caucus99percent

free-range politics, organic community

“I have been feeling very clearheaded lately and what I want to write about today is the sea. It contains so many colors. Silver at dawn, green at noon, dark blue in the evening. Sometimes it looks almost red. Or it will turn the color of old coins. Right now the shadows of clouds are dragging across it, and patches of sunlight are touching down everywhere. White strings of gulls drag over it like beads. It is my favorite thing, I think, that I have ever seen. Sometimes I catch myself staring at it and forget my duties. It seems big enough to contain everything anyone could ever feel.”
~ Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

In a recent discussion online, I suggested that the best we could do in this time of decline was to invoke various species of reactionary nostalgia for the past. Right now our Presidential choices involve some guy who imagines America out of some nostalgia for the 1950s being challenged by some guy who is running on nostalgia for 2016. The guy who is running on nostalgia for 2016 is co-opting the followers of a guy who ran on nostalgia for FDR.

"Rioting and Looting" is how the media is selling this story instead of overwhelming and unnecessary police force against the protesters is fueling the violence. We have seen that time and time again starting long before Ferguson, but that is one of the first places I remember the cops starting to use the military equipment. Who can forget that scene where a cop is on top of a bearcat pointing his rifle at a group of unarmed people standing there with their hands up? The protests were mostly peaceful UNTIL the cops showed up and starting stirring shit up. Why? Because they could. And if the militarized outfitted cops weren't enough many states sent in the national guard. Yeah cuz that has always turned out well.

I have a habit of batch processing a lot of my e-mail, letting it fester and then dealing with it. I especially do this with Caitlin, because I let my phone read it to me when I'm out doing stuff that takes little attention. So, on the 21th Caitlin Johnstone posted this funny yet gritty to do list which I thought would provide some entertainment for the assemblage here.

To-Do List
by Caitlin Johnstone

Laundry

Vacuum

Roar at sky

Ferguson PD

There are likely other reasons as well, especially psychological ones, including sociopathic levels of need for extreme control ‘the other’, even when ‘the other’ is the same color or ethnicity.  Of course black cops kill other blacks, including unarmed ones, and as an honest black Chief of Police had said a decade ago: ‘When a cop zips on the uniform of the security state, he becomes what the Police Chief demands’.  I wish I could remember his name; he’d not allowed his force to carry guns, and back then, it was working to cut down on actual  crime.

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The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 31, 2020