I am just swamped with kittens, cats, and holidays.
President Dumpster Fire has been Constitution-shredding dumpster fire for the month I’ve been away. No big deal there. Meanwhile, my Facebook page is one constant stream of cute kitten pictures… kittens who take an astounding amount of work to deal with as I get them ready to adopt out. Two have been adopted out and are now driving their new owners nuts with their frenzied energy and cuteness, one kitten is stubbornly refusing to tame down and I have to work with him one on one a lot. Sigh.
And yeah, TMF is still around. Took him to the vet today. He has developed a heart murmur, not unusual in a 16 year old cat. We’ll see what the blood work says when the labs come back tomorrow…
And meanwhile I’m preparing for my Christmas trip back to Louisiana. I won’t be taking the detour through Dallas this year. The old friend that I visited regularly there died unexpectedly. Another part of my past gone. Sigh.
Wars are generally won by the organized. Most of the MAGA-hats have never organized anything bigger than a church potluck, and a lot of them couldn’t even manage that. Meanwhile we here in the civilized states have organized some of the biggest corporations known to man, with world-wide supply chains and millions of employees. We control the logistical supply chain of the nation from the civilized states. The ships, trains, trucks, and planes that keep the nation’s goods moving are owned by us and run from our states.
The MAGA-hats are expecting the police and military to enter the fray on their side as their margin of victory. That expectation is the only reason why they would even dare try to wage civil war. But that was true in the first American Civil War too, where most of the U.S. Army and its equipment and gear went to the South. In the end it didn’t matter, the South proved unable to manage its economy to maximize its assets and was beset by inflexible leadership that chose generals based upon compatibility with Jefferson Davis rather than based upon competence (thus the sidelining of their best general, General Joseph Johnston, at multiple critical points because Jefferson Davis didn’t like him). In the end guns win battles but logistics are what wins wars — and we have the logistical expertise here in the civilized states.
My guess — in a second American Civil War the eventual outcome would be the same as in the first — the bubbas will mismanage their economy to the point where their armies collapse for lack of food and boots while at the same time food rots in the field because they cannot get it from where it is grown to where it is needed because they lack the logistical expertise, equipment, or mindset. Things would get bloody long before then, of course, and they could probably win some quick victories before lack of a logistical tail takes its toll, but in the end logistics will tell.
The MAGAbomber, sending letter bombs to prominent Democrats,
A shooting at Kroger where a white supremacist apparently decided to start shooting black people,
and a shooting at a Jewish synagogue where a white supremacist killed eleven people.
All within a week.
So I’ll drop this quote here:
“[These deaths] say to each of us, black and white alike, that we must substitute courage for caution. They say to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers.” — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 18 September 1963
Birmingham, Ala.
What is the commonality between them all? All three murderers (or wanna be in the case of the MAGAbomber) subscribed to various right-wing conspiracy theories about Jews, Democrats, and black people.
At which point we’re back to MLK Jr., who was responding to a church bombing that killed four little girls. The bombers were prominent KKK members who were also top officials in local law enforcement. MLK’s point was that if it was not these particular people, it would have been someone else who murdered civil rights workers, because the whole system of white supremacy was based upon violence against black people and their supporters.
At this point, I think we can say that the whole system of Republican supremacy is based upon violence against black people, Hispanic people, Democrats, Jews, and their supporters.
So how did it happen that there were so many Germans willing to round up Jews and march them into gas chambers?
Well, it started with rhetoric. Rhetoric by the Nazi Party leadership in their Party newspaper, the Daily Stormer, and in speeches and radio broadcasts. Rhetoric painting Jews as criminals, as rapists and thieves, as terrorists and vermins.
We’ve seen the same kind of rhetoric from Donald Trump and his supporters — rhetoric that might have come right out of the pages of the Daily Stormer in the 1920’s, except with immigrants from south of the border in place of the Jews. With the inevitable result: there’s now a significant part of the American population that would be willing to round up immigrants and march them into gas chambers.
I got gentrified out of my place in Santa Clara, so now I’m across the bay in Newark. The new place came with a collection of ferals. I pointed a (sadly poor quality) video camera out the patio door and put out some kibble ($9.95 for a giant bag at Grocery Outlet), and have now collected images of four adult cats, four kittens, a skunk, and two ravens….
Momma Cat, a.k.a. Cali. A Calico kitty
Ghost.
Three black and white kittens
Smokey (gray)
Pepe
Oreo
Gray and white kitten (with Momma)
Note — I’m going to do TNR as soon as I get them used to getting food from me, but it’ll be a bit before I can do that. They have to get used to getting food from the patio, then I have to get them used to getting fed at a specific time rather than having food all the time.
Oh, what does TMF think about all these yard kitties? He’s sad. He sings the song of his people at the window when he sees them, he wants to go out and play with them. The first photo, the one of Momma Cat looking at the camera? TMF’s head is right above it, he’s singing a sad song that woke me up at 6am on a Sunday morning.
This is the main reason that Kavanaugh had to be confirmed immediately, before the Democrats got control of the Senate and could block apartheid supporters. The fact is that white people are becoming a minority within America. When that happens depends on who you ask, but it is happening, and will happen.
Given that, the only way that angry white males, of which Kavanaugh is one, can retain power is via apartheid — by taking away the vote from populations that, well, aren’t white. They dream of a return to the pre-Voting Rights Act segregated South, where black people were denied the vote by any number of means from poll taxes to lynchings, except nationwide and applied to non-whites across a broad spectrum. They really don’t have any choice. George W. Bush had made outreach to Hispanic populations, but Donald Trump has done nationwide what the California Republican Party did two decades ago — via racist acts against Hispanic populations, especially by kidnapping and losing children at the border in order to punish parents, they’ve lost the Hispanic vote for a generation.
The thing about apartheid, however, is that it is not a long time stable situation when it’s the majority of an entire nation that is being suppressed. South Africa and Rhodesia found that out the hard way, they managed to keep their non-white populations suppressed, but the violence needed to do in the face of guerilla warfare by the majority resulted in international repulsion and eventual collapse of their economies and the army of suppression that was funded by their economies. But our angry white male leaders think they have the answer to that — our current cradle to grave police state that tracks everybody from birth to death will allow them to take out the leaders of any opposition with ease, while also being used to remove information about them from the Internet so that angry mobs that wish to hang them from the nearest lamp posts won’t know where to find them.
But of course police states aren’t stable either. They can be maintained for a long time, but only at the expense of collapsing the economy and the impoverishment of the nation, because smart people don’t like police states. Smart people flee police states, or tuck their heads down and refuse to do the sort of entrepreneurship and innovation needed for an economy to thrive for fear that they might attract police state attention. But perhaps the angry white males view being on top of an impoverished failed state is preferable to being ruled by non-whites.
Given how many guns there are in the United States, I am not seeing any way that this situation does not result in bloodshed. Apartheid worked in the American South only because those being suppressed were a minority in the nation as a whole. But I cannot believe that the majority in states like California that are already “majority-minority” will sit by idle while their brethren elsewhere are being suppressed. Either there will be bloody military suppression of resistance, or secession followed by war. All I know is that a hard rain’s gonna fall.
First, a song…. Regina Spektor, “Ballad of a Politician” off her brilliant 2012 album What we Saw from the Cheap Seats.
Okay, so you’re back. Did you listen to the song? If you didn’t listen to the song, go listen to it. Really. It is completely and totally relevant to the point of this post.
So: Did you get the point of the song? Did you, really? If you didn’t, you won’t understand why Kavanaugh will be confirmed despite the fact that he sexually assaulted at least three women, was a drunk and a cad towards many other people, and lacks the fundamental respect for rule of law that we expect for our sitting judges.
And that point was: Basically: If you are a politician today, you are a prostitute.
This is especially true of Senators, who are required to raise millions of dollars from their johns in order to become and remain Senators. If they don’t obey their johns, their johns will find another prostitute willing to pleasure them in the way they demand. And these johns want Kavanaugh, because Kavanaugh has promised to overturn multiple Supreme Court rulings that they find distasteful because they give the little people more rights than the johns want the little people to have.
And that’s that. Now, granted, Nothing is ever 100% guaranteed. Perhaps some of those prostitutes will decide that they’re tired of prostitution, and vote against their johns’ demands. But still, I say there’s a 90% chance that Kavanaugh will be confirmed within the next five weeks…
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