Random Thoughts: I Never Had a Black Teacher

Tweets from June, 2020:

• 2020-06-01: Wow. I'm embarrassed to say I don't remember *ever* having a black teacher. And being blithely unaware of that fact until just now. :-(
• 2020-06-01: Irony. Many of the 2A crowd who insist on arming themselves to defend liberty from government oppression are now calling on that same government to impose martial law to put down protests against the government.
• 2020-06-01: I admit, when Trump was elected, I feared he would start a war, but I never would have guessed the war would be against American citizens in our own country.
• 2020-06-01: Trump is still pissed he didn't get his military parade in Washington, DC.

After the jump, more random thoughts.

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• 2020-06-02: Becoming (2020): Michelle Obama's book. Flattering documentary offers a bit of biography and a lot of book tour, with packed arenas with sit-down interviews with celebrity moderators. Best part is inspiring, smaller Q&As with young people. Not a campaign ad but just as slick. C+
• 2020-06-02: Trump never solves a problem -- he tries to hide it with a wall.
• 2020-06-02: Is it still June?
• 2020-06-02: Well, I have to admit, @realDonaldTrump finally has a crowd bigger than Obama.
• 2020-06-03: This is what community policing looks like. The police defending peaceful protesters, not dispersing them with force.
• 2020-06-03: Watch this very carefully. Then tell me if it supports the narrative of black looting.
• 2020-06-04: Pro-tip: when talking about the Civil War, always say the First Civil War to distinguish it from whatever the hell Trump is up to.
• 2020-06-04: Community Impact Richardson's report of the protest at Berkner Park. See if you can find me (kneeling, in red shirt).
• 2020-06-04: Ted Kaczynski chose Montana, but Alaska has even more wilderness to hide in.
• 2020-06-05: Babylon Berlin - Season 1 (TV 2018): German. Berlin 1929 is gritty, decadent, corrupt. Socialists, Fascists, WWI vets, vice squad and homicide. A policeman from Cologne gets drawn into several convoluted plotlines. Weimar noir. An early long musical club scene is mesmerizing. B+
• 2020-06-06: Not The Onion.
• 2020-06-08: Unorthodox (TV 2020): Young wife flees her Hasidic community in NY. Her husband tracks her to Berlin where she's hoping to make a new life in music. Powerful portrayal of feeling trapped by people who love you, even if they don't try to understand you. Unhappiness all around. B+
• 2020-06-08: "Defund the Police" is this year's "Medicare for All" slogan that means whatever you want it to mean.
• 2020-06-09: One of Us (2017): Documentary about three who leave the Hasidic community in Brooklyn. Young mother's story is heartbreaking. When peer pressure fails, a biased family court awards her children to her abusive husband because she left the community. Tradition? Infuriating! B+
• 2020-06-09: Headline: "Trump Administration Moves to Relax Rules Against Killing Birds." I'm old enough to remember when Trump opposed wind energy because it threatened birds.
• 2020-06-09: Texas Senator @JohnCornyn admitting something that explains a lot about him: "You know, a lot of this stuff just goes over my head."
• 2020-06-10: Explain to me again how vote-by-mail is rife with fraud but in-person voting is free and fair.
• 2020-06-10: The gun crowd has been utterly revealed to be a paper tiger. Years of arguing their guns were to protect the public against government over-reach. Then, when our TVs nightly show us govt over-reach on streets across America, the gun crowd is conspicuously silent. 1/
• 2020-06-10: It was never about protecting liberty. It was always just about the guns. 2/fin
• 2020-06-11: Teaching history is hard. Traitor = one who commits treason. Treason = the offense of attempting to overthrow the govt. Rebel = one who takes up arms against the govt. Confederates = rebels. Easy so far. Now try to explain to kids why we name US military bases for traitors.
• 2020-06-12: Disappearing Earth: A whodunnit about the disappearance of two girls in Kamchatka. But more a collection of vignettes of women of Kamchatka. Each character is fully fleshed out and not just someone to advance the plot. It's also the story of a place previously foreign to me. A-
• 2020-06-13: Shorter Trump: "Defund Public Schools".
• 2020-06-14: In this time of social distancing, when I'm out walking in my neighborhood and someone coming the other way sees me, he or she is likely to cross the street to avoid me. Maybe this, in a tiny, tiny way, is how blacks have experienced life all along.
• 2020-06-15: Da 5 Bloods (2020): Spike Lee. Four war vets return to Vietnam to retrieve the remains of their fallen leader...and gold. Part history lesson, part action movie, and part study of PTSD. Implausible plot. Characters either stereotypes or cartoons. MAGA? Too much going on here. B-
• 2020-06-15: Headline: "'Miracle' water execs admit to fraud." Their mistake was not calling it Trump Water.
• 2020-06-16: The Vast of Night (2020): New Mexico, 1959. Switchboard operator and radio DJ investigate mysterious staticky humming. Movie doesn't bring anything new to 1950s sci-fi, but it has the look and feel of that era down cold, even including a Twilight Zone vibe. Love the dialog. C+
• 2020-06-17: It's the least they can do. Literally.
• 2020-06-17: Let's have that for the 400 House bill that Mitch McConnell and you buried in your "graveyard" without so much as a hearing.
• 2020-06-18: Trump's argument: Bolton's book is full of lies, and those lies are classified.
• 2020-06-18: When Trump says, "Nobody had ever heard of Juneteenth," he means, of course, that he himself had never heard of it.
• 2020-06-19: Brief Answers to the Big Questions: Don't have time to learn quantum mechanics? Read this instead. It's short. Accessible. Still deep. Stephen Hawking talks about the beginning and end of the universe, life, artificial intelligence, time travel, space colonization, and more. A-
• 2020-06-19: A reasonable extension of a policy we've lived with all our lives is suddenly tyranny? What's gotten into us?
• 2020-06-19: Trump is done with respecting peaceful protesters. He now lumps them with "anarchists, agitators, looters or lowlifes." No more "good people on both sides." It's all white nationalists now.
• 2020-06-19: It's the least you could do. Literally. Now do something almost as easy: utter the words "Black Lives Matter."
• 2020-06-19: Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation took effect Jan 1, 1863. Juneteenth was 2.5 years later. I've seen people ask why slaves didn't know of it sooner, by way of TV, radio, or internet.
• 2020-06-20: Chris McNutt is the son-in-law of Mabel Simpson, former Richardson City Council member, and reportedly lives in Richardson.
• 2020-06-20: Just look. Look. Obviously, the crowd was kept away by the rain. Trump says the pavement is slippery.
• 2020-06-21: White privilege: "Minnesota jail accused of bias in allowing only white officers to guard Derek Chauvin"
• 2020-06-21: John Bolton and Donald Trump sniping at each other is a distraction from the fact that *both* share responsibility for our country's mishandled response to coronavirus pandemic. Blame them for us not even being prepared. Note the 2018 date...
• 2020-06-22: Les Miserables (2019): French. Abusive cops patrol a Paris housing complex full of racial and class anger ready to boil. Theft of a lion cub sets it off. Audience learns the ropes through the eyes of the new cop on the team. Plot-driven, not character-driven, but what a plot. A-
• 2020-06-23: Space Force (TV 2020): Think Get Smart but with fewer laughs and even less bite. Not even "POTUS" will be offended. Steve Carell plays, well, Maxwell Smart. Or Michael Scott. Lisa Kudrow is wasted in a subplot that makes no sense. John Malkovich tries but can't save this. C-
• 2020-06-24: "Venezuela wooed congressman Pete Sessions to ease U.S. sanctions and as back channel to Exxon, AP reports." When Venezuela needs help, is it surprising they think of Pete Sessions? Waco, choose wisely.
• 2020-06-24: I used to think that era Trump had in mind to "Make America Great Again" was the 1950s. Now I'm pretty sure it's the 1850s.
• 2020-06-24: Texas's own Louie Gohmert acting like a spoiled child, banging his desk to drown out a witness, arguing that "There's no rules about when you can make noise."
• 2020-06-24: "Students for Trump co-founder pleads guilty to $46,000 fraud scheme." -- Fox News. It sounds like this student might have learned everything from Trump himself.
• 2020-06-25: My own idea: "Leave the statue alone. Don't even put up a plaque. But don't clean and polish it anymore either. Let the birds shit on it. Let the weeds grow around it. Let it take on the appearance of the dustbin of history that it so rightly belongs in."
• 2020-06-26: The Nickel Boys: The story of one of the victims of a 1960s Jim Crow reform school for boys. Fiction based on a real school in Florida. Story arc is depressingly predictable but offers some surprises. A timely contribution to today's Black Lives Matter movement. A-
• 2020-06-26: There's always a tweet -- this one from Mar 19. Proof that being a genius in one area doesn't make you worth a damn in another.
• 2020-06-26: Pence's answer boiled down to, "You're not the boss of me!" followed by two minutes of tossed word salad.
• 2020-06-26: I can't stand listening to President Trump, but I love it when his words come out of Sarah Cooper's mouth. Explain that.
• 2020-06-27: Is this a sneak preview of how the GOP will tear itself apart if Trump loses in November?
• 2020-06-27: I just received an email from Donald Trump: "We are up against an unhinged left-wing mob, a Democratic party that has embraced radical socialism, ..." I suspect it's not authentic. Trump or any real GOPer would have written "Democrat party." They never use the party's real name.
• 2020-06-27: Fact check: "No, Nazis Under Hermann Goering Did Not Defund German Police." Stories saying Nazis did this are the kind of "fake news" that the term was originally applied to before Trump perverted it into the opposite: truth that he doesn't like.
• 2020-06-28: Trump accepted Putin's help when Putin attacked America's election in 2016 (and 2020). Trump did nothing when Putin paid the Taliban bounties to attack American soldiers in Afghanistan. Republicans do nothing to force Trump to defend our country.
• 2020-06-28: Trump's excuse: "there have not been many attacks on us"
• 2020-06-28: As if 2020 couldn't get any worse.
• 2020-06-28: What Christian nationalism looks like.
• 2020-06-28: There's always a tweet. This from 2013.
• 2020-06-29: Hail, Caesar (2016): Farce about a 1950s Hollywood problem fixer. The Coen Brothers' homage to Ben Hur, Esther Williams, Gene Kelly, Gene Autry, and more. Add subplots with Hedda Hopper and Communist screenwriters, and the whole is a game of spot-the-references. B- #TardyReview
• 2020-06-29: Is it standard White House procedure to keep national security intelligence news from the President until after it has been "verified"?
• 2020-06-29: Is it standard White House procedure to keep national security intelligence news from the President until after his national security staff has developed a "consensus" about its details and accuracy?
• 2020-06-29: 3 days ago, evidence that Russia paid bounties on US troops was not credible enough to brief the President. Today, the White House invited all GOP members of Congress to the WH for a private briefing. From "nothing to bother about" to "all hands on deck" in 3 days. What changed?
• 2020-06-30: There's always a tweet. This from 2013.
• 2020-06-30: A young man going door-to-door selling pest control services rang our doorbell. He didn't make a sale. I figured his presence was evidence that his products must not work.
• 2020-06-30: SCOTUS says that by not funding church schools, states are discriminating against religion, a violation of the 1st Amendment. That is, the 1st Amendment, by barring the government from Establishing Religion, violates churches' 1st Amendment rights. All clear?
• 2020-06-30: Received an email from the Trump campaign with a survey: "How is President Trump doing? Great. Good. OK. Other." That "other" is doing a lot of work here.
• 2020-06-30: There's always a tweet. This one from 2014.
• 2020-06-30: It's come down to this. Press Sec. Kayleigh McEnany: "The President does read."
• 2020-06-30: Is there anyone Trump is *not* angry at? China. Coronavirus. Governors. Protesters. Mask-wearers. Oh, I know. Russia. Trump isn't angry at Russia.