Running AMOC

I have no idea why K$H Patel has inserted the FBI into yesterday's shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis.  Could it be because the shooter, who is dead, was transgender, presenting an opportunity to further demonize and vilify this vulnerable community?  Was it because he decided to portray it as a hate crime against Catholics?  It couldn't just be that Minnesota is a blue state with an outspoken governor and they needed a justification for military occupation.

Although it was only a week ago, no one beyond Austin seems to be paying attention to the shooting outside a Target store which also claimed three lives.  Maybe if I use the phrase "naked, carrying a Bible" to describe the condition of the gunman when arrested...is it coming back now?  Unlike Robin Westman, Ethan Nieneker has an extensive criminal record.  He has been charged with murder, attempted murder, robbery and assault in this case, accused of killing a Target employee named Hector Leopoldo Martinez Machuca, Adam Chow and his four-year-old granddaughter.  The FBI does not seem to be involved in this act of terrorism and I have to wonder why.  Two victims of Asian descent and a Latino man suggest a racial motive, apart from Nieneker's enthusiastic support for Trump on Facebook.  Why is Minneapolis a hate crime and not Austin?  When will the Texas National Guard be ordered into violent, crime-ridden Austin?  

Expecting consistency from a dictatorship, especially in the application of the law, is like expecting your cat to ask for guitar lessons.  It's like acting surprised when someone serving twenty years for sex trafficking is suddenly transferred to the equivalent of a girls' boarding school with off-campus work privileges.  It's like wondering why Official MAGA Martyr Ashli Babbitt qualifies for a funeral with military honors when she died committing a criminal act, while the Bronze Star belatedly awarded to the governor of Maryland is threatened with revocation.  (Re-interring Babbitt in Arlington next to the Confederate Monument seems just about right.)  It's like expecting Tulsi Gabbard to be fired for posting the name of an undercover CIA agent on Xitter, as if the Director of National Intelligence is supposed to be intelligent.  

Trump's charm offensive on behalf of peace in Ukraine is going about as well as expected.  In an overnight assault on Kyiv and other cities, buildings of the European Union and the British Council were damaged and an apartment building was destroyed, with at least 45 people injured and 12 killed.  Trump may as well have acted with a modicum of dignity -- but there I go wishing again.

In case you wondered how irrational the regime's hatred of immigrants is, this irrational:  The Border Patrol arrested two people who were fighting the Bear Gulch fire in Olympic National Forest, Washington, yesterday.  Other firefighters were warned not to film the arrests, as if the jackals had some faint sense that they were doing wrong.  Very faint.

In case you wondered how a conspiracy theorist and former heroin user with worms in his head and no training in medicine or any other branch of science became Secretary of Health and Human Suffering, wonder no more:  "I had eleven brothers and sisters [he had ten], I had about seventy first cousins and I never saw anybody with diabetes.  I never knew anybody with a food allergy.  I never knew anybody with autism.  And I know what a healthy child is supposed to look like.  I'm looking at kids as I walk through the airports today...and I see these kids that are just burdened with mitochondrial challenges, with inflammation."  (Roadkill Bob at some farcical event in Texas.)  Did you ever see anyone with Addison's disease or developmental difficulties?  You don't remember Uncle Jack and Aunt Rosemary, do you?  Grandpa Joe went to a lot of trouble to conceal the truth about them.  Who knows what else the family concealed?

In case you thought you understood the depths of Trump's childishness and narcissism, hang on.  J.B. Pritzker made a stirring speech about the impending invasion of Chicago yesterday, and today we heard the very presidential response, referring to the $1.15 billion project at the Des Plaines River to prevent invasive carp from getting into the Great Lakes.  "I didn't get a request from the governor of Illinois.  And I think until I get that request from that guy I'm not going to do anything about it."  If he doesn't call me "sir" with tears in his eyes, I cut off his allowance and to hell with the fishing industry.  And Seth Meyers has "the personality of an insecure child"?

Having given up on Vogue, Melania is now yearning for the cover of Vanity Fair and thinks she has a chance with its inexperienced editor Mark Guiducci.  Isn't she the first presidential wife to have a theater named for her, informally known as the Whore Memorial Opera House?  Wasn't she featured on Vanity Fair Mexico eight years ago, as relations with the US began to sour?  Hasn't Donny promised to make her Queen of the Moon as soon as the first nuclear power plant there is up and running?  But according to the Daily Mail, Guiducci raised the subject with one editor and got the response, "I will walk out the motherfucking door and half my staff will follow me."  I'm sensing reluctance. "We are not going to normalize this despot and his wife."  So that's no?  "If I have to work bagging groceries at Trader Joe's, I'll do it."  It sounds like Kristi Noem has a better shot at the cover of AKC American Dog.

It may not matter, because a crucial Atlantic current is collapsing.  The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) carries warm tropical water to Europe, cools, and sinks to form a return current.  It prevents western Europe from having extreme temperatures in winter and summer and it allows millions to grow food thanks to the tropical rain belt.  This will all stop unless carbon emissions are reduced, and that just isn't happening.  Already the Greenland ice cap is melting, raising sea levels.  

We broke the planet.