Hey, everyone. Notice I didn’t just say “Who shot Donnie Drumpf?” That’s because Donnie wasn’t in fact shot. He was shot AT, for sure, and struck by shattered glass from a teleprompter that one of the stray bullets aimed in his general direction hit. That broken glass apparently nicked his right ear, and — luckily for him — that’s the only injury he sustained.
Meanwhile, the shooter’s identity had to be confirmed by DNA evidence, since the Secret Service took him down immediately (and made quite a mess of his head, so I’ve heard.) We now know who he is, though his motives are still unknown. And no, he was most certainly NO liberal, much less a Democrat. He was a registered Republican, and that’s only the beginning. He was also an aspiring sharpshooter who was anything but sharp at shooting.
Here’s Adam Mockler with some revealing details about his life, as recalled by his former high-school classmates:
Imagine that! The guy who missed Donnie was a lousy shot, so much so that his high school rifle team rejected him. Seems that he hadn’t improved significantly at shooting since then, either.
As for the shooter’s motives, those remain unknown at this time. Let’s hope someone gets to the bottom of that.
PS: If you think Donnie deserves ANY sympathy for his narrow escape, please put that thought firmly out of mind. Here’s a leaked video of him on the phone with Bobby Kennedy Jr., the Kennedy scion turned anti-vax lunatic (and third-party spoiler candidate), immediately after the shooting. Does this sound like a man worth even a drop of empathy in the moment, much less a sympathy vote?
Nope, nothing in there but the usual chronic, pathological, terminal narcissism. Par for the course of someone whose first act, upon nearly being killed, was to literally grandstand over the heads of his own protective detail and urge his delusional followers to “fight, fight, FIGHT!”
Not the faintest expression of concern for the people who were hurt and killed at his rally. Nope, he didn’t call any of the victims’ families to express concern over their lost and suffering loved ones. He called a fucking quack with an extensive history of vile behavior. Not the faintest concern for anyone but himself, as usual.
If there is any takeaway from this whole episode, it’s this: Donnie doesn’t give a shit about the widow of a man who took a bullet meant for him. He doesn’t care about the health of anyone’s children, because he doesn’t know shit about viruses or vaccines. But he’s happy to take whatever aid he can from whatever craven sycophant is willing to glom onto his diaper-clad ass.
Liberté, égalité, fraternité…et la victoire de l’unité? Mais oui! Le voici…
Pardonnez mon anglais, but DAMN. That’s some real beauté right there!
I was biting my nails on the first round, when it looked like Nazism was going to be making a comeback in France after nearly 80 years of freedom. Marine Le Pen, for those unaware, is the nepo baby of a man who had no problem associating with the old (and defeated) Nazis, after all. She’s a neo-Nazi in all but name, because these nouveaux fascistes are cowardly little shits who haven’t got the guts to wear their swastikas out in the open and take their fessées for it. She really has been making an effort to get in under the radar and turn France into something no decent person would even recognize. She may not be her party’s official head, but she is its driving force. So her party’s strong showing on the first ballot was a disturbing wake-up call.
Fortunately, the French have ears like lynxes for that sort of thing. This is the country that guillotined its last king, after all. And it is still the country that most frequently grinds to a halt when mass social discontent takes hold.
So what did the French left do to stop the next Nazi takeover of their land? What leftists everywhere should do but too often don’t — namely, put aside their partisan ideological quibbles and band together as a broad front to defeat fascism. (This is, incidentally, the very thing the German left also neglected to do in the 1930s. Anyone could have foreseen how THAT would end, but everyone was just running around with eyes shut and fingers in ears. And Germans have been paying for it, literally as well as figuratively, ever since.)
You can’t imagine how much I wish this broad-front left unity would happen in more countries, including my home and native land. We, too, are facing a fascist backlash right now. We’ve got pundits proclaiming a Toronto by-election (in a wealthy riding, which is the detail they keep glossing over) to be “a referendum on the Trudeau Liberals”, which in fact it is not. And the drums are now beating for a new election call, one in which a weaselly little con man who has been seen shaking hands with actual neo-Nazis would win.
I’m sick of our media’s blatant right-wing sympathies, and also of holding my nose and voting for the increasingly disappointing Liberals just because the NDP has never won my riding. I would really like to see a new progressive coalition kick this whole mess to the curb before a modern Hitler does to Canada what the OG monster did to my ancestral Germany, with the media seal-clapping its approval all the way.
Anyhow, blah blah blah: Catastrophe averted, at least in France. We can all breathe again. Tomorrow, we need to buckle down and learn from the French example. It would behoove us to be a bit less British, and a lot more French.
Oh, and maestro? A little musique, s’il vous plaît.
You think you’ve heard everything, and then something comes and smacks you upside the head with the fact that you ain’t heard NOTHIN’ yet. Sam and Emma have an incredible clip for us:
“We shall not have security as long as we shall not end the occupation…and we shall not have democracy as long as we shall not end the occupation.”
Translation: No justice, no peace in the Middle East.
What Israel’s doing to Palestine is a gross injustice that strips away all entitlement for them to call themselves “the only democracy in the Middle East” (which was always a bald-face lie anyway) and their armed forces, “the most moral army in the world” (which they never were and should never have harbored the illusion of being — just ask the survivors of the USS Liberty attack if you don’t believe me!)
Cue the outraged right-wing media shitgibbons and hasbaratchiks of AIPAC, howling for Ami Ayalon’s blood. Clearly the man is in the pay of Hamas.
Oh wait, he’s NOT? He’s the former head of the dreaded Shin Bet, Israel’s equivalent of the FBI? He used to work for Bibi Netanyahu himself? He’s the guy who understands, possibly better than anyone in the whole country, what a security risk it is for them to go on oppressing and trying to wipe out Palestinians?
Well. THAT’s embarrassing.
But not nearly as embarrassing as it’s going to be if Bibi keeps trying to pretend that the proposed ceasefire was his idea, when anyone with a working eye can see that it’s not. Or if he goes on trying to pretend that he actually wants peace, when what he really wants is to turn Gaza from the world’s largest open-air concentration camp to the world’s priciest beachfront real estate.
Al Jazeera has some good analysis and backgrounder on today’s failed coup attempt in Bolivia. Apparently a renegade general with a bad reputation even within the armed forces has tried and failed to seize power over the (admittedly weak) democratically elected government of Luis Arce. And that general, in turn, has ties to the Santa Cruz far right, who have repeatedly tried (and failed) to oust Evo Morales in the past. Seems that oligarchs don’t give up as long as there’s money to be made, and money to be paid (in this case, to the corrupto who was only too happy to be bought, seeing as he didn’t get what he wanted from the presidente.)
Now, are these the same religious fascists who made that creepy little finger-cross sign when they swore in their fake government the last time they lashed out against Evo? Or are they some new cult? Is Elon Musk behind this coup too, or is it another home-grown bum that we’ve probably seen here before? And are the CIA and/or Mossad also somehow involved?
Questions, questions. I’ll be ferreting around for answers. Stay tuned…
Is Czar Vladimir the Terrible getting desperate for warm bodies to boost his failing, fascist-imperialist war on Ukraine? It would appear so. He’s actively trying to recruit some of the worst people in the US:
Yeah. He tried to bring in Scott Ritter. SCOTT FUCKING RITTER, the convicted sex offender, who tried to solicit sex from what he thought was an under-age girl. Never mind that the real thing would never talk to a guy his age (source: was once a teenage girl myself, and any guy outside of high school was ancient to us). Nope, he really thought he was going to score a 15-year-old! And that it totally wasn’t a police decoy chatting him up.
But just in case you thought this was an isolated incident, or that Russia was only trying to capture a former US agent to pump him for whatever info they thought they could get this late in the game, or score propaganda points by painting themselves as the world’s one true bastion of freedom, or whatever cockamamie shit Pooty-poot thinks will fly…remember these fuckleheads from my home and native land?
The Feenstra family, led by Arend and Anneesa, relocated to the country seeking refuge under its stringent anti-LGBTQ laws, but the reality of life in Russia has proven to be a stark disappointment.
The family’s disillusionment began when their bank accounts were suddenly frozen upon their arrival, the funds from the sale of their Canadian farm deemed “suspicious” by the Russian banking system. This move left them stranded without resources in a nation where they found themselves linguistically isolated, unable to speak Russian or find English-speaking assistance. Anneesa Feenstra’s subsequent outburst in a YouTube video expressed her exasperation: “I’m ready to jump on a plane and get out of here. We’ve hit the first snag where you have to engage logic in this country, and it’s very, very frustrating.”
Despite the initial setback and the stark cultural and language barriers, the family has since stated that their funds have been unfrozen and they intend to remain in Russia “for the long haul.” Arend Feenstra had earlier expressed in a press conference the motivations behind their move, citing “a lot of left-wing ideology, LGBTQ, trans, just a lot of things that we don’t agree with they teach there now” as the impetus for seeking a new life in a country he believed would protect his family from such influences.
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
I figured something was up when Russia was promising “freedom villages” (or some such BS) to far-right foreigners looking to escape the oppressive LGBT-friendly policies of the west. Now I know: They’re actively looking for real, live GROOMERS. The kind who are so hellbent on having things their own way that real, live kids — either their own, or those of the “western dissidents” they’re trying to woo — will ultimately suffer for it.
I’m really hoping the Mad Czar meets a Ceausescu-style demise, but I’m not holding my breath.
…or, it’s a day ending in -day, and the most gormless buffoons in the US of Amnesia are just at it again, as usual:
Yeah, that’s right. Not even 24 hours after the container ship Dali hit the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, MD, a bunch of quacking morons decided to make wank-bank off it by insisting it was a terrorist conspiracy somehow caused by “DEI”. When, in fact, it was most likely due to mechanical and/or electrical failure on board the vessel, as you can clearly see here:
When you see the lights go dark on the ship, that right there is a terrible sign. The loss of electrical power means not only problems with visibility in the dead of night, but also that the ship lost power to its forward thrusters, which would have helped to keep it centered and on course in its channel, i.e. not hit the bridge. The black smoke from the funnel is also a bad sign; it speaks of engine failure, possibly even a fire on board.
Conspicuously absent, however, are any signs of a bomb going off. Or anything else that smacks of terrorism.
What DID happen, however, was a mayday call which resulted in police diverting traffic away from the bridge, to minimize the number of cars that might fall into the water, and consequently, the number of lives lost. Not the sort of thing you’d expect in a terrorist incident, where the objective is to cause as much harm — and fear — as possible. And certainly nothing to do with any kind of “DEI” hiring practices, which the right is currently squawking its collective guts out over…at least until the next shiny bit of nonsense comes along.
But then again, I’d never expect any of those bozos to traffic in anything remotely resembling an inconvenient fact.
Hey y’all, you might want to start buying stock in Orville Redenbacher again. Why? Oh, no particular reason…
…okay, maybe ONE good reason:
Yeah, that’s right, bitchez. This is happening. Not just two, but THREE of the worst entities in right-wing “media” are gonna be duking it out to see who gets to be king of the neofascist dunghill.
At the apex of this Bermuda Triangle of fashy awfulness, we have a guy named Jeremy Hambly, who runs a YouTube channel called The Quartering, where he drones on ad nauseam about videogames, women who don’t even know he exists, and other assorted hateful shit, when he’s not busy drunkenly petitioning Elon Musk over Freeze Peach, and running in terror of an actual journalist doing actual journalism. (That would be Lance, above, who has him dead to rights for suggesting on his now-deleted tech tip channel that anyone with child sex-abuse materials on their computer should scrub them from their hard drives before taking that machine to the shop, because the techies can and will look.)
Oh, and also, Jeremy is on record for drunkenly pissing in his basement when he lost a round and his wife was out getting pizza without him. Yes, really.
You may want to listen to that with headphones on to get the full tinkle.
Anyhow, this silly jizz-sock from the moldy side of YouTube is going up against a Malaysian fascist Twitter reply guy who recently found out that the whole world collectively hates his guts, and even the most ardent death-penalty opponents would most likely celebrate if the notoriously repressive government of Malaysia actually executed him for…some minor offence or other. Personally, I was only sad to find out that they hadn’t, YET. (Maybe they will? We can always hope.)
And also, Jeremy’s mad at Ezra Levant’s crapaganda outlet, because reasons.
So, while we wait for the fallout to finish falling out, help yourself to some popcorn. And savor that melted butter on your fingers, because it won’t be half as delicious as the irony.
Unless you’ve been living under a lichen-covered rock in the woods, you’ve probably heard by now of Nex Benedict, the indigenous transgender high-schooler in Owasso, Oklahoma, who died of a brain injury on February 8 of this year, shortly after being beaten up in a high school bathroom by three girls. Nex, who used he/him and they/their pronouns, shouldn’t have had to go in there at all, since that bathroom didn’t correspond to his actual gender. But since he was designated as female at birth, by Oklahoma law he wasn’t allowed to use any other facilities but the girls’ room.
And apparently, the school’s meanest girls took violent exception to that.
Even though the school district supposedly had an anti-bullying policy, Nex had been bullied ever since he came out as trans. And his tormentors always got away with it, because Oklahoma state law was on their side, and the legal situation is getting worse by the day. Oklahoma is the state with the largest number of anti-LGBT+ bills currently tabled. It’s not hard to imagine how a situation like that might embolden a bully, or a clique of them.
So, on February 7, three bitches jumped Nex in the bathroom. A scuffle ensued. Nex’s head hit the floor at some point during the assault, and he blacked out. Despite his obvious injuries, the school did not call an ambulance for Nex; his mother had to drive him to hospital herself. He was also able to give a statement to the police in the hours following the incident, but the head injury he sustained in the bathroom proved fatal the following day.
Nex Benedict was just 16.
Nex’s death has spawned protests, but so far, no criminal charges have been laid. The killers are still at large, apparently still in school, and still protected by the hateful environment the school district has deemed to be acceptable. The local police, too, don’t seem to think the matter is worth arresting anyone over. Nobody, it seems, is willing to hold anyone accountable for the death of Nex Benedict.
Nex might still be alive if LGBT+ acceptance had been an actual thing in Oklafuckinghoma, where some of the world’s most repugnant Republicans hold sway, and where failed Brooklyn realtor and highly successful fascist hatemonger Chaya Raichik, a.k.a. “Libs of TikTok”, was hired by the state not so long ago as some kind of advisor to their public library system.
Chaya Raichik is a professional stochastic terrorist, whose only real talent in life is to stir up murderous hate against anyone whom she deems to be a “groomer” of children, particularly if they’re teaching school or in any public setting where children might also be present. She lives for attention, and likes to turn a blast of raw sewage on anyone who is politically and socially progressive, or who dares to be honest and vulnerable about their LGBT+ life. Her shit-disturbing has even led to bomb threats at children’s hospitals. She’s uniquely unqualified to advise anyone on anything, let alone a state’s public libraries on what media its children should be allowed to peruse. Yet there she is, drawing a fat paycheque for doing nothing except what she’s been doing all along…i.e., stirring up hate and generally poisoning the atmosphere every time she farts out a tweet.
Well, one local man has had enough of her and the fascistic flunkies who hired her. He has taken a stand, and his confrontation with the elected officials (and by extension, their unelected “advisor”) is a thing of beauty to behold:
Ahhh. Isn’t that satisfying?
I don’t yet know what difference it’s going to make in the grand scheme of things, or to the Nex case in particular, but let’s hope that Sean’s speech here is the beginning of the end for anti-queer fascism in Oklahoma.
So. I guess you must have heard of a certain “journalist” from the US of Amnesia, who recently decided to show all his countrymen how their “leftist” (really, just very lukewarmly liberal) values have ensured the “fall of Western Civilization”, whatever THAT may be. And that to illustrate his point, he went all the way to Russia, to fawn over Pooty-Poot, lick his boots to a high shine, and just generally humiliate himself by demonstrating how little he knows about the world and how it works.
Anyhow, Russian YouTubers have been having a lot of fun at said “journalist’s” expense, and here’s one of them, doing just that:
Right off the bat, I can see (with my admittedly limited ability to read Russian) that the shopping mall our Bowtie Boy visits is called “Gagarin’s”. Yuri Gagarin was a Soviet-era cosmonaut, the first person ever to orbit the Earth, and also a very committed communist. It’s therefore highly ironic that his name (and a stylized logo glorifying his pioneering space flight) are being used to adorn an oligarch-owned castle of capitalism.
So, Floppy Forelock goes through this goofy-ass mall on his trip to the supermarket, oohing and ahhing over the escalators like he’s never been on one. Maybe he really hasn’t? We learn that he has no idea that coin-lock shopping carts are a thing. (They are, just about everywhere there are supermarkets. Here in Canada, they cost a loonie to unlock, which translates to roughly the ten rubles their Russian cousins take. I often find them loonieless and unlocked, however, and like to leave them that way for the next customer whenever I do.)
And thanks to our narrator, we also learn something Tucky’s not telling us: it isn’t even Russian-owned. It’s a French chain, Auchan (russified, here, to “Ashan”), which may explain why they have all that good-smelling bread that Tuckyducks jizzes his pants over while backhandedly dissing the “low-carb lifestyle”. Yes, Russia has bread, and not just the French kind. It’s a big friggin’ country, and rich in farmland, although the locals seem to be not quite as good at working it as their neighbors in Ukraine, the famous “breadbasket of Europe”. (Which may explain why they want to annex all that sweet, sweet, well-cultivated Ukrainian soil.)
(And all that lovely Crimean wine, too.)
If the insufferable silver-spoon scion really wonders why his ten-ruble shopping cart full of Russian groceries cost so little, it’s because he picked up much of it in the No Name section of the store. Which, apparently, still has its prices (and probably also its quality) stuck in the same dull end of the Soviet era that Tucky took the trouble to slam at the outset. The one thing you can say about the Auchan chain and its Russian subsidiary is hey, at least they haven’t discovered the Galen Weston trick of charging extortionate prices for store-brand goods, and then having the Orwellian audacity to pass it off as a bargain!
So, how DID all those foreign brands supposedly pulling out of Russia somehow still end up just as much for sale in Russia as ever? Well, for that, we can blame good ol’ globalized capitalism. Turns out, there are plenty of foreign companies who will still do business with Russia. And neighboring lands, such as the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, who have trade agreements with Russia still, are more than happy to act as middlemen and bring in whatever is wanted.
And the few western brands that did actually pull out of Russia? Well, Russian oligarchs, in their infinite ingenuity, just bought up their former assets, rebranded them to look vaguely familiar, and sold lesser-quality shit out of them, pretending it was just as good as what was being replaced, AND more “patriotic”, to boot. Which was good for more than a few cynical sneers on the part of the peasants — who, as in the days of the Czars, weren’t really fooled, but at least knew how to pretend to be, in order to save their necks from the imperial boot.
Fucker doesn’t seem to understand how basic pricing works, and how the cost of goods is scaled to what the average Russian can actually afford. In that, he’s just like all the capitalists over here (and remember, he comes from the same damn class as all of them) — he hasn’t got a clue what the average North American worker makes. Or how hard it is for them to make ends meet when they have bosses ripping them off on the one hand, stealing wages to pay for those record-high profits and CEO bonuses, and landlords ripping them off on the other, forcing them to pay the mortgages that said landlords can’t pay off themselves with good honest work. AND, on top of it all, we also have our grocery corporations, who each own pretty much their entire supply chain (hence, those store-brand products), and then have the audacity to claim pandemic-related “supply chain issues” are the reason their “low, low prices” are suddenly all jacked through the roof, and why their “price freezes” are just a dirty PR stunt.
I think Fucker knows damn well what’s up, and just isn’t saying because he’s not being paid to say that. It’s not as if he lacks for education, and it’s certainly not as if he lacks for internet access, newswires, or a big fat roster of experts in every field who could tell him whatever he and his audience might want to know. He’s very well-connected for such a stupid little man (and yes, I cackled when I saw Pooty-poot clown on him for failing to make it into the CIA, on account of his intellect being too low even for that legendarily dim-witted gang of spooks). Even he is not so dense as to be unaware of what’s really going to butter all that great-smelling bread he bought at Auchan/Ashan, or wherever he sends his servants to shop for him when he’s not performing regular suburban guyhood for the cameras.
Tucker Fucking Carlson is being paid to spread racism and fascism in the name of capitalism. That’s why he brings up “filth” (read: IMMIGRANTS AND REFUGEES) in his little soliloquy in that supermarket. He’s being paid to blame immigrants from Latin America, and refugees from Syria and Palestine (but he won’t mention Ukraine, because they’re white) for “taking” all the jobs that capitalism isn’t giving his skinfolk (let’s ignore the fact that the immigrants and refugees are taking the ones that nobody else wants) or bringing in exotic diseases (as though affluent white global travelers couldn’t spread COVID as fast as the poorest non-whites just looking for a home that won’t get bombed out from over top of them.) He’s a capitalist scion himself, being paid by richer capitalists to keep his peasant viewers in the dark about what’s really going on while they continue to rob us all quite literally blind.
And that’s why I’m joining the Russians in their good belly-laugh at his expense. It might not put the best-quality food on the collective table, but it should take some of the bitterness out of it, for at least a little while.
“As individuals I have no doubt that we are the most intelligent beings on this planet. All living things strive to influence their environment to satisfy their needs, but all other species are directed by relatively limited and unvarying sets of instinctive behavioral patterns. Our ability to choose and change has given us remarkable survival powers. But it has also increased the risk that we will trigger changes we don’t fully understand. We are still missing the big picture, and while we are certainly intelligent, we are not yet globally wise. The human race is not yet house-broken, or should we say planet-broken? We are becoming aware that in our race for comfort, security, and affluence we have fouled our own nest.”
Fear doesn't travel well; just as it can warp judgment, its absence can diminish memory's truth. What terrifies one generation is likely to bring only a puzzled smile to the next.
--Arthur Miller, "Why I Wrote 'The Crucible'", The New Yorker, October 21, 1996
All opinions here are the brain-wrackings of Sabina C. Becker, unless otherwise credited. If you cite them, please give credit where due.
