Dwain Northey (Gen X)

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/naacp-travel-advisory-florida-says-state-hostile-to-black-americans/

Remember the good old days when there were only travel advisories and or ban for, what some would call, third word countries? Well now because of the vile vitriol of one Governor Ron DeSantis the state of Florida, a vacation destination, has received a travel advisory by the NAACP.

The wannabe future President has made the climate so venomous in Florida the anyone who is a part of any minority group does not feel safe in the state. Black, Brown, LGTBQ+, these are all groups that are under attack in the Sunshine State. The majority Republican legislature and their fearful leader has passed laws that make almost everything a jailable offence and the fact that the state has very loose gun laws and a stand your ground law makes it more dangerous than being a blonde female in central America.

Florida residents are able to carry concealed guns without a permit under a bill signed into law by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. The law, which goes into effect on July 1, means that anyone who can legally own a gun in Florida can carry a concealed gun in public without any training or background check. This with their ridiculous stand your ground law, ‘Florida’s “Stand-Your-Ground” law was passed in 2005. The law allows those who feel a reasonable threat of death or bodily injury to “meet force with force” rather than retreat. Similar “Castle Doctrine” laws assert that a person does not need to retreat if their home is attacked.’ Makes it really sketchy to go there.

This in top of the don’t say gay rule and the new trans ruling that just passed.

“Florida lawmakers have no shame. This discriminatory bill is extraordinarily desperate and extreme in a year full of extreme, discriminatory legislation. It is a cruel effort to stigmatize, marginalize and erase the LGBTQ+ community, particularly transgender youth. Let me be clear: gender-affirming care saves lives. Every mainstream American medical and mental health organization – representing millions of providers in the United States – call for age-appropriate, gender-affirming care for transgender and non-binary people.

“These politicians have no place inserting themselves in conversations between doctors, parents, and transgender youth about gender-affirming care. And at the same time that Florida lawmakers crow about protecting parental rights they make an extra-constitutional attempt to strip parents of – you guessed it! – their parental rights. The Human Rights Campaign strongly condemns this bill and will continue to fight for LGBTQ+ youth and their families who deserve better from their elected leaders.”

This law makes it possible for anyone to just accuse someone of gender affirming care to have their child taken from them this would include someone traveling from out of state. This alone justifies a travel ban to the Magic Kingdom for families.

Oh, and I haven’t even mentioned DeSantis holy war with Disney, the largest employer in the state. I really hope the Mouse eats this ass holes lunch.

Well that’s enough bitching, thanks again for suffering though my rant.

  • Bullies

    Lyle Northey (Silent/Boomer)

     It seems that some like to live in fear, or at least they like to cause others to live in fear. It is not enough to take someone to the movies and show them “The Texas ChainSaw Massacre” or “The Shining” or some other movie with that sort of message. No today we have people calling up the wifes of members of Congress and relaying threats . 

      This behavior is not okay. It is understood that the behavior you are copying is that of the 45th President and his method of acting was that of the school yard bully. He has been able to get away with that all his life because he had money so he probably had someone with him that he paid to settle his fights because he is much too much of a coward to settle them himself. He acted this way throughout his campaign and the four years he was in office and has continued to do so even today when he is under order of the court to sit down and shut up.

      Addressing those “brave” individuals that like to make threats over the phone. You like he have not figured it out yet but in the very near future the sky is going to fall and all this bravado that you show today is going to get you nothing. Keep threatening and trying to force people to do as you tell them and you are likely to find yourself in the crossbar hotel. Should that occur you best hope you are not the one with the cutest butt cause it will likely get used for some other purpose than relieving yourself unless of course that is what you are looking for in the first place. The line of crap that you are talking about implies that you are a member of the GOP and we do understand that the GOP is all about controlling others and destruction of our nation and form of government. 

      Throughout history people have had disagreements. In the worst of those times humanity has gone off the deep end of common sense and gone to war over some of the dumbest of reasons. It is still happening today and most of the reasons are either greed or religion. Will we ever outgrow this penchant for violence, it is highly unlikely as you cannot cure stupid.

      Those that have risen above the common denominators of hate and distrust should not have to live in fear of those that have become unwrapped. Society at least within the confines of most national borders have learned how to agree to disagree in a civilized fashion. It has only been the last few years that the bigoted intolerant loudmouth hate monger has been loosed on us that it has now become common practice to be a walking septic tank spewing toxic waste in every direction Will we ever be able to put the genie back in the bottle and return to a semblance of decency. It is a hope that that day will return very soon and that either humanity wakes up or the part that can’t get their heads out of their asses suffocate.

    Feel free to comment, engagement is welcomed.

  • This kid

    What are you most proud of in your life?

  • Sanity

    Daily writing prompt
    What have you been working on?

    Trying to maintain some semblance of sanity in the chaos of life and the insanity of todays world.

  • Money well spent (?)

    Dwain Northey (Gen X)

    In the fiscal year 2023, the federal government is estimated to spend $6.3 trillion, amounting to 24.2 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP). Each year federal agencies receive funding from Congress. The Department of Defense (DOD) had $1.80 Trillion distributed among its 6 sub-components.

    According to my calculations, nearly 30% of our federal budget is on defense. Saying Defense gives us a false sense that this is keeping us safe, but we can all see the turmoil around the world and in our own cities, all this spending but is it really keeping us safe. The Biden administration is asking for $1.5 billion for Israel, Ukraine, and the border that is 1/2 of 1% of our total defense budget. Republicans are as usual against this because they can’t even keep their house in order. If America is a bastion of Democracy and has led the world in that arena since WWII ½% of our bloated defense budget seems like a small price to preserve democracy in the world.

    Globally we spend Trillion of dollars killing each other, tens of thousands of dollars on bombs that destroy infrastructure that can only be used once. This seems like a huge waste of capital, spend on an efficient way to decimate something that will cost more to rebuild. These resources would be better spent on solving problems instead of creating them. The time and money we spend killing one another could have solved world hunger, created oases in the desert countries by efficiently desalinating water, made renewable energy cheap and efficient, but that isn’t in our nature.

    Gene Rodenberry’s picture of a time when we explore without the desire to conquer seems to be a dream that will never come to fruition. We assume that if there are other world out there that they are violent because we are, our narcissism has us believe that other life forms haven’t evolved out of the violence that we perpetuate.

    My hope is that one day that effort is made to help instead of harm, to grown instead of tear down. It’s a hope…

    Feel free to respond to any of my post.

  • Issues

    Lyle Northey (Silent/Boomer)

      There are so many issues to deal with in the world it is difficult to know which should get considered at what level of importance. It really depends on where you stand on the stairs as to what you believe is most important.

      Issue, handling of classified information. If you have had no experience with anything in this order you have been living under a rock. Classified information does not just mean national secrets that may cause or stop a war, it also refers to corporate secrets that create huge amounts of profits or losses depending on if the secrets are kept or not. Businesses can suffer major layoffs or huge hiring booms and that means money gained or lost in communities and by private individuals. So if you compare a loss of classified government information to a monetary situation in the millions then it does become more important, at least to the average person.

      Issue, global warming. Living in some regions of the country allow you to have fairly consistent weather year after year. Other parts have very different swings with extremes in either hot or cold depending on the season. The areas of dramatic change are seeing things like the death of entire populations of some animal and plant species because they were not prepared to deal with such changes.

      Issue, Wars and the unnecessary pain and suffering that come with conflict. What are the conflicts about, greed A wants B’s oil, land, water, place in the sun. B does not want to share it as “be my guest, take whatever you want”. B may be willing to sell you the oil, rent you the land or the place in the sun but not out right give it to you, not good enough A wants it to be totally his so he will kill to get it. WAR. Another reason for conflict is not believing in the same God. How dare you not bow to our sacred Deity. He is the one true God and you must obey and follow or die. Nice choices. One variety of monkey has come up with a way to calm the situation and keep things peaceful, that is with sex, maybe mankind should take lessons.

      Issue, Birth Control, Seems such an odd thing to be bringing up when most of us thought this was a done deal a long time ago. We were wrong, as the Republican Party has once again brought this fight back to the table. They want all birth control removed from the US. Somehow the idea of sex without producing offspring does not seem right. They are preaching against it and campaigning against it as they did before and finding the leaders of these movements being caught in “John” stings. The simple truth is that it is another way to control and that is what that party is all about. There are very valid reasons for birth control, one is the size of the population of the world. It may not be in the propaganda material but the idea may be to make sure that birth control is encouraged in places where the population wears darker tans so that their numbers decline and make sure fairer skinned people do not practice birth control so that once again they can dominate the world. In the meantime they will continue to practice the archaic subversive laws that they have enacted and hope to enact on us.

  • Klown Kar Kaucus

    Dwain Northey (Gen X)

    I hate to insult clowns that is why I accentuated the miss spelling of with a K in every word that should be a C, and the KKK reference was not accidental.

    The GOP has made their bed and now instead of trying to clean up their own mess they are coming out and placing the blame on the other side of the isle.

     ‘The Democrats are not voting to let the House get back to work.’ ‘If the Democrats would have just voted for McCarthy, we wouldn’t be in this mess…’   

    Give me a break, the left voted to keep the government open while McCarthys’ own party brought a motion to vacate the Speakership, a rule by the way that they put in. No, the Democrats didn’t vote to save McCarthy and won’t vote to put Jim Jordan in that seat. It is not Hakeem Jefferies job to get the democratic caucus to vote to give the arsonist the match. We have offered to run the government like adults but that won’t work for the Greene, Jordan, Boebert wing refuse to do any kind of compromise governing, they would rather take their ball and go home than act like reasonable adults. So don’t give me the story that the Democrats have to step in and babysit the winy bitch party.

    I am convinced that the disfunction the Republicans are displaying is a Feature not a Bug. They like disfunction, they relish it. In 1980 campaign for President, Ronald Reagan said, “The scariest works ever spoken are, ‘I’m here from the government and I am here to help.” That is the GOP mantra and every day they want to prove that government can’t work, and we should turn the whole country over to the corporations. Their collective campaign slogan should be, “Government can’t help, vote me in and I will prove it.” It is amazing the people that hate government but still want to be a part of it, I suppose it’s easier to burn it down from the inside.

    A prime example of the party differences is job growth. The findings for private-sector job growth are even more striking: businesses have added jobs at a nearly 2.5 times faster rate under Democrats than under Republicans, on average. In fact, the private-sector job growth gap between Democrats and Republicans is even greater than the gap when including government jobs. The supposed fiscal conservatives record according to PolitiFact Reagan took the deficit from $70 billion to $175 billion. Bush 41 took it to $300 billion. Clinton got it to zero. Bush 43 took it from zero to $1.2 trillion. Obama halved it to $600 billion. Trump’s one term got it back to a trillion.” For those that aren’t old enough to remember Jimmy Carter, he served one term and handed Reagan a budget surplus.

    The republican will have us believe that they have such a narrow margin in the house that they can’t get any legislation passed unless the democrats play ball. They neglect to mention the Nancy Pelosi had the exact same narrow margin and the republican voted against nearly everything but still the democrats passed a budget, the PACT act, help for veterans, I could keep going but I won’t.

    The government is set to run out of money again in November if a budget isn’t passed and the Klowns can’t even decide on a driver. This tells me that this iteration of the Republican Party is not serious about governing and should be relegated to the minority until they can get their shit together.

    Thanks for suffering through another rant.

  • Open Book

    What’s something most people don’t know about you?

    I wear my heart on my sleeve in my distain and sarcasm on my face. If you read my post, you’ll see that I don’t really pull any punches.

  • Mutually Assured Destruction

    Dwain Northey (Gen X)

    Are we collectively on a path to ensure extinction of the Human Race? I am seriously asking this because with climate change and war we seem to be continually hammering nails in our own coffin.

    The jury is still out over what killed the dinosaurs, was it a meteor, volcanic activity than caused plant life to die because eruptions blocked out sun light for multiple growing season that led to an ice age, there are lots of theories out there. I am going to hazard a guess than when the next intelligent species rises on this planet their archaeologist will determine that we killed ourselves. “they were so smart and so stupid at the same time” will be on the tombstone of humanity.

    I am sure you are wondering why I am so morbid today… Well first off it is October 20th, 2023, and it is 100°F /38°C here in Phoenix AZ that is not normal for this time of year. Our summer was the hottest on record and according to future predictions our steek of 110°F+ days this past summer is only the beginning of that nonsense, but to way too many, climate change is just a folly, nothing to see here. On the that front we are rapidly running out of water worldwide which is amazing for a planet that is 71% water but 95% of that water is in the oceans and not potable for human consumption. Nothing like dying from dehydration on a water planet.

    The next item of contention on this blue marble floating through the cosmos is our constant desire to kill each other over a deity that no one can prove actually exists. We have genocide in Jerusalem and Iseral over a piece of land that they both consider holy, but can’t agree what prophet is the right one, Moses, Mohamad, Jesus, Aberham. Seriously they are all monotheistic and teach the same basic morality and from I have gleaned from the collected works of all these religions, ‘kill thy neighbor’ wasn’t one of the tenants.

    Since man could walk upright, we have found ways to kill one another, maybe the ‘God’ that’s image we were allegedly created in was Aries the God of war or Hades who relishes in the suffering of others because the pledge to Love one another seems to be far down on the list.

    I hope we figure this out but at the moment to don’t have high hopes, just hope that the next intelligent species has more sense than we do.

    Sorry for such a dummer post.    

  • Don’t have them

    Do lazy days make you feel rested or unproductive?

    I’ve been working for myself for the past six years so I don’t take days off I think this year I haven’t had a single day off and last year I had three so I don’t really have a lazy days.

  • Success

    When you think of the word “successful,” who’s the first person that comes to mind and why?

    I don’t deify anyone as successful, we all walk our own paths and my definition of success may not be yours. Anyone who has pulled themselves out of a dark place is a success in my book. Just because you are fortunate enough to have wealth doesn’t make you successful because who knows how many people you stepped on to achieve that wealth.

    If you are better today by any measure than you were yesterday, in my book you are a success and I salute you.