comey

Or you can read gory details of the dossier itself:  https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3259984-Trump-Intelligence-Allegations.html