Thursday, June 30, 2022

The Old Pardon Gambit Looms Large

From NBC News:

" WASHINGTON — Republicans and other sources are rebutting elements of former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony before the Jan. 6 committee, handing Donald Trump and his allies ammunition as they seek to discredit her and portray her as an unreliable witness.

Hutchinson’s account Tuesday about a dramatic physical altercation between Trump and his top security official on Jan. 6 has come under intense scrutiny after sources told NBC News that two witnesses were prepared to testify under oath that it never happened."

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Cassidy was such a game changer that the republicans have to negate her.

Fear, uncertainty and doubts are the first order of the day.

But after Fox has blanketed nut-land with FUDs for some indeterminate timespan, one fact will remain.

Ms. Hutchinson's testimony is all under oath.

The only way to directly attack that is not Fox, no matter how much slime they can conjure.

The only way to directly attack that is testimony under oath refuting everything Ms. Hutchinson has said.

Assuming that Cassidy was telling the truth (which seems to me to be a very likely to be true assumption - why would a talented young American with an obviously bright future comit perjury on national television?) that says that donnie and the dildos need to recruit a kamikaze cadre to lie under oath and take the criminal risk that such action entails.

That all works out, the kamikazes will be, told, because, as soon as donnie has been re-installed, they will all be pardoned.

 We are so screwed.

Wednesday, June 29, 2022

What Kind Of Moron ...

 ... thinks that he can drive a limousine from its back seat with one hand?

I doubt that even the divinely anointed Ron DeSantis would be that stupid.

But I have been wrong before.

Tuesday, June 28, 2022

Bennie And Liz Strike Again

 I have been hearing almost since the January 6 Hearings immediately became must watch TV that the only thing missing was a John Dean Moment.

We got that today.

The smell of skunk is becoming unbearable.

If that assertion makes no sense, click here to find out more: Skunk Talk.

Life After Comcast

 In various forms I was a Comcast customer for over twenty years.

I am, perhaps, an idiot, but I'm not that stupid.

In my personal experience Comcast is the worst company in the world: function, service, price being three key business components in which Comcast consistently is at the barrel's bottom - at least in my twenty year experience.

So I knew that I was being screwed but I couldn't do anything about it.

As bad as Comcast is, from a band width viewpoint, Comcast was the only game in town.

Three years ago, I got a mailer from Century Link.

It had an offer that was too good to be true, so I threw the mailer in the recycling waste basket and moved on.

But I couldn't forget what Century link appeared to be offering.

So I took the mailer back from the recycling bin and called the number.

The offer was real; all of what looked to me like weasel words meant what they appeared to be saying.

I just did a speed test.

Here's what value - $65 a month - looks like.



Monday, June 27, 2022

Image For Today

 




Ol' Mitch And The Boys Just Got Joined By Amy The Rabbit

 Coney = rabbit.

And you know how they - rabbits - must copulate to produce the broods they are well known for.

I can't think of why else the Coney Court would promulgate what it did last Friday.

She must have a deep-seated need to proliferate.

She of course has the economic wherewithal to do that: copulate and proliferate.

But what about the rest of us?

Those of us that are currently cash flow managing our food/gasoline/utilities/etc. budgets on our credit cards (at 15% uplift daily for the privilege).

That, of course, applies to the minority of us that have credit cards.

We are hoping, for example, that universal day care will magically somehow get out of the iron grip of Ol' Mitch and the Boys.

But it can't; and it won't; nor will any of the other things that are in a bill that would move America into the quadrant of real modern countries; Ol' Mitch and the Boys are in control; they own the third branch; they own the saucer in which the coffee was to be cooled.

(The preceding comment is referring to a breakfast conversation between George Washington and Thomas Jefferson; the analogy made by Washington was that the Senate was constructed as it was to offer a cooling mechanism to the frenzy of legislating emanating from the "people's branch" of the Legislature, just as Jefferson had poured coffee from his cup into a saucer to cool it.  As I wrote this post the analogy appeared to me to equally apply to the Supreme Court as it once was, and still should be, in these heat-filled days of shouting "what goes around comes around").

It's being cooled no more.

They have decided to boil it.

So where does this lead?

Here is where it leads for those of us that are at the pinnacle of the nadir of the economics of the emerging Feudal States of America: see below.

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From Wikipedia

"Serfdom was the status of many peasants under feudalism, specifically relating to manorialism, and similar systems. It was a condition of debt bondage and indentured servitude with similarities to and differences from slavery, which developed during the Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages in Europe and lasted in some countries until the mid-19th century."

"Unlike slaves, serfs could not be bought, sold, or traded individually though they could, depending on the area, be sold together with land. The kholops in Russia, by contrast, could be traded like regular slaves, could be abused with no rights over their own bodies, could not leave the land they were bound to, and could marry only with their lord's permission.  Serfs who occupied a plot of land were required to work for the lord of the manor who owned that land. In return, they were entitled to protection, justice, and the right to cultivate certain fields within the manor to maintain their own subsistence. Serfs were often required not only to work on the lord's fields, but also in his mines and forests and to labour to maintain roads. The manor formed the basic unit of feudal society, and the lord of the manor and the villeins, and to a certain extent the serfs, were bound legally: by taxation in the case of the former, and economically and socially in the latter."

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Since enough of us in enough states are being denied the capability (rights be damned; those are foo foo, extremist left wing artifices) to vote, even for the keeper of the gates for election administration in those states, the most of us are pretty much screwed.

Welcome to serfdom, mes amis.



Saturday, June 25, 2022

Quantum Politics

 On the outer edges of all the work and equations that Albert Einstein left behind is an area that has come to be called quantum physics.

That edge of Einstein postulates that things exist in more than one instance simultaneously.

I haven't been able to divine if that is two instances, or infinite instances.

I probably nodded off during that part of the discussion.

But, for the purpose of this post, more than one - two - is enough.

Most, if not all, of the republicans who have been testifying under oath before the Select Committee for the January 6 insurrection, and clearly fingering donnie with crimes, say that they will vote for him again if given the opportunity.

I don't know if any of this is true, but Seth Meyers says that it is, so it must be true.

So, Einstein's equations reach far beyond physics.

We are so screwed.

Giving A Cat A Pill

 My wife sent this to me.

It was saved from a print screen.

I have no idea to whom I need to attribute copyright.

If it's you, and if you see this, let me know; I will attribute.



Thursday, June 23, 2022

The Roseanne Prophesy

 I never watched Roseanne the TV show when it was prime time.

I don't know why.

I just never watched it.

In the intervening years on curated re-play TV channels, I have watched it a lot.

Probably the best TV show in history.

And there are reasons for that.

There isn't a line that she delivered in those years of her TV stardom - that I have seen - that isn't prophesy.

donnie the dildo was the inevitable outcome of the histoires et les travails of her family.

So it is so sad that she had to go down in flames when the monster that she had invoked leaped out of the pentagram and started doing evil and she decided to endorse the evil.

It's too bad she wasn't able to take the brilliance of the first show and transfer it to the second show and become, again, a banner under which most of us could march.

But she didn't; or she couldn't; or she wouldn't; or all of the above.

How sad.

How wasteful.

So Far Is Enough: The Skunk Is Cornered

 The Bennie and Liz Show has been brilliant so far.

And so far is enough.

I hear that they have more, lots more, but so far is enough.

But I'm looking forward to the much more, too.

But so far is enough.

donnie is trapped like a skunk.

We should be smelling that fact soon.

Saturday, June 18, 2022

Images

 I think I have mentioned before that I have my screen saver pointed at a massive file of images that I have taken over time.

When I am sitting idle at my computer, the screen saver starts after five minutes.

What ensues has two functions, both useful to me.

First, it is an on-going dementia test: if I can remember where I took the image, I must still be OK, I tell myself; it's surprising how many I remember - most of them; maybe I just make stuff up,

Second, it's a curating assistant: a quick print screen and a little Photoshop et voila, a new long forgotten image complete with name goes to the archive.

I usually post a few of them every now and then, but recently I have not been doing that.

So, there is quite an unposted backlog.

Here are a few of them.




















Thursday, June 16, 2022

Paris In The Rain

 Gil Pender loved and understood Paris in the rain.

So do I.

I loved rain in Paris several years before Midnight In Paris appeared.

But Gil is so right.



Monday, June 13, 2022

Captain's Log, Stardate 41199.9. Our Destination Is Planet Earth

 After numerous generations away, with no contact, due to the "nuclear troubles of the last days of civilization on Earth" we have returned.

"We" are a multi-species, multi-instance-of-origin group.

"We", since we escaped just before the last great days of planet earth and became cosmic wanderers, have joined with other wanderers, and have interbred where possible, and inter-leaved our consciousnesses in all other cases.

On this date, as noted, "we" are returning to one of the major pseudopods of a formerly great inter-galactic Republic.

"We" have the mission of trying to discover what it was that happened here, so catastrophically, so long ago.

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Captain's Log, Stardate 41200.0

We have excavated - removed eons of dust and detritus - from an area of interest, designated by our Historic Records Officer.

We have found a massive icon:

On the base of the massive icon was a message scribed in an ancient language.

Computer has translated it.

"The only problem with Democracy is the voters: we died because of the voters: we believe they had the best of intentions".

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Captain's Log, Stardate 41200.1

We are vacating this quadrant permanently. 

There is no value left here.

Saturday, June 11, 2022

Real Irony: The Great Rehearsal

 In 1948 a scholar named Carl van Doren published a book he titled The Great Rehearsal.

The book is a beguilingly accessible tale of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia.

I re-read it every few years: knowing the who, what and why of our - Constitutional - now, is worth refreshing every now and then.

Therefore, the words "great rehearsal" loom large in my life and my way of looking at things: they signify 234 years of orderly transition of power and life within the rule of law.

How ironic that 17 months ago we witnessed another great rehearsal, planned, aided and abetted by our then Constitutional Executive, a handful of co-operating Constitutional Legislators and by all but two of the members of the political descendants of the Federalist Party; that recent rehearsal was designed as a dry run of an exercise ultimately intended to overturn the work product of that first Great Rehearsal. 

17 months and counting.


Friday, June 3, 2022

The Second Amendment Seen From An "Originalist" Point Of View

  • Everyone has assault rifles.
  • Those assault weapons are all equipped with high content "magazines".
  • The biggest magazine found in a Google search:  GEN. II 100 ROUND DRUM MAGAZINE
  • "Open Carry" weapons are de regear.
  • Big magazine assault pistols are almost as prevalent as assault rifles (usually carried as side arms in assault rifle mass killings).
  • No law can be passed controlling individual possession of weapons of mass murder
And on, and on et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Ad infinitum.

Here is the text of the Second Amendment.

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed".

I think Madison was at the end of a long day and was ready to hit the local pub for some drink and a porterhouse steak when he wrote that fateful sentence.

For a man who supplied the basis for what came to be the Constitution of the United States of America to write a non sequitur sentence such as that - slapdash journalism, it would be called in these times, must be embarrassing to him when he thinks about it from his cosmic perch.

But even more interesting is the fact that all the "originalists" - those that want to use the Constitution word by word according to whatever those words must have meant in 1787 - rally around those words and have prevailed in their interpretation of what those words "must have meant" in 1787.

There are a number of linguistic sciences, and there are a number of really old dictionaries that show that language is a fluid sort of art form.

So to try to figure out what somebody meant with some word from 200 years ago is a laughable exercise in futility.

Also I wish they could ask Madison what he meant by those words so he could say to those "originalists" "I don't know; I had a date, and I was really hungry" 

As the mass carnages that unfold daily under the "originalist" interpretation of Madison's non sequitur spread blood: blood of children, blood of old people, blood, all, of decent people just trying to be make their daily way, that blood is spread on the floors of hospitals, churches, super markets, hyper markets and just about everywhere, all the time, all across this land one wishes that the "originalists" had never been in the world of the rest of us; but they have been and are in the world of the rest of us;  blood be damned; they don't care about anything - but power and its retention.

So the floors of America continue to flow redder.

Red with the blood of lots of us.

Red with the blood of more and more of us.

And daily flow with the blood of more of us.

Red, to what end, one might ask.

Red to the ends - whatever they could possibly be - of the "originalists".

So, ask Ol' Mitch.

And the boys.

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Madison obviously didn't know what those words meant; he wouldn't have written them if he had known; but he wasn't a seer; he was just a thinker; and he put down a lot of thoughts on a lot of paper; and a lot of those thoughts have changed the world for the better; but a few of them - the Second Amendment for example - were just a little shaky; and they have destroyed so many lives that one shudders at the counting.

Warren Burger - quoted from a Jim Lehr Newshour interview with Charlayne Hunter-Gault had some thoughts about the various Supreme Court's rulings on Madison's folly.