PuCronies and Other Sorts of Whimsy

They all said they didn’t give a shit about American sanctions.

All of them are Putin’s Cronies.

PuCronies seems an apt term.

All of them are wealthy beyond belief because they grew up with “the Vlad”; no wonder all have remained loyal.

I guess it is really stupid for an American President to think he can exercise leverage on that sort of bunch.

And the response pretty well supports that view because Putin’s Puppets (PuPuppets) have responded in kind.

They have “sanctioned” people such as John McCain and John Boehner with travel bans.

How stupid.

“Stupid” it would be it it weren’t a farce acted out by two “governments” dedicated to the pursuit of nothing.

But since “nothing” is the apparent objective, “farce” seems to be the better description of those government’s actions.

Speaking of farces, the last time I heard some European world leader justifying a swift and unilateral change of the boundaries of nation states, of unilateral annexation of a part or all of what had been until the declaration of annexation a happy little country muddling along as best it could, with said annexation based on the “race” or something closely kindred to the “race” of the annexees being the justification or basis for said annexation, was at a time when I couldn’t hear.

I hadn’t been born yet.

If you can't hear Hitler in Putin, you can’t hear, or you can’t read; or you haven’t read.

Dithering to Oblivion

I was a sophomore at Portland State and was in the Office of Student Affairs when this speech came over the PA system.

Given the Hitlerian nature - big lie, scapegoat phantom enemy et al of Putin - and the implications of the failure of the EU to be allowed to extend itself into its rightful territory - if the people in that territory desire it - I think this speech applies at least as much today as it did in 1962.

Too bad the United States has left the playing field.

I guess stupid wastes of money and lives in Iraq and Afghanistan have taught us a lesson.

Too bad the lesson is bogus. 

But I guess that bogosity is only one more cost to be piled atop the trillions of wasted dollars and hundreds of thousands – or more, depending on whom you choose to count – of wasted lives resulting from Georgie’s wars.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgdUgzAWcrw

And if you are wondering if I believe that the following words apply today:

"It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union." 

I do.

Obviously the geographic names need to be changed; and the backdrop for that statement in the current context is that, when the Neo-Soviets invade Ukraine, that we will counter with conventional military force, no matter where that counter force might lead. 

If that counter force escalates, so be it.

Just my thoughts. 

The Pyrenees are still not very far for the Slavic hoard to travel if all we do is dither.

So, sadly, we are at the crossroads again.

Maybe the devil will show up and teach us all how to play the blues.

Maybe we will just do the human thing and obliterate ourselves.

Kipling went into great detail about the Bandar Log. 

Kipling was a poet and a prophet.

The German Lady Might Have Spoken

This is a hypothetical.

I have no idea whether it, or something like it, happened in fact.

But I have a shred of evidence from the news of the day, and some facts from the biography of one of our world’s most effective leaders, both of which cause me to proffer this scenario.

Angela Merkel grew up and was educated and became a participating adult in East Germany.

East Germany was a small vestige of one of three countries that the World had fought and finally subdued in World War Two.

And it was a Communist powerhouse.

It’s people were well educated and it’s athletes were well pumped.

Angela was educated as a scientist.  She learned to speak fluent Russian.  Obviously she spoke German.

So she is well qualified to proffer an opinion on the state of the number of bricks that Putin carries around and whether he might be a brick or two shy of a load.

That is the case because she has had occasion to talk to him since he has invaded Ukraine.

No one, of course, knows specifically what they might have discussed, but Putin has had a lot to say generally since his invasion, so it is probable that he might have said many of the same things to the Chancellor.

Those things have been that anti Semitics and fascists have driven poor President Yanukovich from power and that Russian “citizens” (they have lived for sixty or so years as “citizens of Ukraine”, but who cares about facts?) are under severe threat of attack from - - - something.

Since the interim Prime Minister of Ukraine is a Jew Putin’s anti Semite assertion seems particularly sinister: Jews must be becoming skinheads in the new Ukraine.

However, that is Putin’s story.

So that, I guess, was probably what Putin said to Merkel, in German (Putin speaks fluent German) and Russian (Angela we have already noticed, speaks Russian).

She probably asked him to tell her his tale of woe in both of their mutually fluent languages.

At this point I fade to fantasy.

But it is fantasy based on what the press reported that Ms. Merkel said after her Putin encounter.

In the press accounts she said something about him not seeming to have a firm grip on reality.

In my fantasy I hear her saying – in fluent English – “that man is deranged”.  

Mortal Sin Etc.

My mother had a cedar chest.

My mother has been dead for some time now.

In that cedar chest one time when I was fairly young I had occasion to notice that she had kept my First Communion Candle.  It was a rather beautiful thing – obviously bees wax and with decorative flourishes that looked to be of the same type as the cream frosting flowers on a birthday cake.

That cedar chest has been lost, I guess, for some time now.

At least I have no idea where it might be.

So I have no idea where that candle might be - or if that candle even is.

I only mention it to establish a Catholic baseline for my life.

I did get as far in the ritual of the Church of Rome as First Communion. 

In fact I even got farther. 

The archbishop of the archdiocese of Portland delivered the slap of Confirmation to me somewhat later in my life.

I took the Confirmation name of Mary.

A lot of young Catholic men did that in those days.

I mention all of this so that whatever it is  that I am about to say may have some sort of credibility – especially to me.

One of two things – I can’t remember which came first – manifested itself to me as a harbinger of doubt that god was in his heaven and all was right with the Catholic world.

The most likely of the two to have been the first was that I knew for a fact that many of the young men and women of much higher Catholic Church status that mine were fucking their mutual brains out as often as they were able.

At this late date in my life I could not care less who does who or how often.

In those days I was jealous.

Such opportunities never presented themselves to me.

If they had, I would have been unable to take advantage of them because my mother had convinced me that the only thing worse than being slowly digested by a carnivorous plant was to come up with a pregnant girlfriend.

But that mother induced conviction did not allay my jealousy.

However – there was a much bigger issue for me.

Those people – the fucking like minks bunch -  were always the first in line for Communion at Sunday mass.

The sixth commandment, I had been taught, had many diverse meanings, but all of them could be summed up in one statement: sex outside matrimony is a mortal sin. And a mortal sin condemns one to eternal damnation. 

Eternal damnation in those days meant you went to hell.

The anomaly that I perceived haunted me.

Then I heard about Galileo.

The short story was that unless he recanted on his view of the solar system – the fundamental truth of which has lived with us for centuries – he would have been guilty of mortal sin.

And we all know where mortal sin ends up – see above.

So he recanted.

At the point of perceiving those two facts I also was beset by two imponderables: the pillars of the youth of my part of the Catholic Church were fucking like minks but could partake of Holy Communion every time they went to mass – taking Communion in a state of mortal sin being in its own right yet another mortal sin – but a guy in the distant past who had been the first to discover a truth of how things work would have gone to hell if he hadn’t agreed to say that he was wrong about his perceived truth.

Things didn’t seem to make sense to me.

But at that point I was only troubled by the apparent lack of consistency that those two facts seemed to support.

It wasn’t until I began to ponder the implications of those two things that I really began to wonder.

If Galileo had not recanted a thing which was true and undeniable would he have been in hell for all eternity?

Can a court of old men in weird hats and robes declare a human soul to eternal damnation?

On the other hand can the act of – I assumed they must have done this – going and confessing the mink fucking every week wipe the slate clean for the pillars of the church so that they could partake of the Sacrament sans sin?  Could they just live as they chose and go get a weekly application of hell-avoidance forgiveness – from a human being just like the rest of us – and go merrily on their chosen course?

The answers seemed to me in both cases to be yes.

At that point I developed a major theological problem.

And I wasn’t very old yet.

How could men legislate others of their fellows to hell or not to hell?

And I have never been able to come up with any answer but that they cannot.

That is why I just laugh at all the furor and excitement surrounding the current pope’s apparent willingness to reconsider some of the Catholic Church’s ridiculous rules and regulations.

How many of us – now dead – are languishing in the fires of hell due to the whim of this or that hierarch of Catholicism no better or worse than we are?

What a ridiculous question.

Unless you believe the bullshit.