26 February 2020

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 26 February 12020 is Ash Wednesday. It is also Liberation Day in Kuwait. And it’s Theodore Sturgeon’s birthday—also the date of Christopher Marlowe’s baptism (7 March 11564 on the proleptic Gregorian Holocene Era calendar used on this site), which is as close as we get to a birthday for most Elizabethan notables. I see in the news that professional village idiot Rush Limbaugh is claiming that the coronavirus that has killed nearly 3000 people is nothing but the common cold being hyped to make the Dopey Don look bad. Who knew that the cold was so deadly? And I suppose lung cancer is nothing but an allergic reaction to smoke. In an incredibly dumb move two men have filed a lawsuit in Florida to keep Bernie Sanders out of the primary on the ground that he is not a Democrat. (Of course neither is Bloomberg, if it comes to that.) I will note however that the party is entitled to run whoever it selects; I’ve seen local races where the Republicans and Democrats are running the same candidate for an office. There’s nothing to stop the Democrats from running an Independent, or a Socialist, or even a Republican for the office, if that’s the person they feel best suited for the position. What a fucking waste of the court’s time.

On this day in history Trayvon Martin was stalked and killed not long after his seventeenth birthday by an armed man who described him in a 911 call as a “fuckin’ coon” “on drugs or sump’n … walkin’ around, lookin’ about … starin’ at all the houses….” The stalker claimed self-defense in the killing, and a jury bought it, and since then this loon has tried to get everybody else to buy his story by suing all and sundry into submission. It’s a bizarre miscarriage of justice, to say the least, but that’s Florida for you.