Teen Sleuth Haunted Library

Coming out of blogger retirement for this.

DEFIANT HILLARY CLINTON STILL RELEASES A BOOK DESPITE MEN TELLING HER NOT TO. Today is the day! Today is the Big Day! The release date for Hillary Clinton’s new book, “These Words Will Irrationally Enrage Dumb People, And It’s Entirely Unclear Why”, and this neoliberal shill is so scited! Folks in NYC are wearing vagina hats and are tweeting things like this picture of a Union Square Barnes and Noble!

Bet she won’t have to  e rearranging the book table at Costco to make it look like her book is popular!

Here are some important questions to ponder on HRC Book Day:

Why is Hillary Clinton walking in the woods when she should be leading the Resistance?
Why is Hillary Clinton trying to lead the Resistance when she should shut up and go walk in the woods?
Why won’t Hillary Clinton explain all the ways she was bad in the campaign?
Why is Hillary Clinton trying to write a book about the campaign?
Why is Hillary Clinton doing book signings when she ought to home baking cookies and not talking?
Why didn’t Hillary Clinton divorce her husband whom she obviously loves?
Why is Hillary Clinton always blaming sexism?
Why is Hillary Clinton such a bitch?

Hillz was on the CBS “Sunday Morning” television program this weekend, giving a righteous good interview. I know, I am supposed to be harmoniously healing from the primary and never saying a bad thing about Bernie Sanders because he is the true king of us and people concerned with the future of the Democratic Party shouldn’t ever point out that Bernie isn’t even a Democrat, or that he’s made clear he doesn’t give a solitary fuck about the party.

Hillary puts her deplorable foot in her mouth by saying the following thing is true, just because it happens to be true:

“I won a landslide victory in the primary.”

WHOA WHOA WHOA, CRAZY LADY WHAT ARE YOU SMOKING RIGHT NOW? Isn’t it a proven fact that Hillary #RIGGED the primary by getting early endorsements and convincing the base of the Democratic party to like her more, to the point that several million more people voted for her? That is unfair and unkind.

Let’s have a full quote:

“I know what it’s like to win and I know what it’s like to lose. And when I lost to Barack Obama, I immediately turned around, I endorsed him, I worked for him, I convinced my supporters to work for him. I didn’t get the same respect from my primary opponent. And a lot of his supporters continued to harass and go after my supporters, all the time”.

If you don’t remember because of the pot-smoking or the ADD meds haven’t kicked in, things got ugly during the  2008 Democratic primary, There was a particularly obnoxious online movement of Hillary supporters called the PUMAs (Party Unity, My Ass — sound familiar?), threatening to blow everything up because Hillary Clinton had lost the primary fair and square. DAME HILLARY OF BENGHAZI DID NOT PUT UP WITH THIS SHIT FROM HER OWN PEOPLE. UNLIKE BERNIE, she showed up, she embraced Barack Obama wholeheartedly, as personally painful as it must have been for her. That is how a woman behaves. If you dive into the MATH, fewer Sanders supporters rejected Hillary than Hillary supporters rejected Obama in 2008. Like we said, the 2008 primary was vicious. It also should give us hope for <insert platitude here about time healing all wounds>.)

“I think a lot of what he churned up in the primary campaign was very hurtful in the general election against me. […] He doesn’t disown the things they say about … some of my favorite Democrats, people like Kamala Harris, who is out there speaking up and speaking out and she’s being attacked from the left. Enough!”

Goddammit, Hillary, stop it with your quote-unquote “REALITY.” How many times did we hear about people “voting with their vaginas” during the primary? Many. How many times have we pushed back against insane, out-of-left-field attacks on Kamala Harris? HERE and HERE are two examples of that.Candidates and politicians have a lot of power to move their supporters. This is why we constantly demand Donald Trump disavow his white supremacist Nazi adorers. How much difference would it make, now, if Bernie stood next to his colleague Kamala Harris, in a mutual display of “Knock that shit off, assholes”? Just asking questions here.

“You know, if you don’t want to support Democrats, then go somewhere else, but if you are willing to work with us, we’re gonna have disagreements. We’re going to be pushing and pulling to get to the right solutions. I’ve been for universal healthcare coverage my entire adult life. I’ve worked to achieve it. And we got closer than we ever had with the Affordable Care Act. I was defending it, he wanted to start over. We were at 90% coverage. I thought that was significant.”

What would have happened if Bernie Sanders had really fought for Hillary Clinton the way Hillary Clinton did for Barack Obama? How much could he have helped prevent the little situation we’re in right now where, despite Hillary winning the popular vote by millions, 77,000 voters in the Rust Belt were able to hand the election to Donald Trump? I am really ” just saying”.

Idealism has its place, but reality has to step in at some point. Voting your “conscience” with stakes as high as they were should have meant HRC as President. You didn’t vote your “conscience” if you voted Stein, Johnson, or Mickey Mouse or if you continued to trash the Democratic candidate and sashay around in your stupid Bernie shirts. You voted as a child who took their toys home rather than share. Some asshole on Twitter asked how HRC supporters sleep at night. I would pose the same question to him. And for the record:
I sleep at night because I registered voters in a heavily black and hispanic neighborhood and was physically threatened and witnessed others being threatened, and among those threatened were CHILDREN. I tried to ward off post-nomination Berniebots because I knew then that is was going to hurt our chances of winning which meant that the unthinkable could happen. I discouraged women from tweeting things like “i just don’t want THAT woman” and bagging on “older generations” telling them what to do, and calling HRC a “republican lite”). But I also can’t sleep because of this, because at some level I feel less human for not putting my foot in some childish asses. All the Bernie people ever did was eat our stuff, tell kids about “Jill Stein”, and try and swipe the button making machine. They were out of touch adult children without proper education in history, feminism and ethics, and no real threats to their personal comfort. I know who they are now, and I’ll be goddamned if I let them fuck the next show up.

READ A BOOK.

Amazon 

IndieBound

The Observer reports that hordes of cranky Trump supporters who can’t find anything in the world to get mad about today are getting their feathers ruffled over Hulu’s upcoming series The Handmaid’s Tale, based on the Margaret Atwood novel, set to premiere on April 26 (viewing party, my house).

Trump People saw the newly released trailer and quickly blew their collective gasket, calling it “liberal propaganda”.

The trailer (google it, it looks great), gives us a full on look at Gilead. Offered (played by Elizabeth Moss), in VO:

 “I was asleep before, that’s how we let it happen. When they slaughtered Congress, we didn’t wake up. When they blamed terrorists and suspended the constitution, we didn’t wake up then either. Now I’m awake.”

We see Offred  before she donned the chilling red coat and white hairpiece, protesting the new totalitarian regime, getting fired from her job, attempting to flee with her husband and daughter to Canada.  As we know, since we have ALL READ THIS BOOK, The Handmaid’s Tale depicts a dystopian future in which the United States of America has been dismantled and replaced with a theocracy, Gilead, which forces women to act as “handmaids” to powerful men and bear them children if their wives are sterile. So yeah, it seems as if it COULD BE SOMETHING REAL WRITTEN RIGHT NOW. Except that it was a NOVEL. And it was WRITTEN IN 1985.

It’s not weird that Republicans have not read, or even heard of this novel, or can not google it prior to tweeting. What is weird is that The Handmaid’s Tale seems so chillingly familiar to the modern day Republican party and its Twitter-addicted leader, that it would jump to this conclusion.

per the Observer:

The book taps into a genuine and age-old threat: those men who will trade away the liberty of their neighbors for power. A fixation on controlling women’s bodies, and their wombs; performative evangelicalism; anti-intellectualism; pollution and sexually transmitted diseases gone unchecked—“’Better’ never means better for everyone,” the Commander remarks. What about “Great Again,” Commander?

I ask: what is it about a dystopian horror world in which terrorist attacks are used as an excuse for unchecked power, and in which women are suppressed until they are worth little more than their ability to reproduce seems like it’s referring to your political party? Because if you recognize The Handmaid’s Tale, written over thirty years ago, as a big subtweet at your political movement, what does that say about your political movement?

Lincoln in the Bardo

By George Saunders

Random House, Hardcover, 9780812995343, 368pp.

Publication Date: February 14, 2017

If the education part doesn’t save them, maybe the trendy architecture will?

North Claremont Public Library, San Diego, CA

Mission Hills Branch Library, San Diego, CA

New Public Library, Minneapolis Minnesota, early 1960’s  

Worcester Public Library, Boston, Mass

Brooklyn Public Library, NY

San Diego Public Library

Hi friends. It’s been a long time. Welcome to Trump’s America.

Question: Who the f*ck votes against a library? Even the f*cking robber barons of the great industrial age funded public libraries, if that’s any kind of measure of the kind of capitalists we’re dealing with now, and it is.

Andrew Carnegie was a f*ckng maniac, a brutal industrialist, presiding over this country’s most bitter labor dispute – The Homestead Steel Strike of 1892 — in which he and conspired with Henry Clay Frick to mercilessly beat down striking steelworkers. They locked the workers out and erected a high fence topped with barbed wire and sniper towers with searchlights and high-pressure water cannons. They hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency to come in and beat back the workers. Yet, even Andrew Carnegie thought libraries were important. Carnegie ultimately gave away $60 million to fund a system of 1,689 public libraries across the country between 1883 and 1929. Carnegie’s reasons for donating money to the founding of libraries were his belief that libraries added to the meritocratic nature of America,  and that immigrants like himself needed to acquire cultural knowledge of America which a library would enable immigrants to do. OR: the exact reasons why the Kochs DON’T want them.

 “In bestowing charity the main consideration should be to help those who help themselves” – A Carnegie. Patrons in the reading room of the Carnegie Library of Homestead, Munhall, Pa., 1900. 

The Koch brothers’ were put on earth to make life as miserable as possible for everyone who isn’t rich. Their ire over the potential dethroning of hereditary power of old rich white men and turned women, and turning non white people and gays loose is unimaginable. These hideous brothers are using their billions to reshape the global economic system in such a way as to enrich themselves and their heirs at the expense of most other inhabitants of the planet. The long-lasting damage they have done to all of humanity, and particularly the poor, from everything from election rigging to bankrolling the climate change denial industry, is positively harrowing.

In their attempts at remaking America into a libertarian paradise, Charles and David Koch’s reach into virtually every aspect of political, economic and physical life on the planet is probably greater than you thought possible. It’s way worse than the paper towels you shouldn’t buy and their campaigns to elect rightwing candidates who promise to never raise taxes or regulate industry. Their front group – “Americans For Prosperity” – is busy infiltrating local politics – such as elections on public transit funding, because government should never be in the business of helping people for any reason. In 2015, they slaughtered a Nashville plan to improve transit, out of pure libertarian “principle”. In Columbus, Ohio, they fought against a funding measure for the local zoo. Naturally, now they’re going after public libraries, because if people want access to books and computers and children’s story hours and author lectures, they should damn well pay for them themselves, not leech taxpayer dollars for the “good” of the “community.” Of course, we do pay for these things ourselves, with something called “our tax dollars”.

In Illinois, AFP took their All Taxes are Bad battle to a small town ballot measure to fund the building of a new library in West Dundee. The Fox River Valley Public Library would have been an impressive, 21st-Century library serving several area communities, but AFP spent a few thousand bucks on scary flyers saying TAX INCREASE, and that was that: no library, no nice things.

AFP also pushed a bill in the Illinois state legislature to eliminate the ability of local library boards to manage their own budgets, instead placing a “budget cap” on local governments that would force libraries to eliminate any improvements in services that might result in a higher budget. It’s just another of the ways the Kochs are working to make life difficult for small town libraries – which are of course are our most colossal wastes of American taxpayer money. A big Koch Fuck You to the “Rural Americans” they snookered into voting for them. In Plainfield, Illinois, another library referendum was recently killed off, thanks to misleading robocalls from AFP claiming enormous tax increases were on the way — even though the property tax increases necessary would have been minuscule.

The Kochs hate libraries for a myriad of reasons:

1. Education and critical thinking skills are The Right’s worst enemies (Koch motto: Keep the electorate illiterate and they will vote against their own self interest).

2. People who are poor and/or homeless use the computers at libraries to find housing and/or jobs. Fuck those people, wanting to find a place to live and a way to pay the rent!

3. If an immigrant wants help learning English and passing the citizenship test, public libraries are a good place to start. The Kochs understand quite well how to reduce participation in the democracy.

4. Librarians will teach you how to research and end up with verifiable facts and data. [ you might even get some critical thinking skills by osmosis ] We’re already gearing up to figure out how to teach critical thinking once the students start pushing back on facts and reliable information. Why should they need that kind of information? The president doesn’t!

(above) The Royal Library of Alexandria in Egypt was one of the largest and most significant libraries of the ancient world. Created by Ptolemy I Soter, a Macedonian general and the successor of Alexander the Great, it was dedicated to the Muses, the nine goddesses of the arts. It flourished under the patronage of the Ptolemaic dynasty and functioned as a major center of scholarship from its construction in the 3rd century BC until the Roman conquest of Egypt in 30 BC, with collections of works, lecture halls, meeting rooms, and gardens. The library was part of a larger research institution called the Musaeum of Alexandria, where many of the most famous thinkers of the ancient world studied. The library burned down and although sources differ on who was responsible for the fire, t’s destruction has become a symbol for the loss of cultural knowledge.

Funny thing. None of this shit so far will affect me. Not the loss of the ACA, not the new Education secretary (I have no kids, thank you, Jesus), not Dr. Ben Brainstems at HUD…none of it hits me personally. I’ve got no children and a fat paycheck and I live in the liberal bastion of California. I happily pay my taxes so my friend’s children and so stranger’s children can have access to schools and health care. HAPPILY, DAMN YOU ALL, because THAT’S HOW THIS WORKS.  Some of this shit may even benefit me, on paper. The extra $$$ a year I stand to put in my pocket is totally offset by the fucking over of people that are not in my position. I am totally willing to have my after-tax income go down if it was going to provide health care for all, good public schools and infrastructure improvments. Those things raise us all as a society and a country. Totally worth the cost. But the jackals making billions are so very worried about an extra 50 to 60K in taxes. Percentage wise, I am willing to give more to the common good than them. More importantly, the extra amount they would need to pay in taxes would not even be noticed in their lives. They are a group of greedy, sociopathic assholes that are so stuck on status and compairing dick size via income they can not see that the route they are taking is actually the route that has led to the most brutally bloody revolutions in history.

When will these Assholes for Philistinism see that success brings responcibility and should include compassion for those with less? I donate to charity. I work in my community. I pay attention to the guy panhandling in front of Walgreens and in the check out line at the grocery store, if I see some one culling their purchases of basic goods because they cant afford them I pay for them and give them to the person. I give blankets to the homeless people living under the bridge in my are when it’s pouring rain. It doesn’t make me feel “good”, it makes me feel normal.  I want people to know someone cares and life is better.

May anyone opposing the existence of libraries be thrown in a circle of hell where they are stuck in a second rate amusement park where they are dope sick, have diarrhea cramps and sweats on a hot, humid day, feeling sticky and wet, forever looking for a nonexistent bathroom while wearing too tight and ill-fitting clothes while a swarm of deer flies are buzzing around biting all exposed bits and everyone pointing and laughing at their misery.

Cue. “Shut up, Libtard. The only books you need are Atlas Shrugged. the Bible, and The Art of the Deal”.

the end.

A group called EveryLibrary has launched a funding drive to mobilize library supporters to fight Koch-funded anti-library measures. Their goal is a modest $250,000, which can actually go a pretty long way in small-town political campaigning. Go help ’em out, because libraries are good things. If they meet their goal, it’s only a matter of time until the Koch Brothers buy all the local fire depts and have the fire depts burn all the books at the local libraries. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

Hillbilly Elegy
A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

By J. D. Vance
Harper, Hardcover, 9780062300546, 272pp.

Publication Date: June 28, 2016

great piece via Moyers.com

Donald Trump reflects the “extremist” values Republicans have been cultivating for decades, while the mainstream media intentionally looked away. Readers weigh in with their perspectives below.

BY KARIN KAMP | MARCH 22, 2016

California governor Ronald Reagan speaks to journalist John Chancellor (L) on the floor of the Republican National Convention, Miami Beach, Florida, August 1968. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

While the media and establishment Republicans like to paint Donald Trump as a colorful outlier, he is actually the fulfillment of everything the GOP has been saying and doing for decades, writes Neal Gabler in his recent media column, “Blowing the Biggest Political Story of the Last Fifty Years.”

Continue reading →

Continue reading →

Hillbilly Elegy
A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

By J. D. Vance
Harper, Hardcover, 9780062300546, 272pp.

Publication Date: June 28, 2016

Via Kotaku