Category: Deep political thought

Some like it hot

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments
Lessee, there’s freedom of the press, freedom of speech,
and freedom to run like hell from the cops with their heat ray. Got it.

H.G. Wells got it wrong. Mars isn’t the problem.

Before the feds drove protesters from Lafayette Square in June, according to an Army National Guard major who was there, the Defense Department’s top military police officer in the Washington region emailed officers in the D.C. National Guard to ask whether the unit had “a microwave-like weapon called the Active Denial System, which was designed by the military to make people feel like their skin is burning when in range of its invisible rays.”

According to The Washington Post:

The technology, also called a “heat ray,” was developed to disperse large crowds in the early 2000s but was shelved amid concerns about its effectiveness, safety and the ethics of using it on human beings.

Pentagon officials were reluctant to use the device in Iraq. In late 2018, The New York Times reported, the Trump administration had weighed using the device on migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border — an idea shot down by Kirstjen Nielsen, then the Homeland Security secretary, citing humanitarian concerns.

But in the email, on which DeMarco was copied, the lead military police officer in the National Capital Region wrote the ADS device “can provide our troops a capacity they currently do not have, the ability to reach out and engage potential adversaries at distances well beyond small arms range, and in a safe, effective, and nonlethal manner.”

Federal police ultimately were unable to obtain a heat ray device — or an LRAD — during the early days of protests in D.C., according to the Defense Department official.

“During the early days,” hey? Don’t forget to wear your Alcoa cammies when you’re out smashing the state, boys and girls. And spray yourself with a little olive oil, maybe stuff a few onions, taters, and carrots into your undies. The “Martians” are going to need a lunch break at some point.

From here to eternity

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
Green now, sure, but the gold is just around the corner.

Don’t let the green leaves fool you. It’s September out there. Sixty degrees at 8 a.m. in Albuquerque, and Old Man Gloom goes up in smoke at 9 p.m. tonight in Fanta Se.

Speaking of burns, approximately nobody, save the Volk wearing their MAGA hats a couple-three sizes too small, was surprised by Jeffrey Goldberg’s piece in The Atlantic describing Adolf Twitler’s thoughts on the “losers” and “suckers” who died for their country instead of blackjacking it in some dark alley and going through its pockets.

Charlie Pierce has some thoughts of his own regarding the Good Soldiers who continued to work for the craven sonofabitch, knowing full well that this is how he sees them and theirs.

They took an oath to defend the Constitution, not to hold their tongues until they could get a book deal as a reckless vandal takes the Republic down, brick by brick. Of all the people whom history will account as being complicit in the attempted demolition of constitutional government, I rank them ahead even of the invertebrate Republicans in the United States Senate.

Sixty days until we get a chance to start rebuilding the Republic. It seems like an eternity.

Off to the races

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 25 Comments

Well, ladeez an’ gennulmens, there you have it.

In a perfect world this would not be my idea of the ideal progressive ticket. But we’re more than a few ZIP codes away from perfect.

The gibbering gobshite besmirching the Oval Office at present is only a secondary infection of the body politic. The primary ailment is a political/economic system designed to shovel wealth upward to people who already have too much of it.

They get their shining city on a hill. We get the big hole in the ground. Hey, the landfill has to go somewhere. Also, the graveyard. Coffee break’s over, bitches. That moola ain’t gonna shovel itself.

Louis C.K. is not a gent I’m fond of citing lately, but he was spot on when he had Kurt, a nihilistic barfly in “Horace and Pete,” describe what Adolf Twitler’s supporters wanted: not to fix the system, but to destroy it.

I can dig it. It feels good to break things. In the short term, anyway. Cleaning up afterward is a chore, though, and then you have to either fix or replace what you broke. Especially if it’s something you need, like the government or the economy.

I don’t expect miracles from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. We’re just hiring another cleanup crew here, is all.

They’re both pragmatic pols, and they don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. We can expect them to lean our way for a while, even after they win in November. If they win in November. And if we give them a Congress that functions. Lots of moving parts in this machine.

But we’re going to have to keep an eye on them, make sure they’re shoveling, and in the proper direction, too.

And while Joe and Kamala do the scutwork, the rest of us need to think long and hard about what this country needs to be, and how it came to be what it is.