30 October 2023

When Do They Start Counting?

 A couple of hours ago I heard a retired Israeli colonel interviewed by the BBC.

She obfuscated on all subjects extremely effectively.

But paramount among her obfuscations was her multi-repeated strident assertion "the Israeli Army does not target civilians".

To date, 8000 Palestinian civilians - 2400 of them children - (have you noticed that the "horrific" Jew body count remains 1400, as the Palestinians deaths rise by the hour?) have been killed.

I guess that that 8000 weren't targeted, assuming truth in the strident protestations, noted above.

I guess not having been targeted is the same as not being dead.

In Israeli-Speak.

Nonetheless, since we, the rest of the world, do have a body count - 8000, and rising by the minute - we have a pretty good idea of how many Palestinians have not been targeted by the Israeli Army, and therefore, in Israeli-speak, are not dead.

So, when do they - the Jews - start counting?


26 October 2023

The Difference



"Too few people with too much money,

 "And too many with too little,

"And then there's me,

"Apparently free,

"Of problems,

"Of money 

"One medical bill or one 'we have totaled your car' away from the abyss,

"'Apparently, apparently, therefore, a word remiss,

"But, remiss or other,
 
"Remiss or not,

"When I looked for its brother.

"'Careless' I got,

And so,

"I've got what I've got,

"And I guess that's good, so good, so good,

"I'm sure that's the feeling I should,

"Have

 "In the best of all countries,

"In the best of all times,

"City on the hill,

"How it all shines,

"But, still, too many with much, much too little",

I thought to myself,

As I scrumbled my dollar bills,

In my wallet,

So I could pay for

A copy of Real Change.

The paper costs two dollars.

I gave the guy three.

The guy thanked me.

Twice.

I felt like a shit.

"What's the difference" I said to no one in particular,

"Between him and me?"

"He has guts" came floating to my brain.

"You would be dead, and down the drain,

"If you had to show up every day in front of QFC,

"That's the difference between him and me".



25 October 2023

Je Rétracte

Today I said "I stand with Secretary Guterres.  I am unable to differentiate what Israel is doing to the Palestinians in Gaza and what Putin is doing to Ukrainians in Ukraine.  I have even heard Israelis say that there is no historic basis for Palestine and Palestinians.  That sounds an awful lot like Putin's hallucinations". 

I may be, probably am, totally misinformed about history, and about what the Jews are doing to the Palestinians; if that is true, it is explainable how I can be so out of step with every Israeli I have heard speak in the last 22 days, including the one who went after the Secretary General of the United Nations for suggesting that there was a nation known as Palestine, and that it consists of human beings, millions of them, and that they ought not be exterminated. 

So, I apologize for and retract all that I have said about what the Jews are doing. 

To be as misinformed as I am on all counts, I decry my "education" and excoriate NPR, BBC and PBS for their balanced and rational coverage of the post 7 October Middle East.

It's Really Hard To Believe


 That it took so long for the republicans to pick a slithering idiot for their leader.

Or so I thought when they announced it.

Then I remembered: there are 221 of them; they all are slitherers, and most are idiots; a few are morons.

Since I'm throwing terms around, and since I am deeply committed to my 2017 mission statement: "to deliver fake news in an entertaining basket" I decided to clash the two - throwing terms around and an entertaining basket - and ask Bing which is smarter, a moron or an idiot.

Bing says:

"It’s difficult to compare the intelligence of a moron and an idiot because they were classified based on different levels of cognitive impairment. 

"According to the same classification system, an idiot is someone whose mental development never exceeds that of a normal child of about two years, while a moron’s mental development is above that of an imbecile but does not exceed that of a normal child of about twelve years. 

"Therefore, it’s not accurate to say that one is smarter than the other".

Jeese; I forgot all about imbeciles.

That category has Georgia and Colorado written all over it.


20 October 2023

Coda To Yesterday's Post


 Yesterday I put up a post titled: 

What JFK Said One Afternoon Three Days Less Than 61 Years Ago


I wasn't paying attention at the time, because if I had been I would have remembered that the date I was referencing, 22 November 1962, was exactly one year before JFK was assassinated in Dallas.

I would have pointed that out in the post.

But I wasn't paying attention.

That date is coming up again soon, nine days after my 81st birthday.

I will post a link to an appropriate song.

On that day.

22 November.

2023.

The day everything changed for all of us.

Sixty-One Years Ago.

And has never come back.

19 October 2023

What JFK Said One Afternoon Three Days Less Than 61 Years Ago


If you watched Joe's speech this afternoon you might want to hear what another President said once.

I listened to this lying on the floor with fellow students in the Students' Affairs Office of Portland State College; I especially liked the any nuclear missile from anywhere, hitting anywhere in our hemisphere will be treated as coming from the Soviet Union; we will take appropriate action in that case.

Things were simpler then.

Address During the Cuban Missile Crisis | JFK Library



17 October 2023

Pop Tarts And Grotesque Ignorance

 I heard an interview of Alexandra Pelosi today.

It was a discussion of her just released documentary of the January 6 coup attempt.

It was an interesting interview.

Most interesting from my point of view is something she said that I am making an attempt to re-create here; this is only a clumsy approximation; but it gets the idea on the table.

She had been asked about the appearance in the documentary that all the people interviewed (minor offenders, all of whom admitted their offenses, and all of whom were convicted of misdemeanors and served short sentences) were startlingly alike.

She concurred.

"A life from weaning made up of pop tarts, little or failed education, and lives that went off the rails early and permanently; pretty much losers all; and they all love trump".

That description describes so accurately the outcome of the last forty years I described in my recent post 

Not Far From Midnight


I am putting a link to it here.

Noel McKeehan: Adventures and Opinions: Not Far From Midnight (noellivefromparis.blogspot.com)


16 October 2023

What If ...

Have you ever pondered the permutational possibilities that would accompany a willful and intentional attack on some United States Outpost, not continental United States, with a nuclear weapon?

I am so strange that I have so pondered.

And I come up blank.

I have no idea what an appropriate response should be.

I wonder if anyone does.

In the last couple years Puty has been rattling his nuclear arsenal at a level of noise not seen since the Canterville Ghost was rattling his chains.

 On the 7th of October HAMAS (it's an acronym - Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah) attacked Israel.

That, of course, is bringing down the fury of the not trivial Israeli military upon Gaza from whence the attack commenced.

Why would Hamas do that utterly stupid thing?

One answer to that question may be as follows.

Of course, the United States has risen up with a fiery sword in defense of the Israeli's.

Given the asymmetric influence of the evangelical christian cult in America, no politician, and Joe Biden is a politician, can withstand the need to be irrationally pro-Israel.

Always remember, and never forget, that when the Jews raise the temple again all evangelicals will be rapturously assumed into heaven and the into arms of Jesus. 

The rest of us will be left to burn in hell, as is only fair.

Liberals, socialists and such being all that will be left.

Burning seems almost too good for that ilk.

So say the christians.

So Jew stuff in Israel is real serious American Politics.

Therefore, it's not surprising that we have sent two aircraft carriers to the - I guess - Mediterranean to show how committed we Americans all are to the Jews erecting that new temple.

What if Kim Jong Un, Puty, and the Old Islamic Nuts in Tehran came up with a plan:

"Hamas, do your thing some Saturday; make it bloody; the Americans will do something disproportionate and, hopefully stupid, like sending aircraft carriers close enough for us to get them".

"Puty, you take out the aircraft carriers, if they show up, with those hotshot hypersonic missiles and deadly new nuclear war tips (the tactical ones, so nobody can accuse you of flirting with WWIII) you have been bragging about; you can launch from Crimea; easy peasy."

"Un, you send one of your new hotshot rockets with one of your new hotshot nuclear war tips to hit Bremerton; nobody cares if you start WWIII".

"Grand Wizard of Allah, you keep sending rockets, mortars and artillery shells to the tunnels in Gaza, AND start hitting northern Israel round the clock with the stuff you already have in Lebanon.

So do we, the United States, in that scenario take out Moscow, Tehran and Pyongyang?

Or what?

And to what end?

And then?

And then?!





13 October 2023

Analogies Usually Limp

 According to Bing, "Fish traps are a type of fishing gear that catch fish by guiding them into a net or enclosure. They can be used to catch salmon in rivers or coastal waters."

A day or two ago the Israeli government demanded that a million Palestinians need to move, post haste, in 24 hours, from the north to the south.

That is so that the Israeli's can exterminate whatever is left behind with impunity.

Whatever is left behind is assumed to be going to be Hamas, so everything is good.

If you ever watched Independence Day, you might have a different opinion: moving a million people in 24 hours on some roads and highways can't happen; instead, chaos.

And gridlock and death.

So that order must be either stupid or designed for an objective.

I assume the latter.

Jews are not stupid.

But let's forget all of that.

Let's pretend that the Jews really believe that a people from whom they have taken their land and their homes, that they have run, over the years, into a corral, bordered by fences and the sea, and who, in that condition of extended confinement have lost everything, can somehow get south in 24 hours.

To what end? might be a logical question.

So, let's get back to the fish trap.

By concentrating the Palestinians (the fish) in a trap, they can be harvested (mass killed).

The use of pamphlets dropped from the air telling the million to move has an ominous similarity to some days long ago over Hiroshima.

The Palestinians have been a thorn in the paw of the Jews ever since 1948.

It is difficult not to surmise that high level Israeli planners, in quiet back rooms, have not always had Operation Eliminate as a desirable solution to that thorn in the paw.

Rahm Emanuel once said “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”

I have read, and cried, while reading, Exodus, Winds of War and War and Remembrance.

And I doubt not and do not deny that six million Jews were gassed and incinerated by Hitler.

And accepting that as fact, I can't reconcile what the descendants of the Jews that didn't burn in Hitler's incinerators have been doing to an innocent people since 1948.


 


11 October 2023

An Assumption Too Far?

 On the assumption that the House of Representatives plays anything resembling a significant part in the business of the Government of the United States of America - and therefore, the business of the World - one might make an observation.

In January the nominee for speaker of that House was someone known to be fairly generally hated by many of his kindred lawmakers: they didn't trust him; they didn't agree with his "policies"; he lacked "policies", his only policy being a ravenous need to be speaker.

It took days and days and 15 ballots to get him into his ravenously desired post.

It took an irrational number of concessions for him to finally, 15 ballots in, achieve that post.

One of those concessions bit him fatally a few months later, and he became the first Speaker of the House of Representatives of the United States of America to be removed from office.

In the void immediately commencing on the heels of that removal a lot of people, some of those who removed him among them, suddenly became aware of what it means to not have the lower House of our bi-cameral Legislature as a functioning entity.

Ukraine needs more money.

The Jews have paid a pretty price for following an incompetent dictator and a thousand of them died dismal deaths last weekend and the United States is irrationally and fatally required to rush to their aid with blood and treasure; the House needs to be functioning.

"What else? What else?" rattled the empty halls of the Empty House.

"We better get us a new leader real fast", some of the deposers shrieked.

I can understand, if I adopt a completely irrational point of view, all of that.

But I would have thought that a key design point of whomever gets put forward as the new Speaker would have had a patina of durability about him.

I would not have even wished for competence; that no longer exists in republican land.

But durability?

Of course.

Steve has blood cancer.

How does that square with durability?

I guess the circus will continue.


Not Far From Midnight

 Why Trump and the GOP are burning the entire system down

Opinion by Thom Hartmann





Today’s Republican Party is dedicated to destroying what they call the “deep state” and the rest of us call the American government. From Trump followers in MAGA hats at rallies to Republican US Senators, they’ll all tell you this without a moment’s hesitation.

Steve Bannon even proclaimed it as the main goal of the Trump presidency in their first months in the White House, saying Trump’s goal was the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”

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

In a book published in 2020, Kurt Andersen fills more than 300 pages with clear, concise and frightening documentation of how, starting in the 1970s, a small group of mostly old, old money (names like Koch and Olin) set out to dismantle the New Deal and return America to its founding roots: a few obscenely wealthy and a vast mudsill of compliant, fear ridden and manor house dependent workers.

We used to call that feudalism.

The primary means to achieving that goal as the Second Founders saw it, was to dismantle as much as possible the Government.

Where but from the government came the largess, equity and tendency toward equality that had grown into American Society since 1932?

The means of dismantling that New Deal Nightmare was to dismantle the Government.

So, they formed Heritage Foundations and Federalist Societies and took over or infiltrated major colleges and universities and on and on.

They assembled lists of malleable candidates for the judiciary at all levels.

They lobbied existing, not yet part of the CABAL members of the legislatures, federal and state, and got a gradual commencement of disintegration of all the laws and regulations underpinning the New Deal.

"Framed" issues were promulgated: "keep 'em barefoot and pregnant" became "Pro Life"; Jim Crow became "War On Drugs"; immigration became "Rapists and Drug Addicts"; there were many, many more.

Armed with all the newly "framed" issues they wove a cloth of prejudice, half-truths and lies, and with that cloth thrown over them, state capitol after state capitol became majority red.

They unleashed an abnormally vicious and toxic form of christianity upon the land.

They engulfed and co-opted the NRA and turned it into a heavily, militarily armed leader in resistance to the Government.

 They monied up the NRA so that it might create the judicial and legislative infrastructure to arm all of America, at least all Americans who had been told that they were victims.

They began to dismantle the Public Education System of the United States.

To name a few of their activities.

They were a clandestine group for the most part.

And they really didn't expect to get very far with their agenda.

But any retrogression is better than none, they all agreed.

In 1980 the American people picked the perfect useful idiot for the agenda of the few, the rich and the powerful.

Ronald Reagan had eight years in office, and starting with busting the Air Traffic Controllers Union he handed the keys to feudal resurgence to those few, rich and powerful.

As life happens, the 80s became the 90s and then the 00s and so on; and now we are here: 2023.

Some time back in that continuum the few, rich and powerful became increasingly amazed at their continuing success and at the magnitude of their achievement; then they became pensive, and then somewhere in the teens, they became outright alarmed.

Much though they fantasize that vast, docile, fearful, serf-like mudsill they knew there is a soft underbelly of fatal flaw in really achieving that goal: serfs have no buying power.

There is only one way to keep corporations getting bigger, fewer and more powerful.

That way needs to be a way of enhancing and advancing the quarterly growth of profit, enhancing shareholder value ("shareholders" being another term for the few, rich and powerful) using most of that quarterly profit, however, not for distribution to the shareholders, or research and development, or employee income and benefits, but for stock buybacks - fewer shares are more valuable shares and what more enhances shareholder value than more valuable shares; and given the universally assigned corporate CEO mission - stock price enhancement, not silly things like product development or employee well-being, the CEOs prospered; and having your value held in an unsold asset is the finest form of tax avoidance - and increasing size and corporate heft vertically and horizontally gives corporations a choke hold on the existence of unions (oblivion for them, they said) and cost of labor (wages shall serve shareholder value, they said) and of keeping the whole cycle virtuously careening toward Valhalla. 

That way (the one way to keep corporations getting bigger, fewer and more powerful) is to keep the mudsill buying and buying and buying causing the economy to grow and to grow and grow, and causing the few, rich and powerful to be richer and richer and richer.

On its face it's a Ponzi.

At its core it's a chimera.

You can't get blood out of a stone, is an old saw that comes to mind.

No value but shareholders' and no wages but permanently low wages are two factors on a collision course the few, the rich and the powerful could see.

But what results from the collision?

Just as the few, rich and powerful were getting nervous about all of that they got taken over by some of the mudsill that they have been prodding back to feudalism: they found out what the results of that collision were.

The inmates took over the asylum.

For all their innate viciousness, meanness and, at times, outright criminality those dismantlers of American Equity and Progress, the few, the rich and the powerful, were and are still men and women of substance: they all went to the right schools, and they all know the difference between a Martini and a Gibson.

So they have some idea of how things work and why they are the way they are.

They just didn't like the way things had become since 1932, and they are beginning to worry about how things are becoming, since 2016, and they are terrified of what might be the shape of things yet to be.

Jim Jordan wouldn't know a Gibson if one crept up behind him and bit him on the ass.

And that pretty well describes the republican party of today.

They want to dismantle the deep state - we call it the Government - not because that is a means to the end envisioned by the few, rich and powerful, but because Q said to do it.

And because it gets clicks and makes them social media influencers.

And what could be better than that?

For the millions of MAGA, they constitute a lofty role model.

They cheer idiots they have elected say predictably idiotic bullshit.

They cheer when a low horsepower wannabe Don - named don - raves about exterminating the vermin.

But not everyone who brought us to this sad state of affairs is MAGA.

For the old money - the few, the wealthy, the powerful and the deeply invested - MAGA is a monster.

Or maybe it not a monster, but instead, Madame Lafarge.

Maybe remembrance of what is now Place de la Concorde sends shivers through whatever passes for spinal cords in the few, the wealthy, the powerful and the deeply invested.

Whatever: this is a big deal.






08 October 2023

The Final Solution: Fish In A Barrel

 Listening to the BBC this afternoon I have heard a lot of Israelis invoking a "final solution" as their answer to the recent Hamas incursion.

I guess they must be being consciously ironic.

They must know that much history.

One would hope.

Maybe not.

Anyway, the Israelis now are going to solve their Palestinian Problem Finally.

After they have gathered all the Palestinians in Gaza, the Israelis are going to incinerate the place.

Nothing like a good holocaust (The word “holocaust” has two meanings. One is a sacrifice by fire. Apparently that is the one today's Jews are invoking in their final solution.  The name of that solution and its method drip with irony).

It's hard for me to imagine how Hamas could have been so stupid as to have made Palestinian genocide an openly stated Israeli policy - and, now, legitimated (in Israeli minds) an imminent goal.

And remember, Israel has a large nuclear arsenal.

I would expect, pragmatics being mandatory, that the impending holocaust will be a one weapon affair.

That's just so efficient.

If you want to incinerate a people, why pull your punches?

This is what happens when the US supports a country, run by a guy who hasn't got time to pay attention to threats inbound from a terrorist rump pseudo government, but has all his time available to jigger his county's judicial system so he won't go to jail, and you have that country as the keystone in your domestic religious-political milieu (when the Jews finally put that temple up again, all American evangelicals will be assumed into heaven - and the rest of us remain behind for eternal fire, so goes the party line; and that wins elections in Iowa; understandable politics, terrible foreign policy).

It does worry me, though, that the world will go down neither with a bang, nor a whimper, but, instead in a giant shitstorm.

I would like to add that sentence to the bible. 


04 October 2023

Some Roses

 Most of these were taken at my favorite haunts in Paris.

A few were on Lopez Island.




















02 October 2023

John Kelly Says It Well

 A recent statement from one of donnie's chiefs of staff:

“What can I add that has not already been said?” Kelly said, when asked if he wanted to weigh in on his former boss in light of recent comments made by other former Trump officials. “A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’ A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family – for all Gold Star families – on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.

“A person who is not truthful regarding his position on the protection of unborn life, on women, on minorities, on evangelical Christians, on Jews, on working men and women,” Kelly continued. “A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. A person who cavalierly suggests that a selfless warrior who has served his country for 40 years in peacetime and war should lose his life for treason – in expectation that someone will take action. A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.

“There is nothing more that can be said,” Kelly concluded. “God help us.”

Read this.

On its face it's powerful.

But read it again, and again, and, maybe, again.

He is saying things inside of what he is saying, such as: "A person who cavalierly suggests that a selfless warrior who has served his country for 40 years in peacetime and war should lose his life for treason – in expectation that someone will take action."

God help us.

Pyrrhic Victory, If Indeed It Even Becomes Victory

 donnie got swatted down by the judge in his fraud trial.

On Sept. 26, 2023, Judge Engoron found Donald Trump and his adult sons liable for fraud and canceled the Trump Organization’s business certification in New York.

Today the rest of the trial - the portion to establish donnie's financial liability - commenced.

After a tirade on the courthouse steps assailing all components of our democracy, the dildo went into the court room.

And so, we shall see.

What, if anything, the dildo might have to pay.

For fraud majeure. 

He may have to come up with a quarter billion dollars.

That shouldn't be a problem for one as rich as he says he is.

And there will be a Court Monitor appointed to manage the sale of assets and make sure donnie and his boys don't indulge in further financial hankey panky.

Just to give a measuring stick for the magnitude of the fraud, and the disparity between donnie's public net worth and what the stuff that the Court Monitor is going to sell: donnie says Mara Lago is worth one billion dollars; appraisers of skill and competence say it is worth 18 million; donnie says that his trump tower dwelling is a 33,000 square foot domicile; when you actually measure it, it's 11,000; and on and on and on and on ...

But poor little donnie is the victim of a multi-decade witch hunt, etc. etc. etc. etc.

And all the rest of his victim bullshit.

And the morons love it.

And, anyway, the Saudis will happily pay a billion for Mara Lago.

It'll make a nice mosque.

So we will get, no matter the result of the rest of the trial, a free roaming, loudly raving, donnie the dildo, presidential candidate.

If he were even remotely competent one might admire him.

Or be mildly amused.