Here we go again...

One of my favorite UF professors, Robert Lawless, passed away in 2012. He had written a book titled Haiti's Bad Press, which covered many of the ways the US has mistreated Haiti since the people there won their independence in 1804. So many ways. And now, a new one. US right-wing racist dipshits have spread a "rumor" that Haitian "illegal" immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are seizing pet cats and dogs and eating them.

First, these immigrants are not "illegal." Second, I know a little about Haiti, much of it from Prof Lawless, and I've never heard of any tradition of people there eating cats or dogs.* This is just another wave of bad press, much of which originated in the wave of sensationalist and inaccurate horror films featuring "voodoo" and "witchcraft" starting in the early 20th century.

The real problem and danger is that Trump and his allies like Vance and Loomer keep doubling down on the story and are setting up a scenario where people are going to get hurt. Like Jan 6. Already schools have had to close and Haitians are being threatened by Trump's witless followers.

It makes me sick.

(*Dr. Lawless did tell us about his being invited to a dog cookout in the forest by men of a tribe of former headhunters in the Philippines, but that was not this.  Link to Picnic)

Still the word of the day

 Eight months or so on, and it still looks like genocide to me.

Word of the day

I know I'll get pummeled for this, but: I keep seeing children in Gaza being pulled, some dead, some alive, out of rubble created by bombing and shelling. The ones lucky enough to be alive will likely go to a hospital with no water, no fuel and thus no electricity, so that they'll only remain lucky if all they need is a band-aid. The word that keeps coming to mind is:

Genocide.

Invasive species...

 I never caught the story, but last week on the CNN news crawl the theme of the global cost of "invasive species" showed up a number of times.

No mention that I saw included Humans, and yet Homo sapiens is invasive everywhere outside of Africa.

Ad don't even think about the cost to the world of that species' invasions...

A couple of thoughts...

Tommy 🥔ville wants the military to bend to his personal fantasies about the world. But in the past, the military has sometimes led the way in establishing rights that "society" has tried to withhold. Access to health care is a human right, not subject to whatever he thinks his imaginary friends want.

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Asa Hutchinson says that women's reproductive health access should be up to each state. I call Bullshit. This is a human rights issue, and not up to the whims of Alabama or Mississippi. Or Iowa.

Neandertals, again...

OK, so it has been a while.  I'm trying to gear up for more writing here.  Meanwhile I posted this on Facebook this morning, edited a bit:

Yesterday after the verdict in the E. Jean Carroll trial was announced, tRump's lawyer Joe Tacopina came out and took a few questions. A heckler in the back kept yelling at him "Fucking Neanderthal! You're a fucking Neanderthal! ..."

So this is when I would have liked to be there to lecture the crowd on the humanity of the Neandertals, and the extremely unlikely chance that any male N would have behaved in his band like the former president has behaved all his life. Such a male Neandertal would have long since been cast out of the group or killed, maybe by the women.

"Neandertal" republicans

 Last night (May10) on The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, law professor Lawrence Tribe described republican efforts to drag women back to pre-Roe days as "Neandertal." I just want to go on record as saying that the Neandertals were very likely nowhere near as misogynistic as these thugs.

Artist: Tom Bjöklund