Good morning, good people!

I have bitched and moaned about AI being encouraged by the Texas State Bar. Well, I read the 2 articles about it in a recent Bar Journal about the ups and downs. Saves time, looks professional, but hire staff to verify every single word, then verify their work, and you are responsible for malpractice if they didn't catch a mistake and you didn't, either.

Welcome to Friday Night Photos everyone. Your once a week break from the daily madness of the crazy world we live in. Post any photos, memes, music, or whatever else you find of interest that helps you escape the madness.

Tonight's birds are from multiple visits to both the San Diego Zoo Safari Park and Santee Lakes. The Black-crowned Night Heron was good enough to pose for me on a rainy day at the Safari Park at the end of March. In April sunny blue skies accompanied me for another visit to the Safari Park and two visits to Santee Lakes. I shot the Owl images at Santee Lakes on Easter weekend. Two days later they were gone.

Snowy Egret Breeding adult

Does it feel like time is moving faster? Things happen so quickly that hardly a second goes by and we're off to a new development, a new revelation, a new outrage. There's hardly time to catch our breath and there's a new squirrel to chase up a tree. We're inundated with problem after problem and very few solutions.

There's an old theory in the science of physics that states the faster one goes the more time slows down. For instance, if one could travel in space at the speed of light time would decelerate. One could leave earth and travel many light years away and upon return will have aged very little while everyone that one knew back on earth would have been long dead.

The revelations are coming so fast they're leaving us behind. Is that it?

Or are we just getting old and running out of time?

Five years ago this past Sunday Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd. Three other officers assisted, also pressing their weight upon Floyd’s prone unresisting dying form, and/or warning bystanders back—at one point with mace. There were many bystanders. Who pleaded with the officers to cease and desist. But the officers preferred not to. Some of these bystanders were filming Floyd’s murder, and the officers knew that. But they didn’t care. To them, what they were doing was Normal. Floyd was a miscreant, suspected of paying for a pack of cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill—he needed to go first to the jail, and then, hopefully, the penitentiary. This, was the officers' Duty. They ordered Floyd out of his own vehicle, at gunpoint, and then instructed him to get in a police car. Floyd said he was panicky, claustrophobic, having trouble breathing. They threw him in the car. Then Chauvin decided he didn’t want Floyd in the car, and drug him full-length off the passenger seat and onto the street. Floyd lying with his chest pressed to the asphalt, Chauvin then kneeled on his neck. For nine minutes.

Chauvin had been kneeling on necks for years. As had law jockeys all across the nation. Such was Normal. Chauvin and two of the other officers now murdering Floyd had kneeled on a neck earlier that very month. Nobody said shit. Chauvin while on the force had previously killed people. Nothing happened to him. In September of 2017 he had bashed a 14-year-old black youth on the head with his flashlight, spouting blood, then kneeled on the child’s neck for 17 minutes. There was video of that one, too. But, such, was simply Normal. So Chauvin was then free to go. To go kneel on more necks. One of Chauvin’s cop confederates in murdering Floyd had previously kicked, beaten, knelt on a man, busting out his teeth—the man was given $25,000 to try to find more teeth; the cop stayed on the force. Such, such: Normal.

Sixteen times Floyd said he couldn’t breathe. Chauvin was unmoved—miscreants always be lying-ass about such shit, especially when they are of melanin. One of Chauvin’s confederates blithely (wrongly) opined if Floyd could talk, he could breathe. Another chortled to the crowd, “this is why you don’t do drugs, kids.” When Floyd said “I’m about to die,” Chauvin said, “relax.”

Shortly after, Floyd fully relaxed. Forever. Not moving. Not breathing. A confederate suggested checking his pulse. There was no pulse. Chauvin, he kept his knee, on the lifeless neck, until the ambulance arrived.

That Floyd died, Chauvin and his confederates gave no shits. That certainly didn’t mean they’d done anything wrong! Miscreants in contact with police die all the time. And, when they do, it’s the fault of the miscreant. Especially when, as with Floyd, they are of melanin. Cops learn this from the very top. As when LAPD chief Daryl Gates pronounced that chokeholds weren’t a problem, it was instead the fact that black people have an “anatomical defect in their necks,” that causes them to react with more distress than “normal people.” They die because they are mutant. No doubt some anatomical mutantcy, in Floyd, had croaked him, too.

When, the day after Floyd died, Chauvin and his three confederates were fired, they were stunned. The fuck? How could they have done anything wrong? They were just doing what law jockeys had been doing in the US for 450 years! They knew they were being filmed, shit-yeah, and that just shows what they were doing was Normal—else they would have left off! For even after the coming of the cameras, killer cops continued to be told of their (now-recorded) killings—yes, that’s Normal. So why was everyone in the nation, and even the world, now suddenly screaming hang ‘em high? Something clearly had gone aberrant in the humans. Chauvin was the first white Minnesota police officer in the history of homo sapiens to be charged with the murder of a black man—not once, going all the way back to the monolith, had such a thing occurred!

What happened to Chauvin & Co., is they ran into steam-engine time. Charles Fort observed “it steam engines when it comes steam-engine time.” Meaning a thing doesn’t happen, until it does; when it’s time for it. You can’t predict it, you can’t control it. Like the storming of the Bastille. That imposing edifice stood for centuries as the symbol of the absolute unchecked power of French kings: people were imprisoned there solely because in some way they had offended the bigly. But when it was finally stormed, it had mostly fallen into disuse—there were only three people in there. But that was the time, when came Bastille-storming time. Similarly, the murder of George Floyd may have been no more egregious than many other such murders. But that was the one when among the Americans it became no mas time—something’s got to be done about these cops killing these melanins! A similar moment arrived when Daryl Gates’ boys went all “gorillas in the mist” on Rodney King. Every 30 years or so, the Americans awake to the fact cops routinely beat and kill black people for No Reason. And then they get worked up about it. For a while.