Anger management

 Everything seems to be designed to piss me off today, beginning with the way this stupid system guesses what I'm about to write.  Until I figure out how to shut it off, there will be blood.  Pounding in my ears.

A non-tenured professor of art history at Hamline University in St. Paul was fired for including a medieval painting of Muhammad in her survey course.  Prior to springing this on the class she warned all students it was coming, gave them permission to absent themselves and offered to discuss the matter privately.  Apparently there were no takers.  She duly displayed the painting, in which the Prophet's face is covered by a veil, and then somebody complained.  The university's associate vice president of inclusive excellence (this is a thing) called her "inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic."  And now unemployed.  The painting is from a 14th century text by Rashid al-Din and not some obscure Danish newspaper, but that's beside the point.  If Hamline fired Erika Lopez Prater because they feared violence, that's even more insulting and Islamophobic.  If they wanted to replenish the ammunition of the "wokeness gone mad" crowd, well done.  Inclusive excellence my ass.

A second batch of classified documents was found in an office Joe Biden used five years ago at the Penn Biden Center and Merrick Garland has already appointed a special counsel, Robert K. Hur, to lead the investigation.  Months after far more sensitive material was found in various storage lockers, desk drawers and a facility in Virginia, Trump continues to sleep in his own bed and shit in his personal golden toilet.  Do you double standard, Judge Garland?

A high school teacher named Keenan Anderson was restrained and repeatedly Tased by Los Angeles police after a traffic accident, subsequently dying in the hospital.  This is not at all uncommon in the city.  It was noteworthy because Anderson's cousin Patrisse Cullors is one of the founders of Black Lives Matter.  The LAPD released their own 12 minute video, not as awful as the murder of George Floyd although it does feature the traditional knee to the neck.  Anderson, on his knees, tries to explain what happened, addressing the police as "sir," but they have already decided that he's drunk.  And now he's dead.  He was 31.

"Woke" grounded all domestic aviation yesterday.  Actually it was a glitch with the FAA's computer software but you wouldn't know that if you were a pitiful fool who tunes in to Fox News expecting news.  This would never have happened if the Secretary of Transportation were a straight white man who works for Trump.  Nor the Southwest Airlines holiday debacle involving thirty-year-old phones and computers and a shortage of flight crews because they'd rather pay a dividend than upgrade their equipment.  Nor the Amtrak delay in South Carolina that occurred because a freight train derailed and the car-and-passenger train needed a special crew for re-routing.  Nor whatever the horrific weather is doing to public transportation in California right now.  It's all Buttigieg's fault; he only got the job because he's gay.  Experts like Jesse Watters and Junior Trump have figured it out.

Governissimo DeSantis displays his cowardice (or amateurishness) in ordering dawn raids on mostly Black people for "illegal voting."  He's not quite ready to have armed police break down the doors of Trump enclaves like The Villages, where a lot of double voting took place.  It's not as if the laird of Mar a Lago ever passes up a chance to rage at him.  Wimp.

Sometimes they come out with something so transcendently stupid that I just close the computer and stare at the wall, often for half an hour.  In a New York Times op-ed Ezra Klein wrote, "Clean abundant energy is the foundation on which a more equal, just and humane world can be built."  On Fox News, where they prefer dirty, expensive energy, an oil and tobacco lobbyist named Steve Milloy retorted, "Wind power made the trans-Atlantic slave trade possible."  Is this the best the carbon emissions-and-lung cancer industries can do?

...and this was only page one.  Who's chasing him around the pool with a blood pressure cup and a Xylazine?  By comparison I'm feeling almost tranquil.  It's a good day when a six-year-old doesn't shoot a teacher with his mom's 9-mm pistol.