Tag Archives: cowardice

An Open Letter to Mike Johnson, Chief Capitulator of the House of Representatives

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Today on the propaganda outlet OAN, Trump declared that he was allowed to overturn any legislation he didn’t agree with. In his words, “I am allowed to cut things that should have never been approved in the first place.” “Approved” means here “passed into law”.

Trump is declaring that he can overturn any law he wants to. It’s the kind of thing, Mike, that you might take umbrage with.

After all, your only function is to create laws. I would hope that you would object to the idea of your laws being overturned by executive fiat. On principle, of course. We all know you are only there to propose laws passed down from your overlords. But don’t you want to think that what you do matters?

You are technically the leader of the Republican Party in the House of Representatives, yet you have rendered yourself and all your colleagues irrelevant. You could have developed a spine at some point to defend your own job, but you didn’t, and I suspect you are content with history’s depiction of you ushering in the monarchy.

You, like many of your comrades, were never a legislator. You have always been a mole for the rich men who would kill their own housekeeper if it meant they wouldn’t have to pay taxes. You are a cowering, simpering little shit who does what he is told, and that’s the real story for how an inexperienced dark horse was elected Speaker of the House. The money demanded that a simpering idiot be put in charge, and the Republicans obliged.

Mike, not only are you weak and cowardly, you are stupid. When fascists rise to power, the survival rate for the little suck-up toadies who got them there is near zero. Project 2025 is in charge now, and honestly I don’t see Trump lasting much longer than you do. “Natural Causes” are coming for Orange Julius Cesar.

This is the world you helped create. Enjoy it while you are still useful to them.

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The War Against Universities is a War on What makes America Great

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When mechanized industry began to replace agriculture, the United States adopted a policy no other country on the planet had considered: mandatory high school.

The results were profound. Industry in the United States had a pool of skilled labor that made our nation THE place to get shit done. My home nation handled this transition so spectacularly well that we became a world power. Other nations insulated the working class from access to education, and paid the economic price.

Up to now, there has been in this nation a general belief that school is good. Sure, there are the special schools accessible only to the wealthy, that don’t actually teach anything special but allow the wealthy to form their own elitist clubs and stack the Supreme Court, but in this country, and ONLY in this country, there are high-quality schools for everyone else.

Name any discipline, and eight of the top ten universities in the world will be in the United States. Seven of those will be state-sponsored universities.

Kids around the world dream of studying in an American university. It is so easy for us to take for granted that we have a sprawling complex of high-quality state schools, that when our current government moves to undermine them that it slips aside. We don’t protest because what is proposed is so absurd we must not have heard it right. Only an idiot would undermine this massive advantage.

That executive order hamstringing the NIH is about a government agency, and not about our schools, right? You know the answer. Defunding science is defunding our future.

MAGA hates education. We haven’t reached “shoot anyone with glasses” yet, and won’t for a while, but we must recognize that the current regime is actively anti-education, actively anti-knowledge, and actively anti-thought. Actively anti-American.

Education was a big part of what made America great. It is hard for people like you and me to understand why so many of our electorate now resent people who have been to school. But that resentment is real, and we have to deal with it. The obvious answer is to increase access to school for everyone. Not necessarily college, but technical or trade or just the skills to run a small business. Anyone who can’t find a job should be able to learn a new job.

School should be available to everyone in this country, without regard to age or history. Schools should be a center for meaningful research. Schools should now be exercising their voices to protest their own emasculation.

So here’s me shouting. I’m shouting for the people who don’t have skills to get a good job, who are tipping the political scales because they don’t. They are not stupid, or lazy. But they have been taught to resent the intellectuals, and therefore to shun any action they might make that might make them an intellectual in the eyes of their neighbors.

More school for everyone. More free school for everyone. Let’s remember what really made America great.

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A Bug Report I Filed Today

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Filed to: Apple Maps

Summary:
Gulf of Mexico shows as some weird “Gulf of America”

Steps To Reproduce:

  1. Open Maps
  2. Look at the Gulf of Mexico

Results:
It has a bizarre name applied by fiat by a bunch of cretins.

Regression:
No regression; the name has been the same for 400 years.

Notes:
This is an act of cowardice, and is utterly shameful.

After I submitted the bug report, I had to give a reason to be given access to follow its progress. I wrote: “I would like to see the progress of this bug, as it is the result of shameful weakness in the face of arbitrary fiat. Not even legislative fiat, just one idiot making a proclamation.”

Edit to add: here’s a really good analysis of why it is right for Apple and Google to comply with the rename, but why the way they did so is also wrong: Golfo del Gringo Loco. The article also touches on why the AP must rise to a different standard, which they have, to the peevishment of our leader-in-chuff.

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