And Also

 I cannot understand or reconcile a world that is structured such that one man can reduce cities to rubble.

And get us all to duck and cover.

Gutted Buildings, Corpses In The Streets And Lies, Lies, Lies

 Every time I see one of Puty's "strategic targets": an apartment building, a hospital, a theatre, a railway station full of people trying to escape death I shudder.

The shudder is, of course, for the people who are becoming corpses.

But it is also, and mainly, for the world that is emerging.

Lying, snarling throwbacks to some imagined halcyon era are calling all the shots.

I recently called it a Coupe du Monde.

Puty levels cities; the rest of us protest; Puty says "I'm gonna nuke ya"; we go to Starbucks.

Looks like a coup to me.

Barn Owl Follow On

 Within hours we had wolfed down most of the loaf that I wrote about the other day.

So we got another the next day.

The stars don't often align such that it's possible to get hot from the oven Barn Owl two days in a row.

So we jumped on the opportunity.

Here's what one looks like, still warm, and un-molested by hungry humans.

Barn Owl Bakery Makes Good Bread

 A few moments ago, I was savoring one of the quignons of a loaf of Barn Owl Bakery bread.

It was still warm, and the croute was still crunchy.

The flavor was somewhere between sour dough and heaven.

With butter, life suddenly looked pre-covidic.

"How good can it get?" I thought I heard someone say.

I had the bag from the loaf in front of me and being a compulsive reader - ketchup labels when nothing else is on offer - I started reading the back of the bag.

It's worth reading.

I Thought Misdemeanors Were Capital Offences

 I just heard this morning that a significant number of Cops in the city where I live were guilty of refusing to wear face masks during the height of the Covid epoch.

That, at the time that it occurred, was a misdemeanor.

Good thing those cops weren't random black people driving with an out of state license plate.

I Don't Laugh Out Loud Very Often

 I can barely spell it.

But this one caught me.

If I'm violating somebody's copyright, please let me know and I will attribute.

That Bird - Again, And Again

 I posted it here a while ago

It was about a bird back then

It told how sad so, so sad, so

Sad I am now, and was then, and when

I saw what I had done

It was so sad, so bad

It was so opposite of the fun

That I had thought I was going to have

When I got my first kill

The result of my animal desire to fulfill

For no reason that I can tell

A blood count that seemed the will

Of some hunter being in charge

Of all things both small and large

Of what I would and what I did

But I was a kid

I guess I was; I hope I was; if I wasn't

A kid, how could I live with what I did?

Today on the porch a beautiful bird lay dead

A varied thrush; it crashed to the window of the door

Probably brought up in a fatally joyous soar

And crushed its head

And lay dead

At the door

All I could do was to cry

And cry

And I still do

Cry

For that bird

And the bird from my youth

Because in truth

I can't forget

Ever forget

That bird

republicans 2022: We Was Robbed: Restore donnie The Dildo

 I just saw a PBS Newshour segment that featured a clip of a recent debate between Brian Kemp and David Perdue (republican candidates for governor of Georgia).

Perdue was attacking Kemp - the incumbent governor - for letting Biden steal the election in Georgia.

And Perdue kept shouting down any response Kemp had to the attack (a clear homage to donnie the dildo from presidential-debate-land 2020).

It appears that overturn the steal is the main republican theme for why they should win all contests in the 2022 mid-terms.

I guess that's a pretty substantial rationale for turning the country over to the Klan.

******************************************************

There are almost 180,000 voting precincts in the United States where local people manage and run the elections of the United States.

There is no national data base of voters.

Those are kept at the county level.

There are 3143 counties in the United States.

So, the recent theft of the 2022 presidential election (there was no theft down ballot - republicans regained or added seats everywhere) was a fiendishly clever intervention by the democrats into the data bases, voting machines, paper ballot scanners and computer tabulated vote counting systems of 180,00 precincts and 3143 counties.

I'd vote for a party that was that well organized.

*******************************************************

The Big Lie notwithstanding (recently I actually heard a republican invoking Hitler's "stab in the back" meme) because it is BIG and it is a LIE, we need to keep our perspective.

And the slogan of trumpism can best bring us to closure: "always remember, and never forget: if you vote for trump in 2024 you are voting for lynching as a method of national cleansing; and that is a good thing, because all those 'others' need to be sociologically and physically cleansed from our great country".

Nightshade

 When I was a little kid, my grandfather told me about nightshade.

He called it deadly nightshade.

He said if you ate it it would kill you.

So I never ate it and it never killed me.

I have wondered many times since if it really would kill me: it looks so much like a tomato with devilishly purple flowers; but I have never eaten one.

But I've taken a lot of pictures of them.

I think they are quite pretty.

Some of these are from Seattle and some are from Paris.

 

The Past Isn't Dead; It Isn't Even Past

William Faulkner said that.

He must have known about Puty the Butcher.

************************************************************

Here is an interesting post from a guy named Curt Doolittle.

“In 1209, Pope Innocent III decided it was time to crack down on followers of a religious sect that had become popular in Southern France. Originally called Albigensians, they came to be more widely known as the Cathars.

Cathars were Christians. But they rejected the authority of the Pope and other key aspects of Catholicism, so they were deemed heretics by the Catholic Church.

This apparently didn’t matter much to most people living in the French town of Beziers.

Catholics and Cathars had lived there together for many years in relative harmony.

On July 22, 1209, they were celebrating the annual Feast of Mary Magdalene together, a religious holiday observed by various Christian religions.

Suddenly, the festivities were cut short when an army of “Crusaders” sent by Pope Innocent III showed up outside the walls of the town.

The military leader of the army was Simon de Montfort, a French nobleman highly motivated by the Pope’s promise that he could keep the land of any heretics he killed.

The Crusaders were accompanied by an official representative of the Pope, a French Cistercian monk named Arnaud Amalric (also variously referred to as Arnald Amalric and Arnauld-Amaury).

De Montfort demanded that the leaders of Beziers turn over the town’s Cathar heretics to him. They refused. The Crusaders attacked.

According to accounts written decades later, as the attack began, a soldier asked Amalric how they would be able to tell which Beziers townspeople were Catholics and which were Cathars.

Amalric supposedly answered (in French):

“Kill them all. God will recognize his own.”

Some sources give the alleged quote as “Kill them all, for the Lord knows his own” or as “Kill them all. The Lord knows his own.”

It eventually came to be most commonly paraphrased as:

“Kill them all and let God sort them out.”

The Origins of “kill Them All and Let God Sort It Out”

Posted by

CURT DOOLITTLE (ERICD)

 Date

JUNE 21, 2018

Florida v Disney

 I think I might have known this.

Because I seem to make a habit of knowing obscure sorts of facts.

I am proffering that prologue because everything else in this post depends upon your belief that I know what I am talking about.

If the prologue works, I wish I could be sharing your belief that I know what I am talking about.

Ol' Ron - Florida's President-in-Waiting - just signed a law that takes away the municipal-corporation-like powers granted in another era - back in 1967, I think - to Walt Disney and the boys so that they would/could invest huge amounts of money in East Central Florida - a place mainly, at the time of the deal, of airboats and alligators.

Now, in our time, it's a hallucinatory destination for most of the peoples of the Western Hemisphere.

The coffers of Florida flow deep with Disney Gold.

But Ol' Ron Orban, in the run up to his inevitable - he believes - replacement of donnie, wants to show the mudsill - his lackey voter hoard - that he is a big man when it comes to Business and its manifold nuances.

I have to ask who Ol' Ron expects to pick up the bill for all the county-like services: roads, garbage, fire, EMT and police etc. that Disney has been providing over the years.

Probably not the air boaters or the alligators. 

Off The Grid, I Guess

 I just heard an interesting segment on KUOW, a Seattle based NPR affiliate.

The segment's overall theme was that of getting back to all natural and locally available foods - this being from the viewpoint of the Native people of the Northwest, so the foods discussed were things like salmon and native blackberries - and the vehicle that guided the discussion was a book written by a woman who is a member of a Native Nation that lives on Vancouver Island.

It was a good interview, and, as a kid who grew up with a lot of incursions into the woods of this magic place, the Pacific Northwest, I found a lot that sounded familiar.

The closing part of the interview dealt with the last two chapters of the book which are about a family: six children and their two parents, who are friends of the author and, I think I understood, also members of the author's Vancouver Island based Native Nation.

The author said that these people, under a banner similar to that which the book being discussed marches, wanted to spend a year becoming one with the natural world, its creatures, its dangers, its foods and its requirements.

To that end, they stripped their kit to the bare essentials.

Interestingly the bare essentials included an electric smoker (how else would one smoke a salmon?).

I assume there was also a portable generator (how else would one run the smoker?) but that was discreetly not mentioned.

Putin Sums It Up

 

The Ubiquitous Traffic Cone

 This is an image of a traffic cone.

It appeared one day in front of my house.

As it happened, my son and daughter in law were visiting.

There is a family story about me and one of those devices that is too long to re-count here.

But remembering that story, once the cone had appeared, elicited gales of laughter from my kids and me.

And finally, it matured into a plan.

To see what that plan was, go to this link: 

Help, Help; The Coneheads Are Loose.

 

Cone Heads

 

An Unusual Image Of Passerelle des Artes

 I like taking nontraditional views of various Paris landmarks.

For example, I have one of Notre Dame framed by the arch support of a bridge shot on the quai.

When I was working on this one, I was hindered by that pesky building.

I guess I need to crop it out.

So, Whatta We Do?

 I posted to this blog a while back a post titled "Coup du Monde" - takeover of the world - that post posited that Puty is finessing his nuclear weapon threat (commonly called World War Three, or Armageddon) to keep any meaningful restraint from being put on him as he annihilates an adjacent Slavic country and all its inhabitants.

Implicit in that post is the obvious fact that Puty's plan is bullet proof.

Nobody is going to start the war that ends this phase of civilization, so Russia can do whatever it wants, probably anywhere.

Where else they intend to exercise that bulletproofness is yet to be announced. 

A similar finesse is on the table domestically.

Ol' Mitch and Ol' Lindsey have both said that in the likely event of a republican takeback of the Senate this November there will be no more Supreme Court nominees allowed to the current president should a vacancy occur.

Of course that's malfeasance of the first water.

And it certainly isn't in keeping with originalist Constitutionalism that all those republicans hold so dear.

The Constitution's words say that the president will nominate and the Senate will advise and consent when a vacancy occurs on the Supreme Court.

But, instead of advising and consenting, the imminent republican Senate is going to block and oppose.

Remember 2012?

So whatta we gonna do about these two enemies, foreign and domestic?

Putin and the republicans?

Yeah, that's what I think too.

Nothing.

We're pretty screwed.

Last Gasp - Or Last?

 From 35,000 feet America looks like a pretty tranquil place.

Descending from the clouds into the midst of the folks down below reveals how wrong that apparent tranquility is.

Because at sea level, and from sea to shining sea, one is immediately immersed into a maelstrom of snarling, gesticulating loudly raving hate 

The majority of a newly and artificially created electorate wants to be governed by a dictator and to be done with ever having to choose a leader again: as long as that leader rules with hatred and lies things will be good - or so the belief of that artificially created majority seems to be.

One might ask to what end their dictator's hatred should be directed; if that question were to be asked, one would get an array of answers; but they would all boil down to one thing, and that one thing would be we fear that we are being replaced; replaced by something sinister.

The fact that that newly and artificially created electorate is all white and heavily male, may point to what it is that that newly appointed ruling class is afraid of and what they intend to do about it.

They are probably afraid of a large and growing group men, and especially women in a certain category, a category that could be dubbed "non-white".

They probably have that fear because they have read some about the impending demographic shift toward which America is hurtling at a speed beyond their control.

But, since most of them don't read, most are probably just feeling the gravitational pull of that impending shift; being ignorant doesn't rule out being cunning, and cunning senses stuff that smart needs to get from reading.

So, literate or cunning, the sense of the shift is there, and the result is the same: a maelstrom of snarling hate - hate with a mission which is to, once and for all cut off from any semblance of a decent life or participation in the administration of power to any but the most supreme of whites.

An optimist might see this as the unfortunate transition necessary as a prelude to something else, maybe even something better.

The optimist would probably say "demography is demography and like time and tide it is not to be denied its direction and implications".

So the optimist might see America's future as being a fully constituted multi-everything democracy.

And that optimist might point out that, all of that being true, the imminent creation of a hate directed and controlled phase of American history is merely the last gasp before a new life of acceptance of all Americans as equal participants comes into being as a new and regularly breathing, post gasp, post hate America.

But that viewpoint ignores the fact that the imminent reign of hate will come into existence because of  the newly and artificially created electorate.

The voting system of the United States has been recently re-designed with a purpose: to purge the Senate and the House in 2022 and to get rid of the President and install a dictator in 2024.

That's hardly a gasp; it's pretty much a last.

The Big Laugh

 Now that the Russians have "accomplished their objectives" in north central Ukraine and have moved off to join their irridentist comrades in eastern Ukraine they have left a lot of dead bodies behind.

As the Ukranian military gradually moves in, and along with them, the international press, a horribly grim story, complete with images and video, is unfolding.

Dead raped women, men with bullets through their skull and their hands tied behind their backs, myriad hopelessly disoriented pets and livestock and weeping, hopeless children shouldn't be a source of comedic relief.

And it wouldn't be if the Russians weren't kibbitzing every horror.

"Fake news".

"Staged by actors" (I can see the Qanon posts: "Spielberg contracts with Zelinsky to make Putin look bad".)

"American conspiracy".

And myriad other Putin Playbook shit.

When I hear this predictable stream of Putin Facts, I just can't restrain a legitimately joyous belly laugh.

Hitler had the big lie.

Putin has refined that concept into the big laugh.

Leave 'em laughin' someone once is supposed to have said.

Puty has a future in vaudeville.

A Picture Of Notre Dame

 This looks more like a painting than a photograph.

I wish I knew what settings I had when I took this.

Picture For Today