Everything Is Broken

I could try to wax wordsmith, but Bob Dylan did it superbly in 1989.

But first, today's news.

Bi Bi attacked the International Court of Justice today for not throwing out South Africa's suit accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza.

He said the Court is antisemitic.

"We're killing all the Palestinians so god can sort it all out in heaven; that's not genocide; that's good military policy" he said.

Or so thought I heard.

With the world as we have known it since 1945 crumbling, let's all listen to an anthem.

Everything Is Broken - Bing video

I guess Bob got the Nobel for being a prophet, not a poet.

So, Let's Debate

donnie the dildo, wanna be mafia don, failed businessman and political loser, wants the American people to elect him dictator.

So, OK, let's talk about that.

Not too many years ago, that would have been a campaign ending proposition for any political candidate.

But today, here and now, 2024, that whiningly nasal request draws coliseum-filling cheers.

The fact that that group is not anywhere near a majority gets lost in the Roman Empire Theatrics of the dildo.

(According to a national NBC News poll conducted in April 2023, only 24% of Americans surveyed have positive views of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement. Another source estimates that about 10% of the U.S. population favor the positions of what President Biden has called “MAGA Republicans”.)

Since we have no apparent or readily described means of dodging that bullet - dildo dictatorship - OK, bring it on for discussion as to how to decide about the proposition.

I propose a series of debates.

Not between the dildo and his opponent but between him and the rest of us.

He needs to make his case to all of us by debating as many of us as can sit to challenge him.

The dildo will be required over the course of most of the days of the weeks of the months between now and November 5, 2024 to debate all comers.

The comers will be the obvious ones, starting with Liz Cheney, probably followed by Adam Schiff and then Jeremy Rifkin; there are many others.

And any American citizen who wants to debate the dildo will be eligible.

Cheney, Schiff and Rifkin are debaters of a sort to be called "implicit"; that means their very existence requires them to enter this verbal combat.

Others of that sort are Mitt Romney, Barack Obama, Michele Obama, George W Bush, Laura Bush, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, E Jean Carroll, and Whoopy Goldberg.

All other Americans will be designated "non-implicit" debaters.

The "non-implicit" cadre will be chosen by the American people from an internet enabled lottery.

The winners of the lottery will be the chosen "non-implicit" debaters and they will be alphabetized by last name, randomized by ZIP Code, and will be sworn in and assigned debate times and dates (an hour each, 8 a day) until time runs out.

There will be a required oath to debate the dildo.

This oath - to be administered by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America: " I despise dictators, especially little tin hat wanna-be dictators, and I revere the Constitution of the United States of America, and promise to defend it with the last blood and life force that I possess; I will not vote for trump and will engage him in verbal combat to expose him for the cancer on the body politic that he is; so help me god."

To protect the debaters from violence, they will be shielded from the dildo by engaging him over ZOOM.

There will be no winners of the debates, no losers, just outcomes - outcomes being what each American concludes from each instance of verbal combat.

It should be noted that MAGA americans will have been assumed to have been excluded from fifth column activity due to the nature of the oath they will be required to have taken before debating.

That oath clearly forbids the inclusion of MAGA rot.

If, in spite of their oath, if a lottery chosen debater becomes docile and compliant in the presence of the dildo - albeit only his ZOOM presence - said debater will be immediately clapped in irons and conducted to a maximum-security prison, therein to lie in disgrace until death takes him/her to his/her reward.

Oaths, we have been incessantly told in the donnie the dildo era are of paramount importance, and violation of oaths are to be punished biblically.

That means death.

SO BE IT.

I thought I heard someone say.

(Maybe - probably, even - it was god).

Anyway, one hopes that the viewership of the debates will be significant - exceeding, say, Super Bowls.

Based on viewing the debates, the American people can then make their decision: do they want to live in a dictatorship?

And they will vote.

And history will quake, and shiver, and shake in the runup to that decision; in its wake, Fukuyama may finally be proven right: we may will have reached the end of history.

We may will have discovered that the rot was unstoppable; that ignorance, fear, prejudice and hatred are truly the currency of the land. 

But, then again, we might will have gotten America back again (GABA).

And in either case, it will have been an election based on the free and fair competition of ideas in the marketplace.

Not alternate facts and the hallucinations of geriatric white people.

Capital Punishment: Asphyxiation In Alabama

I guess they tried, and it didn't work?

I've asked Bing and she is totally confused on the subject:

"Did Alabama try to kill a prison inmate with nitrogen gas?"

"Yes, Alabama tried to execute Kenneth Eugene Smith with nitrogen gas on January 26, 2024".

"Are you sure of the date January 26, 2024?"

"I apologize for the mistake in my previous response. Alabama tried to execute Kenneth Eugene Smith with nitrogen gas on January 25, 2024".

I gave up asking Bing at this point.

But maybe they have already tried and failed.

I understand they have scheduled a second attempt.

This time, though, they have some backup.

"If the gas don't work" the warden of the prison was heard to say, "we're gonna use the old plastic sack method; always works on babies; at least that's what the warning labels say".

"But if that fails, we've got a Louisville Slugger at the ready; got a kid from the high school baseball team lined up to swing it".

"Good kid; lotta home runs".

trump Seen Through A Vaudeville Lense

Burns and Allen were a successful comedy duo that entertained vaudeville, film, radio, and television audiences for over forty years. 

They met in 1922 and married in 1926.

They did a lot of shows during those years.

Often, they did two shows a night.

When they did two shows a night George used the break in between to have a beautiful, double, deeply chilled and shaken martini.

FDR called that type of martini a silver cloud.

In any event, that's what George did on breaks between acts.

Gracie noticed that, after the silver cloud, George was not as sharp on his lines and comebacks as during the first show.

She pointed it out to him.

"You know, in the second act, after your martini, you are a little slow off your marks" she said.

George thought for a moment.

"You are absolutely right; we need to cut out the second show".

Joe Biden is too old to be what America and the world needs for the next four years in the position of American President and Leader of the Free World.

Ergo, we need to put donnie the dildo back in power???????

The Drain Is Making Loud Gurgling Noises

 As america goes down it.

And always remember and never forget: "The People" know only that which is convenient to their hard-wired beliefs; most of us don't want to find a different viewpoint, or even anything that might be construed to be close to unhorsing our own god-fearing theist based "truths". 

"The People" only believe that which they have chosen to believe; so, "The People" have lost in the current game even before the starter whistle has been blown. 

In the looming world, if you can't think, you can't play. 

And if you can't consider alternate viewpoints, you aren't thinking. 

If the international game of football - soccer - had a cadre of players equivalent in their required skills to that of those skills possessed by Americans and required for thinking and voting in America, football - soccer - would be noted for being a recurring exercise in pandemonium.

If This, Then That??

Always remember and never forget: the constitution was, like the bible, written by god and, as such, must be interpreted verbatim, in the context of the day it was written.

Therefore:  

If the Second Amendment says, "AR 15", then the Fourteenth Amendment, section 3 must say "insurrection is self-evident".

"Self-evident" isn't in section 3, but neither is "AR 15" in the Second Amendment.

But what the hey,

My message to the supreme court:

Since you non-elected purveyors of corrupt, class-serving, and inequity perpetuating, bullshit have been able to conjure "AR 15" into the Second Amendment, then you better god damn well conjure "self-evident" into Article 3, of the Fourteenth Amendment.

But, of course, you won't.

You read the Second Amendment with corrupt corporate eyes, while you will - most certainly - read Article 3 with originalist eyes; that's not fair; it's not consistent; and, if the reasons for the inconsistency were surfaced, it would probably not be legal. 

However:

It is going to be so much fun watching you slime and slither your way to "insurrection is an outmoded 19th Century concept, and, in any event 'no harm, no foul".

The catastrophic damage that that those words, or similar, will do to the rest of us is going to be well worth the price of admission; your slime and slithering being so much fun to watch.

Hey, you, life appointed franchisees of one of the most lucrative scams on the planet: have a lot of fun on those yachts that your sponsors all possess and make available to you as a perk of their "friendship".

After you decide that insurrection is not insurrection, and crime is not crime and money is not money' and the dildo wins, and america recedes, you can, all nine, have a relaxing respite in some tropical paradise with your most recent best friends.

I don't hold you, the court, responsible; the rot has come from within; Article 14, section 3 was written for a once in history situation; the fact that it still clearly applies today says that we the people have gone off the rails already - and again; it's just that nobody has noticed.

Until now.

When it's too late.

 

 

I Never Thought That I Would Call PBS Newshour Stupid

But I am compelled to do that tonight.

I just watched the local Seattle purveyor, KCTS 9, present tonight's Newshour.

Like I always do.

At 1800.

Trained like a rat, I am.

It started a little over an hour ago, 1800 PST.

The first item was a brief snippet announcing that donnie the dildo had overwhelmingly won the Iowa republican caucus.

That had occurred within, I think they said, 20 minutes of the caucus period having been closed.

So, no foul, no surprise, no penalty; let's move on to the next - probably more important - news item, anything being more important than what a smattering of this nation's idiots, in the snow, and the extreme cold, had done that everybody already knew they were going to do, because the doers are known to be idiots.

They - the idiots - had been heard all afternoon on NPR being interviewed.

As they pontificated for NPR, overwhelmingly telling us all of their idiocy "I really like his policies" (what policies?) "we need him dealing with world leaders" (like his buddy Putin?) etc. etc. etc. they all firmly established their credentials as card-carrying idiots.

Some of them even delved deeper down into the hierarchy of human intelligence.

But they all share one characteristic: they all love donnie.

So why is PBS, as PBS breathlessly announced toward the end of their Newshour, going to waste time, money and airtime for a 2300 EST live broadcast on the Iowa caucus?

The idiots have already spoken.

Does PBS hope that there are so many non-Iowa idiots that they can bust the Nielsons with a bang-up postmortem from Iowa?

Telling idiots in Idaho how lucky they are to have kindred in Iowa?

At 2300, EST?

I think I'll watch a Ted Lasso re-stream.

 

Adriana: Part Of Chapter Twenty Seven

There were slight hints of shadows from the starlight dappling the ground.

He rose from his fur lined dugout and stepped onto the sparsely vegetated sand.  He took the largest of the skins he had been using for bedding and wrapped it around his shoulders.  It was a clear and fair night but it was cold.  The starlight seemed to emphasize that cold.  As he crossed the fringe of plants and debris that marked the transition from beach to woods he heard the words again.  He headed in their apparent direction.  There was a rustle to his left as he entered the wooded area, and it was followed by another to his right and one directly ahead of him.  Perhaps he had disturbed the hunt of a family of foxes.  Perhaps it had been something else.  But once they had departed the silence returned and he felt himself completely alone once more.  Alone, he felt, except for the words.  They sounded forth again and this time they were slightly louder.  He was closer to their source.

The small trees and underbrush were quite dense.  He had to push branches and small and limber trunks about to make his way through them.  He wished that he had brought the adz to hack some of it out of his way.  But he hadn’t and he wasn’t going to go back.  So he kept thrusting himself through the underbrush looking for something, but not knowing what it might be that he was looking for.

After some minutes of struggle with the brush all the while hearing the words repeated the undergrowth began to become less dense.  Then it began to become smaller in size.  Then it opened into a clearing.  It was not a very large clearing because at the side opposite from where he had entered there was a barrier of significant size.  It was a vertical cliff of stone thrusting up from the floor of the clearing.

  

And there was a faint but clearly present glow coming from it.

And then the words came again.  And they seemed to be coming from the same place as was the glow.

He went closer to the thing to see if he could see any more.

And he did see more.

At first he thought it must be some living thing – a nocturnal insect perhaps – that had moved as he had first approached the wall of stone.  But then he saw that if he looked where the glow was coming from he saw the source of the movement.

There was an image of a woman inside the stone.  And she was looking at him, or seemed to be looking at him – he felt the same connection he always felt when he was looking at another person – and she said “Why are you leaving me?  Are you going to forget me?  What about our dreams?  And what about me?  Tomorrow the elders will take me to the killing place.  I need you to help me.  I need you to save me.  I need you back to take me from them.”

At that moment he recognized her.  She was the woman he had left behind. The elders had forced him to leave with only his dugout and the bare necessities of survival. They had not allowed him to have the woman he lived with to go with him.  She was to be abandoned.   That was part of his punishment.  It was viewed by the elders as a shared punishment.  The woman had lived with the man who had come back from his night under the giant oak tree with the dangerous story of things he had seen.  The woman therefore must have some part in the whole unholy affair.  So they had been forced to separate.  But he had not been allowed to tell her these things.  He had been forced to leave immediately upon hearing the sentence.

But here she was looking out at him from within the stone.  And she was speaking to him as she looked at him.  This time the words were different.

“A piece of this stone will bind us.

 Take a piece of the stone.”

The cliff was a face of rock that was about ten feet or so in height.  In much later times a geologist might have described it as a layer that had experienced a sheer – a mass of stone that had, for some tectonic reason been subject to such a force that it had shattered vertically and part of it had remained in place and part of it had dropped, leaving the sheer face of the fracture line.  The layer that had been shattered in this manner had been a very large deposit of what that geologist might call flint.  And it was from that wall of flint that the glow was emanating and within that wall of flint from which the image and the woman’s voice were being seen and heard. 

 

There were also multiple shards of the flint lying at its base, strewn here and there in a totally haphazard manner.  And they all seemed to have the same glowing property as the cliff.

  

He picked one of them up.

The glow pulsed from the cliff and within the shard.

“In this way we shall be together” he heard, or if not heard, sensed. 

 

“We will be together and you will save me”

I Knew That I had Heard Something Like This, One Time, Back Awhile

Me: "There was a guy, about 18 years ago, who said that people should be paid for their data.  Who was that person, and what are some of his major proposals?  He was an ex-Microsoft employee when he said it,"

Bing: "The person you are referring to is Keith Curtis, a former Microsoft employee who worked there for 11 years. In his book, “After the Software Wars”, he argues that free and open-source software is technically superior to proprietary software because it allows developers to collaborate and innovate. He also believes that people should be paid for their data, and that the current model of companies collecting user data for free is unsustainable. Curtis suggests that users should be able to sell their data to companies, and that this would create a more equitable and transparent system. However, he acknowledges that this would require a significant shift in the way that data is currently collected and used."

I heard an interview with this guy a long time ago.

I was really interested in what he was saying, mainly because I had no idea what "data" he was talking about.

Years and trillions of Google and Facebook/Instagram dollars later, I have an idea of what he was talking about.

If the Fascist Faction of America's Power Structure will not tax the obscenely rich at a fair rate, then, maybe, the obscenely rich can be made to pay via the back door.

If we didn't have Jim Jordan jumping up and down on his desk like a scene from 12 Monkeys, instead of a legislative process, we might be able to have a law passed paying people for "their data".

But that's pretty, and foolishly, optimistic.

Shareholder Value And Oblivion As A Business Plan

I was really angry when I wrote "Thoughts On Boeing" in 2019.

I still am.

Really angry.

In 2023.

Writing this update to that long ago post.

Because all that is left of a great American company is a bunch of spreadsheet-toting bureaucrats.

No action seems to have been taken on the demand I published in this post from May of 2019.

Lotta good stuff happening, though.

And Boeing stock was looking really good until a few days ago.

I wonder how much shareholder value would have been enhanced, if, had god not intervened, the Max 9 we are all talking about had gotten to 36,000 feet before Boeing's loose bolts let the faux door fly off into space.

How many of the 170 passengers would have been left when another Boeing abortion landed?

Or would it have landed? 

Fortunately, those are irrelevant questions.

However, one can't help but conjure the hearing of a great sucking sound and a startling egress of seats and people from the Max 9 if it had been at altitude.

Through its loose bolt, or no bolt, shareholder-value-enhancing unplugged plug.

Into D. B. Cooper Land.

Here is what I wrote in 2019.

Thoughts On Boeing

By the time I was born in early World War Two Boeing had become a great company.

That greatness was the result of a fortuitous confluence of factors.

A high-level distillation of those factors can be described: great organized labor, great entrepreneurial management and great get-your-hands-on-the-products-and-processes executives, all three of whom were imbued with deep scientific curiosity, engineering ability and fanatic commitment to quality.

And those managers, engineers and other skilled workers and executives lived – together daily – on the shop floor.

And – I think this is probably true; it’s hard to imagine otherwise given the culture of those long ago times – they all ended up after hours in the same Renton, bars, grills and taverns; they probably kept talking – in the egalitarian environment that bars, grills and taverns can foster – shop: what was ahead of schedule; what was behind schedule; what was going well; what was screwed up; how to keep getting better and how to fix the problems.

That all produced airplanes like the 70 year old B52 which is still a central part of America’s air war capability.

Or the, until Max 8, flawless (yeah I haven’t forgotten the batteries, but that got fixed quickly and transparently and permanently) string of 7XX airliners.

Have you ever seen the 707 doing barrel rolls over Lake Washington?

So how could that company get to the Max 8?

Of course, I don’t know.

But I think it has to do with the fact that a few years back a cadre of executives having no cultural or hereditary relationship to the Renton Culture decided that they needed to remove themselves from the sweaty stench of the managers and workers.

They moved off to Chicago and began thinking great thoughts in tall buildings.

In that environment, far from “the egalitarian environment that bars, grills and taverns can foster” it is easy to imagine how executives could have spun – to each other – a plane whose design point: quick production, cheap cost and no pilot training, but which was really a lumbering disaster needing sensors and software to keep it from crashing, as a no sweat slam dunk.

And then they spun it, slam dunked it and lied, misrepresented and obfuscated its problems, not the least of which is that the spinners are all off in Chicago.

And two planeloads of human beings have died because of the ivory tower spinners.

I think the Chicago tribe should all be fired and replaced post haste, with promoted-from-within managers and workers from Renton.

And their prime directive should be "get back to the bars after work and hammer out – once more and again – what it means to be a great company: what it means to be Boeing, a Seattle company".

Bing Is An Accommodating Idiot; But Fun To Talk To

 I Had this encounter with Bing recently.

Me: "a blog post by noel mckeehan about president Washington?"

Bing: "Searching for: noel mckeehan president washington blog post"

Bing: "Generating answers for you…"

Bing: "I’m sorry, I couldn’t find any blog post by Noel McKeehan about President Washington. However, I found a page on The Washington Post website that provides the latest news on presidential candidates, polls, primaries, and more 1. You might find it interesting to read."

Bing: "Is there anything else I can help you with?"

Bing: "Learn more"

Bing: "css.washingtonpost.com"

Bing: "gofundme.com"

Me: "Washington has already been President.  He was our first. He served from January 20, 1789, to January 20, 1797. Please look again for that blog post."

Bing: "Searching for: noel mckeehan president washington blog post"

Bing: "Generating answers for you…"

Bing: "I apologize for the confusion. I couldn’t find any blog post by Noel McKeehan about President Washington. However, I found a page on The Washington Post website that provides the latest news on presidential candidates, polls, primaries, and more. You might find it interesting to read."

Bing: "Is there anything else I can help you with?"

I abandoned the Bing Ship at that point; but I moved forward with my mission for the evening.

If you want to read that post, here is the URL; I got it from Stupid Bing, the one without AI.

Noel McKeehan: Adventures and Opinions: Another Day in Paris: I Meet President Washington (noellivefromparis.blogspot.com)

So, all of that sets the stage for this day's little story.

I had been watching Glenn Kirschner explain how the Supreme Court was poised to fuck the country in relation to donnie and his part in the insurrection and, ultimately, in his imminent dictatorship, and I wanted to return briefly to the salving glow of President Washington.

So I wrote this.

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

I am in Seattle which is one of the least favorite places that I know of to be; Portland, Jefferson City, Paris, Venice, Spokane, Avignon, St. Marcair, Sienna, Rome and Lewiston Idaho being among the more favorite.

I live every day with the impending doom of the country in which I have lived, for which I have served and for whose leaders I have faithfully voted since I became 21 in 1964.

I now live in that same, but tragically altered country.

It's now called donnieland by the impending winners in the "can we keep our Republic" contest in which we are currently embroiled.

donnie is the wanna-be-mafioso donnie the dildo.

He wants to be president again so he can wreak mayhem upon the rest of us.

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

I just heard a familiar sound: mouse skittering; and there he is, Jacques; I haven't seen him in years; it's so good to see him; he is a little older, and a little grayer, but he's still the mouse that I met at Deux Magots all those years ago.

We look at each other.

He speaks.

"We need to go".

"Where?"

"You know where, and you know why; and you know how; just give me your hand".

His name is Jacques.

I have had by now so many encounters with Jacques in his various forms – mouse, dog and house sparrow – that I no longer doubt his existence nor do I any longer question his oblique methods of getting to his various points.

So, when he continued mute I reciprocated in kind.

Jacques finally broke the silence.

“There has been a change of plan.  I need to take you to him.”

“How are you going to do that.”

“The way I got here.”

And before I could even think of a reply, let alone vocalize one, I was elsewhere.  Jacques stood next to me in a huge room with a table in its center and people seated at the table.

A doorman said to Jacques “Pardon me sir, who is your guest?”

“Noel from the Twenty First Century.”

“Ah, yes – a troubled time.”

“Just so.”

“So, take your seats in the chairs set out for the observers.

The meeting is just starting.”

And we seated ourselves and a voice rang out un-assisted by electronic amplification.

“Who called this meeting?”

The speaker was hunched over his writing desk set off to the side, as were our observer chairs – unlike almost all of the other Leaders he eschewed a place at the huge narrow, but, it seemed, infinitely long, rectangular table that filled the meeting room (although there were a few others who chose his type of workspace) – and he had just dipped his quill into his pot of ink when word had arrived that a meeting had been called.

He was fairly short and dumpy and was bald at the major central part of his head, the baldness being compensated by flowing locks down below the crown of his pate; it was a genuinely eighteenth-century look.

Indeed.

“I think it was The President” a short, trim fellow in the uniform of eighteenth-century artillery general’s uniform replied.

(Actually, he said something such as “je pense il etait le president”, and that statement was uttered with a heavy Corsican accent.  But this apparently was a post-life group, and language had become subliminally understandable to all of its members.)

As if in support of that assertion, a very tall, very dignified man in a blue revolutionary war American uniform entered the room.

He had apparently heard the question - and the answer - because he said, “It has been coming to us that that which we had expected to happen in only a few years and that which Thomas had always said was necessary for the refreshment of our society - that we tear up the document and start over – has finally after much longer than we had thought has begun to happen”.

“Therefore, as a member of this Council – "we" being an aggregate of equals – The council of The Leaders, I have asked for a plenary session to summon a representative from the Twenty First Century (a mild rumble of sound accompanied the mention of that century) to explain the problem so that we may rectify it.”

“Here him, Here him” was the rising cry as the members took their seats, or in a few cases, their writing desks and prepared to discuss what should be done.

“Since you all know my discomfort with extensive public speaking, I ask that you allow me to delegate leadership of the discussion” said The President.

Since the Council of Leaders was, as The President had previously said, a council of equals, anyone could call a session, and the protocol followed that he, or she who called the meeting, chaired the meeting, and led any discussion that the meeting generated. 

But that protocol also allowed for unusual cases to accommodate members’ unique requirements.  

It allowed the delegation of a meeting’s leadership in special cases. 

This was one of those cases.  The President was not a speaker; he was a leader.  

And he accomplished the things he accomplished through his influence on others, not on his rhetoric.

So the protocol was invoked.

The protocol said that once such a delegation request had been made, it followed that there would be an automatic and proforma unanimous agreement by vocal acclamation.

“Hear him, hear him” said the chorus of voices that rose from the assembled Council.

“I would like to ask Winston to chair for me, in that case.”

“Hear him, hear him.”

An older gentleman with something of a stooped posture, wearing what appeared to be a British naval uniform from the Twentieth Century left a writing desk and took has position at the rostrum in the dead middle of the vast meeting room – it was enclosed by that gigantic rectangular table that squared the room.  A small opening in that table at its apparent head was the access point that had allowed Sir Winston to take his place.

“I am honored, Mr. President; let’s be on with it then, shall we?” he said.

“I once had a similar duty assigned to me in The House of Commons and I was confronted then, as I am now, with the need to ask this question: Mr. President, with all due deference to your aversion for public speaking, we nonetheless need to have some indication of the case you perceive to be at hand. 

Could you, therefore enlighten us?  

You, of course, may be succinct.”

“Succinct is good” seemed to be a murmur from the assembly.

The President stood, rising from his place at the huge table.  

Then he put his right hand flat on the table; his left hand he put to his chin in what looked – initially - to be that gesture that always seems to imply a pondering mood – Rodin used it with The Thinker - on the part of the person employing the gesture.  

But the hand didn’t remain at rest in place on The President’s chin.  

It moved up briefly covering a major part of his mouth.  

And he seemed to push something in backwards into place; then he removed the hand.

"I relinquished command of the army that defeated the King once we had defeated him".

"I relinquished executive authority of our young republic after two terms in office".

"I believe both of those acts to be intrinsically additive to our Constitution; they are implicit to our way of life."

"Peaceful and unquestioned transfer of power based on the results of election by the people is the cornerstone of our existence."

"Without it we have no continuity, no existence".

"So, Noel, from the 21st Century, what is this donnie the dildo, also called donnie the moron, doing?"

"Tell me; give me the details".

"And how did our people ever come to this sad state such that they could allow this?'

"Tell me".

I looked at Jacques; he shrugged; I shrugged; and then we were back in Seattle.

Jacques found some crumbs to eat; I found a beaker of rye; we both sang "If I Were Free".

Fade to white.