Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, apparently Trump is hoping that the Supreme Court (although the Supremely Corrupt court might be a better name) ruling that presidents have immunity for official acts applies to crimes you committed in order to become president. He thinks he should get out of the felony in New York because after all presidents have immunity. I don’t think we really want to go down this road – I would hope even his followers, as much as they’ve drank the flavor-aid and lost the ability to think rationally, woudl recognize that we don’t want to say that anyone who wins election has immunity for anything they had to do to win.

Honestly I’m going to have to write a whole rant about 1) How America is America the enslaved, one of the least free nations in the world and 2) how the supreme court granting presidential immunity is right in line with their tendency to say cops can murder anyone they want, steal anyone’s money they want, and that’s just fine. We are lucky there are as few bad cops as there are or things would be truly unlivable around here, because the criminal justice system is incredibly corrupt and seems to have lost sight with what the founders originally wanted for our country.

But even beyond that I have come to suspect that people will rationalize *anything* that “Their side” does. Not everyone, mind you, but enough folks to make for a major problem. Trump shouldn’t be able to be elected dogcatcher and neither should any other republican, but instead the GOP voters are about to vote themselves into a nightmare fascist dictatorship. And I suspect taht while right now they love it, they’re loving owning the libs, this is so fun.. when their friends get taken to the concentration camps, they may not love it so much any more.

One huge problem I think we face is the output side of every child left behind. The kids aren’t educated enough to realize what’s happening.

Anyway, we still need ranked choice voting.

I post this, because people seem to keep forgetting. We don’t put companies together to make money. We put companies together to meet the needs of the employees and customers. They do make money – I think I’ve mentioned that money as implemented is a fundamentally broken idea and should be scrapped – but if they ever become *all* about making money, they die shortly thereafter, although they can do horrible amounts of damage first.

So, I was watching Call The Midwife the other day and they had someone who was dying from being a broke alcoholic who was drinking methylated spirits – aka denatured alcohol. And I had a interesting realization – we do often see places where humanity chooses money over people’s lives – a recent example was Tesla removing the radar from self-driving EVs, increasing undoubtedly the number of people who will die so that Tesla can make slightly larger profits. And of course we get outraged in cases where this is done.. like the Ford Pinto.

But.. denatured alcohol is a clear case of us deciding killing people is acceptable if the alternative is threatening the government’s profit. There’s no reasonable reason for denaturing alcohol.. other than, it enables us to sell alcohol and know it will only be used for sterilization. The reason this matters is that there’s a huge tax on alcohol. We do the same thing with kerosene – we sell it for heating and aviation use untaxed and for road use taxed and we dye it and trust people to follow the rules based on the dye. We *could* do the same thing with ethanol, but we don’t – instead we risk killing people – *knowing* that people will die – and the government officials probably feel smugly satisfied about this solution.

Now, the government is well aware that broke addicts will buy denatured alcohol and be killed by it. It’s more important to them to not lose whatever tax dollars they would lose to people knowingly cheating by buying denatured alcohol than that those people live.

This isn’t surprising. The government has always acted as if there’s a fairly low price on human life. We accept our police murdering innocents, we accept the government executing innocents – in both cases possibly because there’s no alternative.. we accept the government not enforcing environmental safety regulations, we accept people destroying the water table with things like fracking – in general, the government puts a very low value on life. (We routinely commit mass murder so various corporations can make more profit). But denaturing alcohol demonstrates just how low – of course the government probably thinks it’s a feature, not a bug, that broke addicts are who gets killed off..