Friday Funnies

The Process is the Punishment

So Trump has been found guilty on all counts. A lot of people are lamenting the death of the American justice system, but in my mind it has been dead for a long time. The purpose of lawfare is to make the process the punishment. Ask Julian Assange how that goes.

Now I don’t know if this elevating of Trump into some sort of pariah figure will backfire or not. What I do know is that the show trial stoked the flames of division that the powers that shouldn’t be so desperately desire. Will Trump’s base rally around him and grow bigger all while the former president gets off without any scrutiny given to Operation Warp Speed, the lockdowns, the killer vaccines and the endless bomb dropping? Or will Trump go to jail and perhaps even be assassinated to stoke the flames of civil war? It’s becoming hard to predict the future in this wacky year.

The law can be used to punish anyone for anything, while others are ignored for even heinous offenses. It had me pondering my husband’s five year journey, thus far unsuccessful, to make him a visa to come with me to the United States. I can divide the delays into four camps: there was about a 10 month delay for actual direct Covid shutdowns in 2020 and then a Thailand specific one in 2021. There have also been over two years of delays supposedly related to the case backlog which was created by their Covid shutdowns. There has been about a one year delay due to a denial of something or a request for more documentation. A lot of this was caused by some previously valid document timing out (eg needing updated tax filings or a new police clearance certificate) so then I had to redo something due to the previously long wait messing it up. I would guess that a remaining 6-7 months was me legitimately procrastinating. But after you’ve been delayed, denied and rejected that many times on things it becomes like a ball of dread in the pit of your stomach to even bother with it.

I’m not sure I want the Sadinistas holding us at gunpoint for $5000 ransom either. The rule of law seems to be breaking down.

Perhaps the only silver lining I see there is that at one point in say 2021 if I talked about Ka’s visa process, most people reflexibly defended the state. They assumed that we had done something very wrong for it to be taking so long and I was met with suspicion that I was hiding something, or that perhaps my husband was hiding something from me. A few even insisted that my lived experience of this process was not real because of something they’d read on say Fox News regarding the Southern border. Eye roll.

People seem to be accepting that there’s a two tiered justice system.

Does anyone else notice how the vast majority of “good” jobs in the US have gone towards some type of population management scheme?

I’ve come to the conclusion that most modern art is a money laundering and tax evasion vehicle for the ultra rich, with the added bonus that it discourages the masses towards there being any objective beauty and truth

I think I’ve shared this painting on substack before. My big problem is that I have so many which are not detailed and documented. I was trying to replicate the conditions you might see with very late afternoon sun as a fast moving thunderstorm rolls in, but the sky seems appropriately apocalyptic. Leopard and cub, oil on canvas, 18 by 24.

My older daughter is having her high school commencement ceremony today in Michigan. Time really does fly by! I found this old video from when she was a little girl. I painted a series of murals at this bed and breakfast that my uncle (the one playing the piano) was the manager of.

What do you think will happen with Trump? It’s too wacky of a year for me to make predictions…

Buy me a ko-fi