To Dare the Gods: June 2024

Why can’t people see the benefit of having good relations with their neighbors, even if they disagree with them on political issues? It’s always tough when you have neighbor who just wants to take what's your's: North Korea wants to be unneighborly to South Korea, China wants to be unneighborly to Taiwan, the Israelis and Palestinians just seem to like being unneighborly, and Russia is unneighborly with everyone within shouting distance.

But neighborliness starts at home, right? I mean, there must be better ways of settling arguments with a neighbor than shooting them:

That’s former Bellevue police officer Mike Hetle, “famous” here for shooting an unarmed Hispanic man after his sister admitted making a faked 911 call because she was “mad” at him. Here, Hetle is seen threatening the wife of the unarmed man he just pumped seven bullets into, all stemming from a “noise complaint.”

At least Hetle didn't need a bump stock, like the Las Vegas mass shooter. It seems the far-right on the Supreme Court doesn't understand that once one is attached to a semi-automatic rifle, it becomes part of that killing machine. Further evidence that Republicans are the "party of death" is Jim Jordan not realizing how evil he sounds when he demands that the Manhattan prosecutor appear in his committee to "explain" why he thinks it is a good idea for YouTube to put age restrictions on videos teaching kids how to make their own "ghost guns." Like everything else Republicans complain about, they offer no "solutions," they just make everything a partisan political issue to fool people into thinking they "care" about people being killed by gun violence.

Here in Seattle, was the individual who hung this flag outside his/her condo balcony doing so to be “neighborly,” or just to be a MAGAsshole?

Probably the latter. The New York Post ran this headline the other day:

Southerners slam neighbors with ‘lefty politics’ who move in and drive up cost of living: ‘Don’t California my Tennessee!’

My parents moved from Wisconsin to Tennessee while I was in the service, and being a state that "appreciates" said military service, I was admitted to UTK as a “VET” and “nontraditional student” instead of the usual route (and yet I did graduate “with honors”). My mother voted for Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election, and Dad insisted that Fox News was “fair and balanced,” so politically it didn’t bother them to make the move. I only spent the time there that was necessary (I remember seeing some old guy on a bus getting all red-faced reading an op-ed I wrote in the campus newspaper), before moving to the “left coast.”

Anyways, the sentiment expressed by that headline isn’t a “neighborly” attitude to take, especially since the “natives”—meaning the ones that moved in after Tennessean Andrew Jackson drove out the real natives when he was president—have only themselves to blame for living on the “low wage, low benefits” model. This from ThinkTennessee, a name which seems to be asking Tennesseans to do something they are not used to doing—“think”:

A new fact sheet released today by nonpartisan think tank ThinkTennessee finds that while Tennessee has one of the lowest overall tax burdens in the nation, its low-income families face a higher effective tax rate than both wealthier families and businesses. The analysis comes on the heels of Tax Day when millions of individual income tax returns are due to be submitted to the federal government.

“Paying taxes is a lot like voting,” said Erin Hafkenschiel, President of ThinkTennessee. “It’s an essential civic duty, and one where our participation is necessary for democracy and society to function. But just like with elections, the tax system needs to be transparent and fair. And if it’s overly burdening poor families while benefiting the wealthy and businesses, like our data shows is the case in Tennessee, it’s time for us to understand why and start a conversation around how we might fix it.”

But no, as Trump well knows, red voters are dumb enough to grab at low-hanging fruit that has little or nothing to do with the reality of their lives. They just don’t want people to tell them they are like lemmings willingly being led by power-mad hypocrites over a cliff. I mean, are there people who really want someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene for a neighbor even if they are only just a little less mentally disturbed than she is? Or has a son like Lauren Boebert’s …

…arrested for a string of break-ins into neighbors’ cars and stealing credit cards and identification? We heard about how “neighborly” Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and his wife Martha-Ann are concerning those flag incidents, but what do they really think? There are those “surreptitious” recordings made at that Supreme Court Historical Society dinner, where we hear Alito making this comment when asked if “negotiations” with the “left” is “pointless”:

I think you’re probably right: One side or the other is going to win. I mean there can be a way of working, a way of living together peacefully, right? It’s difficult because there are differences on fundamental things that can’t be compromised.

However, Alito pivoted “slightly,” agreeing that the country needed to go back on the path of “godliness,” and we of course know what that means, as his wife explained at the same event concerning how she “communicates” with non-likeminded neighbors:

"He's like, 'Oh, please don't put up a flag.' I said, 'I won't do it because I'm deferring to you. But when you are free of this nonsense, I'm putting it up, and I'm gonna send them a message every day.' Maybe every week, I'll be changing the flags. They'll be all kinds. I made a flag in my head. This is how I satisfy myself. I made a flag. It's white and has yellow and orange flames around it. And in the middle is the word vergogna. Vergogna in Italian means shame—vergogna. V-E-R-G-O-G-N-A. Vergogna. Shame, shame, shame on you."

Of course, certain people don’t like certain people as neighbors, especially those “Mexicans,” which generally explains why those certain people who don’t like “Mexicans” take every negative thing said about them as "fact" even if they’ve never even bothered to talk to one to see if they are actually “human” and not all “criminals,” rapists or drug dealers (as mentioned before, almost all fentanyl is transported into the country and “dealt” on the streets by U.S. citizens). According to another story by that yellow “journalism” rag, the Post,

Trump rips Biden ‘amnesty’ plan for rewarding ‘sham marriages’ as ‘veterans are dying on the street’

Well, besides other news sources fact-checking and debunking everything Trump said about that and “illegals” stealing all the jobs created during the Biden administration, it should be pointed out that Trump knows all about “sham” marriages, because he is in one right now; Melania can’t even stand to be in the same room with this guy. In regard to “veterans dying in the street,” since when did Trump give a damn about anyone dying on the street from homelessness, hunger and mental illness? Foolish voters need to be reminded of what we learned in this article in The Atlantic:

Trump rejected the idea of the visit (to the French military cemetery) because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed

And the Military Times added

The Defense officials also confirmed to The AP reporting in The Atlantic that Trump on Memorial Day 2017 had gone with his chief of staff, John Kelly, to visit the Arlington Cemetery gravesite of Kelly’s son, Robert, who was killed in 2010 in Afghanistan, and said to Kelly: “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”

The senior Marine Corps officer and The Atlantic, citing sources with firsthand knowledge, also reported that Trump said he didn’t want to support the August 2018 funeral of Republican Sen. John McCain, a decorated Navy veteran who spent years as a Vietnam prisoner of war, because he was a “loser.” The Atlantic also reported that Trump was angered that flags were flown at half-staff for McCain, saying: “What the f—- are we doing that for? Guy was a f—-ing loser.”

Let’s get a grip on reality here: Trump is the last person we'd expect any “neighborly” behavior from, which I will expound upon later.

Political divisiveness is one reason for a lack of neighborliness, but, then there is the cultural. It could be of the variety that isn’t so apparent unless you are actually looking. Yesterday the Seattle Convention Center was the setting for this year’s Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. The technology this conference celebrates has been accused of being used to violate privacy rights and of racial discrimination, given the very poor accuracy of facial “recognition” for people of darker tones—meaning that when police use it, they tend to misidentify people for crimes they did not commit.

I noticed something else: about 90 percent of the people I saw there looked suspiciously of Chinese extraction. Now I’m not saying anything here, except to point out that this group claims to have a policy of “non-discrimination”—meaning, I suppose, not discriminating against anyone just because they may be a Chinese intel agent, seeing what the few white folks actually invited have to “share.” OK, I’m probably “wrong,” but I do note that the organization has a 75-80 percent rejection rate for those who “qualify” to be in it, and it certainly seems “suspicious” to me about who "qualifies"—especially given the accusations of the nefariousness of the technology.

But why I am talking about this? Because yesterday was also the Juneteenth “holiday,” which before the George Floyd incident hardly anyone had ever heard of, including black folks who it “celebrates.” Juneteenth is really nothing more than one date like any other, like, say, December 7, the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and marked the entrance of the U.S. into World War II. Juneteenth (June 19, 1865) simply marked the day that a Union General marched into Texas to tell folks there that Texas was on the losing side of war and that the Emancipation Proclamation from two years previously applied to them too.

I guess MLK day is not considered "black" enough—the reality was that at the time of his assassination, MLK's approval ratings had declined among blacks because he wasn’t “radical” enough—and so to assuage anger about the George Floyd case the powers-that-be needed to come up with another holiday that for blacks would be “our day." Think I’m kidding? Over 300,000 white Union soldiers died to make the Emancipation Proclamation something worth more than the paper it was written on. But this is what someone from a black oriented website called “Scary Mommy” had to say:

Juneteenth is really a holiday for Black Americans. Yes, people of all ethnicities should acknowledge the day, but it’s not a holiday for them to openly celebrate. And I know that if we turn it into a federal holiday, somehow it will also become about white people. Because that’s what always happens. There shouldn’t be white people holding their own Juneteenth celebrations. Black people should be allowed to decide if white people can celebrate with them. You want to celebrate on your own? Donate to a Black organization. Or pay reparations to Black people directly. I know a lot of people will be mad at me for saying this, but it isn’t a decision I came to lightly.

I observed to my bus stop companion that there is no national or federal holiday that celebrates the diversity of this country in general. Sure there are “days” of something or other here and there (we joked about why there wasn’t additional “holidays,” like Bus On-Time Day), but the only people “diverse” enough to warrant a “holiday” of their own in this country are blacks. Juneteenth day seems to used more to beat people on the head with than actually “celebrate”—and believe me, even government people only “celebrate” the day as nothing more than a paid holiday.

The push for the enactment of this holiday after the Floyd incident, at least on the federal level, is a bit hypocritical given a couple of things, besides the lack of “neighborliness” in recognizing that some people seem to think that “We rise together” only applies to blacks in relation to whites, and not any other disadvantaged group. This is an excerpt from a post I wrote a few years ago to explain what I mean by that:

George Floyd’s name has become a standard bearer for police brutality, but he isn’t the only one who has died in a similar fashion in the last year or two. In San Diego, Angel Zapata Hernandez died while handcuffed, and one officer knelt on his neck for more than six minutes. Never heard of it? Neither did the BLM protestors in San Diego. In Antioch, CA Angelo Quinto died after suffering a “mental health crisis,” and an officer knelt on his neck for five minutes until he lost consciousness.

In Tucson, AZ Carlos Ingram Lopez died a “gruesome” death after he was detained by police for wandering aimlessly around train tracks. Lopez was handcuffed, left face down on the ground while the officers kneed his face into the pavement for 12 minutes until he went into cardiac arrest and stopped breathing—despite his pleading for water and crying for his grandmother, and telling the officers he couldn’t breathe; there is now a belatedly-released YouTube video of the whole incident from the police bodycam:

That’s three Hispanics who died the same way that George Floyd did, but who is counting? Their lives “don’t matter.” Even the "liberal" mainstream media doesn't allow them a "voice," at least not one where they are allowed to counter the dehumanizing rhetoric being spewed about them. How neighborly of those who are obsessed with their own “victimhood,” not just blacks, but white women and their stereotypes about Hispanic males. You can't join their "neighborhood" because you are not one of "us."

CNN is “shocked” that black support for Trump has moved from 7 percent in 2020 to 21 percent currently. I’m not “shocked.” It may be "ironic" because the Biden campaign should remind people of past history: do black people know that Trump and his father were sued by the Nixon Justice Department for racial discrimination in their unneighborly housing projects? Do they know that Trump called for the death penalty in a full page ad against the accused Central Park Five who were later found to have no part of the assault on the jogger, convicted solely on “confessions” that they were coerced into?

Do they know that Trump so disliked having “lazy” black people work in businesses that he ran (into the ground), like that at his former Atlantic City casino, where the management was forced to hide black employees in a back room whenever he visited so that he wouldn’t see them? Trump only “loves” black people when they “love” him, but why would they? Apparently many feel a “commonality” with him because he is a convicted felon; he is being "unfairly" treated (by black prosecutors; note he doesn't use the same disparaging rhetoric against Jack Smith, who is white). And they are taken in by his racist rhetoric against immigrants and his use of demeaning and dehumanizing terms directed solely at those of Hispanic origin, and not at themselves.

Meanwhile, neo-Nazis like Fox News' Laura Ingraham have made it plain that they don't like Hispanics as neighbors; dehumanizing claims about them and the "threat" they pose to white supremacy and white "culture" are simple ignorance because their "culture" is largely based on the European model (as "imported" by the Spaniards). What Ingraham and those like her really fear is that their past and ongoing racist rhetoric can't be taken back now, and will eventually blow back into their faces.

But is there a "threat" to being "neighborly" from immigrants from non-European-based cultures? Or ones that "assimilate" the less admirable cultural traits? There is a new guy on bus, apparently an Arab, who wears a hoodie every day. He plays his Arabic music on his phone so that everyone can hear it; he seemed so insistent on his "right" to do so that it must be "religious" in nature, which would mean that he imposing his religion on a generally Christian "audience." I admit that what sounds like something on auto-rewind every 15 seconds with no discernible "riffs" or instrumentation isn't as bad as the vulgarities you can understand in rap or hip-hop, but it's the "principle" of the thinking that civil behavior doesn't apply to some people. Besides wearing a hoodie, this guy has "assimilated" by learning all the four-letter words in the dictionary in response to people asking him to turn it down or use headphones as is posted on the "Ride Ride" posting.

On the other hand, there are groups that avoid assimilation altogether, like most of the Russian community and even the African immigrant community which doesn't like being identified as "black" with all the "baggage" that implies. But while such communities do not parade around their differences in public, that is not true of immigrants from India, from which each Indian "state" has its own separate caste or "tribe" and celebrates their own separate holidays, such as the Khalsa Day festival, which is celebrated solely by the Sikh Khalsa caste. You'd never know how many there were here unless you observed the Kent Showare Center taken over by them:

It seems like there is one of these Indian celebrations going on every other week in some part of King County. I didn't see any non-Indians there (and likely not attended by other Indian castes); the opposite was true of the "International Fair" two weeks later, although to be honest there appeared to be more people tending to the few booths set-up than actual visitors. But where are they when they go home? In Kent, behind these newly erected fences:

Of course who wants to go out of their way to be "neighborly" when they have a hard enough to time being so in the places they came from, like Hindus taking out their frustrations on Muslims...

...and Muslims acting out against their Hindu "neighbors":

Still, I have to confess that if I was the owner of this "residence," I'd erect a fence to "conceal" the fact that I was probably breaking a dozen city codes: