Category: 1312

a little context

Across the planet, police unions are more openly detaching from the justice systems they are embedded in. Case in point.

four continuous days of rioting in France after the police kill a young protester. A library (god damn it) is on the casualty list, as it was burned down.

Here’s the translation of a joint communiqué by UNSA and Alliance Police Nationale, the two main police unions in France. Translation provided by Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand on twitter).

“Now that’s enough… Facing these savage hordes, asking for calm is no longer enough, it must be imposed! Restoring the republican order and putting the apprehended beyond the capacity to harm should be the only political signals to give. In the face of such exactions, the police family must stand together. Our colleagues, like the majority of citizens, can no longer bear the tyranny of these violent minorities. The time is not for union action, but for combat against these “pests”. Surrendering, capitulating, and pleasing them by laying down arms are not the solutions in light of the gravity of the situation. All means must be put in place to restore the rule of law as quickly as possible. Once restored, we already know that we will relive this mess that we have been enduring for decades. For these reasons, Alliance Police Nationale and UNSA Police will take their responsibilities and warn the government from now on that at the end, we will be in action and without concrete measures for the legal protection of the Police, an appropriate penal response, significant means provided, the police will judge the extent of the consideration given. Today the police are in combat because we are at war. Tomorrow we will be in resistance and the government will have to become aware of it.”

The original document, in case of dispute.

Isn’t that nice? Not only do they want to kill protesters with impunity, they want the government to sanction it. I note the use of the word ‘savage’ which is global code for either Indigenous or brown. Christ wept. You may note some other locutions as being a veritable symphony of dog whistles for the racist & xenophobic hard right.

This is not the last time we’re going to see police unions pull shit like this.

For the last time: the police are public servants. If they don’t act or talk like it FIRE THEM

 

10 billion dollars and no water

Apparently they’re going to build a high speed rail line between LA and Las Vegas, 218 miles. Las Vegas’ ‘dead pool’ number is 895 feet. That means that if Lake Mead’s reservoir drops below 895 feet, there’s no water for the city.

The city is not projected to see those numbers for at least the next three to four years. Plenty of time to manifest some water from, er, somewhere, when they open the rail line in 2025 LOL.

Mega-projects are dead, when will people see it.

The ‘Cop City’ in Atlanta, which is going to tear down an urban forest to put up a training facility for the descendants of patterrollers, had the construction site set on fire yesterday. The cops have already killed a protester there. This is a generational conflict – in the sense that it will go for a generation.

I cleaned the kitchen counters, ran the dishwasher and ordered dim sum for delivery yesterday. NOM. Jeff was less impressed; we did after all grow up with Tak Sun. Mickey Dee’s for brekky this morning.  Otherwise I did not to a damned thing and I slept like a dead thing for half the day. Feel fine now, though. And I spoke to various family members yesterday and we’re all doing okay, which is lovely news all by itself.

Pedro Pascal said that Sarah Michelle Gellar was a complete sweetheart to him during their filming together in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the two of them getting on social media and being nice to each other was the tonic I needed this morning. Parasocial relationships, who can live without them LOLOL.

the saanich bank robbers were stochastic terrorism standard issue white guys

I was going to call it on twitter and thought THEIR POOR PARENTS. I’m glad I had the sense and decency to restrain myself even if that’s where they likely learned it. I hope the lads enjoyed their brief moment of liberatory violence.
And congrats you dead guys, you just made it inevitable that the taxpayers of Saanich will hear the police say, “Open your wallets and repeat after me, Help Yourself!” when it comes to better training for … er … terroristic right wing assaults. They’ll all have to go to Hawaii for training (or some such venue), and come back even bigger dicks than when they left. After all Victoria is a provincial capital of a G8 country, it should have a world class terrerizm response team, correct?
I can hear my auntie Mary cackling; who knows why, she’s not here, but I do hear things occasionally.

Kyiv is still Ukrainian

Putin’s a month into his war and he’s achieved so few of his original objectives that some commentators, while not exactly mocking him, are starting to worry that he’s being thwarted, which makes him prone to lash out and be dangerous and threaten nukes, repeatedly. He’s already put at least two hundred children in the ground. Why, if it wasn’t for the wars on the populations of Yemen and Syria, which Russia’s armed forces have helped to prosecute these past many years, and previous Russian outings in Ukraine and Chechnya, I wouldn’t have anything to compare it to.

Learned about SKIF’s, the Ukrainian country/urban tank killer, whose name literally means ‘Scythian’. They’re ferociously effective in modern warfare, cheap like borscht compared to the arms it can kill. It’s a modern day crossbow in terms of its asymmetrical warfare effects – it can take down a person, a vehicle, a tank, a chopper OR – with luck – a jet.

Two kudos overnight, very surprised by one of them; one of the stories I posted to AO3 is a complete outlier because the central character dyad is not destiel, it’s a three person triad that turns into a polyamorous household full of kids, and all this while the lead character is dealing with CRUSHING depression, new fatherhood, and coming to terms with being bisexual. So it has a million feels and some very dramatic and technical sex scenes and it’s not like anything else I’ve posted. (SO it doesn’t get much love.) The other kudo, from another person, is for my most popular fic, which has more than 6000 hits now, and a 4% kudo to hit ratio.

Weather kinda miserable and damp.

very complex ‘tholian web’  migraine imagery just now. It’s probably pollen triggered, it’s just been HORRIBLE, how crappy the allergens have been making me and Jeff feel. I feel brain dead, and then I perk up a bit, and then there’s another puff of cedar pollen and BRAIN DED AGIN. Now it’s a square full of vibrating chevrons; now it’s fuzz. Now it’s fading. dammit I need coffee.

Report has come that one of the Dunnetteers from Toronto has passed of cancer. The kind words are coming in and people are speaking well of the dead; she sounds like she was a superior sort of person and we’re also told she was well cared for, and having been through sitting with Tom (even though it wasn’t much and I didn’t materially assist, not really) I am glad that she was, and that no one stinted on the morphine.

Wordle in three this morning. Somebody I follow on twitter made a hint, that the word seemed apropos today, and that really helped. Didn’t hurt that I guessed the first letter of the word right out of the gate.

R value across Canada has dipped way below one. We’ll still get another surge as the new variant comes through (BA.2) but it won’t be as bad. I feel safer and I’m not as worried about my loved ones, especially my immunocompromised loved ones, but you have to watch the numbers…

Laundry’s all done, now I have to haul it upstairs and put it away. The rug survived being laundered, thank god, often the plastic backing comes off and then Jeff has to disassembled the machine to clear it out.

Time to go back to the world of Omar and Brad and Blossom.

Katie’s making plans to go back to work; I think childcare is going to be split between Suzanne and the (humph, advised not to post this descriptive but possibly offensive soubriquet) other grandma, with me as a backup I guess. There are many advantages to this as one can see, and one can only marvel at Ryker’s good fortune that when so many kids have no grandma’s he ended up somehow with three.

March Madness continues, and I’m adding new words to my conlang, admiring the hairdos of the contestants and their ability to pluck balls out of midair, steal them from each other and otherwise perform feats of athletic magic.

Ted Cruz the douche extraordinaire, brandishing a book which he very obviously has neither opened nor read, repurposed by the lovelies at Working Class History (on finer social media platforms everywhere):

This was a possible Hair Sinister cover:

4251

Jeff and I were just desperate for coffee yesterday so we picked up brekky at IHOP. I mean we would have been fine with coffee alone but I insisted. I think it will be a while before we eat out again. AND we got coffee this am.

The Mu variant is in Vancouver, apparently. Now we wait to see whether it drives the Delta variant off the pitch.

Steve Martin, Selena Gomez and Martin Short have a new show called Only Murders in the Building and apparently it’s really funny. Looking forward to it.

The story, obviously, (4563) is continuing to come along nicely. I have also started another story which is tentatively called ‘The Haunted Sideboard.” It’s about a guy who tries to give away a cursed piece of furniture and the neighbourhood man who convinces him to salt and burn it instead. Then everyone else in the neighbourhood decides it’s BURN YOUR CURST OBJECT DAY and well, you know, shit gets both weird and romantic.

Fuck the police. Seriously. I mean I’d settle for them wearing masks but they don’t want to do that either.

The old lady and her memories

Today I was reminded that many many years ago I was the volunteer coordinator for childcare for a Toronto Pride, back in the 90s.

There’s a fight ‘in the community’ right now about Pride, all across the western world. Not so much in the parts of the world where being openly gay gets you beaten and murdered and being openly lesbian gets you ‘correctively’ raped. Anyway this first world fight is about ‘children at Pride’ and how a substantial minority of gay people who support Pride want the leather daddies and bondage enthusiasts and folks who whatever they sport amidships aren’t long on clothing to just…. cover up for Pride.

Now I think I established, with my childcare cred, that I do indeed care about children and want them to be safe while their parental units or some fraction thereof want to partay on the streets of the city; I also know that Pride started when among the most marginalized of the rainbow community, black transgender women, decided that they were tired of being subjected to raids and police harassment every fucking weekend, and started throwing bricks at the cops.

So for all the shrinking violets who have finished their days of LGBTQA+ activism and thus want all the rest of us to behave like tv housewives, this is le extended middle finger de moi.

For all the parents who want the leather daddies to cover up, fuck ya.

For all the parents who want to take their kids to pride, how about memorizing some easy answers about the costumes …. and lack of them?

The event is for ADULTS. Children are to be expected, and allowed for, and cared for in context of the parade and events, but they aren’t to be CATERED to. No more than the fucking cops or beer companies.

Having cops at Pride is bad. Having kids at pride is not. Having bigots try to tell activists how to dress is bad. Having bigots publicly struck hard in their rhetorical goolies is good.

Allergies

I’m getting hives, probably from the brazil nuts, heavy sigh.

Just ordered doubles and Chicken Roti and Shrimp with Rice from D Roti Shak.

SO DAMNED GOOD

Here’s a funny pic, courtesy of Liz M. shows two old people in a really old car in front of a building called St. Luke’s with a JUST VACCINATED sign like a just married sign.

here’s another funny one, it spells ACAB in cherry blossoms and is apparently from this week in Portland

OLD bugs NEW mental health

If it isn’t broken, don’t need to fix it.

This kind of technology has the potential to reduce human suffering on a planetary scale, but governments could also use it to hunt down and kill people with mental health problems to stop ‘social disruption’ so….

 

 

Also, regarding the shooting of a Black man in Brooklyn Centre MN

IF YOU ARE A COP AND YOU CAN’T TELL THE FUCKING DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A TASER AND A GUN you should NOT BE ON THE FUCKING STREET

 

I’d Like To Ask all of the Smart People to Leave

This is the song you sing when the police are about to raid. It is not very cheerful about police. FULL DISCLOSURE I have never been injured by police, but I can name a lot of people who have been. I see you, Jan and Suzanne.

Lyrics:

I’m going to have to ask the smart people to leave / why should they stay here for this crap? / I’m going to sing some stuff like you would not believe / You’ve been warned, it’s a trap! / Why would you want to listen to anything silly / like me attempting to sing about an armadillo’s will he? won’t he? / I’m going to have to ask the smart people to leave / and when you’re gone we’ll all have fun

We’ll have some more when we are done / the drugs alone weigh half a ton / so if the cops come BETTER

run like hell, run like hell / cops are coming, run like hell

Broke my nose, ripped my clothes / cops are coming, run like hell

Cheap cologne / *BROKE MY PH-O-O-ONE* / cops are coming, run like hell

I’m going to have to ask the smart people to leave / and when you’re gone we’ll all have fun….

 

There’s a time and a place for everything

But as long as I have family to talk to I don’t have to put ALLLL my bs here.

Keith said SO IN THIS FASCIST RERUN SCENARIO are we Poland or Czechoslovakia and sayeth me “You Know We’re Poland. We’re going to get ground between two superpowers, China and the US, with Russia picking at scraps, and there’s not much we can do about it”. and “Well, we’re not going to be ALLOWED to be Switzerland.”

I’m so angry at the typos in the fic I’m reading on AO3 right now even though it’s a charming slow burn fic I’m shutting it down.

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fuck the police in Akkadian, thanks to @antthegay on twitter

technically it’s may the policemen be destroyed but who’s quibbling

Laughed my ass off at this next one:

r/vancouver - give this badass his space please

Text on a sticker on a dogshit brown Chevy Van (perfection!) BACK OFF I’m from Surrey. stolen from reddit

As an aside, the first joke I ever heard about the Vancouver area was about Surrey. “What’s the difference between Surrey and a bus shelter?” “If you really had to, you could live in a bus shelter.” Yes, I am aware this joke has racist, classist, and ‘wrong side of the bridge’-ist implications.

Cartoons

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Inkyrickshaw.com

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Credit @nobonzo on twitter

also this

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also the above noted. I’m following her on instagram now, she has some AMAZING tshirts on Etsy.

Ordered Indian food last night. I shouldn’t have but I love butter chicken.

Pet shaming: the public internet practice of hanging a hand lettered sign over your pet’s neck detailing the dreffle thing they did and posting it. Demon shaming (artist unknown)

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