more 'what the fuck, people!'

Burning Man  was a couple of weeks ago. This is an art and environmental celebration/festival out in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada with tremendous art installations and avant guard performance art and music and chaos and people just being their wildest wackiest selves.

Here's a video from this years event, the first one in two years because of covid. It looks fun and magical and other worldly (and hot as fucking hell).

Here's a picture of the aftermath...8,000 abandoned bikes.

Not shown is all the abandoned camping gear and trash. So what the fuck people? If you pack it in, pack it the fuck out. Don't leave the stuff that you just can't be bothered to deal with after you had your fun and trashed the place. So typical of Americans, no sense of responsibility and for all their hype I would think that the people who attend would be a little more environmentally conscious. At least the people who go in and clean up the mess sell or give away the abandoned bikes and gear.

----------

Re the 'active shooter' call at the grands' old high school...my daughter tells me the police went classroom to classroom with guns drawn in full swat gear scaring the already terrified kids. A much better response than those cowards in Uvalde but, damn, this is just so wrong.

----------

In the news is Florida's republican governor Ron DeSantis' despicable political stunt of paying to have 48 refugees from Venezuela seeking asylum and a safe place to live flown to Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts from the Texas border in chartered planes paid for by taxpayer money that basically dumped them on the tarmac and abandoned them. No calls were made in advance to agencies that these people were on the way so they could be ready to receive them and be helped on arrival but he made sure there was videographer to film it. DeSantis' representative lied to these people telling them they were being sent to Boston or NYC where jobs and housing were waiting for them and the DHS falsified their papers giving them addresses from homeless shelters all across the nation that their hearing notices would be sent to insuring that none of these people would be able to show up setting them up for immediate deportation. DeSantis thought that the upscale island would be horrified at these immigrants dumped on their doorstep and show that Democrats couldn't or wouldn't deal with them but instead the residents came together with food, shelter, medical aid, working with authorities to move them to the mainland where there are support services and housing. The residents were horrified all right, not by the migrants themselves but by the cruelty inherent DeSantis' stunt. And for DeSantis and those who aided him and those republicans who support him, the cruelty was the point. They didn't give a shit about those people.

This is a man who everyone expects to run for president, a man who basically kidnapped these people and trafficked them across the nation with nothing to their names and stranded them on the tarmac of an airport thousands of miles from the border where they would have been processed. I think, I hope that this little stunt has backfired on him since it didn't exactly have the outcome he hoped for. And of course our own asshole governor Abbott is shipping busloads of migrants to DC dropping them off in front of Vice-President Harris' home and to New York's Port Authority not because the border is 'open' no matter how many times republicans lie about it, people and drugs are being apprehended in record amounts, but because playing with helpless people's lives is, to them, an acceptable political stunt to distract from their unpopular policies.

Vote Democrat top to bottom. Make sure everyone you know votes.