SCOTUS

Is it even possible to express how disappointed I am with the recent decisions of the Supreme Court?

Today, in the latest of almost daily affronts to decency, the Court ruled that the U.S. EPA cannot regulate CO₂ emissions from power plants.  This ruling effectively takes away the government's ability to combat climate change and meet the commitments we made to the Paris Accords.  In effect, there now is no stopping catastrophic climate change.  We're just going to have to get used to 100⁰+ temperatures, drought, floods, and no fresh water.

The Court can argue that Congress can enact legislation explicitly instructing EPA to regulate CO₂, but have you seen Congress?  They're totally dysfunctional, and even without the filibuster still probably couldn't write meaningful climate-change laws.  

Remember when an early Supreme Court draft on overturning Roe was leaked?  The best Congress could do was take a meaningless vote to support abortion rights, a motion they knew would lose but was justified as getting opposing Republicans (and some Democrats) "on the record" so they could raise funds to possibly defeat them in November.  But let's be clear - it had nothing to do with trying to preserve women's rights.

Remember when Roe actually was overturned?  Congress basically just threw up their hands and said, "Well, what can we do? We held a meaningless straw vote a few months ago." 

Remember when 19 schoolchildren were murdered by a psychotic gunman at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas?  Best a highly motivated Congress could do was pass the weakest, most ineffectual gun-control legislation, rules that still did not ban semi-automatic assault weapons and would still allow them to be bought by teenagers. It did mange to close a few loopholes on background checks, but other loopholes still exist and new ones will emerge in the future.

No, Congress is incapable of doing jack-shit. Even if the filibuster were to be removed - which today prevents a lot of meaningful change - they are still too worried about the next election cycle, lobbyist funding, and their own career ambitions to accomplish anything of merit. They certainly aren't going to legislate a path to reduce carbon emissions and save the fucking planet.  

The Executive Branch isn't much better.  I've tried to support Biden as long as I could and he still isn't responsible for all of the economic and social problems Republicans accuse him of causing, but his lack of leadership and refusal to take a partisan position and stand up for something has also kept us in this current state of stasis.  I get it that a bipartisan world would be the ideal, but we're not living in that ideal world now.  It's not that you don't have to step on a few toes - you have to go out and stomp on those toes until they resemble strawberry yogurt.

So we now have a 6-3 conservative supermajority in the Supreme Court and no checks and balances on their agenda.  Prayer in public schools?  Sure, as long as it's Christian prayer.  Public funding for private religious schools?  The Court sees no problem there.  Overturn a 100-year-old NYC rule prohibiting concealed weapons in public spaces?  The Court considers THAT an unacceptable infringement on personal liberty, even as they rule that women must bear babies even if it's against their will, as if they were brood mares or some other form of livestock.

These are end times.  We are doomed - fucking doomed I tell you.  I can't see any scenario when any of this doesn't end badly.

"I'm Going to the Capital!"

Today I learned that democracy in the U.S. was saved only because the President didn't know how to drive.

Last week's Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to harness the righteous anger over this issue into electoral turnout, to change the whole paradigm of the upcoming election from a referendum on the economy to one on liberty and equality, and to wrest control of the government away from the far-right, evangelical fanatics who’ve had way too much power for way too long and give it back to the people. 

I can’t wait to see how the Democrats blow it.

Russia is slowly and gradually gaining the upper hand in what is turning out to be a long war of attrition in Ukraine.

Since the beginning of the covid pandemic in 2020, at least 1 in 4 Georgia residents have been infected, a total of 2,553,494 reported cases. At least 1 in 289 Georgians have died from the virus, a total of 36,952 deaths.

We're just a few days into summer, but hot air already blanketed Europe last week, causing parts of France and Spain to feel the way it usually does in July or August, while high temperatures scorched northern and central China and some places in India began experiencing extraordinary heat as early as last March and millions of Americans are once again in the grips of dangerous heat. 

In related news, that large area of disorganized showers and thunderstorms over the eastern Atlantic has crossed the ocean and is now known as Potential Tropical Storm Two, and has a 90% chance of developing into a hurricane.  Heavy rainfall and tropical-storm-force winds are forecast by tomorrow night across the Windward Islands, northeastern Venezuela, and the ABC Islands 

A second tropical wave with a 40% chance of developing into a tropical storm is trailing right behind Potential Tropical Storm Two, and an area of low pressure off the coast of Louisiana is forecast to slowly move westward and approach the Texas coast during the next two days.  

We're barely 48 hours into the new Dobbs era - the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade - and the pundits are already trying to rewrite not only history, but current events.

I watched ABC News' This Week today, and the "Powerhouse Roundtable," or at least some on that panel, were trying to minimize the effects Friday's decision will have on November's mid-term elections.  Guests opined that Americans have many other things on their minds - gas prices, grocery prices, and so on - and that access to abortion isn't really that big an issue to the electorate.  In other words, they were trying to ensure that Republicans don't lose their advantage going into November.

Guest host Martha Raddatz even opined that "I was struck by the picture from the Supreme Court this morning," she said.  "There weren't any protestors out there.  They dispersed pretty quickly there."

Fine, but later that same day, ABC News reported that crowds are still out in cities across the U.S., including in front the Supreme Court in Washington, protesting the decision.  As Bloomberg News noted, the crowd in Washington today is smaller than Friday's crowd, but still consisted of "several hundred" people on the third straight day of protest, despite high temperatures and humidity.

Hey, Raddatz - just because you didn't see protesters this morning at whatever pre-dawn hour you drive to the studio to tape your 11:00 am show doesn't mean they weren't there later.  And the size of the crowd in front of the courthouse isn't directly correlative with voter's decisions this November.

Meanwhile, at a protest last night in Providence, R.I., off-duty police officer and State Senate candidate Jeane Lugo, running on a Republican "pro-life" campaign, punched his opponent, a woman, in the face several times.  That officer is now suspended and has dropped out of the race, although knowing Republicans, they'll probably try and make him into either a hero or some sort of cancel-culture, free-speech martyr.

From gun obsession and school shootings, to inaction on climate change, to racial and income inequality, to the Dobbs decision, I'm pretty disappointed by America right now. Oh, and while it's barely made a ripple in the news, that cowardly villain Putin used this moment of U.S. obsession over its own problems to resume shelling Kyiv in the Ukraine. But you don't care about that, because you think it's not about you.

SCOTUS vs. America

 

The End Is Near

Oh, these times we live in!  War in Ukraine, climate change, a lingering pandemic, a rapid erosion of democratic norms in the U.S. and abroad, and an out-of-control gun obsession in the United States manifesting as school shootings, church massacres, and daily murders.  

And now, an out-of-touch Supreme Court, which includes justices seated as long ago as 1991, has overturned Roe v. Wade, ending nearly 50 years of woman's reproductive rights. For the first time in my life, the court is literally taking away our freedoms and liberty, and the grand trajectory of events is moving towards authoritarianism instead of a more libertarian state.

You can argue all you want about what point a fetus becomes a "person" (however you define that) or about the rights of an unborn child versus the rights of the mother.  But look at it another way: if an infant needed a bone marrow transport, and that infant had a very rare blood type and you were the only person who could donate the marrow that baby needed, the government can't - and won't - insist that you must donate the marrow.  It's the donor's choice, and it doesn't matter if the reason for the donor's refusal is existential ("I'll die from the procedure, and I don't want to die") or trivial ("Nah, sounds like a hassle. Who's got time for that?"), the government shouldn't force you to donate, just like it can't force you to donate organs.  Hell, even if you're dead and not using the organs anymore, your organs can't be harvested if you haven't signed an organ-donor card.

A woman should have the same choice as to whether or not her uterus should be used to incubate a fetus.  Most women choose to do so most of the times, but if she doesn't want to, either for reasons good ("Doctors say I'll die in childbirth, and I don't want to die") or poor ("Nah, sounds like a hassle. Who's got time for that?"), it should be no one's choice but hers.  That's what the courts decided in 1973, and that's been the law of the land for the better part of a generation.  Until today.

Now, women have been reduced to mere brood-mares, handmaidens forced to surrender that bodies, interrupt their lives and careers, and bear the financial burdens of childbirth and most likely child rearing, just because their bodies have the baby-incubating parts.  Possession of a viable uterus negates your right to choose your own destiny.

Justice Clarence Thomas, the judge appointed by George H.W. Bush back in 1991 and the author of yesterday's ruling that the states can't restrict people from carrying firearms in public, said that access to contraception and same-sex marriage will be overturned next.  

I'm not sure this is a world I want to live in, but given everything else going, from climate change to diseases to a looming third World War or a possible new Civil War, I'm not sure living much longer in this world will be an option available to most of us.

Meanwhile, a large area of disorganized showers and thunderstorms over the eastern Atlantic appears conducive for development of a tropical depression by the early to middle part of next week.  The system is moving westward at 15 to 20 mph toward the Windward Islands.

 

Texas GOP Platform Committee

 So much for theories of white supremacy. . . 

 

From the Sports Desk

We apply narratives to the events of our lives, life imitating art as we try to make sense of the randomness of life as if it were a novel, play, or some television show.

"So, yesterday, I went to the supermarket and there was this guy outside playing a tuba."  Sure, there was, but he would have been there whether I went to the supermarket or not.  Other people saw him too, and their narrative might be quite different from mine.  

"Yesterday, some bum with a fucking tuba of all things was blocking the entrance to the supermarket." 

"Yesterday, I heard the most fantastic musician apparently just busking for money over at Publix."

"Yesterday, after putting my groceries in the car, I locked my keys in the trunk, but this strange man with a tuba (I think) helped me get them back."

"Yesterday, I was trying to raise awareness for childhood hunger by playing original music at the store, but the manager said I was annoying the customers and told me to leave."

All the "stories" may be true on one level, but taken together show that there's no single narrative as to what happened.  A thousand random observations, a thousand random narratives.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in sports.  Half the spectators have a narrative of "our team won the game" and why, while the other half have a story of how "our team lost" and why. Children, delighted by the sights, sounds, and smells of a sporting event, may have a narrative that has nothing to do with the outcome or the final score.  Veteran fans may have a larger narrative in which the final score of a particular game has relatively little to do with the story - "Yesterday, for the fourth time this year, the Red Sox struggled in extra-innings due to poor relief pitching."

Yesterday, the Golden State Warriors won Game 6 of the NBA Finals, beating the Boston Celtics 103-90, and winning the championship, 4-2.  Statistically and factually, that's true (you can look it up), but it doesn't describe my narrative of what happened.

For me, the story really began six days and three games earlier.  It began during Game 4 of the Finals, with Boston leading Golden State 2 games to 1. The Celtics were playing at home and despite blowing a 5-point Halftime lead, trailing by double digits early in the 4th Quarter, they fought back and took a 4-point lead with a little over 5 minutes left in the game.

If they held onto or built on that lead, they would have gone up 3-1 in the series, with three games left to clinch the deciding 4th win. But instead, the Warriors outscored Boston 17-3 in the final 5 minutes, and the demoralized Celtics lost that Game 4 and the next two games of the Finals to end the season. In my narrative, that final 17-3 run by the Warriors broke the Celtics spirit and effectively won the championship for Golden State.

But actually, my narrative goes back even further than that. Earlier this year, in the 1st Round of the playoffs, the Celtics swept the talented Brooklyn Nets, the team that eliminated them in the 1st Round last year. The Milwaukee Bucks, for one, were so intimidated by the talented Nets team that it’s suspected they tanked some games late in the season to avoid facing Brooklyn in the 1st Round. As a result, Boston drew the Nets in the 1st and then beat them in 4 straight games.

After beating the Nets, the Celtics faced the Bucks, the team that beat them in the 2nd Round in 2019.  This time, Boston beat Milwaukee and the "Greek Freak" Giannis in 7 bruising games to advance to the Eastern Conference Finals.

Boston faced the Miami Heat in the ECF. In 2020, Boston lost the ECF to the Miami Heat, and the Heat were confident they could win again. But the Celtics beat Jimmy Butler, Kevin Lowry and the rest of the Heat in 7 scrappy games.  And thus, the Celtics won the ECF and completed the “Revenge Tour” of the teams that ended their previous three seasons.

But all of those facts and scores and figures are all just random observations that my mind has selected in order to construct a narrative to make sense of the world around me.  I'm sure Jimmy Butler's narrative of the 2022 NBA post-season is quite different.  I'm sure Giannis' is as well.  I doubt you have the same narrative as me (well, now you do, but I mean before).

It's not that one story is true and the others not, it's just that all stories are merely imagined associations of the chaotic and random occurrences in life.  The story of your life is not your life, it is your story.

Scratch

Listening to these FACT mixes is like reading your way through a library - each mix is like its own unique novel, and you can't (at least I can't) listen to more than one, maybe two, in a row without having to pause and take it all in.

From Nsasi's beat-by-beat, layer-upon-layer master class in African rhythm - from traditional Kiganda percussion to queer Kampala house music and beyond - to Grouper's grand tour of traditional baroque melodies and folk songs, I've already learned quite a lot that I didn't know before.  Meanwhile, I've also worked my way through revelatory FACT mixes by Jon Hopkins (FACT Mix 388), Natasha Kmeto (FACT Mix 514), Tortoise (FACT Mix 541), Jessy Lanza (FACT Mix 543), and Lawrence English (FACT Mix 584).

I started my day this morning, as one is wont to do, over breakfast and coffee while listening to The Orb's 2007 reggae compilation, I'll Be Black.  This got me curious as to what The Orb may have contributed to the FACT Mix series, and was delighted to see they provided a collaboration with Jamaican dub mastermind Lee "Scratch" Perry (FACT Mix 341, June 2012) as a sort of "preview" mixtape for their joint LP, The Orbserver in the Star House.  

If you're not familiar with The Orb, you'd be forgiven for thinking they were a reggae band based on the paragraph above.  Actually, they're a psychedelic English ambient house producer (they've also released a collaboration with Pink Floyd's guitarist, David Gilmour) who've been putting out albums since the early 90s.  They just happen to enjoy reggae and dub as well.

For some reason, the mix itself is no longer on the FACT website, the only mix so far I've not seen posted.  The file is still on the SoundCloud site, but downloading of the file is not available.  Fortunately, though, one can still stream it or repost it.  

FACT attempts to describe this mix as a "slow-motion kayak ride through a pipe of slurry, thick, overwhelmingly delayed basslines obscuring wonky melodies – some recognisable (‘What A Wonderful World’, ‘Zombie’), others from another planet entirely. Plus, of course, you get Perry toasting on top, though around half-way through he gets bored and toddles off for a while. Would you want it any other way? We certainly wouldn’t."

Meanwhile, it's hot as hell here in Georgia. Yesterday's high temperature (95⁰) was the highest since 1958, when it was 96⁰, tying the record set in 1948. It's not even summer yet, but right now (I'm writing this around 3:30 pm) it's 97⁰ outside.  With the humidity (44%), the Heat Index makes it feel like 103⁰. The forecast is for these high temperatures to continue for at least the next 10 days and to be even hotter next week.  Weather advisories are urging us to avoid being out in the sun, to stay indoors in air-conditioned rooms if possible, to drink plenty of fluids, and to check up on relatives and neighbors.  It looks like I got my new AC installed just in time!  

Meanwhile, the tropical disturbance that might/could become Hurricane Bonnie has moved inland over Nicaragua, reducing its chances of forming into a hurricane.  If it moves back over water, it could still develop into a hurricane or tropical storm, but for now it appears to be content to just dropping heavy rain over Nicaragua.

So - ecce homo - here I am staying indoors like it's the 2020 covid season all over again, trying to avoid the punishing heat outside and tripping out to the crazy dub sounds of Lee "Scratch" Perry and The Orb.  Episode 3 of The Treason Hearings airs tomorrow morning, and that evening we have Game 6 of the Celtics-Warriors NBA Finals.  So until then, stay cool.

Grouper

Fact Magazine · FACT mix 379 - Grouper (Apr '13)

I'm working my way through the 40+ hours of FACT mixes I downloaded to a backup drive as well as the 850+ mixes on the FACT website.  

Many, if not most, of the mixes are dance-club ready EDM music, bangers and thumpers most suitable for the dance floor.  Some artists, particularly d.j.s and electronic music producers, simply provide representative examples of their live, club sets.  If you ever suddenly find yourself in Berlin hosting a rave (these things happen), most of the mixes would ably provide a suitable setlist for you. The FACT mixes got you covered.

But it's not all techno and EDM.  Some performers provide mixes to FACT that cover the music that inspires them, or the sources of their samples, or songs that they simply want to share for whatever reason.  You can learn a lot about the creative process of these performers by the songs they select for these mixes.  It may or may not be surprising that so-and-so has a deep knowledge of reggae, or that some other musician included a lot of mid-60s pop songs.  Some of the mixes cover very specific but little-known sub-genres of music, like Nsasi's mix of queer Ugandan house music.

Few mixes fall further from the definition of "dance music" than the one provided by Grouper (Liz Harris) back in April 2013.  For the longest time now, Grouper has been producing great, generally unclassifiable music somewhere between ambient, folk, doom metal, and pop.  It's hard to describe - you really need to listen for yourself to understand.  

One would expect some dreamy and quiet music from Grouper for her FACT mix, which she titled Image of True Death, but I for one didn't expect baroque chamber music, Celtic folk songs, and whatever the rest of the mix is.  Even the song she included by the post-rock, avant-noise band Swans is a folkish, vocal track. In fact, I couldn't identify much of the mix, even using my SoundHound track identifier and the comments on the SoundCloud app, and unlike most of the FACT mixes, a track list wasn't provided by the artist.  Here's the list as best as I can fathom:

• Ivor Cutler - The Best Thing (1975)
• Jandek - Nancy Sings (1982)
• Anne Briggs - Thorneymoor Woods (1971)
• ??? - ????
• Mignarda - The Willow Song (2007)
• Kronos Quartet - Lachrimae Antique (1997) 
• ??? - ????
• Delia Derbyshire - Mattachin
• (unidentified dialog)
• ??? - ????
• Swans - Blackmail (1997)
• Kathleen Ferrier & London Symphony Orchestra - Rodelinda, Act 1: Art Thou Troubled (1997) 
• ??? - ????
• ??? - ????
• ??? - ????

Bonnie?

A broad area of disturbed weather, associated with a surface trough of low pressure, is currently located over the southern Caribbean. The disturbance is expected to move northwestward near the coasts of Nicaragua and Honduras and there's a 40% chance of a tropical depression forming in the next five days if the system remains over water.  Regardless of development, this system could produce periods of heavy rainfall across portions of eastern Nicaragua and eastern Honduras late this week.

Temperatures reached a high of 95⁰ F in Atlanta today.  In a special statement, the National Weather Service forecast heat index values between 100⁰ and 105⁰ and advised avoiding DeKalb County (East Atlanta) today if possible. I had a dentist appointment in DeKalb today, but braved the extreme temperatures and went anyway.  I survived unscathed.

Episode 2 of The Treason Hearings aired this morning.  Fun to watch over a cup of coffee (a cup of covfefe?) (a coup of covfefe?) and a bagel.  If you didn't know better, watching this show, you'd think Donald Trump was a dishonest man.

FACT Mixes

From left, Authentically Plastic, Nsasi and Turkana, co-founders of queer music collective Anti-Mass, August 8, 2021 (Photograph by Guilherme Gomez)

If you think your life is difficult, imagine being gay in Uganda.  

In 2007, the Ugandan newspaper Red Pepper published a list of allegedly gay men, many of whom suffered harassment as a result. Not to be outdone, the Ugandan newspaper Rolling Stone published a front-page article in 2010 titled 100 Pictures of Uganda's Top Homos Leak that listed the names, addresses, and photographs of 100 alleged homosexuals alongside a yellow banner that read "Hang Them." The paper also alleged that homosexuals aimed to recruit Ugandan children. Many Ugandans were attacked since the article was published, and on January 27, 2011, gay rights activist David Kato was murdered.

In 2009, the Ugandan parliament proposed an Anti-Homosexuality Bill that would have allowed the death penalty for people who were previously convicted or were HIV-positive and engaged in same-sex practices. The bill also included provisions for Ugandans who engaged in same-sex practices outside of Uganda to be extradited back to Uganda for punishment. The bill was signed into law by President Yoweri Museveni on February 24, 2014, although the death penalty was dropped in the final legislation. 

More recently, Kampala police and military personnel raided the gay-friendly Ram Bar on November 10, 2019, and arrested over 120 people. Joan Amek, one of those arrested, later told Human Rights Watch, “They kept on calling us prostitutes and genderless people. They kept on making common mistakes on ‘he’ and ‘she’ and dramatically laughing about it, saying that they thought we didn’t care so why are we complaining.”  The Ugandan police said the Ram Bar served hookah and opium and that those arrested would be charged under the Tobacco Control Act of 2015, which bans smoking in public places. Activists argued that this was a smoke screen for the persecution of the LGBTQ community and when 67 of those arrested were eventually charged, it was with “public nuisance”, not a contravention of the Tobacco Control Act.

Ram Bar, Kampala, Uganda

Despite this oppression, Anti-Mass has emerged in Kampala as both a musical collective and a queer night club. Anti-Mass parties have become vital spaces for safe expression for the city’s gay community, bringing together a diverse gathering of people of wildly different genders, sexual orientations, and backgrounds to move and sweat together, all within a city infamous for its conservatism and increasingly draconian legislation. Anti-Mass co-founders Nsasi, Turkana, and Authentically Plastic are the house dj's, pushing a fluid, hyper-modern style of club music that seeks to disrupt traditional forms.  Their style draws a line from Kiganda percussion to Chicago house and beyond.

I know all this because London's on-line FACT magazine posted a mix by Nsasi last month.  The set opens with a slowed-down version of Oh by Ciara (featuring Ludacris) and from there covers a variety of African dance-music artists, including fellow Anti-Mass member Authentically Plastic toward the end. Overall, it's sort of a trance-inducing set and you can choose to dance to it or zone out to it. Either option is acceptable.

Fact Magazine · Fact Mix 861: Nsasi (May '22)

FACT has admirably been posting more-or-less weekly mixtapes curated by various artists, musicians, producers, and dj's (I'll let you decide where to draw the line between those categories) since 2008. They were nearly 100 sets into their series by the time I first became aware of them in late 2009 and they've kept at it since. The Nsasi mix is number 861 in the series, and they just dropped number 862 by the 19-year-old Tanzanian DJ Travella.  

The young Londoners who maintain the FACT site are hipper, worldlier, and sexier than this ROM, but I can tag along behind and take notes to maintain an open mind.  The vast majority of the FACT mixes are in various styles of electronic dance music, which is not necessarily my thing.  But FACT also invites various other electronic, ambient, post-rock, and psych artists to contribute mixes, often to fascinating results.  My collection ranges from 60 minutes of 1960s French pop auteur Serge Gainsbourg, to field recordings of L.A. by Julia Holter, to a seamless blend of Brazilian field recordings, Kenyan club music, Indonesian gabber, and new music from NYC by Brooklyn composer Britton Powell.

All of the mixes can be streamed and downloaded for free, except for some of the older mixes, which were originally uploaded to file-sharing sites no longer in operation. Today, the mixes are all uploaded to Soundcloud, which allows sharing, reposting, and free downloading.  I've got about 40 of the mixes, ranging from June 2010's number 162 (Oneohtrix Point Never) to Nsasi's recent 861, saved to a backup drive, a total of over 42 hours of music.  The programming is so eclectic and diverse that I can play though the sets multiple times and everything still sounds fresh and new on each listen.

So go along for the ride.  If you listen to Nsasi's mix you're hearing the authentic sounds you'd hear today if you managed to find your way into an underground queer dance party in Kampala, Uganda, one eye on the dance floor and the other on the door for the police.

Better Off Dead

Have you been watching The Treason Hearings?  Season 1 debuted Thursday night, starring some guy from Mississippi, Liz Cheney, and a University of Georgia grad who had the bad fortune of working for the Capital police on January 6. 

Fani Wills, the Fulton County DA here in Atlanta, has assembled a Grand Jury to consider charges against Agent Orange for trying to extort the Georgia Secretary of State into "finding" him some 11,780 votes.  A criminal trial is probably pending.  That show should be a good spin-off of The Treason Hearings.

Of course, all of this is just a prequel to the main event, the 2022 Midterm Elections. Here in Georgia, the Elections will include the Rev. Raphael Warnock, the pastor of Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church (literally, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s old job), versus former Georgia Bulldogs running back Hershel Walker.  

I think Warnock will win (Walker, although a beloved sports figure here in Georgia, is a terrible campaigner), but the Democrats will otherwise get clobbered.  They'll lose control of both the Senate and the House, and control of most of the states.  The Republican-controlled Congress will shut down any remaining investigations or hearings on the criminal actions of Agent Orange's so-called presidency, and devote their time to Hunter Biden's laptop, non-existent voter fraud, and whatever other culture-war distractions they could dredge up (e.g., trans athletes dominating girls' sports, gay couples appearing in television ads). 

The Republicans will eviscerate whatever remains of the Voting Rights Act, will outlaw abortion even under the most dire of circumstances, and ignore any suggestions for common-sense gun-control legislation.  The United States will essentially become an autocracy, a religious autocracy at that.  Any efforts to reduce carbon emissions will be ridiculed as "woke," and much of the planet, if it hasn't already reached the tipping point, will become uninhabitable.  The United States will fall behind Europe and Asia in terms of education and technological advancement and life expectancy. We're already behind several other nations in many of these categories.

Of course, I'm an old man, and this ROM won't be alive to see many of the latter predictions above. But I hope the younger generation enjoys the shitty hellscape of a world we've left behind, and can take solace in the fact that at least they owned the libs and didn't fall for any woke ideology.

As David Berman once said, "The dead know what they're doing when they leave this world behind."

Alex

"Potential Tropical Cyclone One" has developed into a Tropical Storm and they named it Alex because, you know, "A." The storm dropped more than 10 inches of rain on Miami and 11 inches on Key Largo. The system didn't develop into a Tropical Storm until after it crossed the Florida Peninsula and met the warm Gulf Stream waters.  But rather than ride the Gulf Stream up the East Coast, it appears that it will head out to sea and dissipate somewhere over the mid-Atlantic. 

Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, a gunman or gunmen opened fire on a South Street crowd during prime, Saturday nightlife hours.  Three people were killed and 11 wounded.  In addition to the recent massacres in Buffalo, Tulsa, and Uvalde, Texas, the Gun Violence Archive has counted more than 235 more mass shootings so far this year, defined as one in which four or more people were killed or injured. Shootings in the United States have risen sharply since the pandemic.

Atlanta is not exempt from the violence, and some Republicans here claim it's because of the actions (or inactions) of the former and current Mayors.  They are calling for the majority white Buckhead district to secede from majority black Atlanta and to form their own City. The secession effort thankfully failed to make the ballot this year and took a lot of steam out of the movement, but the secessionists (or segregationists if you prefer) haven't given up. However, I have yet to hear a coherent explanation from the movement on how the actions (or inactions) of past and present Atlanta mayors have caused crime to increase in Philadelphia, Buffalo, Tulsa, Uvalde, and elsewhere. When pressed for an answer, they just mutter something about BLM, and Antifa, and the "woke" agenda.  Not a compelling argument.

On Thursday, the House committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol will televise the first of its hearings, making their case based on more than 1,000 interviews and review of more than 125,000 records. Fortunately, an NBA Finals game isn't scheduled for that night (go Celtics!), and after two impeachment attempts and lack of any other serious disciplinary action, I can't wait to see how the Democrats blow it this time.

From the Gaming Desk

 

Okay, just because the so-called "real world," you know, the "consensus reality" everyone seems to talk about all the time, is going to hell in a handbasket doesn't mean we can't escape from time to time into the virtual reality of a video game.

While the planet is overheating, while Russia is pushing civilization to the very brink of nuclear annihilation, while the Republican Party in America is conspiring to replace representative democracy with a form of Christian-fascist authoritarianism, while the American populace seems intent of murdering each other with high-capacity assault rifles, and while economic disparity widens, intolerance is on the increase, and polarization is becoming the dominant force in formerly polite society, the Retired Old Man has been amusing himself with a string of fairly entertaining video games. This year alone saw him complete the following games:

• Far Cry 6 - Far from a perfect game, and those who've criticized the game as a clone of the previous Far Cry games have a point.  But that formula developed by the previous games has been successful because quite frankly, the games are fun to play.  You play the games as a hero who learns of his abilities of create mayhem and succeed at asymmetrical combat, single-handedly overtaking heavily fortified enemy encampments.  Far Cry 6 takes place on a Caribbean island similar to Cuba, but who cares about the plot or the politics or the characters?  You get to shoot helicopters out of the sky with a backpack-mounted missile launcher, jump from aircraft and very high places equipped with a wingsuit and a parachute, and battle forces under the command of Giancarlo Esposito (Gus Fring from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul).  Danny Trejo even shows up for a while playing himself.  Not the deepest intellectual experience, but lots of fun.
• The Mass Effect Trilogy - A series of well-written science-fiction games complete with their own backstories, lore, and mythology.  You play as the commander of a spaceship, a sort of James Kirk from the Star Trek series but whichever gender you choose, and engage in a literally intergalactic battle against multi-dimensional entities intent of annihilating existence itself.  Meanwhile, you have a large cast of characters for your crew, each with their own back story and quest lines, that you have to manage and keep in line.  Part of the charm of the series is following the development of video game technology from the first Mass Effect (2007) game to Mass Effect 2 (2010) to Mass Effect 3 (2012).  But the real satisfaction of the game comes from the way it reveals the histories, customs, and manners of the multiple species of aliens in your crew, all without being pedantic or boring, and not requiring the player to read volumes and volumes of embedded texts like the Elder Scrolls games (although there are embedded texts in the Mass Effect universe if one is curious to know more). A fun series of games with true role-playing attributes (decisions made in early gameplay have implications later in the games) and one the ROM would gladly replay, if not for the next game in the queue.
• Horizon Zero Dawn - While most of Western Civilization (as well as the East for all I know) was busy playing the sequel, Horizon Forbidden West, the ROM was playing the original Horizon Zero Dawn.  A masterpiece of a video game, a fine example of the potential games have to provide an immersive, compelling experience.  The gameplay is fun (a LOT of fun) and the storyline is interesting.  The great voice actor Ashley Burch does a fine job as the voice of the main character, Aloy, and there are several other interesting characters in the game.  The setting and imagined world of the game - a far, far future Earth where a medieval-like civilization thrives amid the ruins of our current technology - is pretty original and unlike almost any other game, movie, or book I've experienced.  Much of the gameplay involves hunting or battling large, robotic animals, and both the fighting and the ultimate victories are quite satisfying.  Early in the game, you're given the weapons and lessons needed to "one-shot" some of those beasts, and the satisfaction of the sight and the sound of a mechanical raptor collapsing can't be understated. I'm looking forward to a replay and also to playing the sequel, Forbidden West. Truly one of the best games I've ever played.
• Days Gone - A change of pace, at least for me.  Bikers vs. zombies in rural Oregon. Sons of Anarchy meets The Walking Dead.  And just like those two television shows, not the deepest intellectual experience but if you turn off just a very small portion of your brain, a lot of fun.  The motorcycle simulator is well done and the scenery of the Oregon countryside is frequently breathtaking.  The "zombies" aren't actually zombies, per se, that is, not reanimated dead, but more like frenzied, mindless, cannibalistic victims of some virus a la 28 Days Later. The storyline is simple enough not to be a distraction but not so simple as to insult the intelligence. The real kick of the game, though, is battling hordes of the zombies - huge swarms of 100, 200, even in one case 500, of the monsters - huge masses of more bodies that you can shoot with your weapons and just as fast as you can run.  The first encounter with a swarm is truly a terrifying moment, and I imagine for most players, certainly this ROM, a fatal one.  You have to come up with clever techniques to either lead the swarm into a tight alley, where you can incinerate the trapped zombies with molotovs and napalm, or to spread out the heard where you can pick them off individually one by one.  But either way, once a swarm starts chasing you, it's a totally immersive, if terrifying, encounter and you're not thinking of anything else until the last one is dead.  And then you get to ride around on your motorcycle some more.  

Didn't intend to write capsule reviews of all those games when I started this post, but you never know how these things go.  Anyway, after six highly enjoyable games (four if you count the Mass Effect trilogy as a single game), I finally hit a relative dud.  Although I've liked the Fallout games I've played so far - Fallout 4, New Vegas, and the rebooted version of Fallout 76 (hated the original release of 76, though) - I was disappointed by Fallout 3, the game I played after Days Gone.  Some reviewers and a large portion of the Reddit community consider Fallout 3 to be "one of" the best of the series (New Vegas is widely regarded as the "very best").  I found 3 to be boring, poorly designed, and under-illuminated (the "atmospherics" praised by many reviewers apparently just means many of the settings are so poorly lit that one can barely see).  The game was released in 2008, an eternity ago in video-game years, and some of the shortcomings may be due to the technology available to the game designers back then, although Mass Effect 1 was actually released a year earlier and doesn't feel nearly as clunky.

But anyway, I slogged my way through the game, completing quests that didn't interest me and fighting enemies I couldn't care less about. What I found most interesting was the backstory and lore of some of factions of later Fallout games, like the early version of the Brotherhood of Steel and the Enclave (I was never really sure who the Enclave even were until I played 3). I bought the "Game of the Year" edition of the game, including all of the subsequent downloadable content and to be fair, I found the game's DLCs rather enjoyable, at least compared to the base game.  But to be honest, if I had only bought the base game, I probably wouldn't have added the DLCs based on that primary experience.

Fallout 3 is a big game, especially with all of the DLCs.  According to Steam, I started the game on April 19 and despite my reservations, I managed to put some 116½ hours of play into it, putting it right between Far Cry 3 (113½ hours) and Far Cry 5 (120½ hours) in terms of hours played. 

About a week ago (and I'm just now getting to the point I originally wanted to make when I started this post), I fired up another vintage, 2007 game, Bioshock.  Technically, Bioshock's play mechanisms were more like the enjoyable Mass Effect (2007) experience than that of the clunky Fallout 3 (2008).  In fact, I'd go even further and say it was quite good, despite being 15 years old.  It's a short game - I completed it in a mere 18 hours - but I have to say it's one of the most original, unique games I've played.  It's set in an underwater city, Rapture, designed and built by a sort of John Galt inventor and industrialist, who spouts nearly non-stop Ayn Rand-type philosophy.  It's particularly satisfying killing him in-game (I beat him to death with his own golf club) and finally shutting him up (sometimes I wish I had that option for random dudes who for some reason want to argue with me about Objectivism).

But the game is so unique and original that at times I had no idea what was going on.  You have the typical first-person shooter weapons - pistol, machine gun, a flame-thrower, and if all else fails, a good old reliable pipe wrench - but you also acquire some mutant, recombinant-DNA abilities powered by something called "Adam."  Or is it "Eve?" - there's an "Eve" you're supposed to monitor as well as "Adam."  

And then the quests often get quite convoluted.  At one point, while you're trying to get to a safer, higher floor of the city, your pathway gets blocked by debris.  The plot then goes something like the door to the alternative pathway is locked, so you need to find the key.  But the path to the last known location of the key is guarded by a character who demands you fight some other opponent before he lets you pass, but that opponent can only be beaten by acquiring another "Adam" (or "Eve") superpower at some other, distant location.  So off you go, looking for that power, all this while you're getting randomly attacked by random enemies of various strengths and abilities.  By the time you get the power, beat the opponent, are allowed to pass the guardian, find the key, and then unlock the door, you've forgotten (I'd forgotten) why you wanted to go through in the first place.

But on one level, who cares?  It's about playing the game, and the game play was fun.  So much so, that after completing the game in the mere 18 hours, I've already started a second replay - maybe it will all make more sense to me the second time through.

So that's been my secret, behind-the scenes, virtual second life spent away from the wicked real world of ours.  I can be upset about the recent spate of mass killings (I am!), outraged about Putin's decimation of Ukraine (the bastard!), and angry over the latest Republican shenanigans and flaccid Democratic response (are you fucking kidding me?), or I can go virtual and save a Caribbean banana republic from itself, command a spacecraft, hunt post-apocalyptic animatronics, or shoot zombies from my motorcycle.  I can try to negotiate peace in a post-nuclear dystopia or do whatever it is I'm supposed to be doing in Bioshock's Rapture.

The advantage of the virtual alternative is that if I don't like the way it's all going, I can just turn the computer off, or write a snarky review on my blog.

"And when you spread out your palms in prayer, I hide my eyes from you. Even though you make many prayers, I am not listening, for your very hands are stained with blood." (Isaiah 1:15)

"And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full." (Matthew 6:5)

We don't have a gun problem in America.  We don't have a mental health, godless liberalism, broken family, video game, or over-abundant doorway problem either.  America has a Republican problem, and until we get rid of every last one of those bloodsuckers, children will continue to die in our schools.

I've become very pessimistic about the state of the world - not just America, but the whole damn planet.  I've come to embrace the Tragic View - resolution to our myriad problems can only be found in the extinction of our species.  Humans, homo sapiens, descended from the same common ancestor as gorillas and chimpanzees - territorial, aggressive simians that hunt and fight in organized, patriarchal troops led by the strongest, most dominant members.  We did not descend from the common ancestor of bonobos, those friendly, communal simians who live in peaceful, matriarchal societies. Were that it was the other way around!

Aha!, you think.  Gotcha! Aren't you being just as bad as those warlike gorillas and chimpanzees by blaming the "other" tribe, in this case, the Republicans. on the world's problems? Yes, I am, and while I can make a logical, connect-the-dots case for assigning the blame, I can't help but be tribal about it.  I'm genetically hardwired that way, just as we all are.  It's our evolutionary "original sin."  It's who we are.

I guarantee you this: when some combination of catastrophic climate change, starvation, nuclear war, and infectious disease reduces the world's human population to just two individuals, those two individuals will be at war and would kill each other on sight.

Oh, did I mention catastrophic climate change?  It's only June 3 today, the third official day of the 2022 Hurricane Season, and we already have a "Potential Tropical Cyclone One" forecast to cross the Florida peninsula this weekend.  Considerable flash- and urban flooding is possible across South Florida and the Keys.  Life-threatening flooding and mudslides are possible across western Cuba.

Maybe we'll get lucky and the floods will clear the area of our loathsome species (that's the Tragic View talking). Maybe they will drown Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who today announced his intention to deny Medicare benefits to transgender children.  Think about it - the elected Governor of a state is using his political power not to benefit the people he represents, but to deny a minority portion access to affordable health care to gain political points from a majority portion.  That's some tribal simian shit right there.  And don't even get me started on denying women, fully half the population, access to safe abortion.  That's some hard-core patriarchal action.

In bonobo society, on the rare occasion that a large male individual is seen bullying, harrassing, or dominating a weaker female, all the females in the tribe will rally to her defense and stop the male aggression.  Wouldn't it be something if all the women and transgender youths of Florida all rallied in Tallahassee, and publicly castrated Ron DeSantis?  Not saying they should do that, but wouldn't it be something?  Just throwing some ideas out there. Something to think about.  Not a recommendation, just a suggestion.

"Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets." - Travis Bickle, Taxi  Driver (1976)

Here We Go! . . .

It's June 1, the first official day of the 2022 Hurricane Deason, and lookie here - we already have two potential storms.

The yellow one above has only about a 10% chance of forming into a tropical depression, and even if it does, it'll likely head out to sea and get swept away by the Gulf Stream. Not gonna worry much about that one.

But the red storm now over the Yucatan Peninsula has a 70 to 80% chance of becoming a tropical depression, and a tropical depression can then form a tropical storm and possibly even a hurricane.  The system is forecast to travel over western Cuba and Florida.  If it reaches the Sunshine State, it could drop as much as a half foot of rain and cause widespread flooding.  

Due to an on-going La Nina, warmer-than-average temperatures in the Atlantic and Caribbean, weak trade winds, and an enhanced West African monsoon, NOAA predicts an above-normal 2022 Hurricane Season.

So here we go - good times ahead! Wheeee!