memfree

I blame the defunding of reliable curators. The good gets lost in the torrent of mediocre content. This isn’t just music, but videos, news, art, and so on. Most anything that both craftsmen and amateurs can produce is now easily accessible to everyone everywhere. In addition to the old method of producing albums where the band had to go to some location and work on it as a regular job, and with the label sending in extra musicians, equipment, professionals and such, there used to be trusted critics.

Historically, we had a short list of vetted reviewers who could point us towards the best stuff without the need to wade through the rest. Even if it turned out that your aesthetics did not match that of a given critic, you could probably see why such critics held their opinions and could quickly locate a critic whose tastes did align with yours. Now we have a billion fake review sites run by the companies and/or families of those being reviewed. They are not trustworthy. A person is left to try everything on their own and we often run out of time looking for ‘good’ and settle on ‘good enough’.

That is the exact problem.

As a society, we don’t want to teach people that it is EVER acceptable for the authorities to break rules/laws. They already have power. Why should they go free after breaking the rules meant to control their reach? At the least, they should get charged and go to trial by jury. Ideally, those juries should then convict in all but the most benign cases.

I remember at least a couple old shows had the good old ‘sheriff’ or whatever break some rule and then had to pay for it. And they did, and good guys accept that despite meaning well, they had done wrong and should have followed the law.

If you ask society at large to accept that breaking the rules is ok THIS time because this time is special and our guy is working for Team Good, then our society starts to allow that in all kinds of stupid real-life situations and you end up with criminal cops, politicians, and all manner of officials. Worse, you might end up with random citizens who think it is ok to break the law just because their leader tells them to.

He’ll say it, but only newsy Democrats will hear him. The Republicans will say the bill didn’t go far enough, cost too much, and blah, blah, blah, glossing over the crazy powers it would have allowed. This isn’t any special ‘5d chess’, this is standard politics. Biden knows Congress won’t do ANY border deal now that Trump told them not to, so it doesn’t matter what concessions it has.

Yeah, that’s not caving, that’s DARING Congress to refuse to pass the bill.

See, they were going to pass a budget bill that has some border funding in it, and Mitch McConnell was telling the Republicans to pass the darned thing – but then Trump said it might be nice to use the border mess in his campaign, and Poof! McConnell spun around so fast, his heels were smoking! (no, not literally) Here’s a link: https://news.yahoo.com/trump-thrown-wrench-mitch-mcconnell-214452142.html

The statement from Biden is a double-dog dare to not pass the bill. Every time Republicans cry, “Waaahh! Border scary! Biden’s fault!”, Biden is going to hold up that statement and point out that he was ready, but they refused to sign it.

Heh! The pointy ones are shallots. I agree that Chinese chives or European Leeks or something equally different would have better rounded out the set.

Too soon