Category Archives: muttering to myself

Tired and disgusted

Some days, today for example, I am too tired and disgusted to write anything of use to anyone, myself included.   These days are part of every life, days when the accumulated weight of psychopathic demands (corporations have feelings too, and millions to pay lobbyists to protect their tender feelings) is just too fucking heavy to shrug off.

On such days, just a few taps, to keep the fingers limber and your mind in the game.  When the library closes in a few minutes I go back to my apartment, now an internet dead zone, on Verizon as it was on T-Mobile, and try not to think of the next step I will have to take to get the service we are paying for.  After some sleep, and the rehab exercises for my replaced knee, I’ll get back on the fucking horse.

“Hello, FCC?  This is Eliot, yes, complaint number blah blah blah”

Thank God there is always some kind of robot to listen.

Today on FOX (“fair and balanced” TM)

You’ve got to hand it to these Nazi motherfuckers, they know how to hammer on the same infuriating lies over and over and over. They’re masters of projection and persuasive reframing for their faithful flock, unless you spend a few minutes doing research of any kind. Three quarters of a billion dollars to settle a defamation suit is not going to cause Murdoch to take his beady eye off the bigger picture: serving up scandalous poison to keep their angry demographic enraged, his political influence hissing full blast and his ad coffers full.

Earlier today I watched a short FOX clip of the woman who took “RINO” Liz Cheney’s seat in Congress. What she said was directly counterfactual, and triggered this libtard, because it was such a brazen pile of shit, but I’ve since forgotten the details of her ridiculous claims (may have been that a candidate’s freedom of speech is unregulatable and threats are protected as merely “aspirational”– though that talking point may have been from Chrump’s latest legal genius). She pointed out that she’s a lawyer and that she knows the law and therefore she’s right. The interviewer was impressed. Convincing stuff.

I know from battling with narcissists, those who can never be wrong no matter what and will resort to the violence needed to “win” a conflict, that the actual story, what really took place, is meaningless. The only thing is to get the death blow in, the emotionally resonant, irrefutable pre-emptive heart rending narrative that wins the fight forever. Once they’ve convinced their marks, nothing you can say will change anyone’s heart or mind.

It’s hard to get one’s brain around that, but I have found it is always the case. Logic, reason, common sense, calmness, patience, gentle persuasion — all the useless tools of helpless nice guy losers in a war where the other tribe fights to the death, on pain of humiliation. Desperate narcissists, grimly determined, are capable of any violence necessary for victory, if all else fails.

That said, here’s Lyin’ Ted Cruz from an interview with a supremely supportive Maria Bartoromo, who emits an enthusiastic “wow!” here and there throughout Ted’s talk. Here is some of what Lyin’ Ted told FOX/MAGA nation Sunday morning:

The Hunter Biden special prosecutor who Merrick Garland appointed, after MAGA demanded it, is a puppet installed by Democrats to cover up for the Bidens. After a Chrump-appointed judge, egged on by briefs from MAGA lawmakers and MAGA think tank geniuses, blew up the deal Hunter Biden made with David Weiss, who has been investigating him for five years — Garland corruptly appointed a Biden puppet engaged in a coverup. David Weiss, Lyin’ Ted insists, has been covering up for Biden for five years, since Chrump appointed him US attorney and AG Barr assigned him to the Hunter Biden caper. The proof is that two Democratic senators from Delaware somehow corruptly made sure David Weiss got the job, according to Lyin’ Ted. Apparently Barr didn’t appoint him, Chrump had nothing to do with it, five years ago these two Democrat [sic] cronies of Joe Biden managed to have this puppet appointed to investigate and cover up for the criminal Biden and his son.

Lyin’ Ted praised the great job Jim Jordan and James Comer have done in uncovering irrefutable proof of Biden’s crimes. Here he goes:

We need to pause and look at what the House has uncovered. James Comer has released bank records that show that the Biden Family and their associates have received over 20 million dollars from Russia, Ukraine and Kazahkstan while Joe Biden was vice president. (“wow!”) Lots of Democrats in defending Biden, they keep using reference to ‘influence peddling’ or access, that’s not what these allegations are . . . the allegations are that Hunter was selling official favors from daddy while he was Vice President of the United States. If you look at the FD-1023 the allegation there is the oligarch who owned Burisma spent ten million dollars, five million to Joe Biden, five million to Hunter Biden in exchange for Joe Biden getting to fire the prosecutor who was prosecuting that corrupt oligarch. We know the second part of the quid pro quo happened, Biden has admitted that he got that prosecutor fired.

After these horrific “revelations” Maria breathlessly asked Lyin’ Ted if he supported an Impeachment Inquiry. “Absolutely, yes.” Three in fact:

Alejandro Mayorkas, for an “unprecedented humanitarian crisis at our southern border” (They don’t call this whining twat Lyin’ Ted for nothin’!)

Merrick Garland “for being brazenly lawless, committing perjury and obstruction of justice.”

Joe Biden for bribery. Bribery is specifically enumerated in the Constitution as a grounds for impeachment, the scholarly Lyin’ Ted points out. There was a quid pro quo, he concludes. “We know the quo, Biden bragged that he held hostage over one billion dollars in loan guarantees to Ukraine to fire the prosecutor investigating the oligarch who owned Burisma.”

source for Lyin’ Ted quotes

No worries for Lyin’ Ted or FOX about being sued by the weak Democrats for defamation, the damning proof of Biden’s crimes, Merrick Garland’s crimes, Mayorkas’s crimes speak for themselves! Now, back to the megachurch with y’all, ya bunch of ignorant assholes.

Nazis demand the right to free speech

And under our constitution they have every right to promulgate their worldview. The Jews, using the Blacks, Muslims, Illegals, Aliens, Humanists, Cucks, Dupes, Idiots, Libtards, Feminazis, College Students, etc. are engaged in a titanic struggle for world dominion, Nazis have every right to insist.

Under our laws they may say this shit in speeches, publish it, do whatever they want, short of shouting it as they are actually lynching a Jew, or directly inciting a violent attack. They can even pass laws to promote this view, if they have supermajorities in power. There is no law against being a lying, vicious, racist, hateful piece of shit and Americans have every right to spew their opinions in public or private, no matter how hateful and demonstrably false the basis for those opinions may be.

It’s as if the Founders knew that opinions are like assholes, and just because someone never washes his, he retains the same right to vent his heartfelt feelings as any other asshole.

My hat is off to Jack Smith for conceding this in his DC indictment of Chrumpie and charging nothing implicating the inviolable freedom to be a lying sack of shit, eliminating the defense his lackeys are still shouting 24/7 over every available medium of mass influence. In the court of public opinion, facts take a back seat to emotion, particularly rage. Courts of law, for all their flaws, prohibit and can punish lying under oath and make their rulings based on the evidence and defense presented (well, not all courts, Aileen Cannon’s is a bit different.)

An interesting question arises when an incendiary lie is promulgated by a $50,000,000 advertising campaign, and spouted over and over, uncontradicted, in social media and mass media silos, as tens of millions of dollars are raised from those convinced that the lie is true, and the lie inflames a whipped up crowd to riot and disrupt the functioning of our democratic government.

None of this shit seems that complicated. One party, the MAGA party (the endgame of supremely entitled fascist billionaires like Charles Koch and the patrons of Ginni and Clarence “Black Klansman” Thomas) has the full-throated support of every member of every American hate group, and millions more besides. They howl about how they are persecuted, White Christians with no education are the most persecuted group in American history, and the “liberal media” routinely apologizes by treating their grievances as semi-legitimate. If anything, ignorant white pseudo-Christians are victims of the Chrumps of this world, they are being mind-raped by the powerful people who point to Jewish elites (Hollywood, Soros, Globalists, City Dwellers), Blacks, Mexicans, Ecuadorians, Venezuelans, Muslims, Cannibal Pedophiles, etc. as the ones buggering them out of their birthright.

Makes me want to holler. Watching fucking Chrump’s current lackeys on TV spouting baseless “defenses” and more informed former prosecutors seeming to agree that, even though the defense is advancing no legitimate defenses to the federal crimes Chrumpie is charged with, that the DOJ faces an uphill battle proving “intent”.

Like maybe it was purely chance, and possibly on shaky legal advice, that Chrumpie twisted arms, launched dozens of baseless lawsuits, repeatedly lied about the election results, orchestrated a plan to have fake, sworn electors in every state he lost, participated in a scheme to have his VP count the false electoral votes to keep him in the White House, lied in an official statement on the night of January fifth that Pence would do so, repeated countless, detailed, incendiary lies at a pre-riot rally in front of the White House, where he’d built the impregnable wall Mexico probably paid for, whipped up an angry, armed crowd and sent them to the Capitol to stiffen the spines of “weak” (law abiding) Republicans in Congress, watching the riot on tv and tweeting another provocation to an angry crowd that had erected a gallows and was already chanting “Hang Mike Pence!”

All pure opinion and nothing but First Amendment protected free speech! says MAGA world. Biden just irrationally hates Trump and wants to steal another election from him! And Biden is as insanely angry as these ungrateful, vicious black women who hate all white people FOR NO REASON (etc.) Might as well argue with an angry two year-old or a pile of shit as try to engage with any of this in an attempt at logical persuasion. Now we just have to try to tune out the noise and let the courts sort this out based on the evidence presented.

Does it suck that Nazis enjoy virtually unlimited free speech? Kind of, but that’s the price we pay for our own freedom of speech. Fuck those hateful putos.

It’s all perfectly normal, folks

An openly corrupt former president (“how can he be corrupt, he did it all openly and honestly?”) moves to have the judge overseeing his federal trial in D.C. removed. What are his grounds? Plenty. She’s a woman of color, they all hate Trump, the Black ones are particularly nasty. She’s a woman, and you know how disgusting they are and how many irrationally hate Trump. She was appointed by an illegitimate president who forced patriots to organize the Birther movement. Trump was a top Birther. Therefore, she’s prejudiced against the MAGA martyr. All of this, to a solid 30% of the country makes perfect sense. How can he get a fair trial from someone he didn’t appoint?

Meanwhile, Florida man DeathSantis removes a Black female state’s attorney (Florida’s only) who was elected with 66% of the vote. Presumably she was critical of the enraged little fascist puke. Perfectly normal for anyone with the power to crush an opponent to do so, no matter what the grounds. The new normal that the Koch network has been pushing for for decades.

Also in Florida, the judge appointed by Trump after he lost re-election, the one who was overruled by a conservative appeals court and found to have abused her discretion, and made fatal mistakes of law in her over-reach to help her boss, continues doing her inexperienced best to help her benefactor Trumpie. Serious prosecutors wait for another fatal abuse of discretion before raising a challenge about the conflict of interest and appearance of impropriety (abusing her discretion and violating the law to help the plaintiff in the legally incoherent Trump v US) Aileen Cannon has repeatedly shown. The conflict is between her sworn duty to uphold the law, and fairly apply legal rules to the proceeding, and her loyalty to the former president who demands special treatment. That this Federalist Society star is perhaps the most inexperienced judge on the federal bench, having done only four trials and making serious mistakes in at least one of them, has nothing to do with anything.

And all of this, you know, is as normal as a good old-fashioned American lynching.

Here is the great Vandana Shiva with a few words about our normal world, where it is fitting and proper for five individuals to have more wealth than 50% of humanity combined.

Living in the Age of Narcissism

What do you call a prosperous society where it is perfect, even praiseworthy, for a highly successful winner to relieve himself in a gold toilet bowl costing hundreds of thousands of dollars while, miles away, newborn babies, born to losers, die at “third world” rates because of poverty? Not a trick question. Say it with me, USA! USA!!!

If an individual prioritizes his own luxury and limitless appetite for acquisition over the lives of people he deems worth far less than him, you’d call that asshole a narcissist. It would be the most polite thing you could call him, actually. What do you call a society that prioritizes the values of a handful of these supremely entitled, socially venerated, insatiably covetous assholes over everything else? Exceptional. Unless we are living in the Age of Narcissism. A pretty good case can be made for calling the age we live in the Age of Narcissism.

It wearies me to make that case at the moment, a case so obvious and in-your-face that it hardly needs to be made. I will get at it in the future, on another day like this, when all I can see, and smell, are the evils done by these toxically virtuous pieces of shit. Some days, literally everything you see, hear and smell confirms this horrific fact: fucking narcissists rule, and they always have.

The woke mob goes after another beloved icon

Remember, serial drugger/rapist Bill Cosby got out of jail because a future Trump impeachment lawyer, Bruce Castor, gave him an immunity deal years earlier and some of what he said under this immunity deal was used against him at trial. MAGA gaga. Go eat some more Jello pudding, Bill.

Bill Cosby’s 2018 sexual-assault conviction was thrown out by Pennsylvania’s highest court on Wednesday, and Cosby was released from prison shortly after. The ruling was the product of a deal Cosby had made with a district attorney in 2005 in which the prosecutor promised Cosby he wouldn’t be charged in a case involving Andrea Constand, a former Temple University employee who accused Cosby of drugging and sexually assaulting her in 2004.

That prosecutor — Bruce Castor, then the Montgomery County district attorney — made headlines this year when he represented former President Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial.

Under the terms of his deal with Cosby, Castor asked the disgraced comedian to testify in a civil lawsuit filed by Constand in exchange for avoiding prosecution.

Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that Castor’s deal with Cosby should have prevented Cosby from being charged in the case, which ultimately landed him behind bars

source

Democracy oligarch style

Below are the numbers reauthorizing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Supreme Court margin that ended enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. Effectively restarting the clock on the long fight to end racist, partisan voting practices across our great democracy, for the advantage of entitled, seething anti-majoritarian oligarchs.

Shelby County v Holder was a strategically engineered case that sneakily challenged reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act by eliminating enforcement in historically racist jurisdictions, like Shelby County.

The carefully tailored lawsuit was brought by a secretive cabal of billionaire reactionaries, who secretly paid a lot of money to at least two of the justices in the 5-4 majority, to overturn the will of the people. And they won 5-4.

Check out these numbers again.

At least two of the justices in the five-four majority had glaring appearances of impropriety. The chief Justice’s wife had been paid millions as a headhunter finding talented reactionary lawyers to work for law forms, including the one representing the plaintiff in this case. The wife of Clarence Thomas, Ginni, a far-right activist lawyer with much more than a housewife’s power (on board of directors, Council for National Policy) and influence, was secretly paid a tidy sum by Leonard Leo of Federalist Society fame, by way of a non-profit that was also supporting the plaintiff in this democracy destroying case.

Can you say 5-4 suck it cucks? Sure you can.

USA! USA!!!

Pain meds and personality changes

I had my left knee replaced fifteen days ago in a procedure so traumatic, apparently, that the anesthesiologist administers a drug that induces amnesia to erase the entire process as though it never happened (except for waking up with a new knee and a lot of pain). They gave me oxycodone and tylenol for the pain.

Oxycodone (and the entire mass murdering, philanthropic Sackler family should all go to actual hell — editor’s note) works to significantly dampen much of the pain about 70% of the time. The other 30% of the time it just addles your brain, dredges up your lowest impulses while making you irritable and subject to tantrums; it literally turns you into Rush Limbaugh (who was famously, and criminally, addicted to it).

Two nights after my surgery, as the pain continued to burn full blast in my knee, after a full, maximum dose, I found myself angrily rattling some papers in front of an imaginary microphone improvising a fast-paced racist, misogynistic, homophobic tirade in a kind of growly pirate voice. Through my haze I could see that it was terrifying poor Sekhnet, my loving caretaker. Why anyone would become addicted to this drug is a mystery to me, unless you are a Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded genius with talent on loan from God Himself, I suppose.

I called the surgeon’s PA the next day and told her this. She laughed at the Limbaugh bit (I wasn’t laughing, I had a paper in my hand, about to start rattling) and prescribed an alternative opioid, dilaudid, generic name hydromorphone. I didn’t find it quite as effective against the pain, at least not at first, but eventually switched over to it. I was thankful to no longer feel like Rush Limbaugh, and found, to my surprise, that it was a relief feeling like the MyPillow Guy…

Easy Enough, no?

After being told to do 180 repetitions of each of two painful knee flexing exercises two days after surgery, and being given an uncomfortable position, involving a pyramid of pillows, to sleep in (impossible to even maintain after about 120 reps that day) I was close to turning into Rush Limbaugh from oxycodone. The narcotic did not dampen the extreme pain but made me so angry I was on the verge of becoming an irrational racist, misogynist, homophobe.

I eventually found the sense to drag myself into the other room where, sitting at the computer, I eventually found this, from the National Health Service in England. This information is contained nowhere in the pages the hospital and PT folks left me with before or after my knee replacement. Item number two allowed me to go to bed and get some sleep, which is the best and only medicine when you are overwhelmed, exhausted and in pain the drugs don’t fix.

How fucking hard would it have been for someone who treated me to impart this valuable info to me, folks?