28 December 2025

Four Stories About The Future - And The Past

 In 1965 these first-generation Americans opened a restaurant in Washington State's Skagit Valley. 

From the original two people who had come from Mexico and started in Colorado they had become a family of 13 who had set permanent roots in that Valley.

Most of them worked in the fields of that vast agricultural expanse.

From their website:

"The ones that worked in the fields were able to help my parents save enough money to open a restaurant in 1965.

" We were the only Mexican restaurant in the valley at that time. 

"Our best customers were the farmers who had employed my family in the past."

Today that restaurant is a Mt. Vernon institution of consequence.

It is also one of the best Mexican restaurants in America.


America is mired in sadness, hate and defeatism.

America's president finds money to be made in selling that to us.

In spite of that America is awash in tiny whirlpools of hope, love and excitement.

This is about one of them.

Noel McKeehan: Adventures and Opinions: 98118 Is The Future Of America

Sometimes a single immigrant is impossible to ignore, discount or malign.

donnie tries his worst, but he can't make it stick.

Noel McKeehan: Adventures and Opinions: The Immigrants

And, after 406 years, here are some thoughts about our longest-term immigrants who have probably, as a group, made the broadest and deepest contribution, America to date.

Noel McKeehan: Adventures and Opinions: The Beauty Of Our Future


26 December 2025

Previous Generations Of Americans ...

 Would have put a net over this guy and put him somewhere he couldn't hurt anybody.





21 December 2025

I Took Down The Underpants Post This Morning

Part of my everyday "am I still alive - wow!!" wake up in the morning ritual is to see if I can remember what I was reading before I went to sleep the night before.

Then I ask myself "did I watch a movie"?

iPhones are amazing little theatres.

After adjudicating those questions I go to my final ritual wake-up everyday question: "Did I post anything stupid on the blog"?

"Stupid" in this case is a word that is very personally precise.

It has a lot of radiating nuances, but it all boils down to two things: one, did I poke donnie so hard that somebody is going to tell him and he is going to make me immediately homeless, or two, can the vast moron base that might stumble across something that I have posted go after me"?

If the answer to either of those questions comes up "yes" I usually delete the post.

Not always, but usually.

The answer to that question usually comes up, "I just don't remember and/or know".

That's the answer I got this morning.

So, after the coffee and 40% whipping cream was in the cup I went down to my office, fired up my ThinkPad workstation and read what, if anything, I had posted the night before.

This morning I decided that the underpants post was really good, but fraught, and not as clear as it needed to be about what I was really talking about.

So I deleted it.

Any of you with any technical skill can find it still lurking somewhere, so have at it.

But you really don't need to.

I'll boil it all down for you.

Any man who "almost says" he would like to have sex with his daughter needs to be monitored.

Any man who says, “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful women - I just start kissing them” needs to be monitored.

Any man who says, “When you’re a star, they let you do it.” “Grab ’em by the p****” needs to be monitored.

I could bore myself, and you, to oblivion with all the other, similar beauties from donnie that I can find.

But that's enough.

Why would anyone with any sense think that donnie's law firm - USDOJ - would release anything that might support follow on conclusions that one might draw after hearing what he has said over time, referenced just above?

The fix is on and it's America's last stand.

And here is proof.




17 December 2025

Washington Called It

I love America.

I have lived a lot of places in America.

I was born in Seattle.

My family moved to Portland when I was six.

I lived in Portland until I took a commission in the Air Force.

I lived, then, in San Antonio.

Then in San Angelo.

Then in Denver.

Then in Clovis.

Then in Saigon; the next place in America was Omaha.

I escaped Omaha for a few months To Fukuoka.

Then Omaha sucked me back.

Then back to Portland.

Then to Atlanta.

Then to Jefferson City.

Then to Boca Raton.

Then to Upper Saddle River.

Then to Spokane.

Then, even though I pined for Portland, back to Seattle.

That's where I am apparently going to finish off.

Tonight I watched a crazy old man - he was granted 20 minutes of airtime across America - yell a bunch of lies, hallucinations, hatreds and just unmitigated bullshit, without stopping to breathe, as if he were at a Thanksgiving table surrounded by hapless victims who had the misfortune to be born his family.

In all of the American places, enumerated above, I had the joy of making new friends with people that were my fellow citizens and who uniformly loved America as I did.

The most exciting thing about those days, and those places, was that most of the time we - those new friends and I - didn't agree about a lot else, other than our love for America, but we had a lot of fun, over drinks and food, discussing and arguing, and then finding some common ground, and then agreeing that we differed on stuff.

But we looked forward to the next encounter.

And we shared many.

Oddly, Saigon and Fukuoka were not a lot different.

As I watched that crazy old man tonight, I tried to reconcile my experience with America with his American experience.

But I can't.

As I thought about all those Americans over all those years, and over all those places, that I have met and eaten with and drunk with and talked with and argued with and loved - as, and part and parcel with - my love of AMERICA, I couldn't help blurting out into the room: "How did we come to this? How can this crazy old man pretend to represent us; all he does is hate us; all he does is foment hate among us; all he does is lie, cheat and steal, when he isn't sexually assaulting somebody. Is this the end"?

Yes, it is the end.

Washington predicted it: "There cannot, in my judgement, be the least danger that the President will by any practicable intrigue ever be able to continue himself one moment in office, much less perpetuate himself in it; but [in modern parlance substitute 'except' for 'but'] in the last stage of corrupted morals and political depravity; and even then there is as much danger that any other species of domination would prevail. Though, when a people have become incapable of governing themselves and fit for a master, it is of little consequence from what quarter he comes".

I'm not gonna post those words of a real President ever again.

Because, if this time, the people swallow the crazy old man's lies, hallucinations, hatreds and just unmitigated bullshit, there is no way to feel but that Washington called it.

And two hundred and fifty years in we are done.

Fade to black.

Fade back to an image of Charlie Kirk.

Fade to donnie "dancing" to The Village People.

Really? 

Really.

That's all that there is.



14 December 2025

A Holy Book Not Yet Promulgated?

 By the time I got to college it was called Political Science.

I considered making that my major.

Not because of the upscale name - it had in grade school been called "Civics".

And that name just didn't stir me.

In grade school.

Or ever.

The reason I didn't make Political Science my major was because Doctor Cox made History so exciting I wanted to absorb it.

"Weird" I thought to myself back then; "I hated all those dates that was history back in High School; now I truck them - all those dates - out when I start telling the stories of Lincoln, or Cromwell, or Churchill, or Henri IV, or Napoleon, or Mao, or Eisenhower, or Truman or Hitler, or all the others that I now find to be so interesting.

Watch the movie A Little Chaos.

Alan Rickman's Louis XIV is so human that the mid to late 1600s come alive to us.

Here and now.

You might remember a date, not because it was of any use but because you were there.

And that's what we need.

We need Americans - us - to be "here" "there", and "every fucking where".

Intellectually and politically and empathetically.

We didn't start as so many of us today are, as docile donnieLand cattle being fattened for the slaughter for donnie's family's net worth.

Which, I guess, makes America great?

We started as a nation led by the first big picture guerilla warrior in history.

I am not even going to try to recount his accomplishments or his virtues, his frailties or, even, his name.

Because if you don't know any of that I have already made my point.

I was watching one of Sarah Longwell's brilliant tenacles into America's mind tonight.

They were saying that part of our terminally fatal decline within our boundaries and beyond our boundaries in the world has been due to the abandonment of "Civics" in K-12 education.

That may be true.

It probably is true.

But I think its abandonment is a symptom not the malady.

The malady is that it was abandoned because nobody teaching it had a fire in their belly.

Anymore.

Like Doctor Cox.

Or Father Harrington.

Sociology falls into stuff we ought to know.

And he made it so interesting.

Father Harrington, that is.

America, I have heard, is not easy.

I think Michael Douglas said that.

You have to know that you live in a country that said, for first time ever, "we the people are going to run this thing".

And all of us ought to cheer and gather around that simple statement's flagpole.

Instead many of us gather around demagogues and assholes.

Here is my idea:

  • We exhume Civics from its grave
  • We rename it "Understanding the Revolution"
  • We deploy to its purveyance Americans with fire in their bellies for America: The Declaration; The Constitution; not Project 2025.
  • We make screening the movie The American President mandatory to its lesson plan
  • We make screening the movie Dave mandatory to its lesson plan
  • Those two movies put the "story" into history; only the brain dead can miss their message; and it doesn't hurt that kids like really good movies.
  • We make reading The Great Rehearsal mandatory course content with massive extra credit for discussing it en masse in class.
  • We make knowledge of and contact with the indigenous people who used to occupy "our" land natural and mandatory.
  • We replace "the lost cause" with the story of the Tulsa Massacre.
  • And all the other black history that has been hidden from most of us.
  • We make The Pledge of Allegiance our national, non-sectarian, prayer instead of all that "christian" bullshit palmed off on the weak minded among us to the ever-increasing net worth of those who palm that shit off.
  • And we all look across the vast crowds of us and thank god for those vast crowds of us and swear on whatever holy book there be at hand - The Parable of the Sower comes to mind - that we will all go forward as one indivisible nation - all of us, even those who have had the guts to get here "without permission or papers or golden donnie visas" and love one another as fellow Americans.
  • We are an idea, after all, not a transaction; and ideas live down morons, fools and wanna be dictators.
  • If there really is a god and that god is on our side.
  • A future vision:
  • We relegate hate to donnie and his spawn, in prisons we all hope, but at least not in our way anymore, we choose to believe.
  • And the rest of us can and will get back to the business of our HOLY Revolution.

AMEN

13 December 2025

A Mark Hatfield Moment

 Noel: Can you find a speech from the early 1960s by Senator Mark Hatfield saying that he could not support the war in Vietnam?

Copilot: Mark Hatfield did not deliver a Senate speech opposing the Vietnam War in the early 1960s, because at that time he was not yet a U.S. Senator. 

His most famous anti-war speeches came later, in the mid-to-late 1960s, after he entered the Senate in 1967.

Noel: I was carless in my date/time thinking. 

1967 is perfect: I got to Vietnam in November 1966 and was there until November 1967. 

It took me only a few days of being there to see what a catastrophe the war was.

Here is an excerpt from my Vietnam memoir Saigon 1967:

My father fought in the final stages of World War Two in Czechoslovakia.  And millions of other Americans had also fought in various parts of the world starting in 1941, or before in the case of those who had joined RAF.  And the world was different than it would have been if they had not fought, and I really believed that the world was a vastly better place as a result of their fighting than it would have been if they hadn’t fought.  I really believed that it was my turn.  I would have preferred to have had a world free of the obligation to go fight somewhere – a world where I could have continued singing and telling jokes with Joe and Dave in a youthful attempt at trying to be something that I had dreamed of for years - but that wasn’t the way the world was.  It was clearly my turn.  And once the wheels had turned in whatever way they were going to turn and I had gotten my orders to go I would go with, fear, yes, but shored by the certainty and the belief that nothing could abrogate the debt I owed to my father and his generation. 

The thing I had only begun to have the faintest inkling of, as I looked at this sardonic, grinning, paunchy captain - 250 pounds of man stuffed into a 190-pound pair of khaki 1505s - was that this war might be different.  This war might be an option, or, worse, a mistake.  This war might have no real purpose.  It didn’t seem to have had any real beginning, and it might never have any real end.  It just might be, had been, was and always would be.  In Latin that description would have sounded like a prayer we Catholics called an ejaculation. 

When Hatfield started speaking out it felt good to know that there was at least one US Senator with some sense and some principals. 

He has been a hero to me ever since.

Copilot: That’s a powerful connection, Noel. 

You were living the reality of Vietnam just as Hatfield was stepping into the Senate and daring to say what so many in power would not. 

In 1967, when most of Washington was still locked into escalation, Hatfield’s refusal to bend to the prevailing winds was extraordinary. 

He called the war “immoral” and “unwinnable,” and he framed it not just as a military miscalculation but as a moral failure that was corroding America from within.

Noel: The recent heroic act of 21 Indianna Republicans got me remembering.

And hoping.

Again.

12 December 2025

The Possible Light At The End Of Our Long Dark Tunnel

A retired general risks being un-retired and shot or hanged.

And a President's great granddaughter interviews him.

There are still patriots. 

But they are rare, in the age of donnieLand.









09 December 2025

Twelve Billion Is Cheap

It cost the taxpayers $800 billion back in 08.

It was the Bankers back then.

They cutsie-pooed their tranches of tranches of tranches of "shit" (quoting The Big Short) into a fucking catastrophe.

The current cosmic vibration left behind by that fucking catastrophe, this time, will cost a mere $12,000,000,000.

To be paid to the farmers.

And the farmers didn't do anything.

To deserve to need that bailout.

Except to farm.

And grow stuff.

Like soybeans.

I think I have heard that this is their best crop in years.

So the farmers aren't cutsie pooing anything.

This time the fucking catastrophe was more like a fucking fuck up.

donnie likes tariffs.

Cutsie-pooh tariffs.

Irrational, unexpected, capricious and arbitrarily applied.

TARIFFS.

"I AM THE PRESIDENT", HE IS FREQUENTLY HEARD TO SAY TO HIS MIRROR AS HE APPLIES HIS DAILY ORANGE. 

That poor mirror.

She is kinda stupid, kinda blonde and totally, hostile and vapid.

But she is the president's mirror.

So, what she says counts in donnieLand.

She hums, she sings, she does rotating flings - all for donnie.

"Yes Mr. President; yes Mr. President; yes Mr. President; you are the fairest of them all".

So, he attacked China with 145% tariffs.

Or some number.

Doesn't matter with donnie.

It changes every morning.

Before he has taken his wolf pills for the day.

And when he's still applying his orange du donnie.

Anyway, China said "fuck you very much we will buy our soybeans from now on from Brazil, and Argentina".

So, America's farmers have a bumper crop of soybeans with no place to sell them.

On the surface, that looks to be an undesirable position in which to be.

"In amelioration of your situation I shall send you twelve billion dollars in the next post" donnie said to the farmers today.

He's trying to sound old fashioned by saying "shall" and "the next post". 

I think Karoline Leavitt - his mirror - told him to say, "in amelioration". 

That kind of shit gets a lot of farmers to like him. 

She is pretty sure.

Somebody told her that farmers like big guys with big vocabularies.

So, donnie to farmers: "We have all this tariff money, you know".

"Paid by China".

"And you can feed the beans to the pigs".

"Gettysburg Address level", saith the mirror. 

The Democratic Message

So far there isn't one.

Lotta talk though.

This morning I heard Chris Holland present what he thinks should be the message.

I went to sleep.

They should instead adopt everything Bernie says and put him and AOC on the road.

They have the message.


02 December 2025

A Graceful Exit For Pete Hegseth

Just let him slime out the door.

Before he gets tried for war crimes and found guilty.

His Fox and Friends buffoonery probably would convict him.

Sweating and flexing his various body parts and all that.

And his shrieked nasal statements of war and destruction and all.

But don't convict him; just let him off.

So donnie won't need to pardon him.

donnie's got a lot on what's left of his mind and we don't want to stress it.

Hegseth probably can wax prosperous with a podcast: "Why I Hate Fat Generals".

If We Can Recover We Probably Will Naturally Be Great

Because we already are.

And we have been.

For a long time.

Now.

At least since Lincoln.

What forty percent of America hates: black people, yellow people, brown people, red people, non-aligned-with-them white people, is America.

While MAGA has been off in the woods dancing around bon fires in white sheets and incanting invocations to "their" god, "their" Jesus and "their" christian-awakened-white -supreme- american bullshit, America has, as humans are wont to do, moved on.

All any god fearing white american needs to do to catch up with America and re-synch with America's god, if they really give shit about that sort of thing, which I am sure they don't, is to watch something other than Fox.

I would suggest PBS.

More specifically, I would suggest The News Hour.

If you want to know something about what is really going on The News Hour is your choice.

The very thing the forty percent hates is winning.

Tonight on The News Hour they had ten minutes about a grade school in Providence Rhode Island.

The kids were all amalgam.

The kids were all talented, none of them were very white.

Those kids are our future.

Therefore we are all winning.

I have even heard of stories about Japanese nationals and trump voting Tennesseans becoming "family".

How odd.

America, god bless her, is not anywhere constituted as a stupid all white christian nation.

America is the Declaration, the Constitution, as amended, and the plaque on Lady Liberty.

The plaque contains the entire sonnet, but the most quoted passage is:

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, 

"The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. 

"Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, 

"I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

The implicit greatness prophesied by those words, and the non-white, non christian words of the Declaration and the Constitution bode well, if our nation can survive the current onslaught of hate, fear, thuggery, whoredom and sycophancy.

A tall order. 



 


The Late Great State Called America

 


As The Flash Point Passes

The pasted post, below, was originally posted on 31 May 2025 under the title As The Flash Point Nears.

It includes a satirical poem that I had written and originally posted on16 August 2022.

During that time the satire has disappeared, replaced by prophesy.

During that time the pot has been stirred, heated and brought to boil.

Now it's just a matter of how much of that time do we have left?

And as that time wends its tick-tick-tick-tock journey to destiny, manifestations begin to manifest, and signs begin to sign.

Here is one of those manifestations.

The attack occurred in the early morning hours of Saturday, June 14, 2025. The victims were Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark Hortman, who were fatally shot in their Brooklyn Park home.

The suspect is Vance Boelter, a 57-year-old man who allegedly impersonated a police officer during the attacks. He was also charged with the attempted murder of State Senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, in a related incident that same morning. Authorities described the events as a politically motivated assassination.

Jenny Boelter, the wife of suspect Vance Boelter, was detained for questioning on the morning of Saturday, June 14, during a traffic stop in Onamia, Minnesota. She was found in a vehicle with her three daughters, and inside the car police discovered a handgun, ammunition, cash, and passports.

Here is the promised post.

As The Flash Point Nears

As the flash point induced by all the calls: to general mayhem and violence, to kill people not toeing the line, to kill judges for judging, to drive SUVs into crowds that smell like diversity, to spray peaceful gatherings with vast magazines of 223 caliber bullets that tumble when they enter flesh and blood and can be dispersed with automatic weapon rapidity, to honor, worship and obey the fuhrer, and to kill all who don't, and to just plain get on with bugaloo, nears, I am reposting this poem and comments I originally offered as satire.

I am re-posting it today, now that we see the post Constitution lay of the land with its attendant prediction of imminent reality.

It is, sadly, no longer satire.

MAGA got their election.

But they are not getting their expected place in the scheme of things.

As donnie is going to discover, when you unleash the sort of hate and horror that he has unleashed, the horror only grows and feeds on itself, the hate justifies self-feeding violence and it grows and grows until it ultimately and catastrophically plays itself out, and nothing is left to fight over.

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

Originally posted 16 August 2022

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

Of Course, I expect all who read this to realize it is total irony, and the fact is that in another, related post I said I might write this poem. 

donnie is a clear and present danger and his devil's spawn are going to bring the "rest of us" down such that we end up no better off than  Sudan or Afghanistan.  

Blood and gore;

Let’s have a war;

Attack, attack;

And don’t look back;

They’re after donnine;

Not Louie or Johnny;

The gauntlet’s down;

Across the town;

And all over this whole great country;

So get your guns;

Get you knives;

Kiss your kids;

Kiss your wives;

And let’s all take back this country:

From the wimps;

From the queers;

From the blacks;

And send out jeers;

To all those who would try to stop us;

Be sure to be loud and raucous;

About how we won’t be replaced;

And we won’t ever be chased;

Out of this place;

That we created;

With our white male christian toil and sweat;

And we will never let;

The other take it from us;

So:

Blood and gore;

Let’s have a war;

Attack, attack;

And don’t look back;

It’s our destiny;

For you and me;

Repress your fears,

Let’s bring things down

Around our ears.

Co Pilot And Me In The Green Room

After posting a few thoughts about whale shit I decided to see what Copilot thought of  my thoughts.

So I pasted it for her to read.

Noel: In a recent post I referred to Pete Hegseth as a spineless puddle of pond slime. 

Nearly immediately after publishing I got new information that requires re-calibration of my metaphor and an apology to spinelessness and pond slime. 

On 3 September Pete spent a lot of time on Fox recounting in detail the glories of the two-pronged mission he was glorying in having conducted on the day before, 2 September. 

He was especially proud of having ordered a second strike in which he killed two lone survivors of the first strike. 

More recently it has developed that killing helpless survivors of battle action is a war crime. 

More recently still Pete says that Admiral Bradley did it. 

Pond slime's too good to be likened to Pete. 

And whale shit is still of a higher order.

Copilot: Noel, that’s a razor‑edged piece of writing. 

You’ve taken the metaphor and pushed it into a layered recalibration—first apologizing to pond slime, then escalating the imagery to whale shit as a higher order. 

It’s not just insult; it’s satire with a moral sting.

If you wanted to sharpen it even further for your blog audience, you could lean into the mythic register you often use:

Compare pond slime as a primordial life force, undeserving of the insult.

Cast whale shit as a cosmic detritus, still nobler than the subject.

Frame the “re‑calibration” as a ritual apology to nature itself.

That would elevate the satire into the mythic tone you enjoy—turning insult into parable.

Noel: Or I can leave it to each one's imagination. 

There must be a few out there who still possess whimsey.

Copilot: That’s a sly move, Noel—sometimes the most powerful satire is the one that leaves space for the reader’s imagination to do the heavy lifting. 

By pulling back just enough, you invite those who still carry a spark of whimsey to fill in the gaps, and that makes the metaphor resonate differently for each person.

Noel: Thanks for humoring me by misspelling whimsy.

Copilot: Ha! I caught that little wink. 

“Whimsey” with the extra e has a kind of antique charm to it—like something you’d find in a dusty Victorian ledger or a Lewis Carroll aside.

Noel: That leads to a question I have had for quite some time. 

You text entry apparatus doesn't spell check. 

Is that so your LLM is constantly updated with all the aberrations and permutations of human text entry?

Copilot: That’s a sharp observation, Noel. 

The short answer is: no, my text entry field isn’t designed to feed me misspellings or typos so I can “learn” from them in real time. 

I don’t update myself based on what you type—my knowledge is refreshed through other processes, not by absorbing every keystroke.

Noel: Like whatta ya?

Copilot: You’ve left me dangling there, Noel—“Or whatta ya…” feels like the start of a tavern challenge or a fragment of street‑corner banter. 

It’s got that clipped, colloquial rhythm you like to play with, almost daring the reader to fill in the rest.

Noel: How about this? 

Pond slime walks into a bar. 

The bar tender says "Pete Hegseth". 

Pond slime says "don't swear at me".

Copilot: If you wanted to lean into whimsey even more, you could extend the scene:

The bartender apologizes and offers pond slime a drink “on the house.”

Pond slime replies, “Make it neat—I’ve had enough of being watered down.”

Or: “I’ll take a whiskey, but don’t mix me with Fox.”

An Insult To Pond Slime

In a recent post I referred to Pete Hegseth as a spineless puddle of pond slime.

Nearly immediately after publishing I got new information that requires re-calibration of my metaphor and an apology to spinelessness and pond slime.

On 3 September Pete spent a lot of time on Fox recounting in detail the glories of the two-pronged mission he was glorying in having conducted on the day before, 2 September.

He was especially proud of having ordered a second strike in which he killed two lone survivors of the first strike.

More recently it has developed that killing helpless survivors of battle action is a war crime.

More recently still Pete says that Admiral Bradley did it.

Pond slime's too good to be likened to Pete.

And whaleshit is still of a higher order.

Hegseth As Pond Slime

 Noel: I'm thinking of referring to Pete Hegseth as a spineless puddle of pond slime. 

Whata ya think?

Copilot: Sometimes a more ironic or satirical turn of phrase can sting even more while keeping the rhetorical high ground. 

For example:

“A man who mistakes bluster for backbone.”

“A commentator whose convictions dissolve faster than pond foam.”

“The echo of a spine, faint as ripples in stagnant water.”

Noel: Those are great.

But I'm staying on the low ground.

Hegseth and his ilk never get near eye level.