2026-01-18
Right-wing hate preacher Greg Locke claims his house was attacked by someone with a machine gun and played what he claimed was an audio of the attack, featuring the sound of 60 shots in three seconds.
Well, the incident was real (and police have arrested a suspect), but Locke's supposed audio was a fake.
It was supposedly from some home security system but sounded fake to me when I first heard it. Even so, I was prepared to chalk it up to the quality of the system’s recording ability until I looked up the info about the weapon.
See, the police said the weapon was a .40 caliber automatic pistol. That is a SEMI-automatic weapon - meaning the trigger has to be pulled for each shot - with a capacity of up to 15 rounds.
So if he did fire 60 shots, he had to fire 15 times, pause to reload (which police said he did), fire 15 times, reload, and so on. No flaming way in hell did he do than in, as Locke claimed, three seconds.
Why he felt it necessary to manipulate or manufacture the audio I can't say; maybe he thought the original didn't sound as scary as he wanted. Whatever the reason, is was a fake.
==
2026-01-18
I've asserted several times that much of the bigotry and hatred around trans folks is actually about discomfort and fear about sex, our societal sickness about the subject. For way too many of us, anything and everything about LGBTQ+ folks in general and trans folks in particular isn’t about who a person is, but about how they “do it," about "what's in their pants," with the unwanted lurid thoughts such notions arouse and the self-loathing guilt they produce turned outward as self-protection.
Here we have another example.
RJ May is - or was until he quit — a member of the South Carolina state legislature.
During his time in office he claimed that children are being "harmed" by "exposing" them to drag shows and "pushing sex changes on toddlers," ranting about “child exploitation.”
And to what should be no one's surprise he has been sentenced to 17.5 years in federal prison after pleading guilty to distributing child sex abuse material, including nearly 500 explicit videos featuring toddlers and young children involved in sex acts and incest between young children and their parents. (He has a seven-year-old child.)
After his indictment in June, he claimed he'd been framed by his political enemies (of course he did) but wound up pleading guilty to five counts in exchange for the dropping of five others.
From the article:
Moms for Liberty — the anti-LGBTQ+ extremist group that regularly seeks to ban LGBTQ+-inclusive children’s books as a form of “pornography” and regularly accuses LGBTQ+ people and their allies of “grooming” children for sexual abuse — honored May as their 2023 Legislator of the Year and had him speak at their 2022 event on “Reclaiming Education in America.”
I wonder if they'll take back the honor.
Actually, I doubt it. Just like I doubt there aren't a lot more just like May among the haters.
==
2026-01-19
It is time for Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk to be disbarred for judicial misconduct for accepting and ruling on issues where he clearly has a profound personal bias.
==
2026-01-21
A post suggested that The Orange Overlord's desire for Greenland is because the area distortions inherent to the Mercator Projection map makes it look much bigger than it actually is.
The post is interesting and worthwhile but have to contest that starting point as I rather doubt that has much if anything at all to do with it. I think it’s much more to do with TOO’s vision of a “greater America,” the same vision that drove the business of Canada being “the 51st state” - something that still sits in the back of his head; note that he recently referred to Greenland becoming the “52nd state.”
(And people in Puerto Rico went “um, hey!”)
What matters here is that he thinks in 19th-century sphere of influence terms, with one nation dominating it’s own: China in Asia, Russia in Europe, and the US in the Americas. In that view, each of those dominant nations should be free to do pretty much what it wants within their own sphere so long as it does not intrude into one of the others.
In that way of thinking, expanding our borders would be the ultimate establishment in the historical record of the US being a great power and him a great leader, something he so desperately desires (which, parenthetically, I think relates to his practice of plastering his name on things and his pathetic desire for a Nobel Peace Prize, ways to be seen and remembered as someone worthy of note). It’s not so much the size of the expansion per se (although it would be significant, increasing the area of the US by about 22%) as the sheer fact of it that provokes his dreams of grandeur.
Footnote: Post author Christopher Lockett protested (with a smile) that
he didn’t say that’s why TOO was saying that, rather it was just an
excuse to “nerd out about cartography.” To which I replied, that’s okay,
I was doing the same thing: using a remark as a hook for my own rant.
And that I enjoyed the article.
==
2026-01-21
[To my Congressional reps after the release of the elated budget proposal to the floor of the House.]
I call on you to vote NO on any appropriations for DHS or ICE until after - repeat, after - major reforms are agreed to and acted on.
DHS, a product of post-9/11 paranoia, should be dismantled. ICE should be stripped down and rebuilt from scratch with strict controls; to steal a phrase, it should be "repealed and replaced." Until then, they should get nothing.
On this, I will not be satisfied with less.
==
There is no federal law establishing a right to GAC (or any health care, for that matter - note that Medicare, the ACA, and the like are about access to care, not a right to it). Even the Biden-era protections for trans folks were an Executive Order based on an interpretation of Title IX and rescinded by The Orange Overlord.
Nor is there any established Constitutional right to GAC or even just to being transgender. In fact, in US v. Skrmetti, upholding a Tennessee ban on GAC for youth, the Scurrilous Six majority said the ban is valid because it merely "removes one set of diagnoses," that is, gender dysphoria, "from the range of treatable conditions” so no violation of rights was involved. I expect any claim that denial of access to GAC violates a Constitutional right would likely be treated dismissively.
The closest I think we could come now is Bostock v. Clayton County, but since that was about employment, not health care and preceded Skrmetti (2020 vs. 2025) I doubt it would be persuasive.
-
2026-01-24
[There are laws on state and federal interference with rights to property, commerce, etc. Rights don’t need to be in the Constitution; rather, there must be government power to limit them, otherwise they are plenary.]
On the first point, the established power of a state to regulate commerce, in this case the practice of medicine, is exactly what SCOTUS relied on in Skrmetti, arguing that's what Tennessee did: regulate the practice of medicine.
On the second, it's true that the 9th Amendment refers to "enumerated" rights and that a right not being listed does not mean it doesn't exist. But that does not mean that any given non-enumerated right exists legally, rather it must be discovered, usually by implication of those that are.
For example, a right of married couples to obtain contraceptives was found in to exist within the "penumbra" of the 4th Amendment's relation to personal privacy. The principle was later extended to cover unmarried couples and still later to strike down sodomy laws, but legally, that right didn't exist until 1965.
So it seems to me the only way to pursue the suits and prosecutions you suggest is to establish an overall right to health care and then have GAC be an accepted right within that, so that it could not be regulated out of bounds.
Like I said, an incredibly heavy lift.
And as a footnote, all this is without considering the impact of the Constitution's ban on ex post facto laws on your hoped-for prosecutions.
-
2026-01-24
I was addressing the legal landscape facing the course you argued for. I stand by it.
Now you are arguing that laws barring GAC (particularly puberty blockers) are "constitutionally impermissible" even though Skrmetti, by virtue of upholding Tennessee's ban, said they are valid.
So at least you have to overcome that barrier. That alone makes it a heavy lift. Doesn't mean it can't be done, but do not pretend it would be anything short of that.
As for ex post facto, you are proposing criminalizing actions that were not considered criminal at the time they were performed, which at the least raises ex post facto concerns. While child abuse laws already exist, the application of them to deny access to GAC doesn't; in fact, it is far more common to hear the opposite, to hear the transmisics and reactionaries screaming that GAC is itself "child abuse" and some places - Texas, for example - have proposed prosecuting parents on just that basis.
Morally and ethically, as you say, "those in favor of these laws have no case." But unhappily, as someone (I don't recall who) said, "The law is not about justice. The law is about the law." And that is what we're dealing with here.
Bottom line and I think the end from my side: Not impossible. But know how hard it will be to get there and the obstacles to be overcome.
[Background: Dr. Kirk Milhoan is the head of RF (my father would be ashamed of me) Kennedy Jr's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. He is also an evangelical Christian pastor with no background in immunology who says vaccination should be voluntary.]
So Milhoan is "returning individual autonomy to the first order, not public health, but individual autonomy to the first order," even though "declin[ing] a vaccine may also affect others," is he?
How does he feel about speed limit laws? Sure, speeding "may affect others," but if "individual autonomy" can outweigh public health, why not public safety?
By the way, is he a flat-Earther? I mean, he says “I don’t like established science” and “Science is what I observe.” Central arguments of flat-Earthers revolve around the "observation" that "Hey, it looks flat" and how you can't trust "the scientific establishment." Sounds pretty flerfy to me.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment