Day Progresses into Decline

Today, after my early morning rising and activity, progressed more or less into a span of rest and inactivity, me spending much of it in bed or on the living room couch.  I still ran in place for a few more minutes before leveling off.  Tomorrow morning they're staging another Depot Parkrun 5K.  I want to show up there and do at least one lap, with Melissa doing the valuable driving.  We're sitting right now in the dining room while AI Alexa is playing the piano version of It Came Upon a Midnight Clear...very pretty. Equally NOT very pretty is this overbearing missile war happening right now between USA, Iran and Israel...enough of that on the news! I suspect that the president dictator others elected will turn against his own people once he impatiently declares victory and moves on to new perceived enemies that challenge his egomania...he'll use his own handpicked cronies as proxies. I still think that people...especially some of the more creepy ones from Utah...have lost their minds with their violent  rampages against each other. And I include Florida's Dixie and Marion counties in that indictment. Not a nice picture at all.  Now for me to digest my last food of the day.  Either I'll get up tomorrow morning at a good, early time or we'll just put off the next Parkrun until another time...

Cancel Culture from the Fascist Side about Kirk

The freaks hidden among the multitudes in our increasingly fascist America are the real menace in our society when it comes to assassinations, whether you're talking about JFK, Martin Luther King, Jr., RFK, the attempts against George Wallace, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, John Lennon, or the attempts against Trump in 2024...and the sniper shot against Charlie Kirk recently.  With all the guns floating around in clear view in our gun-crazy culture, an adept, murderous maniac can seize the opportunity and commit a horrendous act, pretty much from the vantage point of anonymity, if he or she has successfully been concealing from others any intentions of taking such action.  It does not require conspiracies from an extremist group, as some in the current fascist regime have angrily gone off about in public rage.  You or I might become famous, and if there is at least a little controversy accompanying that fame then chances are that somebody, somewhere will allow themselves to become offended and at least consider making us into a target.  It's interesting nowadays that the MAGA Trump boot-lickers are the ones practicing "politically correct" cancel culture on anyone they can get away with accusing of inappropriate comments about the murder or Kirk himself...reference recent outbursts by Stephen Miller, JD Vance and Pam Bondi.  This canceling of Jimmy Kimmel for suggesting (in my opinion, presumptuously and probably erroneously) that the shooter just might have been pro-Trump, is a spotlighted case in point.  Long ago I tired of watching these late-night "comedy" spectacles like Kimmel, Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers because of the political ugliness behind much (if not most of) their jokes, so not having Kimmel on doesn't change anything with me.  Besides, you can get your audience to laugh at the politicians you dislike, but try coaxing the same fans to actively and consistently participate in the voting process.  In EVERY available election, even those "boring" local and state contests.  Yeah, good luck with that...I think these smartass professional jokesters need to start ridiculing the electorate instead!  Then again, a lot of these half-ass, apathetic and emotion-driven voters seem to think that the meaning of democracy is going to protest rallies after their side has lost the election. Now THAT is a sick joke...   

Society Becoming Unhinged and Violent, Mirroring World Leaders

I'm looking around me and it doesn't look good.  People in society, and leaders around the world, are becoming mentally and morally unhinged, holding tight to their resentments and grudges and then exploding into acts of terror.  Putin keeps sending drones to bomb his neighbor Ukraine, knowing that the main result of his actions is murderous terror against ordinary civilians.  Yet in the interests of longevity he touts a vaccine that is supposed to ward off cancer, and in personal visits comes off seeming like a reasonable and congenial individual.  Those two children massacred in a Minnesota church by a sick monster, and the young Ukrainian immigrant woman who finished her work shift, boarded a Charlotte, North Carolina commuter train, and was promptly stabbed to death in random fashion by the young man who happened to be sitting behind her seat, are just the more recent examples of what I see as a complete breakdown in civil society. And this president of ours, I'm sure, would be an active part of this chain of violence and terror as he is governed by vengeance, fear and anger. I don't need to watch the national news to get more than my share of disheartening news.  The local news shows consistently come up with stories about people who shot up their own home or of others who got mad at someone at a party, workplace or bar and then went back to their car and returned, guns blazing with fury.  I go out of my way on my neighborhood walk/runs to keep my mouth shut and eyes trained on the road ahead of me, but this doesn't stop some motorists around me from slowing down and checking me out from safely behind their tinted windows as if my mere existence posed a kind of threat to them.  Life is fragile: that's a lesson I already learned but which was brutally reinforced in the last two years with the deaths of my son and sister-in-law.  Stephen King wrote a 2006 novel titled Cell, in which cellphone users would suddenly become violently deranged and go on killing sprees.  I don't think we're so far off from that scenario, I'm afraid. Lord, get me through this day...  

Boys with Toys

While shopping with Melissa the other day, I was very carefully steering our shopping cart past other customers along an especially crowded stretch of the store.  And then, straight toward us, an employee was casually pushing an imposing-looking pallet jack.  I watched him as he approached...and then he took out his cell phone and started looking at it while nonchalantly navigating his jack past without regard to anyone around...I guess it was up to us to get out of his way.  People whipping out their phones...what a scourge of our times.  Have you ever found yourself talking to someone, only to look over and see that they're zoned out and ignoring you, scrolling on their phone?  The only thing worse I know is the increasingly frightening circumstance of people...in anger...pulling out guns without any sense of restraint in using them.  It's become far too commonplace on the news to be met with the story of a shooter at a school, church, home or business...and often it's a minor who has committed the crime.  In the 1995 James Bond flick Goldeneye, Agent 007's Russian female partner Natalya Simonova had a contemptuous name for this phenomenon for pervasive and often harmful obsession with gadgetry: Boys with Toys.  So we're now living...or trying to stay alive...in the "Boys (and Girls) with Toys" era: whoopee...   

Quote of the Week...from Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall) in The Godfather

He never asks a second favor when he's been refused the first, understood?   

                                                                   Tom Hagen (played by Robert Duvall) from The Godfather

Tom Hagen is the adopted son and attorney of Don Vito Corleone...aka the Godfather in the famed movie series.  After being sent out to Hollywood to secure a sensitive favor from a belligerent movie producer, Hagen finds himself a guest at the dinner table as "Mr. Woltz" refuses the Godfather's request while indicating that he'd be only too happy to comply with any others.  Both parties know that the requested favor is only a superficial nicety to cover up what is essentially an extortion demand...do this or else.  That Vito Corleone thrived in a criminal environment of circumventing the law never kept him from enunciating and practicing his own "principles"...the above "one-and-done" refused favor being one of these.  Crime, extortion, violence...not at all for me, thank you.  Yet I can see the Don's point of view from my own life experiences of dealing with obnoxious people whose paper authority in certain settings goes to their heads as they try to remind me of our relative positions on their cherished, pathetic pecking orders.  I will ask such an individual for something once and if they make a grand show of resistance to my proposal based on their "superior" status, then that's the absolutely final time they will ever hear from me about any request...and they'd just better forget about me ever covering for their eventual mistakes as well.  The Godfather...I'm speaking about the original movie...is a masterpiece of psychological and social relationships, exposing the corruption beneath practically...if not all...institutions (including business, law, government and religion).  Corruption, I might add, enforced by its own extra-legal system of justice devoid of due process.  We like to pretend we live in a free society, but I strongly disagree for the above reason...

Just Finished Reading Devil in the Grove by Gilbert King

I just finished reading Gilbert King's historical work Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America.  Published in 2012, it won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction the following year.  It's an account, earlier in Marshall's career before his tenure on the United States Supreme Court, of when he was an NAACP lawyer defending blacks across the country, and of a case in Jim Crow-segregated central Florida in the late 1940s and early 1950s where four young black man were framed in a white supremist justice system for a rape that probably never happened.  Called the Groveland Four case after the southern Lake County town at the epicenter, King examines the deeply entrenched racism of the white community there at that time, with an extremely corrupt, racist sheriff and deputy who would stoop to any level to see to it that Charles Greenlee, Earnest Thomas, Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin would be executed for their alleged crimes.  If Marshall represented the virtuous, rescuing hero of this story then Sheriff Willis McCall would be the archvillain, closely tied in with the Ku Klux Klan and illegal gambling operations in the area.  On one evening outside Groveland, a poor rural white married couple, the Padgetts, got their car stuck in the mud...Shepherd and Irvin were together driving by, and stopped to help them get their car free.  Unsuccessful, the husband, Willie, got angry at them and after insulting them got on the short end of a fist fight with Shepherd.  That was the incident that later was turned into a gang rape allegation...the other two eventual defendants were nowhere near at the time and were sucked into the case by McCall.  Thomas, hearing that he was being accused of this capital offense, fled to the north Florida woods while the other three, while in detention, were beaten and whipped into forced confessions by deputy Yates and his partner...with McCall looking on.  I'll save relating the fates of these four innocent black men, two of them brave, returning World War II veterans, in case you decide to read or research the case for yourself.  Instead I'll discuss how the author chose to present it...

Gilbert King split his analysis of the Groveland Four case into sections whereby he described Thurmond Marshall's philosophy of defense and his different partners and associates within the NAACP, as well as his communications and relationships with the FBI, Florida governors, and the judges and prosecution.  The endemic racism of the South...and of Lake County, Florida in particular...of that time was emphasized as King related incidences of previous horrific lynchings of blacks.  This was crucial to the story as it showed the defense strategy Marshall would employ in trying to save his clients from the electric chair.  The citrus growers would use cheap black prison labor in their groves...Sheriff McCall would see to it that he provided the necessary bodies. The author also presented the corruption and ties to the KKK of the local law enforcement as well as the inherent racism of the local justice system at the time through the principals involved.  And of course, the sequence of events that first led up to the arrests and what followed to the end was revealed through the course of the book.  This is not one of your "whitewashed" Yankee Doodle Dandy American history texts that paint our past in generally idealized terms, but rather is an important testament to the underlying reasons for the racial divisions still plaguing our society in this Black Lives Matter era...I recommend it although its content is very disturbing and pulls no punches about the extreme violence that happened: if you're white and grew up in Lake County back then you most definitely enjoyed a much different experience than if your skin had been of a darker hue...

Quote of the Week...from President Trump

Mental illness and hatred pulls the trigger, not the gun.      ---President Donald Trump

To this quote I'd like to add two pro-gun clichés and two New York Times headlines:

The Clichés:
1) If guns were outlawed only outlaws would have guns.
------and------
2) Guns don't kill people, people do.

The NY Times Headlines (August 6, early and late editions):
1) Trump Urges Unity Vs Racism
------and------
2) Assailing Hate But Not Guns

The Times headlines and article came after President Donald Trump spoke to the nation following the mass shooting murders in El Paso and Dayton this past weekend. There was so much criticism coming at the newspaper for its first headline...which critics claimed failed to capture the essence of Trump's address...that they changed it between editions.  The President did speak out against racism and for national unity...but he also gave a variation on the second of my two cited clichés with the above quote, claiming that the gun doesn't pull its own trigger.  No kidding, sir, yet I've heard this kind of foolish argument before by gun advocates, implying that since guns don't shoot people by themselves, then they're somehow okay and shouldn't be part of any discussion...and tagging the mentally ill with blame for gun violence doesn't correspond to the facts as I know them. No, it's the wrong guns (military-style weapons with multiple rounds increased by high-capacity magazines) in the wrong hands (only the military and law enforcement should have them, in my opinion) that is causing the problem with these evil mass shooters using them to pick off multitudes of innocent people in stores, places of worship, schools, concerts, festivals, workplaces...or any other locale where people gather in numbers.  So although it's commendable that Trump spoke out against racism and hate, he has yet to explain why it's quite all right for civilians to be able to legally acquire semi-automatic rifles that can be used to inflict massive carnage quickly on large numbers of people, as preferred as they may legitimately be by some sportsmen with their game hunting.  Still, from where I stand the public's security far outweighs the enhancement of some people's hunting experiences. It's true that many more murders are caused through the abuse of handguns...and to be sure, by other means than through firearms. Restricting these higher-powered weapons will not thwart evil people from trying to murder others...and sometimes tragically succeeding.  But you would not be looking at these horrendous casualty figures had the mass shooters been more limited in their choice of murder weapon.  Regarding that first cliché above, it sadly has much truth to it.  Localities and states that greatly restrict legal gun ownership put their law-abiding citizens in a helpless situation against the criminal elements operating there who can easily bring in their weapons from outside.  And even if the nation as a whole enacted stricter laws against these military-level guns, we would still be overrun with them for years...and no doubt a thriving black market would develop as well.  As for more stringent background checks for gun buyers, I wonder how many of the mass shooters over the past several years would have been caught and prevented from building up their arsenals if the laws now being pushed had already been in place...probably not that many, I'm guessing.  Doesn't sound like I'm very optimistic about where this is all going, does it?  Well, give me something positive to latch onto, then, while I reflect on the somber conclusion that we live in a culture that idolizes and glorifies violence, inviting evil into our midst while refusing to acknowledge it for what it is...

About the Recent Mass Shootings

Within just a few hours of each other this weekend two different gunmen went on shooting sprees in an El Paso, Texas Wal-Mart and a Dayton, Ohio nightclub, randomly murdering at last count a total of 29 people and injuring many more.  And last Sunday there was another such rampage at a Gilroy, California agricultural festival.  Naturally, the media is, on one hand, expressing deep sorrow and grief for the victims and their families while on the other many politicians and opinion makers are doubling down on the need for stricter gun regulation.  Folks can agree or disagree about their Second Amendment rights and how far they go in allowing military combat-level weaponry in the hands of any civilian who can afford them, but can we all at least come together on the evil behind these acts, regardless of their reasons...including supposed mental illness?  Yet I hear little about the depravity of the murderers...just that we need to keep guns out of their hands before they commit their heinous acts.  Let's face it...there are a lot of weird, paranoid, and conspiracist fringe ideologies out there and enough disturbed souls to buy into them: this in itself, though, doesn't necessarily involve anyone picking up a military rifle and mowing down crowds of innocent people in public.  No, regardless of beliefs and rationales, those directly responsible for these acts should be held accountable in the most severe way.  Grief counseling, silent moments of prayer, candlelight vigils...and sincerely pushing political remedies to restrict the general access of advanced weaponry all have their place as legitimate responses, but the most important takeaway from these atrocities...and often the one thing that is most ignored...is the abject evilness, to the core, of those who commit these crimes of murder.  Yes, there is very much such a thing as "evil" and we might as well begin to acknowledge this fact...

My Problem with Robert Mueller's Testimony

I heard some of the Robert Mueller testimony yesterday before two House of Representative committees and was dismayed at his apparent lack of knowledge of passages in his own report, his evasiveness to often simple questions from either party, and his general presentation as somebody who simply did not want to be there.  Charges of feeblemindedness and figurehead are now cropping up about him, and I wonder whether, during these past three years his public image, with television continually depicting him as a sharp professional who was completely on top of things, wasn't monumentally inflated.  How much input did he actually have in this report of his...or was he just somebody put up there "in charge" to legitimize it?  And about this exoneration issue: when someone is investigated and prosecution is not recommended, those performing the investigation are supposed to abide by the principal that the target of that investigation is to be presumed innocent in the absence of any charges.  To not affirmatively assert that Trump committed obstruction during the investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 campaign places should translate into a return to the default position of innocence on the part of the President, legally and professionally speaking.  Now you and I as private citizens can differ on how much Trump is guilty of this or that...and he can still be impeached since that process is a political one...but from the perspective of a Justice Department counsel claiming possible guilt after refusing to press for charges is, in my lay opinion, unethical.  Not that I care a whit for Trump, mind you...but this reminds me of something that happened in Gainesville's tragic past...

In the late summer of 1990, a succession of grisly murders of young people occurred in my hometown.  The pressure was on the police to quickly nab a suspect, and conveniently for them a suspicious, mentally disturbed young man was available to present to the public as the likely murderer.  Only one problem: he was innocent, and later on they discovered the true murderer, who at the time was in a Marion County jail and had audio-recorded his own diary of his crimes.  But even though the first suspect was subsequently released and not charged, the Gainesville police chief at the time publicly claimed that he still believed that this individual was somehow tied in with the murders even though he was legally exonerated, damaging his reputation in an entirely unprofessional way.  So since then I've been sensitive to this notion that if an investigator won't recommend charges against someone then they should refrain from expressing their own personal biases.  Then-FBI Director James Comey violated this principle in July 2016 when he went on a public rant against presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for her unsecured emails while not pushing for her prosecution.  Now coming back to the present, I'm always hearing how upstanding and professional Robert Mueller is...but he's doing the same thing, in my estimation, with Donald Trump that Comey did with Clinton...