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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • It’s hard to overstate what these guys see. If you’ve ever experienced this magnitude of disaster, you know damned well that all the pictures and video in the world doesn’t do justice to the actual destruction and suffering on the ground.

    Ex-FIL was in the Mississippi Guard. Earned 2 Bronze Stars on two (three?) tours of Iraq. Humanitarian aid, not combat, a detail relevant to the story below. He was just fine.

    Came home and fought his way through Katrina on the tip of the spear. Those men chainsawed houses in half and pushed them off the road to get in. After all that he suffered PTSD, hooked up with another Guard member, left his wife of 32-years and stopped talking to his only child. He was not fine.

    New Orleans got the news coverage, but the Mississippi Gulf Coast was fucking wrecked. We went to see the man in Gulfport, then headed north. The last of the damage we saw was past Hattiesburg, 80 miles of destruction. And that was going straight away, the blast radius closer to the Gulf was wide.

    Some of these people are digging for corpses, some are little corpses, with their hands. Many, most?, of these people are facing serious PTSD in the near future.

    Anyway, after living Ivan, I cried my eyes out over Katrina. I still tear up when I think about it, still cry thinking about what I saw the next morning. Cried when the Florida Guard rolled in to save our asses, thought I was on my own.

    Taking the kids swimming in the creek now. I’m out.




  • ^ Channeling Slaughter House 5

    American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter plans flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

    The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody good as new.

    When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly so they would never hurt anybody ever again.









  • American, white, liberal, redneck gun nut here. If you’re talking about “defund the police”, that’s yet another idiot liberal slogan that misses the mark. The idea is to take police funds and pay for workers who can handle situations police should never have been sent to. Want to kill yourself? Call the cops!

    The far right loves cops because cops are on their side, or are perceived to be. To put it bluntly, guns are for shooting marauding black people, not white people. See all the stories about white people being shocked when law enforcement doesn’t go their way? Yeah.

    Also, I suspect people who are anti-gun have never had violence inflicted upon them, or cops who are far away, or haven’t had a bear wander in the dog door, or haven’t had an enraged redneck struggling to be polite because they’re visibly armed. In related news, my MAGA neighbor came stomping down here to kick my ass, turned right the fuck around when I went inside for my .45.

    I could write all night on the subject, but let me leave it at this: Now is not the fucking time for Americans to disarm themselves. The only reason fascists haven’t run us completely over is that they know there will be a real chance we’ll fucking kill them. Look where the ICE raids are happening, in the places where guns are the most suppressed.

    Yes, this all sucks, but it’s where we’re at in America.