Day Sixteen - The Weather; Return Of The Haiku

It’s like being kicked in the head by a raspberry

Jenna (on mixing raspberry sambuca and apple sours)

Some call it cheating, I just call it winning.

via XKCD

Fuck Minnieapolis, did you learn NOTHING from George Floyd?

The Minneapolis police are back to publicly being terrorists now that George Floyd’s death is out of the media cycle.

Directly from the article:

Bayle Adod Gelle was deep in sleep late Wednesday night at his home in Eden Prairie when he heard loud banging on the door.

The intensity of the sound at 2:15 a.m. left Bayle confused. He trudged down the stairs from his second-floor bedroom. As soon as he reached the living room, he found his wife there—surrounded by more than a dozen officers from the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office. The officers allegedly pointed their guns at him and his wife, Bayle said, and then tied their hands tightly with a cord.

Awakened by the bangs and commotion, three children—ages 4, 7, and 9— joined their parents in the living room. Officers allegedly pointed guns at them, too, Bayle said.

“I felt very scared,” Bayle said in an interview with Sahan Journal at his home Thursday evening, some 14 hours after the police raid. “I thought they were going to kill us.”

The police search felt like it took forever—maybe two hours, he said. Bayle kept asking the officers who they were and why they’d come to his house. (In the end, the police appear to have found nothing, and took no evidence with them, Bayle said.)

They told him “shut up,” he recalled.

Bayle said the officers ransacked the house and never showed him a search warrant— until the end. That’s when they told him his son had been killed.

Bayle said that until that moment, he had no idea that nearly 8 hours earlier Minneapolis Police officers had fatally shot his 23-year-old son, Dolal Bayle Idd, in an altercation at a Holiday gas station in south Minneapolis. It was the first police killing in Minneapolis since Officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd about a dozen blocks away.

Here’s the full article

they had to move out of their house on new year’s eve to a nearby mosque.

please share, I haven’t seen anyone talking about this

My Sins...

Greed: Medium  

Gluttony: Medium  

Wrath: Low  

Sloth: Medium  

Envy: Very Low  

Lust: Low  

Pride: Very Low   The Seven Deadly Sins Quiz on 4degreez.com

Huh... that's kinda interesting - I would have thought I'd score higher... then again most of the answers were quite specific and didn't really apply...

“You need to believe in things that aren’t true. How else can they become” - Hogfather, Terry Pratchett

please fucking vote

Day One - Death

“I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the ordeal of meeting me is another matter.” ~Winston Churchill

Rather a morbid topic to begin with, but here goes.

Death to me is just another part of the natural cycle; things die, things get consumed, their energy continues through the chain, the power of death seems to be the one thing that has powered our entire ecosystem - which is easy to say in general because there's no personal ramifications, it's easy to say shit dies because the thing that's dying is merely an abstract.

However when that thing is something or someone you've built an emotional attachment to, that concept becomes a scary one and I will admit that the death of someone close to me is the one thing that I am truly scared shitless of because despite what a large percentage of the population will tell you, we don't actually have the slightest of clues what truly happens when we cease to be on this mortal coil.

While I would like to believe in reincarnation (it sounds like a fantastic concept) there are far too many question, for example; do you get to choose? if so, why aren't there trillions of cats filling up this planet? do you have to start again from the bottom as an amoeba? do you carry on up the chain and turn into something else? what is up the chain from humanity? why am I asking so many questions? when will this topic end? and so on...

I also like the concept of an afterlife but the various different sets of qualifying criteria set out by the great (and tiny) religions of our world make this rather over complicated too, what if they're all true? what if none of them are true? what if just one of them is true? how would you know you've picked the right one until it's too late?

I suppose my best guess at the moment would be the 'you just cease' argument though the only crumb of comfort that comes into this is the idea that all the time someone is remembered, they are never truly dead, to me this makes life worth something.

It sets us each with a challenge; do something that would actually make your life memorable, bonus points if Hollywood make a film about it.

To anyone that reads this who is grieving for a loved one or close friend, my heart goes out to you, take solace in the thought that they are free from the struggle of this world and that all the time you cherish their memory, they are never truly dead.

Love, light and peace

Nik.

yesterday, tumblr totally deleted the account of a prominent trans girl on this website because she was posting safe for work transition timeline photos. this is supposedly "the queerest place on the internet" but i haven't seen anybody but trans girls talking about this. why does nobody else give a fuck?

There’s some common threads I see in the anti-voting posts going around, and I feel like I need to discuss some of them. Let’s start with the biggest one:

Voting to punish evil. I see lots of variations of this. Biden is supporting Israel, therefore we can’t vote for him. Is there any viable candidate who would stop the genocide? I don’t think the anti voting crowd actually cares. They are appealing to moral feelings rather than political strategy, because strategically, you have to realize that voting is not going to change foreign policy, and that change has to be pushed by other means. It’ll probably be something in the long haul.

Democrats should run someone else. First of all, this is a shit strategy. You don’t primary your president in the second term unless your party is falling apart. This may come from people from countries where replacing the head of government is easier, but the POTUS is the de facto party head. Also, going to the lack of thought to the goal — do you know someone willing to primary Biden and able to win who would do the things you want?

Biden hasn’t done anything anyway. This is just a way to bat away pro arguments. There’s plenty of lists of progress on lots of things. Student loans, insulin price caps, regulations, anti-trust.

Putting the entire Palestinian genocide on Biden. I’m not saying there’s not culpability there, but understand that the entire US government is in support of Israel, on both sides. It was a miracle we got a handful of Senators to call for investigations. We should cut off aid, absolutely. Who’s running to do that? And keep in mind that Israel chose to engage. US officials would have liked a more limited response, not out of care for Palestinians, but because they know from experience that it will come back to bite Israel in the form of newly radicalized Hamas recruits.

Liberals just have no hope for change. This is a new one. Just some idea that people are stuck in a rut and that’s the reason the two party system exists. The two party system is a mathematical consequence of the way we vote. There is reason to hope for change. The change, though, whatever means you choose, will take decades. Keep working at it. The hope is not that this election will fundamentally change things. The hope is that many small political actions over the years will push things forward.

Funnily enough, I haven’t seen a whole lot of third party promotion, just lots of this rhetoric aiming to punish. When voting, ask yourself:

Is this problem I have with this candidate something that the other candidate would be better on?

Are there other political actions I can take that will help?

What things can change with a different President or Congress, and what needs to be pursued by other means?

Withholding your vote as a punishment isn’t really going to help. Biden doesn’t know who you are or why you are not voting for him, and there is no one with a chance of winning that will do everything you want. But you have other means. Protest, organize, donate, build up alternatives, advocate for a different system.

Vote to give yourself space and get a little bit. Do other things to keep things moving.