Yearly Archives: 2023

Age produces a certain intolerance for stupidity. The “here’s your sign” kind of stupidity made hilarious by comedian Bill Engvall.

Each morning I awaken at roughly 4:00 a.m. and before starting the day’s work assignment, I fix a cup of Folgers instant coffee, turn on my computer, and head for Yahoo News. I want to make sure the world is still standing after a night of incomprehensible violence in some part of the world. I may devote all of ten seconds wondering how humans developed the audacity to call humankind “civilized.”

As I scroll through the news feed trying to find something relevant to read, I see enticements about 8 “stunning see through bikini photos” of some British (and/other other nationality) Wang Dang Doodle model, soccer star, Alpine skier, pro wrestler, or kangaroo rider on the beaches in Arizona.

Why would a man, woman, transgender, or no gender give a “good flying fuck” (and I don’t even want to think about where that term came from) about Wang Dang Doodle in a see through bikini bear-hugging a cactus plant in a New Mexico desert.

Maybe I’m too old to appreciate the “finer things” in life anymore. I find it more interesting, and occasionally more enjoyable, to watch the human traffic moving about in the parking lot of the local grocery.

Another thing on my mind that pisses me off is this “transgender issue.”

The Washington Post recently posted an op-ed piece about “understanding biological sex.” The newspaper reported that more than 7,000 of its readers took valuable time out of their lives to pass their opinion about what another person wants to be sexually, how they wish to dress in public, and how they view sex in general.

Folks, this is “breaking news happening right now”: planet earth is dying and humankind is just yards from the end zone.

Take my advice please: you be whatever the fuck you want to be and let the other person be whatever the fuck they want to be. It will make life so much simpler, perhaps even happier, as we all hurdle towards the “end days” or certainly toward our last day.

Finally but not lastly, I’ve had about as much of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s stupidity as I can stand. When I see her name, I will run away in fear of being blighted by the stench of it. This Congressional scientist recently informed the public that global warming is a natural phenomenon brought about because the earth is a spinning ball in the universe; and because that is the natural order of things, current day Americans should not be required to pay taxes to subsidize climate change because people in the Ice Age (more than 11,000 years ago) did not have to pay taxes to keep the earth frozen.

That is the new political criteria for being a U.S. Congressperson.

At least George Santos, like we all do, knows that world is square and that it sits motionless on a catalytic converter just five miles from the third rock to the sun.

America has become a society of rage

This rage is driven by racism, political divisions, cultural differences, and for-profit industries that promote violence.

The evening news on one local channel in San Antonio recently led with three stories about road rage, one involving a promising young college student.

Stories appearing in Yahoo News over the past weekend carried reports about current and former sports figures arrested for violent behavior.

Our society has become so infested with rage that too many athletes feel that violence, whether mimic or actual, enhances their “brand.”

In other words, they are not “for real” unless they can shoot a gun like they shoot a basketball or hit their partners like they hit baseballs.

Rage seeps into the very fabric of society. It stains and ultimately rots the threads that hold the society together.

A 16-year-old Black teenager—the kind of kid everyone would be proud to have as a son—mistakenly walked up to the house of an 84-year-old White man in Kansas City looking for his brother and was shot, and seriously wounded, by the embittered racist old White man. The Black kid survived; the old White man went to jail.

The incident has triggered a “national discussion” about race in America—especially after it was reported that three White families refused to help the wounded young Black teenager seeking assistance.

Rage leads to some White people in our military betraying our county to declared enemies who are not only encouraged but actually praised for their traitorous actions by lunatic right-wing Congressional leaders.

That is the fabric of our rage-driven American society today.

So, if a young college student or a person of different color cuts off an already pissed off driver, he (much more often than a she) feels he has a license to shoot and kill the offending driver with one of the dozens of guns he keeps handy for such a moment.

In Texas, White men, especially those with former military or law enforcement backgrounds, have a license to either run over or shoot to kill any Black Lives Matter protestors that stand in his way.

In Ohio, White police officers can shoot an unarmed Black man 46 times for a traffic violation without any accountability.

More than half of all murders committed in the U.S. each year are committed in the South—the former Confederate States of America. Most of those murders are not committed by “bad guys” with a gun but rather by “good guys” with a gun who let their rage make them feel they have a license to kill.

Rage is a cancer in society. It awakens the worse demons in all of us. And it will consume our society.

These three words are frequently employed to describe a situation in which justice has been debased or wrongfully withheld;

What was done to Lydell Grant in Houston, Texas in 2010 was a travesty of justice. He was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison for stabbing a man to death in a barroom.

Grant was wrongfully convicted.

He was innocent.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals said as much in 2021 when the court declared Grant “actually innocent” for the barroom killing. DNA evidence and a confession by the real killer unequivocally confirmed his innocence.

Grant’s exoneration gained national media attention because of the travesty of justice in his wrongful conviction. The State of Texas tried to make amends for the seven years he spent in the state’s prison system by awarding him $1 million in compensation.

As of this month, Texas had paid Grant $317,000. The state still owes him $673,000.

Prison, standing alone, teaches an inmate nothing. Whatever an inmate gains or loses in prison depends exclusively upon the endeavors, mentally and physically, they undertake while incarcerated.

The success or failure to those endeavors will be determined by two frames of mind.

First, a reckless, irresponsible reaction to people, events and circumstances that percolates throughout any given incarcerated day which inevitably lead to negative consequences. Or, second, a measured, self-discipline reaction to all the myriad situations that arise in an angry, hostile, fucked-up environment which brings an acceptable level of tolerance. In other words, your mouth stays closed when every fiber in your brain screams “fuck you!”

One is lack of control, the other is control.

I don’t know what kind of inmate Grant was during his seven years in prison. I just know he was a former inmate given $1 million dollars and “we’re so sorry” pass from the State of Texas upon his release from prison.

So what did Grant do with that $317,000?

He bought a goddamn gun he used to kill a 33-year-old man in a “road rage” incident earlier this month in Houston.

Texas still owes him that $673,000 that it will have to continue to pay him while he awaits disposition of the road rage killing. If convicted, most of the remaining $673,000 will most probably go to court costs and victim restitution. He will not enjoy it in prison, for sure.

Did prison damage Lydell Grant?

I doubt it.

I’m sure that with a little cache of money in the bank, a socially inherited right to feel victimized, and a desire (not need) to open or conceal carry a firearm as a license to shoot the fuck out of anyone who cut him off in traffic, the “prison experience” had nothing to do with Grant’s decision to kill that man because of road rage.

Prison is a beast with a lot of warts. I don’t think “road rage” is one of them. That wart belongs strictly to stupidity.

Catholics and evangelicals form the nucleus of Christianity in the United States.

Both Christian entities are extremely pro-life. They preach the theology of protecting the unborn in the name of God’s only begotten son.

It is from these religious ranks, like White Christian Nationalist Marjorie Taylor Green, that promote the outlandish—obscene actually—political mantra that “Democrats are pedophiles.” The Florida politically conservative “war on Disney,” led by its Gov. Ron DeSantis, is based on this belief expressed by a right-wing White Christian Nationalist and conspiracy theorist Candace Owen in a tweet:

“”Child groomers and pedophiles.  They (Disney) have now openly admitted  they have a not so secret agenda with your [Christian] children.  This is the death of Disney.”

But what are the facts?

A recent report issued by the Maryland Attorney General’s Office list more than 150 priests accused of sexually molesting more than 600 children with the near-blessing of the local Catholic Diocese for decades. This latest report is just one of the hundreds of other reports released in the U.S. (and around the world) chronicling the history of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests.

In 2018, the Washington Post carried a major story about “the epidemic of denial about sexual abuse in the evangelical church.” The author of the article, Joshua Peace, made this observation:

“So many Christian churches in the United States do so much good—nourishing the soul, comforting the sick, providing services, counseling congregants, teaching Jesus’s example, and even working to fight sexual abuse and harassment. But like in any community of faith, there is also sin—often silenced, ignored and denied—and it is much more common than many want to believe. It has often led to failure by evangelicals to report sexual abuse [including that of children], respond appropriately to victims and change the institutional cultures that enabled the abuse in the first place.”

That means, as evidenced by the latest Catholic Church child sex abuse report in Baltimore Maryland, that while literally tens of thousands of standard-bearer Catholic Christians and Evangelical Christians fight and protest for the rights of unborn children, they are simultaneously sexually abusing, and terrorizing, the very children they saved from abortion.

There are more Christian child sexual abusers in the nation’s churches every Sunday than all the “liberal Democratic” Disney executives who may be “grooming” children for pedophilia.

Every country in the world has some kind of prison system—some humane, others not so much.

According to the World Population Review, the United States incarcerates more people than any other nation.

Incarceration begins with policing.

According to WorldAtlas, the United States ranks third in the world, behind the more heavily populated China and India, with the number of police.

The American Bar Association instructs that the purpose of policing in America is: safeguard individual freedoms, preserve life and property, protect the constitutional rights of citizens, maintain respect for the rule of law through its proper enforcement, and preserve the nation’s democratic processes.

Criminal defense attorneys generally recognize that there are three primary purpose of penal incarceration: deterrence, punishment, and rehabilitation.

A donation appeal from The Appeal appeared last month in my email inbox. I’ve never donated to The Appeal, although I have hyperlinked them as a source in some of my writings because I respect some of their work.

Written by Olayemi Olurin, the email opened with this first line:

“Yes, when abolitionists say abolition, we do really mean abolish prisons, policing, and America’s entire criminal justice system.”

I know a thing or two about police, prison, and American justice.

I have been in the “custody” of the Louisiana justice system—one of the most corrupt and racist in America—for more than 57 years. The state’s police tried on several occasions to kill me; its violent prison system tried to destroy me as a human being for more than 40 years; and its corrupt parole system is determined to keep me in its custody until I die.

So by no means am I a champion of police, prison, and traditional justice.

There are, I believe, more bad cops than good ones; mass penal incarceration is a $200 billion industrial complex that is a form of modern day slavery; and the entire nation’s criminal justice system is systemically racist and corrupt, perhaps irreparably so as some like Olayemi Olurin reasonably argue.

However, arguments for the abolition of all these social safety nets are misguided, I believe.

I am not about to disparage the abolitionists. They are well-meaning, good-intention folks trying to bring fairness, reason, decency and transparency in efforts to protect society and preserve the nation’s democratic institutions.

But the harsh reality is that in America today—a nation bitterly divided by systemic racism of every stripe, the increasing development of white supremacy, and the staggering harm caused by inexcusable, profit-driven gun violence—policing and penal incarceration, as well as the larger justice system of which they are components, are necessary to maintain some semblance of law and order.

Nihilistic anarchy and violent fascism lurks at the doorstep of every democracy.

There are roughly 330 million people in America today—20 to 30 million of whom are incorrigibly criminal, dangerously mentally ill, white nationalists bent on civil war, and racists who want to harm all other races.

Within this social mix are ruthless murderers, serial killers, mass shooters, drug cartels, organized gangs, pedophiles, and an endless assortment of rage killers who are psychologically primed to harm anyone at any given moment.

All of our social institutions have been harmed by these dangerous, lawless forces—schools, places of worship, work places, the family unit, the public square, and even in our child foster care and elderly treatment centers.

Group counseling, neighborhood watch groups, diversionary programs, alternatives to incarceration, social policing, and vigilante justice will not protect law-abiding and decent people trying to survive from cradle to grave.

Bottom line: the group must be protected from the self-centered interests of the individual. Abolitionists believe—or so I think—that the individual must be protected from the group.

Believe me; neither the group nor the individual is without sin. The divergent interests of the two have robbed mankind of decency and humanity since the proverbial bite out of the apple.

I once read that mankind will never know peace until the last general is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

Most probably true.

Worldwide wars and religious strife between groups today have given some individuals in the groups a license to be as criminal, mean, and violent as they please.

Georgetown Law Center’s Associate Professor Allegra M. McLeod coined the phrase “prison abolitionist ethic”—a rooted ideological belief that this ethic will eliminate prison and policing’s “brutality, violence, racial stratification, ideological rigidity, despair, and waste.”

It will not.

Look at history.

The Marxism-Leninism ideology promised mankind economic equality and social fairness free of the privileged class.

Yet as Yuri N. Maltsev wrote in a November 2, 2017 piece for Fee Stories, “Never has there been such an insidious and deadly ideology as Marxism-Leninism.”

This ideological belief system carried out an estimated 28,000 executions a year between 1917 and 1922 to replace the Czarist police, prison, and criminal justice systems.

That was the “justice” it gave to Russia.

Abolition of any stripe born from the belly of anarchy, whether inspired by nihilism or socialism, will always produce mass murder and injustice.

Rudolph Rummel estimated that socialism, and its pledge for social justice, killed roughly 61 million people in the Soviet Union, another 78 million in China, and an estimated 200 million worldwide during the 20^th century—all in the name of “justice” of one kind or another.

That’s why I believe repair is better than abolition.

America’s police, prison, and criminal justice systems can be repaired.

More people than not in this country favor a justice delivery system that is fair, equitable, and humane. This objective can be achieved through the power of the vote—by electing people to public office committed to bringing about such a system.

The one lesson I’ve learned in this life, more than half of which has been spent in penal incarceration, is that protection of the group must always trump the freedom of the self-centered individuals

Humans survive as a group, not as individuals.