I said before everything that needed to be said.  Yet here we are again. There are so many mass shootings that we hardly need special attention for them anymore, lest we risk becoming The Onion reprinting the same article over and over again.

I've mentioned stochastic terrorism before. Keith Olbermann, of course, is using the same language for this event, because it's clear that Republicans in Colorado were speaking for years to encourage exactly this outcome. How many times have you heard about "grooming" from politicians during the last year? It's been popular in Florida for decades, the same place where somebody thinks they could challenge Trump for the presidency. There are no "sides" to an argument when one person thinks that other people just fundamentally should not exist at all. Somebody is grooming people, yes, but for violence. That's stochastic terrorism in a nutshell. AOC, my progressive hero and hopefully the next president, tells people to "connect the dots".


And this white-skinned terrorist previously was in custody for felony menacing and three counts of first-degree kidnapping for a bomb threat, but the District Attorney declined to prosecute then the court records were sealed. What now? Who was this District Attorney, a "bleeding heart liberal being soft on crime"? No, wait, it was a Republican who provided these answers during their recent campaign.


Not knowing anything else about the bomb threat (because the records were sealed), I have to assume the Family Guy racism color chart is at play in this release. We learned nothing from Kyle Rittenhouse, it seems. This emboldened young white guy went on to demand in August that a newspaper remove its article about his arrest since no charges were filed. It's still online because, of course, the threat actually happened.  And he went on to mass murder.

Fuck your NRA.
Fuck your Republican party.
Fuck your USA 2nd Amendment.
Fuck your pro-life fucking bullshit.
Fuck your goddamned obstructionist voting.
Fuck your ammosexual gun and violence idolatry.
Fuck your useless fucking thoughts and fucking prayers.

Why the fuck do you make us all live in your fucking demented hellscape?

And fuck Democrats who can't do any fucking thing even when they hold both chambers of fucking Congress.

This is the view from my front door this morning. This is the weather for the protests yesterday and last night.

I'm feeling slightly better this morning. Still enormously distracted, though. Definitely not feeling focused on work like I should be at this hour, while I'm writing this blog entry. I'm reading up on the events of last night, and it's just as bad as I expected.

I've told this story before (back during yet another police murder of another local black man), but it bears repeating.

I'm old enough that I remember when cops would enter gay bars for no justifiable reason whatsoever. The too-loud dance music would immediately end, the disco lights would go off, the loud chatter in the bar would stop. White lights would turn on... and then there would be nothing but the sound of police boots as a group of cops entered the room. They walked the entire perimeter of the small bar, then they walked out again. No other sound. No word spoken by anyone.  Both sides looking at each other, wondering "What will they do?", and both sides knowing that only one side will suffer if anybody does anything at all to disturb this ritual display of authority and submission.

I remember.  I was there.

This old (white male straight (I assume)) Minnesota professor's summary is still best for these recent events:


Another day.  My thanks to all the protesters who continued yesterday, while I'm feeling old and tired and frustrated.

The curfew begins at 7pm today.  The road I drove to work in the morning was blocked off this afternoon.  It passes directly by the local Federal Reserve building, which got its own National Guard troops during last year's riots.  There are plenty of news articles with photos showing how authorities responded yesterday (local story) too.  Traffic on my alternate path home was gridlocked worse than before covid arrived.  After stopping at the grocery store on my way home, I passed military vehicles stationed at a mini-plaza area about a dozen blocks from my house. 

Freakin' military vehicles and troops are in my neighborhood!  Because yet another cop killed yet another black man for no justifiable reason at all.  Where I got my covid shot last week, that's about halfway between where Daunte Wright was killed and the police precinct where people went to protest.  It's a suburb neighboring Minneapolis to the northwest.

Early word is that the officer called out "Tazer" but shot a gun instead.  It doesn't matter if it was a mixup.  It straight up Does. Not. Matter.

1) Accepting that defense would mean, as we've said all along, that people trained to self-authorize a killing act cannot be trusted to act in any situation that does NOT require killing.  They will make deadly mistakes, and those mistakes cannot be tolerated.  Those mistakes SHOULD NOT be tolerated!  As we keep saying, time and again and again and again and again.

2) Accepting that defense would mean that every police encounter has an immediate loophole.  It's the same ploy used by "stand your ground" legislation.  All you have to do is claim that you perceived the situation in a way that justifies a plausible action.  It becomes an opinion which replaces as fact the actual situation.  It's a self-justification with no accountability.  This escape route is perfectly illustrated in this very old South Park comedy clip.  All that officers would have to do is start shouting "Tazer" every time they fire a bullet.  Don't allow it.  End it now.


3) Accepting that defense would mean that fully trained professionals are forgiven to act irresponsibly, while untrained civilians must act perfectly or just accept getting killed by their own government.  Anytime an encounter results in an observer thinking, "They should've just done [x]", then we're holding the public to a higher standard than the government itself.  Don't do that.  That's backwards.

I am angry that police killed again.

I am angry that military are stationed in my neighborhood.

I am angry that my government will go to any freakin' lengths to preserve its status quo.

As an old, white male Minnesota professor put it so appropriately in a tweet earlier today:


I think a lot of people are finally realizing the necessity of the changes that we've been advocating.  No more stalling!

My tolerance continues to fray.  Here's a 2-minute video recording that I clipped from the public meeting that my city councilmember held on October 8th. 
http://www.deltaworld.info/media/jordan/minneapolis.ward5.publicsafety.20201008.mp4  (12MB)

When I wrote my earlier "dream" post and started yelling that people should listen to what I hear daily, that was exactly the day that the police officer described in the above MP4 clip.

• 400 people shot, 60 dead, so far this year in Minneapolis
• 809 guns recovered thus far in 2020, a 90% increase over 2019
• 4th police precinct includes my Jordan neighborhood and others here in north Minneapolis
• 42% of all guns recovered in city of Minneapolis are recovered in 4th precinct
• 2020 October 07 Wednesday, 250 bullets fired between 6pm-11pm in 4th precinct

When I repeatedly over years refer to my area as the #WarzoneInMinneapolis, I AM NOT KIDDING!  When government and people of all levels continue to ignore this disaster of a civilization, it is starting to make me angry.  When people talk about going out for a walk to relax in these stressful times, I want to heave an annoyed sigh and glare at them for being so ignorantly privileged to enjoy their own safe sidewalks.  When people talk about traveling for vacations (especially to foreign countries), I want to yell at them to pay some much needed attention to their own crumbling territory first.

I DARE YOU to name exactly what either Donald Trump or Joe Biden would do that will make life better HERE.  On my street.  There were candidates that had ideas that seemed targeted at exactly these painful oversights of government, but people somewhere are collectively responsible for sidelining all of them.  I'm willing to make significant changes.  I blame everyone else for being unwilling to see the suffering that happens near them or to actually solve it.

I am feeling significantly uncharitable to everything associated with "status quo".  The two separate Americas are entirely unsustainable.

It was another rough night with gunshots a few houses away. I got about 3 hours of sleep. The violence has been bad here in recent days. They even did a special news segment last night about the weapons that actually harmed people. My house is at the far north side of their map. They failed to mention ANYthing about the many bullets flying everywhere that do NOT hit someone. It really is a #WarzoneInMinneapolis here.

As I learned last year upon self-reflection after "Engaging Across Difference" training at work, frustration can make simple-but-wrong solutions very attractive. Systemic changes are too slow, yet we need fast relief. I'm facing that problem again. I'm certain that we need both kinds of solutions here in my Jordan neighborhood of Minneapolis. I promised a post back in January, and someone at work asked me online today:


There's simply no time to wait decades for system changes. Everyone in my area needs and deserves immediate relief from the stress of circumstances here. What does it look like to SOLVE some of the underlying problems instead of merely SUPPRESSING or RELOCATING the symptoms?

Drug-selling business:
Legalize everything.  If my crack house neighbors want to "play" at running a business, then make them actually do it.  1) When they have a dispute with a competing business, make them buy lawyers and advertising to solve it instead of literally killing their competition (and anyone else nearby).  2) Make them pay taxes to help rebuild the streets, sidewalks, fences, and trash cans for all of the extra car traffic and foot traffic they bring.  3) Calm them down by preventing their DEFENSIVE posture of hiding their business.  Instead, encourage an OPEN posture of advertising so they can establish a stake within the community for themselves.

Drug-buying customers:
Raise minimum wage and/or establish Universal Basic Income so people can afford to put food in their belly, keep a roof over their head, and keep clothes on their bodies (bare minimum survival standards) without the constant fear-stress of systemic failures facing all of us these days.  For the poor here, there are not enough jobs and not enough money to meet basic needs.  Remove that stress, because people are heavily self-medicating with bad drugs and bad food.  Remove that need.  Now.  Also, legalize marijuana completely.  Let people grow pot in their garden if they want, again to remove the DEFENSIVE nature of it now and promote OPENNESS instead.  Remove the chronic fear-stress of hiding everything all of the time.

Basic survival needs:
Make food, clothing, shelter, and healthcare easily available.  Other countries do it, and the USA is supposedly better than them, so what's the issue here?  I eliminated grass from my front yard and planted strawberries, raspberries, and juneberries.  Everyone is welcome to pick them.  I'm even putting in a path to make it easier for visitors to pick food here (picture at left).  Someone at the end of the block has a "Sharing Is Caring" plastic tub filled with durable food products, free for the taking.  More edible landscaping in the city, please!  More free food lines!  There should be a fixed location in every neighborhood, every day, where someone can get a free meal.  It shouldn't matter if they're too poor to afford food or too mentally broken to prepare their own food.  Once-a-month church events are woefully insufficient.  No adult who is sleep-deprived, nutrition-deprived, and chronically stressed is going to perform well in daily planning, job interviews, or job performance.  Relieve those precursor problems.

Gunfire:
A lot of gunfire here is simple anger/aggression not related to drug business.  Why are so many people (usually male) resorting to violence to relieve their emotions?  I'm not a good person to address this problem.  I'm too self-absorbed to worry what other people think.  My answer to distress is always self-isolation.  I understand that most other people are "built" as social animals and need to develop their skills of non-fatal problem resolution.  I dunno.  More hippie drum circles and Buddhist meditation chants?  LOL  I want those things, yes, but we need to help people other than just me.  Or, taking the opposite tactic, more official training in violent arts?  Would formal training in boxing, karate, and gunfire remove the novelty factor of violence and instill a responsibility ethic instead?

Education:
SHOW kids how they can affect their own future paths in life.  The high school a few blocks from my house has a 13% graduation rate after 4 years, and a 40% graduation rate after 5 years.  Without kids of my own, I'm ignorant about the failure here.  Is someone not encouraging them to build things (woodcraft, gardening, painting, programming, cooking, writing)?  Is someone not encouraging their curiosity (reading, science, history, architecture)?  Are they sleep-deprived (frequent shouting at home or neighborhood gunfire)?  Are they hungry?  Create more local events in every neighborhood that provide food (free/cheap) and peaceful socializing.  If I try to imagine myself failing as these kids are, I can think only of the futility of existence, a lack of personal motivation for effort that's never rewarded.  SHOW them that they matter.  Their hobbies matter.  Their attention matters.  Their voting matters.

Healthcare:
Tax and spend appropriately.  Defund the police to spend for training and job positions that will actually help here.  People here need crisis counseling, family counseling, all kinds of mental health care, normal physician care, environmental justice, and more.  Stop procastinating, government; make it happen.

What will not help: putting National Guard troops at checkpoints on every street corner.  My gut wants that immediate solution, but my brain knows that it's not really a solution.  It's just a suppression of symptoms, not a cure for the underlying disease that needs healing.

Please...  if you have additional suggestions, please create a free Dreamwidth account to add your ideas here.  It matters.  I want things to change.  Everyone here in Jordan in Minneapolis DESERVES for things to change.  It stresses me out to live here, when I already have the adult mental skills to comprehend the complexity involved.  I can't imagine what parents teach their kids about living here, amidst the crime and violence and gunfire.

People at work were taking plants home from the office today, like they were expecting not to return for a month. I wondered why everyone was in such a panic. I stopped after work at a nearby brewery to get their discounted 3-for-2 pricing on crowlers to put in my refrigerator. Another patron asked why it was so empty and quiet there today. The bartenders said it was because the news all day had been terrible. I went from there to the local Aldi (cheap grocery) store.  The parking lot was nearly full, even on a Thursday evening. This photo shows the shelf where they usually have paper towels and toilet paper.

I got home from work and scanned the headlines. Wow. Maybe it's time for one of those beers and a few jokes to lighten the mood.

1. It's weird that people keep stockpiling toilet paper, when they should be buying condoms. If the USA goes on mandatory lockdown for 2-4 weeks, does anybody else expect a spike of births in 9 months?  Okay, maybe, maybe not.


2. All these companies expecting people to work from home across the whole USA at the same time are going to be in for a surprise.  You're there at home, repeatedly dropping out of teleconference sessions that worked fine last month, because your neighbors now are all watching watching Netflix and YouTube on 4K televisions, using up bandwidth on the home neighborhood networks.  Monopolies and their lack of infrastructure investment.  Gotta love it.  I mean, what else can we possibly do? 


3. It's weird that Trump prohibited incoming travel from Europe when the USA is already 8th internationally for COVID-19 cases.  We're barely even testing for the virus, and we're still 8th.  If guesses are right, we're actually #1 internationally, including China itself.  Maybe everyone else should ban incoming travel from the USA.  Ha ha.  That's funny because Trump's an idiot, and he's our president.  The joke is on us, and about 2% of infected Americans will die.

I'll write a serious post tomorrow, something about concrete steps to take that will actually help in this ongoing epidemic.  For now, I'll crack open one of those crowlers and chill in front of the tv for a while.  Doom can wait.

It's been about 9 months since I last posted about this Republican administration, but today's absurdity deserves a new mention. The conservative spokespeople are already out in force, getting their condemnations of Trump's speech into the historical record, before they go back to supporting the egregious policies of this U.S. President and protecting him from impeachment proceedings.

Even after the indictments that came out a few days ago, people are still saying this Russia investigation is pointless. I occasionally join a group that meets at local breweries, and recently someone there said people he knew in the intelligence community were all saying that Trump would spend his life in jail. What Mueller knows hasn't been made public yet. It will become known, eventually. Some members of Congress probably know some of the details, yet they're all still rooting for their team instead of for the law. They are responsible for presidential oversight, and they have willingly shirked their duty. I hold them accountable too.

As Ron Perlman said in his usual blunt and partisan way:



I'll keep saying it with the usual lack of effect:


And it's not just Trump. I also blame all Republicans for this point in our history. They spent an estimated $100 million investigating Hillary Clinton across many years, and some of that time they had full control of the national government. And they came up with nothing. Zilch. Nada. They are incompetent at governing.

Republicans resort to high school pep rally histrionics, because they've got no actual facts to support their agenda. Remember when that previous man-baby interrupted the U.S. State Of The Union address to shout, "You lie!" at Obama? Yet Trump tells multiple lies daily, and Republicans make no effort whatsoever to rein him in. They're incompetent, and they run government like a high school popularity contest.


Trump is a terrible president who has corroded standards of decency in government. We still haven't seen his tax returns. I'm sure that he has interests in so many global corporations and foreign nations that few would ever believe he was serving the USA and its constitution. They've believed Trump up to now, but maybe those tax returns would just be "too much".

They should've known better. I didn't vote for Hillary Clinton (see: "Plutocrats" above; stop voting for them already!), but she really forecast the future well in regards to Trump. NATO, European Union, immigration, etc.

As one of the "rogue" U.S. Government twitter accounts puts it:


When Mueller is done, I'm sure it'll cost more than just Trump's presidency. From his nominees to Congressional intentional unwillingness to see the truth, I'm sure much of the Republican establishment will lose its shine. Even the NRA is now being traced back to Russian money and influence, and it has resulted in one arrest already.

In the Republican party's appeal to old white people, they've lost the next generation.  This recent quote is from David Hogg, one of the high school students who survived a mass shooting event. (Does it really matter which one, when there are so many?)

 
More and more people are reaching the conclusion that plutocracy must go.  I'm with them.  I have been since the Occupy movement and probably before.

2018 July 17 update: I see today that I was long on opinion and short on evidence.  A few hours later, Rachel Maddow did an excellent journalism show that pieced together many of the data points in this recent burst of outrage.  The first 5 minutes are mostly about Trump himself, but the next 20 minutes cover the Russia probe results, the NRA-associated Russian now in jail, and why it's obvious that many American citizens cooperated/colluded in this process.
https://youtu.be/ySZvUCFR4tk

My car died.  I've had it in the shop for 1.5 days, and the mechanic finally called to say he estimated $2200 in repairs.  He said the onboard computer offered a long list of problems: camshaft, ignition coil, head gasket, and other stuff. For that price, I might as well try to get another vehicle instead.  Living without a car is a lot cheaper, however, since Minnesota currently has the highest gas prices in the contiguous 48 states. I guess I'm back to being motorless again.

The bus schedule is awful.  I made it to work today on the bus.  Unfortunately, bus service operates within a very narrow window of time near my workplace, so I have to be up at the first bus stop by 7am, and I don't get home until 5pm.  It's a terribly inefficient use of time (10 hours) for what would in normal circumstances be just a 4-hour shift at work.

My leg is still not 100%.  I would enjoy commuting by bicycle, except that my leg is still not fully healed.  I can walk, yes, but very slowly with a slight limp.  The doctor warned me specifically against exercising as soon as I felt "able".  I don't have many options, though.

I finally applied for a credit card through State Farm Insurance, the same company where I've paid my car insurance for the last 20 years or so.  Maybe my long history with them will motivate them to take pity on me by granting me a line of credit.  At least then I can dump my many medical bills into a single debt for more convenient payment.  I'd rather owe money just 1 place rather than several places.

I also finally applied for a new job.  I found an opening in the Twin Cities where they wanted a Powershell programmer.  The rest of the skills were only a moderate match for me, but the job itself is something I'm certain I can do and enjoy.  Plus, they'd pay me 4-5X what I'm currently earning.  I don't normally motivate for cash, but I'll make an exception under these trying circumstances.

Meanwhile, I suppose I'll dump some money into a bus transit card and muddle through.

I forgot to mention in yesterday's post that Target and Best Buy had the largest tents at Pride.  I tried to walk around them a few times rather than directly past them because they're both still on my boycott list.  Somebody had them in mind even before Pride weekend...


Yay!  That's Patrick of Patrick's Cabaret fame.  I've also seen him out at Radical Faerie events before.  Thank goodness somebody has more dramatic sense than I do.

In related news, at least this year's Pride festival had a state governor participating for the first time.