Category: FreeDumb®

Hands on

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments
Many hands make light work.

We smashed the State yesterday. You’re welcome.

Herself and I were part of a crowd guesstimated in the thousands that piled into Civic Plaza for our local Hands Off! rally, taking a raucous stand against fascism.

We carpooled with two friends to the thing, and met up with a few others at the plaza. Frankly, I was not expecting a big turnout — the “high” temperature of 43° just missed the record low, set in 1983, by a single degree — but I was delighted to be proven unsmart as per usual.

In Bibleburg it was easy to think we were the only libtards in town, though we knew better; it just felt that way sometimes. As in almost always, especially during election years.

In Duck!Burg, we’re surrounded by fellow travelers — but even here, with the endless cascade of caca pouring out of DeeCee, some days it seems that no umbrella, no matter how all-encompassing, can keep the stink off you.

So, yeah — even I, Captain Cynicism, was moved to see the throng hooting and hollering along with emcee Robert Luke, legendary activist Dolores Huerta, Mayor Tim Keller, former Interior Secretary turned gubernatorial candidate Deb Haaland, state Attorney General Raúl Torrez, former Albuquerque poet laureate Mary Oishi, and others.

Better than nothing, but only barely.

There were so many excellent, creative, handmade signs in evidence that I regretted dogging it and downloading prefabs from the Hands Off! people. My faves included “Shut Your Heil Hole,” the ever-popular “Elect a Clown, Expect a Circus,” and “Deport This Pendejo,” with an image of everyone’s favorite Swasticar salesman. There was even an excellent “Chingatumaga” placard, which we praised to its grinning creator.

So, props to Hands Off! and their partners for pulling off this nationwide dance party, which grabbed a whole lot of headlines. Now, the question is … where do we go from here? Or as that old troublemaker V.I. Lenin put it, “What is to be done?”

Saints preserve us

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments

It being St. Me Day, and with a nod to The New York Times for its story on how the DOGEbags have been taking a shillelagh to the National Nuclear Security Administration — which is said to have lost “a huge cadre of scientists, engineers, safety experts, project officers, accountants and lawyers — all in the midst of its most ambitious endeavors in a generation” — we present The Bothy Band performing, “Old Hag You Have Killed Me.”

‘If you’re a bum, you’re a bum’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
“You know why people call you a bum? Because it makes them feel better when they say it.”

From The Associated Press (yeah, those bums):

Stocks tumbled in morning trading on Wall Street Tuesday as a trade war between the U.S. and its key trading partners escalated, wiping out all the gains for the S&P 500 since Election Day.

“Only I can fix it,” the other bum sez. He’s fixin’ it, a’ight. Tariffic.

Ignorance is strength

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
“Hey, I said no DEI! Who wrote this?”

The FreeDummies have finally turned their beady little eyes to the Land of Enchantment.

According to Alaina Mencinger at The New Mexican, Los Alamos National Laboratory has been “suspending programs related to diversity, equity and inclusion and climate change and scrubbing old issues of the lab’s magazine that discuss these now-disfavored topics.”

LANL employees are federal contractors, not federal employees. Nevertheless, a review has determined that at least two of Dear Leader’s edicts apply to the lab’s DEI and affirmative-action programs, “and the lab is ending such programs as a result,” Mencinger writes.

The New Mexican apparently got its hands on some internal communications — a memo signed by lab director Thom Mason went out Thursday — and bits of this, that, and the other have already begun slip-sliding away down the old memory hole, among them issues of LANL’s National Security Science magazine, focused on anything and everything from climate to diversity, nuclear deterrence to manufacturing.

And it’s not just magazines getting fed into the shredder. According to Mason, LANL has “received guidance” to suspend climate action, sustainability and carbon-neutral energy programs. It goes without saying that LANL is also removing “relevant terminology” from external communications.

But, good news, comrades! “The removal of some content isn’t permanent,” according to the Ministry for Sit the Fuck Down and Shut the Fuck Up.

“To comply with recent direction from the Presidential administration, parts of our website are temporarily unavailable while they’re under construction. We appreciate your patience as we work to update and repost them. … You may notice changes to our website while we reconstruct pages and evaluate language.”

Huh. “Construction” and “update” are not the words I would have chosen for this odious project. As for “evaluating language,” I’d be inclined to leave that sort of thing to the smarties, who are very much not in evidence as the Stalinization of the federal government continues.