Good morning, my flaming little twatwaffles. It is a Tuesday morning here in my Hunker-Bunker overlooking the Puget Sound on the West bank of West Seattle. It is going to be a partly-cloudy day with a forecasted high of 73°F.

I will be here in my Hunker-Bunker for the next three days, hoping to finish up on the Phase I of my project. I still have a lot of coding left to go, to finish up on some minor issues and it requires a place with no distractions. So here is where I will be.

Apparently, “Weird” has entered into the 2024 election lexicon, arriving rather late, if you ask me. It seems to me that we crossed the boundary of ‘Weird’ a long, long, long time ago.

I don’t know why it took someone like Kamala Harris to point this out before people started realizing that

“Hey, you know what? This shit really is kinda weird, isn’t it?”

Diversity fosters “weird”. I am in my eighth decade on this planet, and growing up in 1950-60s America it was drilled into our heads that Americans celebrate our individualism. As long as it doesn’t veer too far away from the cookie-cutter ‘traditional’ societal scaffolding Conservatives want to cling to.

So let’s start from the premise that we all ‘weird’ in our individual ways, and that it would be weird if you weren’t weird in some way, shape, or form.

Presidential campaigns have always been a bit ‘weird’. At least the Post-Eisenhower campaigns. The era of television took the campaigns out of the newsreels, radio and print and right into our living rooms. They started becoming productions, worthy of Hollyweird. In the mid-1980s campaigns became “focus-grouped’ where slogans, messaging, and even rumors were ran past a group of randomly-selected people for reactions. And how those reactions could determine the outcome of an election.

Since We, the People are a pretty weird lot collectively, candidates have to try and reach as many of us as possible, and they do that by trying to reach our particular ‘weirdness’.

In 1972, the Richard Nixon tapestry would have bothered a LOT of people at the time, but it would have reached a particular set who not only didn’t take offense, but thought it clever. And clever often translates into votes.

It’s really no different today, except that our diversity is a lot greater today than it was in 1972. There are a lot more ‘weird’ people out in the open around us.

Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy a certain level of ‘weird’

Just don’t require me to be part of it. Don’t expect me to go out of my way to accommodate your weirdness. I’ll do what I can, given my personal limitations, and If my weirdness requires me to laugh at your weirdness, then it’s up to you whether you want to take it personally or not. But I will never deny your right to your weirdness. But that right ends at the moment you want to impose your weirdness onto me.

So when Kamala called the Trump supporters ‘weird’, it triggered a bunch of Conservatives, much like it did when Hillary Clinton called Trump supporters “Deplorables”.

This is true of anyone who spends their time calling other people out. When someone else starts calling them out, they are suddenly the ‘victim’.

If you don’t like to be considered “weird”, then maybe don’t endorse stupid shit like this:

“White Dudes For Kamala” is a weird thing…

I think that it is safe to say that most people think it’s kind of weird for a 78-year-old man to be plastering his face with foundation and orange spray paint in a failed vain effort to appear thirty years younger than he really is.

There are people in this world who are afraid of clowns. What they are actually afraid of is the face paint on clowns and how it alters the appearance indicating a ‘deception’, and therefore potentially dangerous.

How’s that for some arm-chair psychobabble?

Can you imagine if Donald Trump wasn’t quite as vain as he is, and didn’t try to hide his massive bald spot with a magical comb-over held in place by industrial strength hair spray, and troweled on plaster?

IMHO, the second image would pretty much cinch his election.

Image is everything, they say…

Then we have what I’m going to call “Compound Weirdness”. It’s a more complex level of weird, where you can take two separate weird things and relate them to form a compounded weird item.

• The first weird thing was when South Dakota governor Kristi Noem wrote a passage in her book about shooting her dog and the Internet exploded.
• The second weird thing was when JD Vance complained that the U.S. was being run by Democrats, corporate oligarchs and “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
  
  “It’s just a basic fact — you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” Vance continued. “And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”

So here we have the “compounded weirdness”:

In 2021 JD Vance made some comments on a Charlie Kirk podcast that childless Americans ought to pay higher taxes than those who have kids.

“If you’re making $100,000 [or] $400,000 a year, and you’ve got three kids, you should pay a different, lower tax rate than if you’re making the same amount of money and you don’t have kids,” Vance said back then, during an interview with conservative activist and podcaster Charlie Kirk.

I don’t know if JD knows this now or knew it back then, but childless Americans already DO pay more in taxes than those with kids.  Substantially more.  Basically, they are already subsidizing your spawn, and JD wants more?

Meanwhile, in France, where “weird” is a way of life, we have the 2024 Summer Olympics (which I swear seems to come around at least three or four times a year…) and the big kerfuffle is about trans people re-imagining The Last Supper of Christ.

Speaking of the 2024 Summer Olympics…

Here is the Swedish king Carl XVI Gustaf and his wife, Queen Silvia, at a handball match:

A picture worth a thousand words.

Here is some Texas Weird:

JD Vance’s couch is still trending:

John Bolton Sets The Record Straight on Afghanistan Evacuation

I’ve been pointing this out forever here on the Rott. The evacuation of US troops and materiel was ALL on Trump. Bolton has the receipts.

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about!’ Ex-NSA laughs at Trump apologist in fiery debate

The deal was cut for a complete and total withdrawal from Afghanistan. Troop levels dropped to zero. It was only AFTER the agreement was made and signed that Trump suggested that troop levels be keep at 2500 to prevent chaos after the withdrawal. But his agreement wouldn’t allow for that.

Finally, we come to the Weirdness in Israel

Not when we are talking about the GOVERNMENT of Israel — which is all anyone is referring to when they talk about Israel.

So this is what is being debated in the Knesset today:

In case you were wondering what the response was:

So much for the Golden Rule.

The importance of not mistreating others is highlighted in an anecdote about Hillel the Elder, a Jewish scholar who lived in the first century before Christ. One of Hillel’s students was exasperated by the complexity of the Torah—the five books of Moses with their 613 commandments and associated rabbinic writings. The student challenged Hillel to explain the Torah using only the time that Hillel could stand on one foot. Hillel may not have had great balance but accepted the challenge. He quoted from Leviticus, saying, “Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” Hillel then concluded: “That which is hateful unto you, do not do to your neighbor. This is the whole of the Torah; the rest is commentary. Go forth and study.”

In case you want to see the entire exchange for the full context, then here’s the video:

That’s a bit weird, isn’t it? The three major versions of the Abrahamic god is very clear about the treatment of other human beings regardless of their status. Don’t treat other humans any worse than you would want or be expected to be treated yourself.

If you have no problem with you or your family being rectally violated if captured and held by the enemy, then by all means, continue on with that practice.

But that isn’t where the majority of Israelis are — and never have been. By and large, the Israeli people do not approve of the mistreatment of prisoners for any reason. Torture, abuse, rape, experimentation, extermination — its all related. It’s all of the same evil human behavior. A lack of basic human morals.

It takes a certain lack of morality to try and achieve your goals by any means necessary. If that means the murder and displacement of an entire group of people who you’ve deemed to be in your way of ridding the nation of ‘the animals’, then who are the actual “animals”?

The FULL blame goes to the Israeli government, and more specifically, those running the government. The Israeli people aren’t the ones that anyone should be blaming. There is nothing religious about this. What is wrong, is wrong. Period.

WEIRD