I Wonder

Just when I thought the “Christians” couldn’t sink lower, I saw a TV commercial for Wonder Bible. 

Paris Parrots

I first saw them in Parc Montsourris on bleak cold day late in 2010.

Really, I didn’t see them until I had heard them, and with disbelief in my heart (Parrots live in tropical rainforests)

started looking for them.

I knew what parrots sound like and I concluded that there must be a cold weather resistant variety.

And I saw them hurtling aerobatically through the grey sky.

That was the start of a multi year photographic stalk of the birds.

And I have gotten a lot of pictures of them – mostly blurry; but there have been some good ones.

And since that first encounter they have expanded their range.

The only wooded areas that I go to that I haven’t seen parrots in are le Bois de Boulogne and Parc Monceau.

The tube feeders – made by an American company, the Droll Yankees – are in le Jardin des Plantes.

donnie Investigates……..

“So Chris, you can talk to the senators who were in the hearing”.

“Mr. President, how about the other witnesses?”

“What other witnesses?”

“I gotcha, boss”.

“Loyalty is good”.

I Couldn’t Live Like That

We are apparently about to see several “Red State” Democrats vote for confirmation of Kavanaugh.

I can’t imagine having a job that was so important to me that I would violate all norms of morality to keep it.

I couldn’t live like that.

But then I’ve never amounted to much.

That’s probably one of the reasons.

Harlequins

We’ve heard a lot of talk about “circus” the last few days.

That’s probably because circuses have a lot of clowns.

And the republican party is replete with clowns.

And that, to me, is not entertaining.

The republican clowns are pretty inept at their craft.

To buoy my spirits, the other morning, I took a bunch of pictures of real clowns.

A flotilla of harlequin ducks was milling around in front of our bedroom.

I felt a lot better after watching them for awhile.

The Invention Of America

On several occasions I have posted calls for Americans – and anyone interested in truth and the threat that a third rate power, Russia, poses to America and the world - to read The Invention of Russia, by Arkady Ostrovsky, who, when he wrote the book, was a writer for The Economist.

There have been a variety of subsidiary reasons for my pleas for anyone reading this blog to read Invention, but the over arching reason has always been Ostrovsky’s documentation of Putin’s use of alternate facts and conjectural truths and stuff that drives the proletariat to just throw up their hands and say “I don’t know; I don’t know”.

If you can accomplish that dynamic in a country – or in the world – you can rule forever; no one will ever rise up with “the truth” to smite you if you are a dictator who has the alternate facts under your control.

Other than screwing with the pension age, Putin has been unopposed by anybody, least of all by the Russian People.

They love him.

Alternate facts have made them quit asking questions.

It’s all just too much trouble, and, probably, no one really knows what is true.

So who cares.

Bret Kavanaugh endorsed this Putin tactic in his unbelievably over-long, self serving, Nixonian (“I won’t let them take my little dog”) donnian (his allusion to his being the victim of a Clintonian plot – I kept waiting for him to start chanting “lock her up; lock her up”) opening statement.

He is clearly in Puty’s thrall.

I guess that’s good.

So is donnie.

In Puty’s thrall.

(If I end up mysteriously poisoned, I hope somebody will say something, but I doubt if that could happen.)

Now.

Having Ol’ Bret on The Court will hasten the Constitutional slide toward lifetime rule of a previously limited power office, in the oldest, and previously greatest democracy in the world.

Can you say King donnie jr?

Or Queen ivanka?.

That contest would be a real goat rodeo.

And Puty and 37,000 american voters and Cambridge Analytica and a voter suppression algorithm got it done.

And the total inability of Americans to talk, compromise and move forward is an indication of how successful the russian takeover of America has been.

Alternate facts, fake news, multiple versions and the Press being the enemy sets the stage.

donnie and his minions – like Ol’ Bret – are running Puty’s Playbook.

I’m Not A Psychiatrist But …

…Ol’ Bret just pretty well documented that he is dangerously paranoid.

And suffers from multiple delusion syndromes.

From The Washington Post

“On the eve of a high-stakes hearing for Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee disclosed late Wednesday that they had questioned two men who say they, not Kavanaugh, had the encounter with Christine Blasey Ford that led to her sexual assault allegations, but offered no evidence to back up either claim”.

Sounds like Ol’ Chuck and the boys are thrashing.

Interesting Counterpoint

The Democrats, armed with five minutes apiece, are letting Doctor Ford make an extremely convincing case.

The republicans on the other hand, have turned over their entire allotment of minutes to Perry Mason.

I guess Paul Drake will appear late and prove that Doctor Ford is a plant placed by the Iranians.

Then Ol’ Cuck Grassley will crow “I tol’ ya so; I tol’ ya so”.

And then they will confirm Ol’ Bret.

Kavanaugh On Fox News Monday

"That's totally false and outrageous," he said. "I have never done any such thing, known about any such thing. When I was in high school, and I went to an all-boys Catholic high school where I was focused on academics and athletics and going to church every Sunday at Little Flower and working on my service projects and friendships."

I can’t think of what to say to that.

I went to an all-boys Catholic high school also.

It wasn’t like that.

Also, does he want to be on the Supreme Court or Pope?

From AP

“Trump asserts American sovereignty in UN speech”

donnie has America great again.

I guess that’s why he felt it necessary to go to the UN and assert our national sovereignty.

America hasn’t had to do that since we took out the Barbary Pirates.

To me that doesn’t seem to project greatness; it makes us all look like fools.

But then, look who was doing the talking.

To sink us into deeper fooldom donnie said that he has gotten more done than any administration in history.

Got a good laugh though.

Just Some Pictures

The dispiriting state of the nation’s affairs can make a previously pleasant existence less than great again.

So those that say that donnie hasn’t accomplished anything are wrong.

There are ways to take respite from the grimness of reality however.

I do it with pictures that I have taken and continue to take.

Here are a few.

From this morning:

From the garden:

From the oven”

From the horizon:

From Photoshop:

From hell:

From the wild:

Kavanaugh Situation - Again

Then there were two and counting.

Ol’ Bret denies everything.

donnie trucks out some of his “fine person” tweets (remember:“fraudulent statements and a lack of factual support rule the day as long as it fits into a tweet”).

The republicans all go on the male chauvinist channel and attack the accusers.

And – as Kurt Vonnegut always said – so it goes.

But one unexpected alternate fact does seem to be emerging.

Ol’ Bret might have a drinking problem.

From Newsweek

“Former Trump Aide Leaves CNN After Abortion Accusation”

The guy’s name is Jason Miller.

Apparently he buys suits where donnie buys suits.

Maybe they have a volume purchase agreement.

Based on volume of cloth used, not on the number of suits purchased.

He was one of donnie’s communications advisors.

So he knows how to dish the slime.

He is shocked and dismayed that he could be slimed with the same brush that he and donnie brandish with such glee.

An allegation has surfaced that he fed his pregnant girl friend a smoothie with a day after pill ground up in it and she aborted whatever it was that o’’ Jason had implanted.

Great copy.

Must have been trumped up by a russian troll.

Anyway, ol’ Jason has resigned his slime consultancy at CNN to defend his good name.

That seems to me to be indulging in the debating error known as begging the question.

Or a kindred sort of logic flaw.

Ol’ Jason says ““fraudulent statements and a lack of factual support rule the day as long as it fits into a tweet.”

I hope donnie does ol’ Jason the service of one of his “he’s a fine man tweets”; they are so presidential.

And they sound so factual.

And, being tweets, they fit.

Into some bizarre other dimension.

But they fit.

And, as ol’ Jason has now revealed “fraudulent statements and a lack of factual support rule the day as long as it fits into a tweet.”

It’s nice to finally have that clearly on the table.

Paris Screen Saver–Again (1)

Only one picture this time: it was a family of Canada geese in le Bois de Boulogne.

donnie’s cat food tweet

donnie woke up the other morning with a great idea.

The base would love it.

He loved it.

Barron loved it.

“Eureka” he shouted.

donnie, that is.

“I have found it” resounded through the heavens.

An idea had occurred to donnie the 45.

That had never happened before.

In his life.

He asked to have his wife join him to celebrate, but she demurred.

So donnie had to be alone.

And that is, we are all learning, dangerous.

The idea was: “let’s gas and grind up all those little illegal kids we have laying around, after we have deported their parents, and make cat food out of them”.

“What a great idea” said Kelly Ann.

“And it will be popular with the cat lobby” said Larry Kudlow.

“What a good use for all those little proto-criminals” said Steve Bannon.

@real etc. etc. etc.tweeted today: “We have solved the problem of starving cats in America; the rest is history”.

Kavanaugh Situation

If it can be proven that he tried to rape a female teenage classmate I might adopt the widely held red hat donnie view that it was just teenaged hormonal exuberance and must be forgiven now the ol’ Bret has become a man.

I might adopt that view.

I can at least understand the vague outlines of that reasoning pattern.

I doubt that I would but I can imagine that I might.

Adopt that view.

But if the attempted rape can be proven, there is another problem.

And this one can’t be danced around.

Ol’ Bret has flatly denied that such a thing took place.

If it can be proven that it did, then Kavanaugh is a proven liar.

The trump precedents notwithstanding, that disqualifies him from being on the Court.

Screen Saver And Paris

I have an image file that contains 700 GB of images.

That’s a lot of images.

A lot of those images are of Paris (on one trip a while back I took a new camera that came out of the box and went on the plane with me; before the trip was over – it was five months that time – I had rolled the image counter past ten thousand back to zero).

I have my screen saver set for pictures and the file at that huge image file.

So I see a lot of images that I haven’t seen for a long time, or maybe even remembered, when the screen saver is operating.

A lot of those are  random images of Paris.

What a marketing program for the City of Lights.

I have begun saving some of these images that are randomly charming – at least to me.

Here are a few of them.

Starlings taking a bath near the Eiffel Tower.

Crows eating persimmons in le Jardin des Plantes.

You figure it out.

A spider that spent four months outside on my patio.

A merle noire.

My family in le Jardin de Luxembourg.

A meerkat at the Paris Zoo.

In le Jardin des Plantes.

Giverny.

Amendment Twenty Two

Here it is:

“No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.”

Does this preclude a two term president from being elected as the running mate of a presidential candidate and, if that ticket is elected, serving as vice president, and if the president dies, serving as president?

If this were true, that has the potential of making some eminently electable – but old – Democrats suddenly become viable presidential candidates: like Jerry Brown, Joe Biden and John Kerry.

Having Barack Obama as their running mate would serve two purposes: it would take an already powerful candidate to the winner’s circle and it would give America an assurance of succession competence.

I can’t make the 22nd Amendment say that this is not possible.

But then I can’t make the 2nd Amendment say anything more than that we need the citizens to be free to have an armory where they keep and bear arms in the event of civil unrest.

I Just Keep Asking Myself (2)

How can a documented idiot, a documented liar who doesn’t just lob an occasional lie over the transom, but who can’t speak without lying, a rightfully dubbed “fucking moron”, a threat to the continued existence of our Republic, the most serious threat currently identified to the health of the economy of the world, and to it’s continued, post WWII political stability, be allowed to continue to pretend to be the president of the United States of America?

He is a crotch grabber and seems to want to have intimate relations with his daughter.

But those are just interesting reality show stuff.

The continued existence of the American way of life is the issue.

That way of life has done ok to well under 44 presidents to date – even bad ones.

The documented stuff – above – says why we aren’t going to continue to do well; or even continue.

We have never had a disaster in the White House.

Until now.

So why doesn’t he just resign and start a new reality show.

I doubt if I would watch it though.

It wouldn’t be competitive.

I Just Keep Asking Myself

How can the the greatest, most powerful idea/country – to a great extent powerful because the human race has seen its humanity, values and pragmatic globalism – have been brought down in less than two years?

How can 37,000 or so voters in four states have destroyed the last greatest hope for humanity?

That hope being the United States of America.

(I am sorry for this fragment, Sister Justitia; but it works; so I am using it.)

I guess if you have the right algorithm you can cause voters not to vote.

Apparently the Russians and Cambridge Analytica have such an algorithm.

And, I guess, if you control the state legislatures, and are republican, you can pass laws that will keep non republicans – you know, that “other” group all of the white folks want to get rid of – you can pass laws, design voting districts, and create an environment of hate and fear that will cause those of us who are already here, and who WILL ULTIMATELY PREVAIL, and ARE CITIZENS, and who have a RIGHT TO VOTE, not to vote; but you will not win; the Convention of 1787 set something in motion that is unstoppable, and we WILL PREVAIL; and America will be the better for it.

By the way, “those of us who are already here” does not include me.

I was exercising rhetorical voice for another, a group that I am not included in.

But wait: I am a several (I have no idea what my history is, other than we have been here for quite q while) generation born American.

I went mostly to Catholic schools – I have always wondered what was wrong with me; no priest ever made a pass at me; and I was an altar boy.

I went to a “pagan temple of learning” (a term John Laughlin at Central Catholic High School used to use in derision of America’s public education system) for college, and then to Viet Nam.

Look up John Laughlin if you want to know about abuse of kids.

He died recently in prison.

But, that hasn’t got much to do with my story here, other than adding side story spice.

So back to me.

And then I joined IBM.

And then – after I had to escape the IBM implosion at the end of the last century - oblivion.

But I am still here and I still feel the same as I did when I was about 9 or 10 years old living in Portland: America will only be GREAT when WE are ALL a medium tan color.

So saying that the rhetorical voice wasn’t me is true.

I am not a recent non white citizen or threatened non citizen.

But that voice really is me.

Which is why I even took the time to write this thing.

I believe deeply in America.

And America will puke donnie out of its great welcoming maw, as it should have his ancestral drumpfs when they showed up – in due course – and we will again become America.

But the damage this cretin has done may be unfixable.

Here is a related link: http://noellivefromparis.blogspot.com/2017/12/98118.html

Withdrawal Symptoms

I hear that the born again crowd want to give donnie a new nickname.

They want to dub him Onan.

That’s because he withdraws so much from everything.

I wonder what that means.

Sounds disgusting.

Ol’ Mike Pence Says…

…that he will take a lie detector test to prove that he is not the “Failing New York Times Fake News Op Ed Liar And  Anti trump (donnie) Coward” if the technician is not a woman.

He says that if he takes the test with a woman tech he can’t be responsible for the results.

He is so magnetic – he said.

To Elaborate A Little Bit: Thoughts On Invoking The 25th Amendment

As I said in a previous blog post, it is hard to imagine invoking the 25th Amendment in any way that doesn't look like - and may actually be - a coup d'état.

Putting that aside, if it ever were to be invoked it would need Cabinet, Court and House/Senate buy in ahead of time.

That is a really tiny needle to try to thread.

However, maybe, if the Vice President were to start the process as an unidentified rogue op ed writer there could be an osmosis-like process that could be started, almost subliminally.

If over time more and more people came to the same conclusion, they could all show up with a net and take donnie off to the looney bin

And then all we would be confronted with would be a not very good person as a half assed president.

We have survived that before..

But it was touch and go for five years or so.

And it took our greatest President to bail us out of the mess.

After he replaced the half assed one.

Reality After donnie

I saw this morning that Omarosa says the style of the anonymous NYT Op Ed is in the style of writing used by Mike Pence and his staff.

Since the 25th Amendment looks pretty much like a coup d’état I think if I were Pence, confronted with the obvious necessity of invoking it, I might  decide that some front end diversions would be advisable and put up a smoke screen ahead of time to induce the proper level of irrational frenzy in the White House.

That could make the need to invoke the amendment obvious to all but the most irrational of the red hat crowd.

On the other hand it all just may all be a part of a very long pilot for a new reality show debuting in 2021: “So You Thought The Borgia’s Were Bad”.

In either event the world is imminently much worse for this debacle.

If I Were Interviewing Brett Kavanaugh…

… I would ask him what he thinks about Larry Nassar.

And then I would ask him what was the deal here: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/parkland-victims-father-and-kavanaugh-the-handshake-that-wasnt/ar-BBMSoOo?li=BBnb7Kz&OCID=ansmsnnews11

Neither are “hypotheticals”.

Phil Knight

Thank you.
I would have hoped that an Oregonian would have done what you have done, but in the current reign of terror I would not have expected it.

La Louvre de la Monde Nouveau

When the Brazil National Museum burned today, taking with it centuries of artifacts, it left a blank space in the world and the world’s history.

I hope the keepers of the British National Museum, the Smithsonian and la Louvre took note and are going to be even more vigilant.

If one or more of them were to burn we might as well fold up our tents and follow donnie into the gloom of trumped up apocalyptic despair and hatred.

I am really sorry for the people of Brazil.

I wish there had been a way to have saved the museum’s contents.

Franklin Graham

I just heard him interviewed by the New Yorker Radio Hour.

He is as slimy as donnie.

I guess, knowing who Franklin’s father was, slime is hereditary.