Comic Relief in the Time of Trump. Hat Tip to Gabriel García Márquez.- UPDATE

UPDATE: Thank you, President Biden for ending forever War. I can take a deep breath now. We can have nice things now. We must clean house now. Remember this: -------------> ----------->

Published 12-26-17

READY FOR WAR? 

I am ready for and need some comic relief. Maybe you do too? So I posted the funny stuff first.

If you have reached peak rage too, just skip the editorial shyte below and stick with the laughs. I am getting so scared and angry that I am too distressed to read more than a few pages at a time.

The first video is just evil. I do not find the pelvic thrust convincing. But videos are like assholes; everybody has one.

US military leaders have sent an ominous warning to American troops to be prepared, saying the enemy is ‘watching you.’ General Robert Neller pointed to the near future possibility of Russia and the Pacific theatre being the next major areas of conflict and said a “big ass fight” was on the way, reports military.com.
Read more by Patrick Knox... 

When have we not been at war since Vietnam? War is why we cannot have CHIPS, speed controls on our trains, decent airports, bridges that are not going to fall any minute.

From Eugene Victor Debs, American Socialist Party candidate for POTUS:

As we have said, the bankers are for bullets—for the fool patriots that enlist at paupers' wages to stop the bullets, while the bankers clip coupons, boost food prices, increase dividends, and pile up millions and billions for themselves. Say, Mr. Workingman, suppose you have sense enough to be as patriotic as the banker, but not a bit more so. When you see the bankers on the firing line with guns in their hands ready to stop bullets as well as start them, then it is time enough for you to be seized with the patriotic itch and have yourself shot into a crazy-quilt for their profit and glory. Don't you take a fit and rush to the front until you see them there. They own the country and if they don't set the example of fighting for it, why should you?
As quoted in "American State Trials: A Collection of the Important and Interesting Criminal Trials which Have Taken Place in the United States, from the Beginning of Our Government to the Present Day", Vol. 13, 1921

Roasted Pumpkin Guts - Repeated as Public Service

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My favorite holiday is coming. Gorgeous pumpkins of all sizes in the market. So I am doing this again. Note: you can roast the seeds of any hard winter squash.

When I was a child, you could buy a box of roasted salty Indian Brand Pumpkin Seeds at the corner candy store. The box the seeds were packed in had a beautiful illustration of an American Indian in full Chief's headdress. The brand is still around but the illustration is gone from the packaging.

When you get done carving that pumpkin for Halloween or just to make a pie, you can roast your own pumpkin seeds. Roasted pumpkin seeds are so good.

Roasted Pumpkin Seeds

1 and 1/2 cups raw whole Pumpkin Seeds
2 teaspoons Butter, melted
Pinch Salt

Preheat oven to 300 degrees F (150 degrees C).

Toss seeds in a bowl with the melted butter and salt. Spread the seeds in a single layer on a baking sheet and bake for about 45 minutes or until golden brown; stir occasionally.

This recipe comes from allrecipes.com - for my money the best recipe site on the net. Cooks share their variations on the recipe and their opinions of the recipe's quality. Think Chili Roasted Pumpkin Seeds. Or Cinnamon Roasted Pumpkin Seeds.

Cooks also share practical tips for recipe execution like this tip below. There are a lot of creative cooks in the world. This tip is from Valerie's Kitchen.

"If you've never roasted pumpkin seeds before here are my tips. When you carve your pumpkins scoop the seeds into a colander and the guts onto newspaper. Inevitably some of the guts will be mixed in with the seeds but when you run water over them it's separated out pretty easily. After you drain the rinsed seeds, pour them onto a large, dry cookie sheet and let them sit for 24 hours or so to dry out. Now you can pick out the remaining pieces of pumpkin stuff that didn't get pulled out earlier and they will roast better if they are not wet when they go in the oven. My family prefers them seasoned with garlic salt in place of regular salt but you can use whatever suits your taste. So good!"

October's Bright Blue Weather

Fall is my favorite season. Time to make Pumpkin Pie and enjoy good Soup. Halloween will soon be here. The colors of Fall are so rich - eggplant purple, bright blue sky, bright orange squashes. Time for children to dive into piles of golden leaves with abandon. Life is good. Poet is Helen Hunt Jackson.

October’s Bright Blue Weather

O SUNS and skies and clouds of June,
And flowers of June together,
Ye cannot rival for one hour
October’s bright blue weather;
When loud the bumble-bee makes haste,
Belated, thriftless vagrant,
And Golden-Rod is dying fast,
And lanes with grapes are fragrant;
When Gentians roll their fringes tight
To save them for the morning,
And chestnuts fall from satin burrs
Without a sound of warning;
When on the ground red apples lie
In piles like jewels shining,
And redder still on old stone walls
Are leaves of woodbine twining;
When all the lovely wayside things
Their white-winged seeds are sowing,
And in the fields, still green and fair,

Late aftermaths are growing;
When springs run low, and on the brooks,
In idle golden freighting,
Bright leaves sink noiseless in the hush
Of woods, for winter waiting;
When comrades seek sweet country haunts,
By twos and twos together,
And count like misers, hour by hour,
October’s bright blue weather.
O suns and skies and flowers of June,
Count all your boasts together,
Love loveth best of all the year
October’s bright blue weather.

Doggerel can be Sweet and Romantic

 From a poster named Flying Junior:

A MORNING POEM

My weenie is just tiny,
He's like a little mouse;
But even though he's little,
He has a tiny house.

He mostly likes to stay inside,
And come out for a peep.
But there is a girl he likes,
And dreams of when he sleeps.

Labor Day Tribute to My Mother - Polka Queen and Member of the IBEW with Folkways Music

Wow, Putin does NOT like Labor protesters, does he? Oh wait, that's McDonald's in Illinois. Then Mickey D's in NYC.

My Mother is Rosie the Riveter. Helen Cebulski De Angelis worked in an aircraft factory during WWII. She was the boss cook of the Sun Ray Pharmacy lunch counter in 1940's Trenton NJ for a time. Without graduating High School, she became an officer for the IBEW and sat on the Labor Board in Washington DC. Rest in peace, Polka Queen. You were a force of Nature.

"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration." - Abraham Lincoln

"Ten thousand times has the labor movement stumbled and fallen and bruised itself, and risen again; been seized by the throat and choked and clubbed into insensibility; enjoined by courts, assaulted by thugs, charged by the militia, shot down by regulars, traduced by the press, frowned upon by public opinion, deceived by politicians, threatened by priests, repudiated by renegades, preyed upon by grafters, infested by spies, deserted by cowards, betrayed by traitors, bled by leeches, and sold out by leaders, but notwithstanding all this, and all these, it is today the most vital and potential power this planet has ever known, and its historic mission of emancipating the workers of the world from the thraldom of the ages is as certain of ultimate realization as is the setting of the sun." - Eugene Victor Debs, Socialist Party Candidate for POTUS, "An Ideal Labor Press," The Metal Worker (May 1904)

FOLKWAYS

 

Reducing Abortion Stigma Video Contest

Abortion Care Network created a contest for videos to help reduce abortion stigma. These are the winning videos below.

The second video by Ms. Emily Letts, an abortion counselor, has gone viral. What a brave young woman. Her video is not the only visual representation of abortion. See another HERE. 

Texas Empowers Vigilantes to Hunt Women. SCOTUS says KOOL.

 Graphics by Favianna Rodriguez. 

Rather than imposing a criminal or regulatory punishment for those who conduct abortions after the point in the pregnancy, the state law created a so-called "private right of action" to enforce the restriction. Essentially, the legislature deputized private citizens to bring civil litigation -- with the threat of $10,000 or more in damages -- against providers or even anyone who helped a woman access an abortion after six weeks.  

https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/31/politics/texas-six-week-abortion-ban-supreme-court-explainer/index.html

Purity culture kills Women. Purity culture colonizes Women. Texas has the highest maternal mortality rate among the States. The USA has the highest maternal mortality rate among the developed nations. Would it not be prolife to make childbirth safe before you compel childbirth

It has been my opinion for some time that Anti Abortion Zealots, many of them religious, suffer from a paraphilia and exhibit behaviors associated with voyeurism, exhibitionism, and sexual sadism.

SCOTUS has incentivized stalking. Women are going to be murdered and maimed. The abortion part is bad enough, but the bounty hunting provision of the law is unbelievably bad. I wrote a series about the perverts who inhabit the wombnazi movement. I had to stop because it was making me sick. Meet Curtis Anton Beseda.

https://plumstchili.blogspo...

And now Women in Texas will be hunted by vigilantes and grifters. Texas offers $10,000.00 to anyone who sues. Get the picture? For a brief while there, Women did not have to fuck Men to feed the kids anymore. Men resent that. Here we are.

Tell me how a woman on minimum wage can go to a new city, get a new job and pay for a place to live and perhaps an abortion by herself? 

I think Texans live in fantasies of poor 15 year old slutty girls who need religion get abortions. Reality bites, Texas.

Texas has the highest maternal mortality rate of all the US States. Texas has a higher maternal mortality rate than some countries. If a Woman dies in childbirth who wanted to abort, can her husband sue for loss of consortium or her children for loss of parent? Who would they sue? I say the State and the Vigilante who stalked them.

If the State of Texas and/or Individual X compel a birth, are they going to operate in loco parentis or inter parentis? I think they should contribute to support that child through college. How dare the State or Some Person reach into a family to compel the birth of children they may not be able to support or want to support or be capable of supporting.

Bill Allyn's Justice Reform List

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Published again for obvious reasons.

I found this excellent essay about law enforcement on Crooks and Liars. It was just hanging out in the comments. The author, Bill Allyn, has posted it on a number of online sites. I hope I can help his comments go viral by publishing them here. I think he covers all the bases. Bill Allyn approves this message. 

Justice System Reform List

America has a serious, institutionalized, systemic law enforcement problem. Over the last 4 decades, our law enforcement has become increasingly militarized, putting every citizen at risk of being shot and killed for nothing more than reaching for their wallet, as instructed, or less. This may increase safety for police officers (debatable, in the long run), but at the expense of making American citizens far less safe, which is the exact opposite of the goals of law enforcement. We need to create systems that bring back accountability within every level of the justice system.

Nationally, we need to:

1. Create citizen oversight committees with powers of subpoena and prosecutorial discretion for every law enforcement agency in the country. A special independent prosecutor must be assigned immediately for officer-involved shootings. Committee members should be randomly selected and replaced often, like grand jurors, to avoid corruption.

2. Require law enforcement officers to be personally insured to protect taxpayers from lawsuits. Too risky for insurance? No insurance, no badge. Insurance could be partially publicly subsidized.

3. Require every law enforcement officer to wear a camera. No camera, no gun. Also, implement GPS tracking on all police cars and cameras.

4. Require yearly psyche tests to screen out potentially abusive officers.

5. Require random drug and steroid tests.

6. All police agencies must keep a database of every officer-caused civilian injury, shooting or killing, and that data must be periodically transmitted to a third-party, non-biased national database.

7. Any officer involved in a shooting must be alcohol and drug tested immediately.

8. Officers should be made aware of studies on abuse of power, such as the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures. Ensure there are clear policies on use of force.

9. More training to deal with mentally ill, or a mental illness crisis unit. More training and encouragement to use peacemaking, conflict resolution, and de-escalation skills. Increase educational requirements, focusing on psychology, sociology, and social work.

10. Create a special number (third party, independent of police) to report police brutality. Victims of police brutality and the families of police shootings should immediately be appointed an attorney to represent their position/case.

11. Create national database of abusive officers, so they don’t just get hired elsewhere.

12. Reverse militarization of police forces. Take away military weapons, APC's, uniforms, and especially the attitude. Police officers are civilians, not a branch of the military. Require at least 5 years between active duty military and civilian police employment. Keep SWAT/military weapons and equipment under lock and key only to be used in genuine emergencies. Quit viewing the community you police as a “war zone”.

13. Prohibit television shows that glorify bad, illegal, or unconstitutional policing, such as “Cops”. Glorifying these behaviors creates a dangerous situation for American citizens and should not be tolerated.

14. Increase community outreach. Hire officers from the community. Officers need to be more in touch with the people they are sworn to protect.

15. End no-knock raids. It is perfectly legal for a home owner to respond to a break in with gun in hand, which gets them killed when the police are the intruders. This makes it unreasonably dangerous on citizens, especially when cops often go to the wrong address.

16. Reform forfeiture laws to protect citizens’ property rights and due process. No forfeiture proceedings until after conviction. All forfeiture proceeds go directly to the victims of police brutality and the families of police shootings.

17. End drug prohibition/war on drugs. Use harm reduction strategies.

18. End private prison industry.

19. Create a national organization dedicated to these ideals.