If you cannot bring good news, then don't bring any

 Well, it's Saturday again and college football has begun in earnest. Mississippi State beat national champs LSU fairly handily, so everyone around here's happy As Paul Harvey used to say, though, "first, the news."

 Monday was a fair-to-midddlin' round-up, touching on Hurricane Beta, Mike Espy's growing success in his senate run, and the on-going attempt by the GOP to make protesting illegal. Wednesday we looked at the slap on the wrists Breonna Taylor's murders got and how the outcome isn't going to be pretty.

 And while it wasn't a deep dive, Friday saw us looking a bit into Amy Coney Barrett, Trump's pick to replace the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court. She's still got plenty to go through to actually get the seat, like a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, investigations by the FBI and American Bar Association, and public hearings, so nothing is written in stone.

 Trump's wanting to get this done before the election, but that's going to be a trick since there are only 38 days left. It usually takes around 70 days, though Ginsburg herself went through it in 45. It can be done, but what also can be done is the Democrats could drag their feet on the process and slow things down. Time will tell if they've got the stone to do that, though.

 We'll have plenty to look at with Barrett over the coming weeks. She's a hardcore traditional Catholic of the wacky "submit to your husband" thing and apparently, she's got some connection to some screwball Christian online learning to do that may or may not be a fraud. I'm not even going to pretend to be impartial in all this. Her resume is a bit thin for a Supreme Court justice, spending most of her professional career as a professor at Harvard, which isn't the colored egg it used to be. Anyhow, we'll see what we'll see.

 In other news, I got me a new laptop and, in fact, writing on it as we speak. I got this, and while I haven't had much time to monkey with it, I'm pleased so far. The only problem I have is the screen resolution is so small I have difficulty reading the words on it's recommended setting. This, for example, is magnified by 175. Wearing my glasses doesn't really help. Of all the bummers middle age brings, I think finding it more difficult to read is the worst one of all.

 Learning to type on a laptop is a bit of a chore, too. I never have learned to type properly and over the years developed my own style. It's hard to translate to different keyboards, particularly small keyboards that are geared to pick up quick movements. I probably didn't really need it, but what the hell. It's the end of the world as we know it, maybe. Might as well have a little fun.

 I don't know what else. Been in a Weird Western mood and I think I might have a way to start an actual story. It's still floating around and my head's not in the right place, but I may try to squeeze something out in the next day or so. And that is word count. I'm going to edit this on my tower, but overall, I'd say this is a success. Have a nice weekend.

Lord, I pity the mother and father when the kids move away.

  I'm letting the day slip away from me. Unfortunately, I don't know if I have anything interesting to talk about. Listen to more Amazing Rhythm Aces, I guess.

 It's been a fairly active one, actively. I went to see my doctor for the regular check-up. I skipped the usual one back in March due to COVID-19 kicking into high gear. Completely overestimating the intelligence and diligence of My Fellow Americans, I thought we'd have a decent hand on the whole thing by June, July at the latest. Silly me.

 Anyhow, the visit went well. Waiting on some blood work to get done - I'm on Lithium and that apparently can do a number on your kidney - everything's about the same. In fact, it turns out I've lost five pounds since the last time I saw a doctor. I go see the Psych Doctor next month and I reckon I should make a date with the Therapist, too. Need to make my insurance premium if nothing else.

 I also bought me a new laptop. Well, ordered one and paid for it, anyway. BestBuy, for what it's worth. Sometimes I use NewEgg, but I got a pretty sweet rig for a cheaper price from the store. I really didn't need it. My MacBook is fried but my PC works fine. Still, I wanted a laptop if just because sitting in this chair is hell on my back. In any event, if we ever get out from under this COVID-19 business and don't let Trump destroy the country in the process, I'd like to do some more traveling. I don't know where I'd go, but that's not really important.

 I bought a gaming laptop. I figure it'll be just as fine as this PC for writing and web crawling, so I can write it off on my taxes. Win-win, all around. It cost more than a regular laptop, of course, but it's the money I've made from the Actual Paying Gigs, so I figured I'd treat myself.  I was kicking around the idea of getting a console, and maybe I'll do that with the next savings.

 That's about it for me, really. I'm still pretty bummed about the Breonna Taylor verdict as well as the ugliness it kicked off last night in Louisville. Apparently, two cops were shot and I'm not going to joke about that. It's just going to get worse, especially when stuff like this goes on. Long story short, a 13-year-old kid with Asperger's syndrome freaks out when the cop tells him to freeze and runs. So, of course, the cop shot him 11 times in the back.

 Linden Cameron is his name and he's in intensive care. Seems his mom called 9/11 because the kid was having a meltdown and tried to tell the police he was scared of cops. This happened in Utah, and there are actually recordings of the cops at the scene arguing whether or not to go in the house. But this is the outcome. There was some question that he had a gun and some question if it was an actual gun instead of a BB gun or pellet gun or just a toy gun because the kid is 13, for Christ's sake. No weapon was found.

 Fellow white people, when you disparage what happened to George Floyd or Breonna Taylor or Philado Castielle or any of the black folks who get shot down by the cops because they didn't follow all of the rules, this is the world you're demanding. This is the society you want. This is what you're saying is okay to happen to you if the cops decide you're not following orders quick or completely enough.

 But if that's the world you want to live in, hey, fine by me, I guess. I'm out in the boonies. But stop acting so surprised everyone else is sort of tired of this and thinks it should change. Stop acting surprised because they decide to fight back despite the costs. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

We didn't appreciate Cub Koda enough when we had him.

 I have some Actual Paying Work to do tonight, so I'm not going to spend much time here. Initially, anyway. I also finally let Windows update itself, and damn, if that didn't take hours. So let's lay something down for continuity's sake and perhaps I'll come back to it.

 I'm not going to lie, though. I had something earlier today, but it's gone now. It's just as well as it was a pretty dour outlook on things. On the whole, I am not hopeful we're past the "things will get worse before..." of the game yet, not by a long shot.

 For one, the city of Louisville has declared a state of emergency because they're days away from giving the verdict on the cops that murdered Breonna Taylor. I really don't think that bodes well. Worse, one of the killer cops posted an email telling other officers to do "what they need to do" to the protestors that he called "thugs," claiming everything they did the night they killed Taylor was legal and moral. Sure, which is why the initial report was full of lies and the DA tried to lean on Taylor's ex-boyfriend - the guy they were actually looking for - to implicate her without success.

 Putting aside the issue of police brutality running rampant in this country, everything I've seen shows that these cops are, at the very best, guilty of being sloppy with who they decide who needs killing. Furthermore, everything the city has done, even up to the settlement paid out to Taylor's family, tells me they know she was killed because some lunkheaded cops couldn't be bothered to do the job properly.

 People are still defending this, either saying that it's just a regrettable but necessary accident or outright lying about Taylor to make her look guilty and, thus, worthy of extrajudicial execution. And that's the thing that really bums me out the most, that there are so many people in this country that prides itself on rugged individualism are so eager to bend a knee to authority.

 I don't know if I can in good conscience argue that we don't need some sort of peace-keeping or law-enforcement force. Even if it's just to give out speeding tickets and take paperwork for insurance when someone's car gets broken into, there's a necessity. They don't protect and I think recent events have shown us that there are better ways of dealing with people in the midst of a mental episode that sending in a couple thick-necked, heavily armed, poorly trained dingbats.

 My ex worked for the public defender in New Orleans as a social worker and she regularly went to neighborhoods the police wouldn't. All 5'4" of her, and it wasn't because she was especially brave or fearless or badass. She was doing her job and while cops have their jobs, is there any question why people, especially black people, see that the police's job, whatever it is, isn't concerned with their health?

 But this turns out to a bridge too far for far too many people, especially white people. They're fine with living in a country that keeps its thumb on certain people, even if it erodes their own rights. I shouldn't be shocked at this, I know. Back after 9/11, the average American rube couldn't wait to curtail civil liberties at the government's behest for an ounce of security. All the free-speech warriors of today were fine with "free speech zones" at the 2004 Republican National Convention just like they're fine with the crackdown on protesting in Louisville and other places.

 And this isn't a partisan thing. Someone on Twitter took my condemnation of conservative thought in America as possibly choosing one side over the other, but this isn't that. In a sane culture, the Democrats would be the conservative-middle party, but that's really not important. Americans in general are fine with curtailing the Constitutionally given rights they claim to adore. They'll behave themselves, after all, so why should they care?

 Okay, that's plenty. I'm going to get to work and hope to be in a better move tomorrow. It springs eternal, they say.

I don't need no proof, 'cause that's the truth, and I'll drink to that.

 Man, it has been a day, hasn't it? Protests and riots across the country, the president trying to bring the government hammer down on a private company because his feelings are hurt, and the sneaking suspicion that "reopening the country" this soon wasn't a great idea. One upside is the forces of old and evil are sounding dumber than shit in trying to defend what obviously isn't going to work anymore.

 I really don't know where to start. Momma and I had a rather heavy discussion about the George Floyd murder and the resulting chaos that's popped up as a result. Make no mistake, Momma is Mississippi through and through, and one thing about Mississippi is this state digs on some authority. Look at that walking thumb that's the mayor of Petal for another example. Regardless, she's heartsick over this man's murder and understands the rage and anger behind the rioters. She doesn't understand why they would destroy businesses that employ them, but she also doesn't grok that most of those businesses don't pay them enough to live on anyway.

 What she had problems with, however, was my stance that the cops in general don't deserve the benefit of the doubt, and I won't budge on that. They do not. They've spent the last 20 years militarizing and deciding we were the enemy, telling us their safety is more important than our lives, and claiming that they don't even need to know the law. All body cameras and social media has done up until now is show how guilty they are and how little they care about how their actions affect the communities they're supposed to "protect and serve," especially when those communities are black.

 For me, it's like that old Chris Rock bit. I ain't saying people burning down a Target is right. I'm just saying I understand where that anger and frustration is coming from. If nothing else - nothing else - the recent COVID-19 business should have shown us that, without any sort of doubt, the Powers That Be do not care if the people that make their wealth live or die, nor do they care how healthy or happy those folks are. Target pays starvation wages and the owners are billionaires many times over. If the people in that community thought it was worth something, maybe they wouldn't have pulled it down.

 I do think there's something different about this one, especially coming so soon after the egregious subverting of the law we're supposed to follow in the Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor situations. In both cases, the murders were ignored by the legal establishment of the respective areas, almost to the point where they condoned it. Both took months of screaming in the faces of authority to make anyone even look ashamed. This one, well... the guy having his hands in his pockets while kneeling on Floyd's neck as someone filmed him, he had to know that wouldn't go well.

 Protests are popping up all over the country. Someone in Denver actively tried to run some dude over, and people on Twitter are trying to defend it. I do wonder, however, if we're not seeing how the whole "Twitter isn't real life" thing plays out. The mayor of Petal got his ass nailed to the wall by his townsfolk and trying to claim they're all AntiFa. Y'all, there is no AntiFa in a Mississippi town of 10,000. There just isn't.

 Maybe a little more ambiguous is this bit about Trump trying to use government muscle to censor Twitter because they had the audacity to add a link to one of his wacky claims. They didn't even fact check him, much less censor him. They added a link that said "for more information". It was the very least they could do, and he throws the biggest fit we've seen yet. A hundred thousand dead, 40 million on unemployment, and he doesn't budge. Twitter doesn't kiss his ass and he's ready to rain down hell.

 The conservative argument is, apparently, that Twitter shouldn't be considered a publisher rather than a platform and what they did was censorship. The latter argument is obviously stupid and silly, nothing more than another example of Trump's persecution complex and the reason conservatives worship the ground he walks on. The former, though, I wonder.

 I really don't see Twitter as a publisher any more than the telephone line is. It is true, however, that technology has moved too fast for the law to keep up on this note and there are serious questions to be asked. That being said, since the death of Net Neutrality - another thing conservatives have a boner for - it was probably inevitable that things were headed this way. Above all else, Twitter is a profit-oriented business, and anyone who's trying to assign noble intentions to it is whistling Dixie writ large.

 One of the running tropes of cyberpunk is that in a world where corporations control all government, official press and whatall, there's always an underground sort of internet that's For The People. What a lot of science fiction writers never assumed, though, was that the Harvard-educated trust fund squirts who have the cash to develop this sort of technology would be interested in anything but getting their hands on more filthy lucre.

 You'd think after watching Bill Gates for the past 40 years, we'd learn. But no, that's not how it works. Here we are.

All is not lost, it is only mistaken. That's small consolation, but I know just how you feel.

 The internet's dropping in and out again. Hasn't done this all week after Momma got the new modem from the telephone company. She thinks it's due to the heat, and hell, I don't know, it might be. It's in the high 80s outside and fairly humid.

 Anyhow, I got the screen open, so we can do what we do. I can always add links or look up stuff later. Since I'm remembering it this weekend, let's take a lot at what we saw with the News this week.

Monday

Wednesday

Friday

 I'm particularly proud of Friday's offering, a fairly deep dive into the Breeona Taylor execution. Another black person murdered because white shooters had to kill someone, another cover-up by local law, and another killing that went unknown for months until social media raised hell about it. This time, however, the killing was done by the local police in the most murderously Barney Fife way possible. They thought they were hitting a drug den which was actually 10 miles away, searching for a suspect who was already in custody.

 Check out the piece and keep your eye on this one. Wingnuts may raise Cain about how their First Amendment rights are being trampled because they can't post Nazi propaganda on Facebook or gun losers think it's perfectly natural and sane to go to Starbucks loaded for bear, but if the Fourth Amendment gets anymore tattered, none of that will matter. There is definitely a racist element, sure, and the American people as a whole are far too generous to cops who kill the wrong black person when killing anyone wasn't necessary. But if we as a culture keep giving authoritarians more and more leeway, we're going to wake one day wondering how that boot got on our neck.

 Governmental authoritarianism is nothing new. Once nations started actually becoming nations rather than kingdoms, their governments felt the need to keep a close eye on the populace, for good or ill. It is what it is. Read your Roman history. Read about John Dee. Read about the development of the Chinese Empire. I don't know how much we'd fight it, either, as we all carry locator beacons in our pockets as a part of the super computers and Hitchhiker's Guides. Hell, I'm using Google to look up some of this stuff, and they've long since given up on the whole "don't be evil" thing.

 As an aside, I don't fret too much about the "surveillance state", either from the government or Corporate America. I don't like it and know it can be abused, and it is, but I don't have to worry about it. I'm a straight white male, I'm good. I hope the System comes crashing down, but figure since it will do it to itself anyway, there's nothing I can really do to help. But the main reason is I don't think I should have to hide what I say or think from anyone. There's nothing I do that needs to be hidden, I feel. Not my love of mind-altering substances or flirtations with anarchism, I don't see any of that as anything to be ashamed of. The law changes, as the Good Doctor said, but I don't feel I have to.

 Well. I've reached word count. During my constitutional, I thought about writing about the corporate press, the mainstream media, and why most people who complain about it really don't know what they're talking about. I don't really feel like doing a deep dive now, but in a nutshell, the mainstream, big corporate press - CNN, the networks, The New York Times, even the big-time websites like Slate or Politico - are all owned by rich people or groups of rich people who incorporate themselves. Most of them are worth ridiculous amounts of money themselves. CNN is worth about five billion dollars, and Fox recently sold assets to Disney for $71 billion.

 These companies and people have a vested interest in keeping the Status Quo. That is, whatever societal changes (you think) they promote, the cold, hard economics of things aren't meant to change. That's how they got rich and how they get richer; they're not going to change that. If you honestly think CNN or the Times wants to destroy capitalism, you are a goddamn moron. Ted Turner might have wanted to change the world for (what he thinks is) the better, but he doesn't own CNN anymore.

 This is reality, but people don't want to acknowledge it and that's where the problem comes. Everything about it makes much more sense if you can recognize that little bit of wisdom and keep it in mind when using the media. It's easy to rage at Maggie Haberman and her limp approach to the Trump Administration, but her job and The New York Times' mission isn't shaking up the Status Quo. They are the Status Quo, just as Trump is, and both of them have a vested interest in keeping the gravy train going. The mainstream press is still useful, just keep that in mind.

 So, one of these days I'll get deeper into it. I keep saying that about a number of things but I haven't yet. That being said, I would totally do it if someone wants to pay me. I'm getting pretty good at deep dives to explain things, especially when I'm getting paid. Just something to think about. Just putting it out there.