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Aiding & Abetting Our Friends And Trusted Allies/1200+ Signs [1]

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Date: 2025-04-08

Somewhere out there the perfect meme/slogan juxtaposing land-grabbing with President Pussygrabber is waiting to be discovered. Until then there's this stopgap, which stayed up for a solid 30+ hours. The "Hands Off" in the background is at least half a mile away, and although it's plenty big, the size as shown is largely the effect of the zoom. (see below)

This is about 18’ by 5’, staying up over 48 hours. There’s maybe 6 people in the US who want to see Canada become the 51st state, and 340 million who don’t. This really shouldn’t be a nail-biter.

1212 signs posted in 2024 — appearing in larger formats after the text

Howdy Neighbor!

It’s us, the People of the United States. You know, the loud ones downstairs? The ones who seem to think we’re the only ones living here that you’ve been nothing but decent to? We just wanted to let you know we really appreciate that, and your unflinching support in every* war we’ve fought for over a century. It’s not like we didn’t notice - it’s just that sometimes we act that way. Most of the time, probably.

This is a new pedestrian bridge in Berkeley — a twin to the Mario Savio Pedestrian Bridge, (which was recently attacked by foreign agents. Subject for another time, alas...) It’s got a dauntingly long approach, which provided some of the inspiration to buy an electric scooter — man, those things are fun!

from the archives

last month

We were appalled at Trump’s remarks and kept waiting for an apology - not from him of course, but from someone…

See, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary, we like thinking we still have a real government filled with competent adults working in the best interests of the country. You know, because there has to be! Can you imagine what we’d feel like thinking everything’s really being left in the hands of President Crazypants and his Council of Idiots? We couldn’t even function. So we keep waiting for the people who are really in charge to show up and start walking some of this shit back.

No, we can’t tell you who. It’s not the Supreme Court, obviously. It’s not the Republicans. We’d like to think it was the Democrats because they’re clearly working on something, it’s just not clear what. They seem to be looking for a way to weaponize dithering. We know that sounds unlikely, but man... imagine if they managed to do it: They’d be unstoppable.

But for the time being we’re mostly waiting for someone to save us, but we can’t think of who, and if you’re wondering how that’s possible I can explain it in just one word: Hope. So if you’re looking for someone to blame, blame Obama. This is his legacy. He was the one who first gave us hope, and even after all these years, it remains foundational to our political identity — and that’s true for the majority of Americans, not just Democrats. But while Obama was offering hope as a source of spiritual sustenance — fuel for the soul — many of us started adopting it as a plan of action. It turned out that what works in spiritual realms can also be pretty handy down here on the material plane. For a nation as busy and pressed for time as ours, actually doing things is a pretty hard sell compared to the ease and convenience of simply hoping that they get done.

And Obama made hope look cool — like you could use it and not let it get the better of you.

Because hope is a powerful drug, and like other drugs or anything else that actually works, it tends to be addictive. There’s a very thin line between use and abuse and all kinds of side-effects. Especially in terms of vision and mobility, hope runs the whole gamut of impairment: everything from short-sighted and mildly lethargic to totally paralyzed and blind. What had been reserved for special occasions starts becoming necessary just to feel normal.

Take right now for example, given that the party in power seems to have no qualms about stampeding over the sovereignty of friends and allies, what on earth makes us think they’d respect an electoral loss? (Hint: it ain’t common sense.)

Also, on a purely intellectual level we can both can see exactly where this thing’s headed. Viewed historically, or as an academic abstract, the writing’s right there on the wall and while we might not know exactly what it was, we’d know that we needed to do something. But what seems almost certain in any other light seems practically absurd to us right now. Why? Well, a case can certainly be made that by employing a strategic combination of economic and military pressure the US could coerce you into joining us as the 51st state is such a phenomenally stupid idea that nobody would ever even dream of enacting it. So stupid in fact it makes Trump’s musings in the field of internal medicine seem almost reasonable by comparison. At first. But then, the more you consider it… the more stupid it gets, honestly. I mean seriously: it’s a really really really stupid idea.

If you’ve been paying attention to what we’ve been quite happy to ignore, everything he’s done for the last two months has served to undermine and weaken the interests of the US Government. This to a point where our geopolitical status has gone from Leader of the Free World down to something more like Hungary except with more cars and Diabetes. So by now it should be obvious that when it comes to making policy decisions, there’s no such thing as too stupid for Donald Trump, and the more harmful the probable outcome, the more likely it is to be employed. With that in mind, and none of the usual models being reliable, it’s hard to figure out what would work as an effective deterrent. That is, until you actually stop and think about it. It is, after all, Donald Trump we’re talking about. Keep that in mind and it’s pretty damn easy to figure out.

“2024: Leader of the Free World.” and “2025: Belarus with Diabetes.”

So we should make good use of the time we have left as the trusted friends we’ve been for more than a century and make plans for what lies ahead. Because behind all that high-minded talk of checks and balances and separation of powers, ours was apparently a government that ultimately runs on the honor system, and unbelievable as it may be, some asshole can just erase history and declare us as mortal enemies with nothing more than the stroke of a pen.

“Betraying all our allies & values for Putin is bad.” and “Doing it quietly is unforgivable”

By now you’ve probably figured out there’s something badly wrong with President Donald J. Trump, unless it’s his mission to destroy the United States, in which case, believe me: he’s doing a bang up job. Either way, should he pursue a course of annexation none of the usual deterrents can be expected to work. You’ll be able to count on us — the American People — to have massive demonstrations in protest and you can count on them having little if any effect on the situation. NATO is also going to be in a bind with both belligerents being members but don’t worry, we’re going to fix all that.

Tomorrow your Prime Minister will call fellow named targets Panama and Denmark and explain to them what I’m about to explain to you. If they’re on board, and they will be, the three of you will call the rest of NATO. Except Hungary.

Each Head of State agreeing to join the pact will appoint one coordinator who will immediately alert. by phone and/or memo each level of interior territorial government down to the most granular, so that there is at least one official at every level of state, city, province, county, village, etc. alert and at the ready and they may also sign on colleagues or deputize civilians as they see fit. The more the merrier. While that’s going on I’ll have my webmaster — a proud Canadian — build and launch a website with the proper instructions, documents, boilerplate, graphics etc. and a map of the world as the piece de resistance where Trump can see the only planet he’ll ever know melt away into his worst nightmare. But the beauty of it is that it’ll be a hellscape for him and him alone.

Realistically, within 72 hours of right now everything should be in place to let Trump know that any annexing or adventurism on his part will be responded to one hundred times over by naming stuff after Obama. From monoliths to mountain ranges… beaches, bays and bayous, fishing piers and forests, bike paths to bays… anything that can be named or where appropriate, renamed. And that’s just the opening salvo. We’ll have the territory and manpower in place to do this over and over.

And if escalation is called for, then sure, we might pick up the pace, but we’ll double down on the petty. Because that’s hitting him where he lives. In the interest of fairness we’ll start naming things after Trump and his family too. For example, vista points and overlooks of some of the larger and grander Obama sites will be outfitted with benches that will be dedicated to Trump and various family members. They’ll be good for people seeking to relax in the shade while gazing out at the alluvial fan surrounding the base of Mt. Obama #5. Brass plaques with inspirational quotes from Barack and Michelle Obama will be matched with some from Don Jr. and Eric. Whenever possible we should take advantage of metaphorical feng shui where objets des Trump exist literally in the shadow of Obama. Of course there will be beautiful things dedicated to the Trump clan, not just benches, storm drains and termite mounds, but dells, vales, and lovely little groves… but those will almost exclusively go to Tiffany The-Forgotten-Trump, and perhaps a few to Marla, her Mom. Try to imagine, if you can, a world that actually treats Donald Trump as unfairly as he says this one does. That is my artistic vision — Breathtaking, isn’t it?

Vanity-annexations of ice and rock in the North Atlantic will seem cold comfort indeed in the midst of a world that’s been O-bombed practically beyond recognition.

On the other hand, maybe we could dispense with all of that and simply rename Newfoundland “New-Found-Admiration-For --Donald-Trump Land”. Or even “New-Found-Admiration-For-Donald-Trump’s Manly-Physique-And-Boy-That-Ivanka-Sure-Is-A-Looker-Though-Ain’t-She?-Yowsah!-Yowsah! Land.” Appearances being after all, of the utmost for the man and as for Nuance and Sincerity, they’re just like Hope, Joy and Charity: unless they’re the names of strippers, they don’t mean a thing to him.

Your Friends and Neighbors,

The American People**

*Okay, not every war. You opted out of Operation Urgent Fury, The Liberation of Grenada, despite the strategic importance of an island that was pointed like a dagger at the very heart of the Lesser Dutch Antilles, you probably thought it was just to distract from 241 Marines getting killed in their sleep by a truck bomb in Beirut 36 hours before. That’s alright — a lot of people thought that.

** Obviously this doesn’t mean that every man, woman and child in the USA, contributed to this letter. Or even a majority of the population. More like a plurality really. But just to be clear, “more like a plurality” doesn’t mean more than a plurality, as authorship here is probably less than a plurality. In fact, just using the term “plural” is a bit misleading: It’s really just me, one guy. Apologies for any misunderstanding.

* * *



Following are some recent works, and every one of the 1,212 I posted in 2024. Clicking on the month will bring you to the blogpost with somewhat larger renderings. Still, a bit crowded but this isn’t the medium the art is really made for.

Kosmail for questions or freewayblogger at yahoo

Your most powerful means of political expression as an American citizen is your vote… on Election Day. On all the other days it’s the First Amendment. 1A makes all public property your property for the purposes of expressing your political opinions to your fellow citizens whether through speech, art, theater, interpretive dance… whatever. Here are the basic rules. There aren’t many.

My brother sent me the “America has no King” picture after noticing one of my signs had a cameo:(behind the 1st A in America and on the left it’s the one in the middle.)

Signs from last year:

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