“I’m happy that the pop songs have a bit of a twist. When I’m writing, I never know how it’s going to come out. I don’t think, well, I’ve done a catchy one, now I can do a weird one. I read a lot of poetry, and that gives me a wide range of permission to say anything in a song — they’re more twisted than I’ll ever be.” – Ric Ocacek
Louis Vuitton Exhibition – Artist, Urs Fischer – Arcimboldo
Pity The Nation
“Pity the nation whose people are sheep,
and whose shepherds mislead them.
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced,
and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice,
except to praise conquerors and acclaim the bully as hero
and aims to rule the world with force and by torture.
Pity the nation that knows no other language but its own
and no other culture but its own.
Pity the nation whose breath is money
and sleeps the sleep of the too well fed.
Pity the nation — oh, pity the people who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away.
My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty.”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti – 2007
By Dustin Rowles | Politics | February 19, 2018
(Photo by L.K. Thayer – Women’s March 2017 – Los Angeles)
“The Trump Presidency is a fluke.”
“It’s good to remind ourselves of that sometimes, especially when it feels like our country is going into the toilet: Donald Trump won the election only by virtue of nearly everything breaking his way. He was running against a historically unpopular candidate (God bless Hillary), who had been thrown under the bus by James Comey. Trump won by virtue of $6 billion in free advertising. By virtue of the media’s false equivalencies. By an enthusiastic far right inflamed by their own bigotry after a black man ran our country successfully for eight years. He won because Facebook didn’t yet know what it was doing. He won because of a highly effective Russian influence campaign, and because our sitting President made a miscalculation when he decided that Hillary would win and forcefully calling out the Russians would blow back on her. He won because of voter suppression. He won because the Russians convinced a small segment of the population that Jill Stein was a viable alternative. He won because the Russians hacked the DNC and use that intel to vilify Hillary in the minds of a large number of Bernie supporters in places like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio. He won because part of the American public was morbidly curious; they wanted to see what our country would look like if it was run by a reality-show celebrity.”
“Congress explicitly banned AR-15s and other semiautomatic rifles that fit its definition of assault weapons from 1994 to 2004.
Since that law expired 14 years ago, in most states it has been just as easy to buy an AR-15-style gun as it is in Florida. (Buyers can also purchase the weapon in person or online from private sellers who are not required to perform a background check — an exemption known as the “gun show loophole.”)
Only New York, California, Washington, D.C., and five other states have their own assault-weapon bans, according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Washington, D.C., and eight states also limit the large capacity magazines that have made many mass shootings so deadly. Even so, there have been efforts to circumvent the bans, legally and illegally, by making minor changes to the weapons.”
Snap by L.K. Thayer – “escape artist” – DTLA
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