They have nothing to do with the debate.
I was just saying that to get you to click on the link.
Kinda like donnie and the coal miners.
************
This is a salmonberry.
This is a cormorant on the Seine.
Geodesic thing in Paris at the Peripherique.
Rue St. Romaine in Rouen
I am relieved to find that no one is going to fact check donnie in the debates.
Fact checking him would have been tacit acceptance of the concept that he sometimes tells the truth.
The hollow halls of hell reverberate with the sardonic laughter that that ridiculous flight of fancy induces.
This morning I finally got around to sending an email to a friend of mine who has a lot of guns.
I have a lot of guns too.
Most of mine are left over from my much earlier life when I was a hunter - birds mostly - but I also have some great hand guns that I inherited from my father in law.
Anyway, my gun owning friend travels to some extent in the same environment as do various militia types.
I have been curious about how much he knows about the militias in his neighborhood.
Here is what I sent an hour or so ago.
"Are you in a militia?
I assume not, but just curious.
I do assume that you have some idea of the deployment of various militias in your part of Florida, so the other question is, do you think they will take over your part of the state if trump doesn't win?
I am more worried about the Midwest and especially New York.
I think they have more nooks and crannies in those states in which to hide and mount attacks.
It appears to me that we can't depend on the military to put down an insurrection because so many members of the active duty military are of the trump demographic: no-hopers with nothing much going for them, white supremacists and militia members.
I would have thought that this was dystopian fiction if I were reading the email six years ago; but life moves on.
All my guns are in Seattle and I have thought about bringing a couple of them to Lopez "just in case" but I realized that if it comes to that there isn't much left, and I'm not really interested in killing anybody in defense of not much left; in any event shooting some asshole isn't going to change the balance: there are way too many assholes for me to be able to kill them all, so I guess it's wait and see.
(I understand - if I would buy a decent hamburger gun I could kill all the assholes I want; the problem is that the assholes all have hamburger guns and "n" assholes with hamburger guns are way more firepower than "one" Noel with a hamburger gun. The story ends the same.)
I have no idea the state of my ammunition in any event. It's all past the "use by" date, so it's probably not worth much."
I guess she just saw donnie.
Les Tomates
Lopez bee on thistle; these are native honey bees; we have very few of the European variety.
Somewhere in Entre Deux Mers
"Tocqueville, was a French aristocrat, diplomat, political scientist, and historian.
He is best known for his works Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution.
In both, he analyzed the improved living standards and social conditions of individuals as well as their relationship to the market and state in Western societies.
Democracy in America was published after Tocqueville's travels in the United States and is today considered an early work of sociology and political science."
(The above was cut and pasted from Wikipedia.)
Tocqueville wondered at various aspects of t the United States of America as he toured it and as he discovered it.
He found America's proclivity to form associations for the achievement of socially advantageous purposes to be of especial note.
Even more special than that, he found that America seemed to be proving that a people could govern themselves, sans roi.
He found that to be amazing.
Oddly the thing that I remember most from his book was his description of a farmstead that he had wandered upon somewhere in the frontier - Ohio/Indiana in those days: he said that the people had enclosed their keep with a fence made up of a fairly robust weave of the branches of some local shrub.
The branches had apparently retained enough vitality and sap to sprout leaves and put down roots; the result was a keep enclosed in a living shrubbery barrier.
For some reason that has always been one of my favorite images of early America.
Given my interest in Tocqueville I was recently excited by the discovery of some unpublished parts of the manuscript that became Democracy in America.
In a cellar of a building on rue Guénégaud in Paris, in an alcove in the limestone wall, some workers found a roll of paper nearly destroyed by the humidity of two centuries; but, since it had been rolled, it could be unrolled and read.
It had been intended to have been included in Democracy in America.
Here it is.
"I do have one overriding concern, however.
Prosperity for all will no doubt result in an increase in the less than intelligent, less than perceptive, less than - shall we say - thinking, class; that increase, in Europe, would merely swell the streets with urchins; however, in egalitarian America, that might well swell the polling places with fucking morons.
One can only hope that if this observation be accurate, that the fucking morons will remain a minority, albeit a vocal and troublesome one, and that of the leaders from whom they are offered a choice at the polling places, none of their class will prevail."
I think I like this almost as much as the keep with the living fence story.
If I were a woman, and donnie nominated me for anything, particularly the Supreme Court, I would feel thrice defiled: once by having had the dildo utter my name, once by having had to respond to his utterance, and once to know that I would be a laugh line for night-time television for years to come.
Having that viewpoint, I can't help but wonder what kind of creature it is that donnie is going to have jump out of the cake.
What kind of creature would accept that sort of defilement?
And why would we want that sort of creature to replace one of our great justices?
But then why do we continue to tolerate the dildo?
The fact that such an inane statement is news, and that it is supposed to bring a vast transcontinental sigh of relief is a red light indicator of how much trouble we are in.
The fact that the republicans had previously assured all of us that donnie was only kidding about not being willing to accept the will of the people and to a peaceful transition rather than spearheading articles of impeachment in the House is an equally red blinker of how little hope there is for the future of the United States.
The dildo is going to announce his choice to replace RBG on Saturday.
Can't you just see it?
There will be a massive stage rigged up in the White House slime garden.
An image of the Virgin Mary (or is it The Lady of Slovenia?) will be festooned across the Whitehouse providing a dramatic backdrop for the imminent festivities: donnie's FEMALE SUPREME COURT JUSTICE.
A huge band - impressed sailors from the US Navy - will open with the Navy hymn, then the scene will transition artfully to a massive super sized screen that will suddenly appear, popping up from the ground, that will present Bert Parks singing "There She Is Miss America".
After finishing his song Bert will transition in the video with a screen scrape sideways to a fade in to Ol' Mitch and the Boys singing and dancing to "You Can't Always get What You Want".
Then a huge cake will be wheeled onto the stage in front of the Navy Band.
After a massive crash of dramatic chords issued from the various band instruments of the Navy and donnie shrieking mindlessly something about "I give you Roe vs Wade" some generic blond republican fascist woman (image of same here) will leap out of the cake clad in a high school cheer leader's outfit.
A flight of Vietnam era Huey choppers, Navy whatever Fxxs they fly these days, and vintage Airforce C130s (in support of tradition - a reference to SCOTUS before expropriation) will then buzz the stage.
Fade to black.
When I am in Paris I always go to the Paris Aquarium Tropical.
It's a great place to spend a rainy afternoon, having taken the Metro, to avoid the rain, to get there.
On a sunny day it is an equally great place to visit, having walked down the Seine to Pont d'Austerlitz and across to la Bastille and along the back side of the new Opera to the steps leading up to la Promenade des Plantes, and all the way down la Promenade to the golden guy right by an entrance to le Bois de Vincennes; skip the Bois and go left, behind the golden guy and across the street to le Aquarium.
The aquarium is always full of teachers and parents with hoards of little kids who pound on the faces of the aquariums, all of which have signs saying ne touchez pas, or something similar.
I always take an amazing number of pictures, most of which are a waste of chip space, the lighting conditions and activity level of the denizens of the aquariums being what they are.
But I do get a few that are pretty good.
Here are some of them.
I was born in Seattle, left for Portland when I was five years old and have been back in Seattle since 1992.
After leaving Seattle in 1948, I grew up in Portland and only left twice: when I went into the Air Force - I returned to Portland after that - and when IBM asked me to begin the Trek d'IBM which ultimately returned me to Seattle.
I guess anarchy just always brings you back.
Being born in anarchy in Seattle, and moving to and growing up with anarchy in Portland, wherever I was in between couldn't undo the anarchy bred into me early and often.
I should warn Jefferson City, San Angelo, Clovis, Boca Raton, Omaha, Atlanta (really Alpharetta) Spokane, Saigon, Fukuoka, and Upper Saddle River that, since I once lived in all of them, they will probably be added to the list.
Upper saddle River - being close to NYC - is probably why New York is on the list.
A perfect trifecta, I would assert.
Can't you just see Nancy Pelosi sneaking in to Justice Ginsburg's room, leaving the letter, and cackling fiendishly as her green glowing witch's face exits the room through the wall?
Anyone who has read "The Invention of Russia" will recognize this as straight out of the Putin Playbook.
Fauci and Redfield are the carboard cutout placemen in donnie's info war on public health and science.
The short version of the Putin Playbook is that if enough different stories are spewed out - some of them even marginally true - the government can induce an "oh what's the use?" reaction from the citizens; then all bets are off, and the glorious leader can reign supreme.
The fact that donnie is no Putin - more like Joffrey in Game of Thrones - doesn't make things much better.
Dandelions don't get their just due.
Cop boat in Rome
Paris: THIS is a cop boat. It backs up the French Navy.
