The Sociopaths Keep Winning

Um...Happy Friday.

​Not gonna violate the copyright notice (which, by the way, ought to come with a link one can click to obtain written permission to use the work, don't you think?) by reposting Sunday's Pearls Before Swine strip, so I'll link to it and embed a YouTube vid of an Anti-Nowhere League song instead.

As for the PBS cartoon: I totally feel ya, Pig. Le cochon, c'est moi. "Don't check Twitter!" Oops, I checked Twitter. Fuck me sideways, what a shit-show.

It's difficult to see the silver lining when even the silver lining has its own cloud. Sure, there's plenty of good news around. But the events in the Bad News column are killing, injuring, or brutally diminishing the quality of life for millions of people who aren't in the Global Elite.

Here are just a few items taking up space on my Twitter feed this week, to complement the continuing parade of atrocities like Yemen and atmospheric CO2 hitting another milestone (415 ppm):

• DC Metro Police broke into the Venezuelan Embassy to arrest the remaining holdouts from the Embassy Protection Collective. Not that getting arrested is any major deal to comrades like Kevin Zeese and Dr. Margaret Flowers, but this raid is a clear violation of the Vienna Convention, a violation which could set a horrendous precedent if not swiftly censured by the international community.
• It was bad enough that Scotland Yard extricated Julian Assange from the Ecuadoran Embassy in London after a seven-year wait. On top of that, Chelsea Manning is facing ludicrously severe penalties for her refusal to testify before a grand jury. This is a crucial chapter of the war against the principle of having an informed public; without an informed public, democracy is impossible, which is OK by the plutocrats who run the world.
• States are playing "We're More Anti-Abortion Than You Are" to horrifying extent: Alabama, Georgia, Missouri, Ohio. Until April, Texas had a Death Penalty for Abortion Providers bill floating around the Legislature, but the laws enacted (or soon to be) by those other states' governments make Texas look like a piker by comparison.
• However, Texas will soon have its own enactment of the law that could make even protesting at a "critical infrastructure" site a felonious offense. It's intent is to keep activists from turning off the valves at pipelines and the like, but it's vague af. People who just happen to be there when said infrastructure is damaged and fail to stop the damage could be found in violation. As of today, the bill is in the Senate Committee on Judiciary and Civil Jurisprudence. Sad fact: Our representative, Democrat Shawn Thierry voted for it in the House.
• Say Her Name: Pamela Turner. Yet another unarmed person of color, this time with a diagnosed mental illness, has been killed by yet another rogue cop. The best story that Baytown PD could come up with was she got hold of the officer's taser and zapped him, so of course he had to kill her. The whole case stinks worse than the stinkiest parts of Baytown. The glint of silver lining here is that Officer Delacruz may actually face consequences as the lies unravel.

At this point, it's no consolation that there are millions and millions of human beings capable of tremendous love and beauty and creativity. They don't make up for those who are robbing us of our future, our loved ones, our planet at a breakneck pace. If there's a God, then He/She/It fucked up divinely by placing homo not-so-sapiens in charge of All Creation.