I am CuTRis

I saw this, this morning...

Often, when shopping at Aldi, I like to ask the person with 5 items behind me if they'd like to go in front of me. The person always seems pleasantly surprised, and says, "Yes! thanks!" They never say, "No, that's all right. It will take me at least twice as long to buy these 5 items than it will take you to buy your cart full. You see, besides simultaneously using my phone while at the checkout, I will be using 3 different methods of payment, and each will take at least 2 minutes. Then after my transaction is finally over, I'll remember that I need to buy a bag. Then I will be slowly removing my items from the same cart that the cashier is putting your items into. So, no, I'll stay back here and wait."

Families are complicated. Sometimes "close family" isn't so close. Sometimes you meet family you didn't know you had. Marrying a Hmong woman hasn't always been easy. Sometimes I feel the need to maintain my personal culture, while being pressured to follow foreign ideas. Things like 3-day Hmong funerals test everyone. But after three Hmong funerals for close family in 2022, I learned, relearned and learned a third time that I have (Hmong) cousins in Milwaukee. And one of my young nephews, endured a health crisis that left him blind. But it also left him, and his family determined. Kai has now set off on a journey. Journeys always lead to somewhere. I invite you to watch (on Facebook) Kai Music Journey .

Pay attention now those of you who thought it was a good idea to remove police liaison officers from schools...

George Santos! You just won Super Bowl 57! What are you going to do next?

CuTRis Shoots Object Over His Yard UnAssociated Press February 11, 2023 At 1:00PM CST today, CuTRis using a slingshot, reportedly fired at an unidentified object flying over his yard in St. Paul, Minnesota. It may have been a Chinese Spy balloon, the Goodyear Blimp, or possibly a sparrow. The object was hit, and reportedly flew in wide circles before crash landing in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of South Carolina. The U.S. Navy is not looking for the wreckage at this time.

I have been thinking about the tactic of dehumanizing an enemy. It has long been used in warfare to make it easier to legitimize harming and killing other people. It starts with language. By calling your adversary an animal, particularly something like a rat, you begin the process of conceptualizing people as vermin. From there, the propaganda generally transforms into pictures, these might include political cartoons--but with the advent of computers, people have gotten very creative. The images are often dismissed as humorous, but the level of acceptability keeps getting pushed to more extremes. There tends to be a lack of reality in the propaganda of dehumanization. It is about changing the viewpoint of the population to seeing a person or more likely a group of people, as inferior and not deserving basic human rights. Truth is not important. While it has been in the realm of politics, more recently, perhaps with the rise of Donald Trump, dehumanization reached new heights in polit...

State of the Union... One side clapping, one side sitting angrily. Just like the people who have to tell you that you're wrong and not as smart as they are if you have a different view. It's just more polarized hatred. It's destructive. It needs to stop. We can't change others, but we can change ourselves.