Tag: segregation

Monday’s Theme Music — Memory

Ashland, southern Oregon — Monday, October 19, 2026.

I don’t know about everyone else but October is running a fast pace. Today is busy with appointments and contractors coming by. My wife completed her mail-in ballot yesterday, and I need to do mine this week.

A cool day, with clouds hiding the sun and filtering its light and warmth. Rain threatens. Right now, it’s 52 F and we might make it to 60.

Nothing from Mom or my sisters yesterday or today, both a relief and a worry. I’ll take relief for 100, Alex.

As I’m push for time, this is short. Nothing about Trump. I have a song stuck in the morning mental music stream. Titled “Expressway to Your Heart”, the song was released by the Soul Survivors in 1967. I honestly enjoy this song. Nice rhythm is embedded in it, and it’s easy to sing along. I also like little flourishes they use — changes in tempo, the organ, the piano, the use of traffic sounds, the electric guitar. Loved hearing all of that when it came out when I was 11, and I still like it.

For a bonus, this is video from early days of “American Bandstand” and a young Dick Clark. I didn’t watch the show consistently but had many friends, especially females, who set their schedule around it. They liked hearing the music but also seeing the clothes and make up being worn, and the latest dance moves. Watching it makes me smile. It’s terrific, when you think about it, that we have a technology that allows us to revisit moments like this from our past.

Watching this video from 1967, we have no sense of all the drama going on in the world. These are just young people enjoying music. No sense of the demonstrations taking place, the social change being pursued. During that era, we had the cold war boiling along with Vietnam, and still stood in the shadows of WW I, WW II, and Korea — and that was only the wars overtly involving the US. Many other wars and conflicts rage.

Comparing this time to now, we can how far we’ve come but how much further we have to go. We also see how some things haven’t changed much.

Back in 1967, voters were standing up for equal rights for women and minorities. The nation was trying to move away from ‘separate but equal’. Integration was replacing segregation.

And now, almost sixty years later, it feels like Trump is trying to drag us into the 1950s. Donald Trump and his administration are moving against equality, rewriting history to downplay the parts of anyone except white men, even trying to downplay the role of anyone but Republicans. Trump a war that he promised he wouldn’t, a shadow that won’t go away.

Then we have the Epstein and the disgusting revelations in it.

Long sigh.

On to other things momentarily. May good things happen to you today.

Cheers

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Civil Disobedience

A Bad Bus Driver

Enlargement on a bit of history and a reminder of what civil disobedience can do, when it’s done right. It can be useful to apply this knowledge to what we’re now enduring under the Trump Regime and right-wing activists who want to turn back time in the U.S. and world. Cheers

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Satyrdaz Wandering Political Thoughts

The headline misled me.

Biggest-Ever Black Hole With Mass Of 36 Billion Suns Discovered: ‘Cosmic Behemoth’

Naturally, I thought this was a political piece. I thought surely that they were referring to the Greedy Old Trump Party, commonly shortened to GOTP, or the Trump Regime as the biggest-black hole ever.

The GOTP used to be known as the GOP, or the ‘Grand Old Party’. But under Trump’s squeamish, heavy-handed leadership, the spineless GOP has become a seething unprincipled black hole of greed and avarice. A place where they decry pedophiles while protecting pedophiles, where they scream that they’re pro-life as they turn their heads from children dying. Truth and facts go in and get bent out of shape into lies and falsehoods. History morphs into a lopsided retelling of all the great things which white men did. The black hole’s idealogical forces twists intelligent discourse into childish mouthings.

The GOTP black hole is a time portal, trying to push the world back to a pretend time, which they fantasize was better for all because white men were in charge, and all knew and understood. They liked that time because industry and commerce were not hamstrung by regulations to keep employees, or air, water, and the earth safe. Only two sexes were recognized, and only one was respected. The weaker, fairer sex, aka ‘the female’, known to be emotionally charged and weak of mind, was conditioned to accept their place in the bedroom and in the kitchen, staying home to raise more slave labor. Other sexual choices were kept in the closet, done in darkness, never to be spoken of in daylight. Abuse of others was allowed as long as the perpetrator was wealthy, white, and male, or dutifully mouthed the appropriate platitudes and respected the power structure. Religion was settled as a Christian thing with malleable morality and loudly stated and often ignored values. Do your sentence at church every Sunday and feed your local house of worship some gold and trinkets and your soul was saved, freeing you for Saturday night debauchery and business day cruelty. “Nothing personal,” are the words they like to use. “It’s just business.” Greed was blessed by God.

Blacks knew not to get too uppity. Browns kept quiet and stayed to their side of town, as did ‘the Asians’. If necessary, a little police violence could be used to keep them in their place and protect the white man’s place. Sure, it might lead to a little tension and soul searching in the aftermath, but it could all be swept away by the whites, because they were writing history. Then all would be good again.

As for the rest, the poor and sick, put them to work in the fields and factories. Slave labor keeps prices down and profit margins up. Children are the best little workers because they’re too young and ignorant to protest or complain. They eat less so they can be paid less. Let them ‘pull themselves up with their own bootstraps’. Hard work is good for the soul.

Make a profit off every piece of human suffering and indignity. That’s what comes out of the Trump Regime black hole. Plate it with gold to make it shiny and increase its value. Only gold has value, you know.

That’s the Trump Regime. I don’t care what science declares. Trump and the GOTP don’t, so why should I? So I reiterate my position: the Trump Regime is the biggest black hole ever known. It’s the biggest black hole in the Universe. Hitler and his NAZIs, and several other dictators, have been close, but Trump is just getting started with his attacks on logic, humanity, science, education, history, and decency. He’ll prove that he’s the greatest, most beautiful black hole ever.

What’s most sickening is that Trump and the MAGAts think that’s the most wonderful title that can be won because their world has become so perverse and irrational. Sure, a few are learning otherwise that it’s not as great as they expected in episodes christianed FAFO, or ‘The Leopard Ate My Face’. But most MAGAts are so far into the black hole that truth, empathy, education, facts, and science can no longer reach them.

Maybe that’ll change someday, after the black hole turns on itself and is finally gone.

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