Weekend Open Thread: GOP Convention Preview; Pokémon Go Study Materials; and Whoa, Cop-Killing Doesn’t Work!

.

.

.

“Ridicule Killed the Graphic Arts Star!”

From the very moment it saw the new logo of the Trumppence campaign, Orange Juice Blog obsessively spent ALL OF FRIDAY AND SATURDAY doing research on its guide to this week’s Republican convention in Cleveland, inclduing not only collecting the above example of instant graphic satire from arch-comedian Samantha Bee’s shop (entitled “Breaking America’s Mattress”) and hundreds of others, half of which were made up by Orange Juice Blog itself, only to find when it emerged from its creative bubble late Saturday afternoon that TRUMP WAS GIVING UP THE LOGO!, which by Sunday morning included only the lower, less penetrating, portion of the above graphic.

OJB was so dispirited by this that it said “screw everything” and went back to bed, and by “bed” OJB means “playing Pokémon Go” — which might have been resistable except that Brea’s best burger joint, Brea’s Best, is a freaking “gym”!, where one of OJB editors must view the colors of rival gangs “teams” of PokéPlayers flying all of the damn time, and so has committed himself to keeping his chosen portion of the Romanian tricolor — which is like the French one but with yellow instead of white, and even mentioning France right now makes OJB said not only because of the tragedy in France but because it is now several tragedies old by now, not even including Trump’s press conference with West Covina’s Indiana’s Mike Spence Pence — and so had to dedicate the weekend to gathering munitions, which in practical effect meant a lot of playing in parks with the grandson, so that was actually pretty much OK.

OJB has come out of it by Sunday noon-ish, and has decided that not all paragraphs in this piece will be one long run-on sentence, when a short run-on sentence will do.

OK, we have to cover a lot of ground today, between Pokémon Go, Anaheim Go-Too-Far, Cop-Killing Do-Not-Pass-Go, the Republican Convention-a-Go-Go, and OJB’s urgent new project: to change the spelling of “Nice” — the City in France, to “Niece,” “Neece,” “Nyce,” “Kniesce,” or anything else that would spare OJB from waking up to a headline like “Fatal Casualties from Attack by Nice Truck Driver Now Exceed 80.”  Yes, OJB too thought that the coincidental spelling of the jewel of the French Riviera was funny, when it was a youth, but we don’t spell “Bucharest” as “București” so clearly we have some latitude to change the spelling of place names when translated into English and, dammit, we should take it.  You can send money to our“It’s Not Nice!” campaign once we’ve filed the necessary paperwork.

All right.  We’ll cover Anaheim in a separate post.  As for Pokémon, the main things for you to know are: (1) YES, we DO know that that “e” should have an umlaut rather than an accent gravé, thank you very much; (2) TURN OFF the fracking Augmented Reality switch as soon as you’ve gotten a sufficient taste of it, which will be less than 55 seconds!, and (3) RUN AWAY from the three characters that Prof. Willow offers you as your as your PokéCompanions at the very beginning AS OFTEN AS IT TAKES until you are finally offered a proper Pikachu, which you should then snap up.  (Don’t be stuck with a pathetic 12-Compat-point Charmander like a certain OJB Editor we could name, or your kids will laugh at you.)

Beyond that, we’ll just leave you with the news that armed robbers have used lures to … well, lure people to certain spots where they could take more than just their PokéCoins, if you know what OJB means.  (The damned things are supposed to work only on Pokémons.)  Oh, and two people stepped off a 90-foot bluff — known by some as a “cliff” — in nearby Encinitas, but did not faint.  (Pokémon-speak for “die.”  By the way, if it’s not clear, OJB’s Editorial Staff, which comes from the days when Hot Wheels and the Harlem Globetrotters and the Beatles — yes, really, them — were the Saturday morning cartoons, it not exactly clear on which cartoon linguistic conventions are from the Smurfs and which are from Pokémon, so for now it it just putting “Poké” before PokéFracking PokéEverything and hoping that it is doing it pokéright.)

Here’s what else you should know before you play (or at least before you enter Brea’s Best to battle), a list that will evolve in time.  (hahaha)

qz.com/731057/the-ultimate-guide-to-pokemon-go/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2016/07/09/ten-things-i-wish-i-knew-when-i-started-pokemon-go/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2016/07/11/i-have-finally-figured-out-nearby-tracking-in-pokemon-go/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2016/07/14/i-tried-pokemon-go-compass-nearby-tracking-and-this-is-what-i-found/

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/gaming/2016/07/10/seven-tips-playing-pokmon-go/86930292/

http://www.polygon.com/2016/7/6/12105992/pokemon-go-guide-faq-ios-android

http://www.polygon.com/2016/7/11/12148448/which-pokemon-go-team-should-i-pick

In other news: It turns out that indiscriminately killing cops does not actually make things better!  In fact, as both Dallas and Baton Rouge can address, it makes things a lot worse!  OJB is all for protest, and even occasionally for civil disobedience that authorities may (rightly or wrongly) consider illegal, but as we have stressed since at least the Occupy days began just under five years ago we do not like violent attacks on police for reasons including its intrinsic badness and its tendency to not only not to achieve its goals but to change the subject away from “victims of police violence” to “police victims of violence” — but also because the people who we oppose do like it so much.  Fascism — the political system into which the Donald Trumps of the world are having us slide, if the neo-liberals don’t get us to feudalism first — depends on the ability to “wave the bloody shirt,” to focus on the affront against “us” while blurring or erasing any affront that “we” may have imposed (and keep imposing) on “the Other.”  (Even when, as in this case, “the Other” is our fellow citizens.)

If you don’t understand how this works, go ahead and watch the Republican convention this week, where all of the talk about “9/11” from years past will be recycled into talk about violence against police — with the politicians and the media carefully not doing the match about how many police versus how many innocent Blacks and Latinos are killed in doubtfully constitutional traffic stops — and it won’t matter how much you set the record straight because the record does not matter to people who are “taking advantage of a good crisis,” as political operatives put it.  Violence against police — unless it’s Harvey Keitel coming after you in a way that allows you to invoke normal principles of proportional and imminent self-defense (despite which you will likely be convicted anyway) — is not only wrong, it’s STUPID wrong.  It’s the sort of thing that the Rudy Giulianis and poor old Chris Christies of the world luxuriate in.  Do not call for violence against police — no matter what you think, the civilian side is outnumbered and outgunned, and it’s not going to help.  Thank you.

And, by the way, the Second Amendment does not apply to Black people, including Black protesters, as the police union in Cleveland, Ohio has determined in asking that Ohio’s right to “open carry” be suspended for convention protesters.  If you don’t think that this is a problem, please leave a comment explaining why you are not a bigoted fascist.

This is your Weekend Open Thread — and also your Weeklong Open Thread for convention discussion.  Decorum, discretion, decency, etc.  This will be a horrible week for us all, but we hope that you enjoy it anyway.  The falling pink flower petals on your map represent “lures, and the PokéHunting will be smurfy — dammit, we’re not doing that right, aren’t we! — so go enjoy the rush of exotic monsters and watch out for armed miscreats who are out to rob and perhaps kill you.  And no, that is not a reference to the GOP convention.  Technically.