A lesson in dealing with Republicans:

This is how I think about talking to them about anything of substance:

The Philly Inquirer is using this photo of Gaetz:

A consideration of the George Floyd murder:

Quite honestly, I’ve been harboring this thought for a long time. I was weighing whether to post it or not, and decided finally to throw caution to the winds.

George Floyd was not murdered in the traditional sense of a cop killing a black man. He was horizontally crucified.

One of the reasons people died on the cross when executed by the Romans was that they were unable to breathe properly and after a very long time succumbed to hypoxia. That is what the cop did to this poor man. It enrages me that every week, millions of people go to church and lament the passing of their Savior Jesus Christ who was unmercifully crucified by the Romans and fail to see the similarities in process here. Those of us who possess a moral compass excoriated waterboarding as an interrogation technique because it gave the victim the impression that he or she was going to die by drowning and the thought of doing that to someone was unconscionable. Cutting off someone’s air supply is a horrendous way to torture or kill someone and to take nine minutes to do it is sadistic and Beyond contemptible.

As an aside, I still believe that there was a personal issue between the two here, that the cop knew him from the club at which they both had worked. It can’t just be a coincidence in my opinion and I feel That the lack of public discussion of this fact is very curious.

Did I have a hallucination ?

Did I not hear soon after the death of Mr Floyd that both the cop and the decedent worked as bouncers AT THE SAME NIGHTCLUB???

Am I going nuts, senile, or both at the same time?

So I was watching the CNN documentary of doctors

And switched to watch the end of the Godzilla movie because at least that it is admitted that it’s fantasy. Then I changed back to watch the end of this ridiculous program.

All of a sudden it’s revisionist history time and everybody has an appropriate attack of conscience. You know what, I feel at least 400,000 of these people died unnecessarily and these doctors are complicit in mass murder. They should have all convened a panel and stated that if federal mandates were not enacted, they would resign.

Believe me they could all get jobs elsewhere in a moment. No one was starving to death, no one needed food on the table or the mortgage payment. Their continued employment caused untold suffering and death to say nothing of the eventual cases which will manifest themselves in years to come of stroke and cardiovascular diseases. Oh, did I forget to discuss pulmonary issues?

They all stink. To high heaven.

A thought for a Sunday morning:

I have had a hard week. It was capped off yesterday by a woman upon whom I’m doing a very large dental case, who came in and told me that she can’t stand to watch Biden on TV, that he makes her physically ill, and that she did not watch the press conference but heard that he was incapacitated and mentally deficient. I was so tired of dealing with all the things I’ve had to deal with this week that I said not a word. There is no way I can possibly say anything That would alter her perception, she’s not here for political conversion I said to myself, so just don’t comment. Believe me, it took everything in my power to grit my teeth and just keep my mouth shut. Quite frankly, I’m getting to the point at this age where I can’t stand listening to this shit anymore, and if there were some underlying reason for me to retire if I could, which I can’t, it would be so I don’t have to talk to the assholes.

That being said, another thing I can’t stand dealing with is when one of these people comes in and says something about the good old days. I actually have a speech for them which goes something like this: you know, the good old days were not so good. If an ambulance pulled up in front of someone’s house, likely as not you never saw them again. If someone had a blockage around their heart, they died. If they had cancer that was not immediately locally resectable, they died. If they were in an automobile accident over 35 mph, there’s still a good chance of being killed even though the damage to the car may have been minimal. Women died in childbirth often, and things were so primitive that multiple births such as twins or triplets were a giant surprise to the physician and mother when discovered in the operating room in which they were giving birth. Men, by the way, were not permitted in the operating room when I was young. Medical syndromes were poorly understood, if at all, and children died routinely from inability to diagnose. If someone were allergic to penicillin and they were subject to say, chronic lung infections, they often eventually died if it progressed to pneumonia. Almost every suburban neighborhood had DDT sprayed daily or every other day during the summer to kill mosquitoes, and God only knows what effects this had upon us as we age. Where I lived the pollution from the Rohm & Haas chemical plant was so heavy that with the wind blew in a certain direction we could not go outside and play because it was overwhelming stench and there was no one to call, no appeal, and quite frankly nobody cared. The Amazing thing was that the parents of children who could not go outside we just shrugged their shoulders in resignation, and talk about how big business always had their way so no use complaining.

There were no consumer protections, if you bought a car that had multiple defects and was essentially unusable because it was constantly breaking down Continuously, tough beans to you. In my lifetime you could go to a shoe store and have your feet x-rayed many many times in the same visit in order to see if your shoes fit correctly. The exposure to not only the customers but the staff must have been enormous and I do not believe that anyone ever did a study showing premature death of shoe sales people but I would bet from that era there was a lot of cancer. It was like Madame Curie all over again. but you know what? Almost Nobody cared, or seemingly nobody. It took decades to begin to straighten all this out and here comes the right wing who want to send us back to the golden age of male landowners voting, second class citizenship for people Whom they feel are deserving of such, and street justice a.k.a. lynching as a form of extrajudicial punishment.

My mother , in 1929 at the age of 12, started smoking. She told me that even then they referred to cigarettes as coffin nails, but everyone assumed that something else was going to kill you first. There was a lady on our block who was 82 years old and everyone was in awe of her. Today’s equivalent would be 106. Most people assumed tgat even if they reached Social Security recipient age, that it would only be used for a very few years, if at all. Speaking of our block, there was a rumor going around in 1961 that the fellow who lived next door to us made.....-gasp- ten thousand dollars a year! I remember another neighbor said to my father, “if I made that much, I wouldn’t have to worry about anything for the rest of my life.” Such was life in those days.

But in fact you don’t have to look that far back for issues which would not present themselves today. When I was in training, we had in our kits boxes of rolled up asbestos which we used for casting metal crowns and inlays . There were fibers of this cancer-promoter all over the laboratories and in our lockers and on our clothes, and where I went to school there would be 165 of us in two rooms with low ceilings and no ventilation tearing or cutting the strips of asbestos. In addition, we used a material to make custom trays for dental impressions the monomer of which was the most vicious smelling solvent type liquid to this day I have ever smelled. It was definitely cancer-causing, and when I would leave lab both as a student and as a professor, every fold in my body arms legs and elsewhere, itched maddeningly because of the presence of this material in the air. I know this is anecdotal, but of the 165 in my class three have died or dying from pancreatic cancer, and we are only in our late 60s. God only knows what’s to come but needless to say, they don’t use that material anymore.

All of this constitutes the myth of America and it’s mythical exceptionalism. I am very tired as I stated at the outset of the assholes and I’m worn out from attempting to explain to them the simplest Concept or idea. If they don’t believe in the germ theory of disease, and thus refused to wear a mask, then what more can I do? Nothing. The fact of the matter is, these people believe in their hearts that the two greatest mistakes ever made in America were the freeing of the slaves and the constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote. They see America is going downhill from those points. The inherent hate and racism in this country runs very deep, and in fact the Civil War is apparently never-ending. The next five years will determine the fate of the Republic: whether it stands as a democratic state, or reverts to corporate feudalism run by tinhorn Mussolinis.

I would like to posit that

Al-Anon is Q-Anon’s brother

I believe this began as satire or a “dare” and, like the movement to clothe “naked” animals, it was supposed to be a joke and got out of hand. The perpetrators likely stared at each other in disbelief after it initially caught on and laughed and wondered how far could they go until people figured this out. It turned out that as with former President Shithead, there turned out to be no floor.

I must admit, wouldn’t it be fun jerking these assholes’ chain every day, and making them believe the weirdest shit imaginable? I can’t think of more exhilaration than that except for winning the lottery.

We could start a satirical forum here, coming up with the most outrageous theories as statements of fact. Given the intellect and creativity of DU members , the sky would be the limit.

Hey ! Today isn't a total loss:

I was doing some Googling of Ted Cruz and an ad popped up entitled:

“The Healthiest Way To Wipe Your Butt”

Now THAT’S an accurate target market entry!

Excuse #832 for the insurrection at the Capitol:

Background: the lady who proffered this to me yesterday comes from northeastern Pennsylvania business money. Her family owned a chain of now-defunct department stores so you get the idea.

I must admit I have not heard this one before and was so amused by it that I could not retort:

“So you see, the FBI is spending enormous amounts of time manpower and effort into finding these people who really should not have done what they did but the manpower and money would be better spent looking for people who perpetrated or even would perpetrate gun and even knife violence in this country and locking them away. Imagine if the FBI always worked this hard and could get rid of the real criminals in the society instead of these people who may have had a lapse of judgment for an afternoon.”



I must admit that this was so incredibly stupid coming from someone who is educated that I started to laugh. She asked me which part of this was so funny, and I referred her to Orwell’s 1984. She did not appreciate the reference to thought-crimes. I quietly said to her that invading the Nation’s Capitol is not a lapse of judgement but an attempt to violently overthrow a duly elected government which has serious personal implications including capital punishment and/or life in prison.

The perfect retort to a RW asshole who repeats

The BS from Faux or elsewhere about our guys and gals:

Just wait for them to finish and quietly say:

Hypocrisy is the Vaseline of political intercourse.