NOT Cassandric!

It has been hot as blazes here lately – a week of 90s and heat index 100+. So both cats are now sleeping in the bedroom with the AC, which means I have not been sleeping well at all, since Franklin is usually on my half. Thus I took a nap earlier today, and now am pretty awake. Since it has been a really bad week for the Good Guys, I thought I'd put a post here.

Plus, summer Sox/Yankees are on the tv, so seems apt. 
How a bad week you ask?

[Wow, seriously, I can't indent?!? Poor paragraph editing options. Otherwise this would structurally be better. But I know, it's free, blah blah]

• The SCOTUS travel ban and Kennedy retiring (we now know his political lean)
• The bullshit Janus decision
• Marching in the streets is underappreciated

 Granted my week was pretty swell. We're doing a job search, and HR is still coordinating visits. I was really productive in terms of writing lectures (hello, Ambioris) and even reading. See above. But the Union thing is really suck.

Sorry I didn't clip the credit, but tbc: not mine!

I did a bad job labeling the "receipt," but I would agree that this only ends with marching in the streets. And not the torch-lit night-time marching either.

Mostly though, something has been bugging me, and a public threshing out would be good.

But a larger thing has been percolating in my head, and here I can at least list the theory: Trump has the RNC emails. Given to him, obviously.
Granted, those could only have come from "someone" who had authorized and state-supported extensive hacking into Western political organizations.

(You seriously think only the DNC emails were hacked? You also probably think that back-channels into this White House don't exist. If you also think that Dear Leader Trump is great and MAGA!! – please leave this blog.)

I've seen marginally thoughtful people struggling to understand why and how the Republican Party has capitulated so thoroughly to Trump. And I would point at them and laugh. (Thoughtful people know why – they read Kruse or Schickler or Sugrue; there are others on my list, but I have only read through these so far.)

Because THIS is what the Republican Party has been working toward since the 1910s.

Yes I know the problems of this picture, thus her mother here is clearly shown being searched.

Why the leadership of the GOP has gone so quickly, so willingly and so FAR down the rabbit hole of authoritarianism and fascism without so much as a "Meep" to the effects this could, perhaps have on their political party is interesting though, just the same.

So: Putin gave Trump the RNC emails to ensure the party's docility. 

And if Trump did have the RNC emails, and the coordinated propaganda and character sliming, and the Gorsuch conspiracies, and the financial crimes (looking at you, NRA and Cambridge Anal), that would explain the deafening silence. You know, if you needed an additional reason beyond the racism and ethnic cleansing.

This champion's name is roslyn la liberte it seems. She can have capital letters when she reca..... well, or not. 

Richard Nixon in a dress

Apparently the Great Alaska Grifter was in town yesterday, and because people are f***ing retarded and seem to care, she got followed around. Thankfully, she fled shortly after for the north, where apparently this interview took place.

I was obviously struck by the "America is for Americans" line, since I have heard that a thousand times in my dissertation research. And I think this perfectly proves what her appeal, her audience, and her own ideology all point toward. As Raymond Pearl pointed out in a 1927 article skewering racial nativists who were twisting scientific information to serve their purposes, this is all intentional. They nativists, he wrote, really mean that we have to keep out people that "I don't like because they're not like me." And this is entirely the case here.

This woman is famous for one reason, and one reason only: she stokes the fears and resentments of white people. She legitimizes their grievances against those people who are "not American" - meaning not white, Christianist morons. Her popularity in this country is embarrassing.

Spotted: Insanity on the loose

On my way home from my commute today, in lovely Norton at about 5pm, spotted some TEABAGGERS!! (No, not the fun kind) Having heard so much of this new species I observed them intently for the 4-minute stop-light cycle.
Curious bunch. All seven of them (well, it was Norton). One carried a sign that said "Home Ownership Works if You Do" which was so obvious I didn't quite understand what it was supposed to mean. Um. . . Yeah. I thought about it for like ten minutes, and now still, arrived at home, I still don't quite get it.
Another had a sign that said "Born Free, Taxed to Death." Which struck me as intensely interesting, b/c it was so patently false it suggested that the individual bearing it was completely fucking retarded. Taxed to death in the United States??? (See Robert Reich's smart take-down here on that bullshit nonsense). Has this "moran" ever heard of like Sweden? Isn't that what all these conservative fuckwads always say is SO WRONG with Europe? That it taxes too much, is socialist, etc., etc.? I don't particularly like paying taxes either (just sent my MA and RI ones off today), but I do like all the shit (most of it anyway) it provides me with. Roads, schools, physical security from whack-jobs. But these teabaggers' idiotic protests are not a protest against taxes, "guv'mint" spending or anything. These are all, I think at least, dogwhistles for the horrifying fact that a black man is president, and Democrats are in power in Congress. I'd have a lot more respect for them if they were at least honest. Or original. Or capable of reasonable thought.
Oh, one sign was pretty original: The Debt Star, with a giant picture of the Death Star. Kudos to you. Until I realized that there was nothing original about it.
Nutjob. I am of course leaving out the fact that they also obviously have no sense of the historical context of the original Tea Party here in good ol'Beantown (and I'm sure the Irony escapes them that these conservative dumbfucks are stealing an idea from "Taxachusetts" and the "Gay State" that they love to deride us as...) b/c that is also totally self-evident for anyone with an historical IQ above 45.
Anyway. Totally exhausting semester, but it is winding down. Graduation is now less than a month away. I'm excited.