The dreaded pineapple threat

I generally ignore Trump news anymore — I’m waiting for the indictments, arrest, and trial, which will probably never happen — but sometimes he’s so ridiculous I can’t pretend he doesn’t exist. So, the latest: in a deposition last year, he revealed his fear of fruit.

Former president Donald Trump said he feared protesters would hit him with tomatoes, pineapples and other “very dangerous” fruit at his campaign rallies, declaring in a sworn deposition that “you can be killed if that happens.”

It gave me flashbacks.

Let’s be realistic, though. He wasn’t really afraid of fruit. He was inflating the dangers of fruit so he could justify using violence against people who oppose him.

Dictor then asked Trump: “Is it your expectation that if your security guards see someone about to throw a tomato that they should knock the crap out of them?”

Trump replied in the affirmative, noting that he expected his security team to use physical force in such cases.

“Yeah, I think that they have to be aggressive in stopping that from happening,” Trump said. “Because if that happens, you can be killed if that happens. … To stop somebody from throwing pineapples, tomatoes, bananas, stuff like that, yeah, it’s dangerous stuff.”

Has anyone ever thrown pineapples at a protest?

It’s been obvious for a long time that the Minneapolis police are rotten to the core

George Floyd was just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a new report out on our cops, and it’s not pretty. They’re under-trained bigots who take a military approach to policing. They kill people at an alarming rate.

The report said race-based policing in Minneapolis is primarily a result of police force culture. Officers, supervisors and trainers “receive deficient training, which emphasizes a paramilitary approach to policing that results in officers unnecessarily escalating encounters or using inappropriate levels of force,” it said.

The department’s accountability systems are “insufficient and ineffective at holding officers accountable for misconduct,” the report said. But it said former and current city and police leaders have failed to act, effectively allowing an aggressive culture to fester.

The report said the department maintains a culture where officers “consistently use racist, misogynistic, and disrespectful language and are rarely held accountable” for it.

“Without fundamental organizational culture changes, reforming MPD’s policies, procedures, and trainings will be meaningless,” the report said.

Fire them all. Or at least, go through their records and ruthlessly fire anyone with a history of discrimination and violence — kick out everyone with spousal abuse on file, for instance. There go 90% of the cops!

I know, that’s unrealistic. Instead, they’ll do nothing and use the report as an excuse to hire more, presumably “better” cops. Maybe get some more tanks and SWAT teams.

Hey, in totally unrelated news, the man who murdered George Floyd wants his jail sentence overturned.

Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin has filed an appeal, asking the state Court of Appeal to overturn his conviction for killing George Floyd in 2020, according to CNN. Chauvin was found guilty of unintentional second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter, and was sentenced to 22 1/2 years in prison by Hennepin County Judge Peter Cahill back in June, NPR reports.

An 82-page brief filed on Monday alleged that several factors during the case corrupted proceedings and made them “structurally defective,” CNN reports. One of the factors also noted was the pretrial publicity, protests outside the courthouse and the announcement during jury selection that Floyd’s family would receive a $27 million settlement. It continued, describing the court proceedings as “so pervaded by error, misconduct and prejudice that they were structurally defective.”

What a shame that he chose to publicly, callously murder a man in front of all those phone cameras. If it hadn’t been for all the publicity, nobody would have caught on and he’d be a free man today, probably still with a good job with the Minneapolis police department. And the Floyd family probably wouldn’t have gotten that settlement if the whole world hadn’t seen Chauvin openly execute a man!

Doesn’t everyone realize he was innocent, just a product of accepted Minneapolis police behavior?

I thought we’d moved beyond this in the ’70s

I grew up under the cloud of nuclear war — we kids saw it as an omnipresent threat, any day now a bunch of bombs were going to come sailing out of the sky and roll everything back to the stone age. Then that got replaced with pollution, and starvation, and then global warming. None of that got fixed, and now we’re calling back the ominous danger of nuclear war on top of everything else? No fair.

You know, the biggest terrorists in the world are the ones with a nuclear arsenal that they wave around to terrorize people into doing what they want. We need to disarm everyone right now.

Once, I would have predicted that Ukraine was going to be crushed

Even now, I don’t know — at a guess, I’d assume the eastern Ukraine is going to get bloodily chewed up by the blundering Russian war machine. But then I see this map of recent fires and explosions at important Russian military facilities.

Look at those sites north of Moscow. Are Ukrainians that fierce and bold that they’re carrying out a counter-invasion? Not likely. Here’s a better explanation or two.

The fact that so many fires have broken out at key locations in such a short period is “quite suspicious,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, chairman of the Silverado Policy Accelerator think tank in Washington. However, he added, it is “really impossible to tell at this stage.”

There are explanations other than sabotage, Alperovitch said. Accidental fires are not unusual in Russia, which has a reputation for poor maintenance, and Western sanctions are making it harder to secure spare parts for vital machinery.

Arestovych doubts Ukraine was involved in the fires at the defense-related facilities and suggested that Russian officials are setting fires to cover up evidence of corruption.

Oh. Russia might manage to eke out some pyrrhic victory in the east, but wow, one thing they’ve just lost forever is any reputation as a formidable fighting force. More like a gang that couldn’t shoot straight. It’s too bad Don Knotts has died, he would have been perfect playing Putin in the bio-pic to come.

The degeneracy…!

Hieronymus Bosch, move over. When we want to show scenes of perversity, chaos, and wickedness, new masters have taken over: Meyers and Frazee. Their work is terrifyingly lurid. Take a look at this (I hope it doesn’t get my blog banned):

What hell is this, you say. It’s from a children‘s board book, Babies Everywhere, and it is so salacious in the minds of right-wingers that it has been banned. I mean, look at it. Horrifying, if you look at it through a conservative lens.

You might think it’s just a scene of normal families walking on a city street, but that’s only because you lack a filthy mind and the power of projection. A man alone walking with a child? THE BREAKUP OF THE AMERICAN FAMILY. Two women walking together pushing a stroller? LESBIANS. Two men walking together? Men don’t have friends, must be HOMOS. Old man pulling a wagon with a baby and a dog? OH MY GOD CALL THE POLICE!

It has been banned, but the people responsible can’t quite explain why. It’s like pornography, they know it when they see it.

The book was among dozens of works recently banned from public school libraries in Walton County, Fla. School district officials confirmed the removal of the books to WJHG-TV in Florida. Walton County School Superintendent Russell Hughes told the outlet that it was “necessary in this moment for me to make that decision and I did it for just a welfare of all involved, including our constituents, our teachers, and our students.”

Right. He just has the welfare of the students in mind, so he glanced at this, and in the heat of the moment, decided it was wicked and needed to be blotted out. It’s a palimpsest. It’s the nonexistent basement of a pizza parlor. It’s a thing with reflects back the filthy mind of Walton County School Superintendent Russell Hughes, and therefore we must get rid of it before everyone can see what he is thinking.

Using this logic, clearly Florida must be destroyed, because everyone looks at it and sees a floppy, dangling penis.

Why were journalists so slow to pick up on the hate festering here?

I’ve bumped into “Libs of TikTok” a few times on social media, and was so thoroughly repulsed that my response was to immediately block them. It was good to see the author of all that hate, Chaya Raichik, exposed in the Washington Post.

Just four months after getting started, Libs of TikTok got its big break: Joe Rogan started promoting the account to the millions of listeners of his hit podcast. He mentioned it several times on the show in August, then again in late September. “Libs of TikTok is one of the greatest f—ing accounts of all time,” he said. With his seal of approval, Raichik’s following skyrocketed.

Libs of TikTok gained more prominence throughout the end of last year, cementing its spot in the right-wing media outrage cycle. Its attacks on the LGBTQ+ community also escalated. By January, Raichik’s page was leaning hard into “groomer” discourse, calling for any teacher who comes out as gay to their students to be “fired on the spot.”

Her anti-trans tweets went especially viral. She called on her followers to contact schools that were allowing “boys in the girls bathrooms” and pushed the false conspiracy theory that schools were installing litter boxes in bathrooms for children who identify as cats. She also purported that adults who teach children about LGBTQ+ identities are “abusive,” that being gender-nonconforming or an ally to the LGBTQ+ community is a “mental illness,” and referred to schools as “government run indoctrination camps” for the LGBTQ+ community.

You can see why I would insta-block her — the combination of hate and dishonesty was more than enough. That passage also explains why I don’t listen to Joe Rogan. He’s part of the same ugly mess. “one of the greatest f—ing accounts of all time” was openly anti-LGBT, with an endless parade of posts framing the existence of gay people as a great evil.

It also wasn’t that hard to discover.

“Finding these “Shaya Ray” and “Chaya Raichik” identities for Libs is OSINT 101-level stuff. The shallowest indexing of the Internet Archive’s Twitter Stream Grab turns them up. Antifascist researchers shouldn’t be the only ones doing this work,” Brown wrote.

He called it a “failure of US journalism” that “an anonymous hate account can shape a far-right national movement, influence legislation in several states, etc., and (as far as I can tell) nobody has tried to find out who is behind it,” before it became public knowledge that Lorenz was working on a story about the identity of the Libs of Tik Tok’s creator.

But then I see lots of right-wingers blowing up over the fact that a journalist, Taylor Lorenz, would dare to investigate the latest font of ignorance and hate. I didn’t get it. That was her job! You can’t object to the general idea of investigative journalism.

But of course you can. Alex Pareene explains their objective.

If you are attempting to persuade this creep’s defenders, specifically, and not a general audience, that what Lorenz did was ethical, and that the creep’s identity is newsworthy, you have made a category error. These people on this ascendant right don’t just have different ideas about the role and function of journalism; they don’t just believe journalists are biased liberals; they don’t just believe the media is too hostile to conservatives; they are hostile to the concept of journalism itself. As in, uncovering things dutifully and carefully and attempting to convey your findings to the public honestly. They don’t want that and don’t like it and are endeavoring to end it as a common practice. You are debating logic and facts with frothing bigots with a bone-deep opposition to your entire project.

This new right fundamentally doesn’t want “newsgathering” to happen. They want a chaotic information stream of unverifiable bullshit and context collapse and propaganda. Their backers, the people behind the whole project, are philosophically and materially opposed to the idea that true things should be uncovered and verified and disseminated publicly about, well, them, and their projects. This may have started as a politically opportunistic war against particular outlets and stories, but it has quickly blossomed into a worldview. It’s an ideologically coherent opposition to the liberal precepts of verifiability and transparency, and the holders of those precepts are too invested in them to understand what their enemy is doing. The creep’s account, everyone in the press should understand, is the model for what they will be replaced with.

That’s Tucker Carlson, and the fortunately late Andrew Breitbart, and Rupert Murdoch, and the rationale behind all of Fox News, and OANN, and NewsMax. They don’t do journalism. They try to destroy it.

Ding dong…

Orrin Hatch is dead. He was my senator for while, when I lived in Utah, and I learned quickly to detest him. Even the Salt Lake Tribune was sometimes ambivalent about him: they called for his resignation in 2018, even after they’d propped him up for years, with this overlong and somewhat confusing headline: Sen. Orrin Hatch’s 42-year legacy includes passing sweeping legislation, working across the aisle while sometimes being sharply partisan and, for the past two years, sidling up to Trump. Not to mention his history of sidling up to Reagan.

I think this article in the Nation better summarizes his legacy.

Orrin Hatch Was Never a ‘Public Servant’. The retiring senator has always been a shameless tool of billionaire campaign donors and a partisan errand boy for the likes of Donald Trump.

Few, aside from President Trump, Republican majority leader Mitch McConnell, and the lobbyists for the special interests Hatch served, will miss one of the most egregious hypocrites ever to serve in a chamber where mendacity has always been well represented.

That was written while he was alive, and the journalist could be honest. Brace yourself for a few days of slimy politicians and biased journalists to start vomiting up buckets and buckets of whitewash now.

America, where corrupt criminals are just funny characters on a TV show

I have never watched this show, The Masked Singer, in which celebrities are dressed up in silly costumes to sing songs, and then celebrity judges try to guess their identities. It sounds insipid. From the few short clips I have now suffered through, it is deeply, painfully, agonizingly stupid. Do they pay the audience to put on over-the-top expressions and squeal excitedly over banalities, or is it just that the kind of people who get tickets to see the show are selected for idiocy?

Anyway, they unmasked one “singer” in the most recent show. It was Rudy Giuliani.

Is this the new path for rehabilitating the reputations of deplorables, letting them caper and dance like court jesters for the mob?

Fuck that evil clown. Fuck that show.

It’s not real, Ted

Ted Cruz thinks we have to worry about “space pirates”. Really. I’m not making this up.

During a Tuesday hearing of the Senate’s subcommittee on Aviation and Space discussing space policy, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) cited the threat of space pirates as a reason to back Trump’s unpopular “space force” idea. Cruz is the chair of the committee.

Discussing threats to commercial and governmental space assets, Cruz then veered off course into the realm of the fantastic.

“Since the ancient Greeks first put to sea, nations have recognized the necessity of naval forces and maintaining a superior capability to protect waterborne travel and commerce from bad actors,” Cruz said. “Pirates threaten the open seas and the same is possible in space.”

The threat of space piracy, Cruz said, now means America must recognize “the necessity of a space force.”

He’s quite annoyed that those danged Leftists are making fun of him, and is trying to defend his argument.

The threat of nations destroying commercial resources in space is not space piracy. The pirates he’s talking about were independent, lawless adventures robbing ships of cargo. There are no people living in space who might decide to start looting passing spaceships; there is no significant commercial cargo transport in space.

Coincidentally, the video game No Man’s Sky has just come out with a new update called “Outlaws” in which you have to fight off the depradations of space pirates. I’ve found that if you upgrade your phase beam and positron ejector they’re easily fought off.

Also, it’s a game. It’s not real, Ted.

Fighting back

Lana Theis: a horrible person who shouldn’t be in politics.

This is inspiring. Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow was accused by another politician, Lana Theis, of being a pedophile and a groomer — get used to it, this is the preferred tactic of Republicans everywhere, and every Democrat is going to get labeled “groomer” in the next campaign season. McMorrow decided to fight back with a fierce rebuke, which I think is the best strategy. It’s analogous to another great reply to Joseph McCarthy by Joseph Welch, “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” It ought to be our standard reaction when a Republican lifts their slimy head up from the muck they wallow in.

I sat on it for a while wondering why me?

Then I realized…

I’m the biggest threat to your hollow, hateful scheme. Because you can’t claim that you’re targeting marginalized kids in the name of “parental rights” if another parent is standing up and saying no.

So you dehumanize and marginalize ME. You say I’m one of THEM. You say she’s a groomer, she supports pedophilia, she wants children to believe they were responsible for slavery and to feel bad about themselves because they’re white.

Here’s a little background on who I really am.

Growing up my family was active in our church. I sang in choir. My mom taught CCD. One day, our priest called a meeting with my mom and told her that she was not living up to the church’s expectations, b/c she was divorced, and because he didn’t see her w us at mass every Sunday.

Where was my mom on Sunday?

She was at a soup kitchen. With me.

My mom taught me at a young age that Christianity and faith was about being a part of a community, about recognizing our privilege and blessings and doing what we could to be of service to others –

especially people who were marginalized, targeted, who had less…often unfairly.

I learned that SERVICE was far more important than performative nonsense like being seen in the same pew every Sunday or writing “Christian” in your Twitter bio and using it as a shield to target and marginalize already-marginalized people.

I also stand on the shoulders of people like Father Ted Hesburgh, the longtime president of the University of Notre Dame who was active in the civil rights movement, who recognized his power and privilege as a white man, a faith leader, and the head of an influential and well-respected institution – and who saw Black people in this country being targeted and discriminated against and beaten, and reached out and locked arms with Dr. Martin Luther King when he was alive, when it was unpopular and risky, and marching with them to say, “We got you.” To offer protection and service and allyship, to try to right wrongs and fix the injustice in the world.

So who am I? I am a straight, white, Christian, married, suburban mom who knows that the very notion that learning about slavery or redlining or systemic racism means that children are being taught to feel bad or hate themselves because they are white is absolute nonsense.

No child alive today is responsible for slavery. No one is this room is responsible for slavery.

But each and every single one of us bears responsibility for writing the next chapter of history. We decides what happens next, and how WE respond to history and the world around us.

We are not responsible for the past. We also cannot change the past. We can’t pretend that it didn’t happen, or deny people their very right to exist.

I want my daughter to know that she is loved, supported, and seen for whoever she becomes. I want her to be curious, empathetic, and kind.

I want every child to feel seen, heard, and supported, not marginalized and targeted if they are not straight, white, and Christian.

People who are different are not the reason our roads are in bad shape, or healthcare costs are too high, or teachers are leaving the profession.

We cannot let hateful people tell you otherwise to scapegoat and deflect from the fact that they’re not doing anything to fix the real issues that impact peoples lives.

I know that hate will only win if people like me stand by and let it happen.

And I want to be very clear right now:

Call me whatever you want. I know who I am. I know what faith and service mean, and what it calls for in this moment.

We will not let hate win.

I’m glad that Christians like McMorrow exist, but I fear that there are a great many wretched, hate-filled, repressive Christians like Lana Theis. I hope that the people of Michigan make Theis’s political career a short one.