friday cat blogging, one day late

the sultans of swat

Welcome to a new era of American policing, where cops increasingly see themselves as soldiers occupying enemy territory, often with the help of Uncle Sam’s armory, and where even nonviolent crimes are met with overwhelming force and brutality. (ACLU's Matthew Harwood @ TomDispatch).

 There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, you can't take part. And you've got to put your body upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. (Mario Savio, author of UC Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, 1963)

Become an internationalist and learn to respect all life. Make war on machines. And in particular the sterile machines of corporate death and the robots that guard them. (Abbie Hoffman, activist)

This would be one thing if Ferguson were in a war zone, or if protesters were violent — although, it’s hard to imagine a situation in which American police would need a mine-resistant vehicle. But an episode of looting aside, Ferguson and St. Louis County police aren’t dealing with any particular danger. Nonetheless, they’re treating demonstrators — and Ferguson residents writ large — as a population to occupy, not citizens to protect. (Jamalle Boule in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch)

I suppose it was inevitable that the War on Terror, like the War on Drugs, would become a War on American Citizens. In fact, it was from the beginning. And in any War on American Citizens, America's minority communities are the front line. (Mark Summer @ Dailykos.com)

Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace, but there is no peace... (Patrick Henry)

At the website Naked Capitalism,  Lambert Strether asks, 'Will the  political class of today ever  admit the U.S. lost the two major land wars they got us into?" then answers his own question: "Sure! On the 1st of Never."

Having lost in Iraq & Afghanistan, but still looking to let out no-bid contracts to their fat friends, since that, not victory, is the real objective of the U.S.'s war machine today, our political class has decided to continue the war on our own ground. They've sent innumerable armies among us, armed with humvees, grenade launchers, machine guns, racial animosity and ethnic chauvinism. Police departments nationwide are now fully equipped to continue their War on Terror right here in the USA. (Originally it was called the War on Drugs, but they lost that one, too.)

If it's war they want, we'll bring it. Keeping in mind that there's no way we can ever hope to prevail in a hardware war, we'll need to fall back on the strategy and tactics taught to us by Mr. Gandhi, via Dr. King, and lie down on the pavement. The neighborhoods, those places I still call "the ghetto" are the front lines, and we'll have to be willing to become martyrs along with the the people who live there if it's required of us. We'll also have to take the war to the enemy, in his precinct stations, bomb factories (Pantex, Amarillo, Texas), nuclear firepower depots (the Trident bases in Bangor, Washington, and Camden County, Georgia), and it will require are opening the doors of the endless interstate gulag where the best of our soldiers are warehoused by the millions -- young black men doing 10,20, or 30 years for possession of a joint.

It'll be a long war.. I don't expect it to be concluded in my lifetime, but one can hope, 

friday cat blogging

Fat & fluffy.

reform

Reform happens in two ways:

Through legal channels and legislatures, laws are altered which make possible that which was formerly impossible, such as total disarmament.

Hermann Scheer, a German Social Democrat accomplished this by mostly single-handedly converting his country to a commitment to 100% renewable energy. Concluding that energy gerneration was the main cause of global climate change early in his career, Scheer worked the rest of his life first laying the legal and economic foundations that would make 100% renewable energy possible, and then getting the laws passed which require it.

That kind of work is extremely difficult at best, and impossible for some of us. It requires sitting in endless meetings, listening patiently to the trumped-up concerns of people on oil company payrolls, and suffering partial defeats while remaining alive to fight another day. Anyone who truly wants reform will avoid from the "politics is bullshit" temptation, because unless someone is willing to submit to the compromises, forced cordiality, and choreographed pecking-order rituals ojf political life, reform can´t happen.

Politics is truly working within the system.

The other thing that makes reform possible is social agitation, disorder, riots, and anarchy. Street war, the weapon of demoralized proles who have nothing left to lose, causes oligarchs and dictators to doubt themselves, and pressures the established order from the outside. The qualities that make an effective agitator are the diametrical opposite of those possessed by an effective politician.


The US is Ground Zero in the struggle for reform, and Ground Zero is doing the best political work I've seen in promoting the necessity of disarming. The political functioning of the Ground Zero organzatin consists mostly of graying rich and middle-class liberals. Some would call them Baby Boomers, and politics is an older person's game. The agitation function of the organization is less clear than I had hoped, and I believe needs to define its objectives. If disarmament is necessary to survival, and I agree that it is, then pressure from outside the established order must be brought, as quickly, forcefully, and unexpectedly as possible. Politics alone won´t get the job done.

Search through history and find the roster of dominant institutions -- governments, churches, etc. -- that reformed themselves from the inside. Such a list doesn´t exist, so far as I know. It never happened.

Next year is the 70th anniversary of the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The US was the world´s only nuclear power then, is still the largest by far, and still out of control. The Trident Nuclear submarine base in Bangor, Washington, is home to maybe 1/4th ofthe kilotons with which we have concluded our murder-suicide pact with the world. Eight Ohio-class submarines dock there; each is capable of carrying 24 Trident missiles, each of which can be fitted with four independently-targetable vehicles, each tipped with a nuke. That´s 96 nukes per boat (potentially -- I don´t know what these vessels typically carry) times 8 boats = 768 nukes.

The  problem: nobody seems to know; nobody seems to care. People need to know, and wake up to the danger all of us are in. If the legal groundwork is laid, reform can occcur overnight. It won´t happen without pressuring the oligarchy, to where they can´t sleep at night. Our message to them:
Planet Earth -- love it or leave it.

нашим читателям в pоссии

Porfirio Diaz. Presidente de Mexico, 1876-1880 and 1884-1911 


  
                                                                                   
                                                   
If you´re not aleady reading Dmitri Orlov´s blog, Cluborlov.blogspot.com, you should be. Lately, since the trouble in Ukraine has snowballed out of control and anti-Russianism is higher in the US than at any time since the cold war sputtered out, Orlov, who left the Soviet Union at age 12 in 1974, and sees the same fate for the US. Orlov has concentrated on analyzing relations between the two countries, with the EU stuck on the hind tit and watching the heavyweights to see which way this will go.

Vladimir Putin, the Czar of all the Russias, for his part has been the picture of restraint and self'-efacement, as Obama & the rest of the clowns in the US polititical apparatus try to outdo each other in their condemnations of ¨The Russian dictator¨ and his flocks of syncophants, and proposing new, harsher, and more suicidal economic sanctions.

Putin, who finally ran out of patience and put countersanctions in place, doesn´t have to worry, and he doesn´t. When you´re he world's biggest oil producer nobody can do much to you (unless they can live without oil), and politically he´s still in his salad days. His dictatorship is approaching its tenth year, still in the ¨honeymoon¨ period. My observation of dicatorships.going back to Ollie Cromwell and a couple thousand years beyond is that they´ve got shelf lives of 30 years or so. The first 10 everybody loves Dick, and they tell each other he's the hottest thing since spicy guacamole. From years 10 to 20, it´s touch-and-go. After 20 years his beloved people are waitiing for the old dog to leave, one way or the other. If he´s still around after 30 years of rule, he has to be helped toward the exit.

Its the fortunate dictator who dies before he´s held power for 20 years -- the late Mr Chavez is a good example. Russians and Venezuelans will be quick to point out that both Putin and Chavez were popularly elected to their positions, but almost all of them start out that way -- as reformers. Porfirio Diaz of Mexico was beloved by his people, and modernized Mexican infrastructure, economy, & military. Under Diaz, the country for the first time truly became the United Sates of Mexico. But he stayed on the job too long, & by the time he left, feeling agaist him was universal. The old war horses never know when to quit, & feign blindness to the corruption that inevitably overtakes their administrations.

Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe is now 34 years the dictator, and so far past his pull date he´s stinky Limburger. That´s the same length of time we´ve been ruled by a tyrranical oligarchy in this country. So I realize an oligarchy is not the same as a dictatorship, since no single individual bends the nation and people to his will. However, the tyrrany is as great as that of Robert Mugabe or Vlad the Impaler, beginning in 1980 with the elevation of St. Ronald the Good and Great to the presidency, which might  easily and appropriately be renamed The Office of the Head Bullshitter.
                     With the oligarchy now so far past its viable shelf life it´s stinking up the globe, the US is in its death spiral. Orlov has known this since he got here years ago and began looking around. Americans are mostly impervious to reality these days, but as the science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick once said, "Reality is the one thing that, when you stop believing in it, it doesn´t go away." Orlov's hypothesis relates back to his own experience as the old CCCP unraveled, and he knows what even school kids now know  hang on to any gold and silver you have, and get more now while it´s cheap.

demonstration

I was thinking about past anti-war demonstrations I've participated in as I made the short drive to Poulsbo, Washington today. Motoring along in bright sunshine through cathedrals of Doug fir, hemlock, and cedar, I concluded it had been 44 years since my last demo, at Stop the Draft Week in Oakland, 1967.

My memory was faulty -- that happens a lot these days -- but in this case I know why. There were thousands of us on the streets of Oaktown that day, fully expecting to be charged and clobbered by the Oakland  cops, many of whom were recruited to the OPD from the deep South. They were younger men who loved hippie punching, and many of them were looking forward to a repeat of the action two days previous, when a line of Oakland's finest charged the crowd, which was attempting to block access to the Oakland Induction Center, and scattered it with flailing clubs, leaving blood, broken eyeglasses, hair, and a few injured bodies in their wake. 

But even a conservative police chief has to remember that public relations demands one abstain from unnecessary brutality, and the press is always watching. People all over the US were outraged by film of the Police attacking demonstrators. When the crowd swelled to about 4 thousand  by late afternoon, We were surprised to see the line of cops back off. I was near the front, and for the next couple of hours no one came or went through the Induction Center's main door, since (I later learned) demonstrators on streets a block away had barricaded the buses full of draftees from approaching the Center. 

Then, late in the afternoon, down the street comes the California National Guard, with bayonets fixed. Many of us had been there since before dawn, and prudently decided to call it a day. 

As I drove home on this calm and bright Saturday afternoon, it occurred to me that I've been to several such events since 1967, but  they were all sedate affairs compared to the '67 rising. The liveliest one was the most recent, 8 years ago in Seattle, and I wrote it up for the other blog, newser style.

Today's march and demo was a placid affair, consisting of a mile-plus march along the side of the road from the Ground Zero organization's site to the Bangor Trident Submarine base. Arriving at the base, I noticed that the leaders of ground zero are on cordial terms with the police -- in this case the State Patrol -- and that the cops knew exactly how this would go. There were maybe 50 people in this demonstration, and half a dozen of us got cited for attempting to block traffic in a choreographed sort  of interlude, (I was one) although there was precious little to traffic to block, and we were into, and out of the street before anyone's progress into or out of the base was interfered with.

Nearly all the demonstrators were over 50, and the organizational leadership is all 60 or more. I heard one leader noting the cost of printing leaflets, and remarked to myself that "leaflet" sounds awfully 20th century. These are solid people -- the kind you'd meet at a Universalist-Unitarian Church, and I'll bet there's quite a lot of overlap there -- and the organization is characterized by the same careful politeness, attention to protocol, and scrupulous commitment to non-violence as any UU church. I liked everyone I met, and I met quite a few.

However, 50 people turning out at the Trident base to protest nuclear weapons is pretty sad. The leaders say they want more young people at these things, but do they? I could probably recruit a couple hundred young, hoody-clad, unemployed 20-somethings to show up, but they would be hard to control. Even if they behave immaculately on that occasion, the youth of America these days  are dangerous  and unpredictable, because they have nothing to lose. The leaders of Ground Zero, if such a thing was to happen next year, would quickly find themselves on the WSP's shit list.

I've been in the habit of writing once a week lately, but tomorrow, I'd like tell why I think next year's 70th anniversary of  the doomsday bomb at the Trident nuclear sub base is so extremely important to this country.

Photo © Dave B.,a.k.a. Catboxer 2009, 2014.

hiroshima week

(Being a fragment of an interminable conversation at F***b***k.)

Ron, I think the parallels between then & now are enormous, and everywhere.

How did Lincoln see the Civil War? As the war went on and the lists of dead and maimed grew beyond what anybody thought possible, he came to see it as a blood sacrifice demanded by the god he worshiped, the God of the Israelites, of Abraham and Isaac.

Slavery, he concluded, was a sin so abominable, and we had gone on with it so long, that normal acts of penance couldn't wash it away. God demanded blood, and bodies. Think I´m all wet? Read or listen closely to the short speech at Gettysburg.

Fast forward to America´s second great sin. It began at Hiroshima, exactly 69 years ago next Wednesday. And we´ve obstinately clung to our god of war way too long. Like slavery, the war machine will destroy us if we don´t pull it out by the roots. 

Maybe, as Nietzsche once wrote, God is dead. But the fact is, Nietzsche is dead, and if there is a god, he, she, or it will require a sacrifice.

Think of it like you would an amputation. Why amputate a limb? To save a life, obviously.

And by the way Ron, guess what flag I fly in front of my house? It might surprise you. Oh, and I tried to read Saul Alinsky once, cause wingnuts kept telling me I´m a disciple. He was a crashing bore, and not radical in the least.

friday cat blogging

A lady in Portland awakes every morning when the weather is decent under the gaze of this semi-feral female waiting for her morning dish.

The cat has found a human, but there's no physical contact between them -- yet.

visions of god

       

An incredible illumination from a 13th-century French book of hours, depicting God in the act of creating the  world. Having completed the sky, the sun (l) and moon (r), and the seas, the author and architect  of the cosmos now  prepares to give shape and form to the center of the medieval unverse -- earth. 

When I first saw him, at age 5, he was very much  like this image, only older & calmer, & the earth was older as well.

I first saw him on the way home from kindergarten one day. It wasn't as dramatic as William Blake's seeing the face of the Almighty thru a window when he was 3, but it answered all my questions.

This is the corner where I saw God for the first time. there was a large sign frame on the lawn, facing the corner, and one day on my way home from Kindergarten, after successfully negotiating the Market Street crossing (kinda scary for a little kid), I found myself in front of a poster which showed God levitating the earth between his outstretched palms.

         

An elderly gentleman with long, silver hair and beard, God was decidedly caucasian, and there was no doubt his language of choice was English. He looked pretty much exactly as I thought he would, and I was awestruck by the concreteness of the image. Instead of the vague and invisible sky god I´d heard about, this was finally the real deal, reasurringly familiar. God looked like my friend Lewis´s Uncle Lew, but a hell of a lot cleaner, not to mention much bigger.

And this is where our house used to be. Old Mr. Christie lived alone in the house on the left; the lady who lived on the other side we called "Aunt" Ruth. Every school day I set out from this spot and headed east for the 8-block shuffle toward school.

Finally after a half hour´s trudge and 3 blocks east of Market, I arrived at Garfield Elementary. I finally retraced the route on Google Maps yesterday, after not remembering it for years, and as soon as I saw the cement slab. Knew where I was. Garfield was demolished years ago, and there is no known photo of it. But I´ll always remember the imposing, soot streaked red brick exterior, the huge wooden windows which shrieked in pain as the teachers pried them open in hot weather, the glow of the wooden floors, the cloak room in every classroom where "bad" children were isolated for an hour or two, and most of all, the smell of books, or rather of the glue of their bindings. All these things still exist, but only in the memories of Garfield Elementary´s former inmates.

At the end of my home block I´d turn right on Oak Hill Ave. 60 yrs ago Oak Hill was a bustling scene, with small businesses lining both sides of the street. Mr. White´s grocery was right here on the corner, a tiny shop that was probably one of the first to go.

                                        Oak Hill Ave looking north. A holy roller church
                                             is the only remaining business on this once-
                                             thriving thoroughfare.

To see any of these images full size, click on them. But unless you

be new to computadors, you gnu that.

almost there

                                           

Out on the Salish Sea where the spirits spoke 2 me;
Out on the Salish Sea,  let it roll...

Any people that doesn´t turn away from torture in horror and disgust isn´t worthy of the name "people."

I know we´ve been doing it more and more since thet leetle dust-up in Veetnam started, but until Darth Cheney was appointed de facto Torturemaster, we were ashamed enough to keep it hid.

Gotta give old Darth credit for one thing: he always brazened it out, and let us know eggs ackley what he was doing. He's impervious to reason, proud of his blood-drenched record, and has already testified against himself in many TV appearances, during which he would snarl while extolling the virtues of waterboarding. There is sufficient evidence to convict him of war crimes on video recordings of them.

You know, we got thru WWII without doing any of what the Germans did to others, or the Japanese did to us. Our leaders back in those were wise enouh to know that if we tortured, we would have no grounds for objecting when the screws were put on our boys. They also had possession of a moral sense, and in that were different from your average neocon.

We let the architects of Vietnam off the hook, but the architects of Iraqghanistan will be brought to book. It won´t be soon, but as Guantanamo bumps & grinds toward closure, we will be reminded by the reappearance of torture porn in the media retrospective that accompanies it, that crimes of the neocons cast a very long shadow.

#30#

4th of July

    

As Americans prepare to celebrate the 238th birthday of our country later today by fire roasting large chunks of cattle and poultry and blowing stuff up, we need to reflect on the nature of revolution and our declaration of it. What does it mean, this document written 238 years ago by Jefferson et. al.?

As we look at today´s headlines, we are struck by the amount of unrest in our society, focused mainly today on women & homosexuals. Just as it ocurred in 1776, in 1863, and 1965, today, this disturbance is about is extending the rights formerly limited to aristocrats and royalty to everyone.


We´ve see a lot of whining in the papers & on the internet these days about gay people´s demands.  But because they are human, ...they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Women today, by the same principle, are demanding full equality with men, & to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men People, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

There are much wider implications than gay rights and female emancipation that are driving the current phase of revolution, however. Today the US government´s power to rule has been usurped by the .01% of citizens rich enough to buy it, in violation of all the principles laid down in the declaration, & whenever any 
Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the 
Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Not all revolutions require war & death, and let's hope this phase of our ongoing experiment in self-government does not cause a lot of blood 2 B spilled. But it's naive to think our oligarchic masters will relinquish their autocracy without resorting 2 violence. Now it's 

lobby 4 my hobby

This is certainty the mot du jour on all the lefty & righty Blogs 2day.

II don't know how or why people would expend so many pixels (at least theyre not killing all those trees Any more) on such a simple case.

The Supremes have decided, or at least 5/9ths of em have, that the US does have a religion (Christianity) that's favored in some circumstances & that one of the tenets of that faith that should be respected is that women may not have unauthorized sexytime.

At least 4/9ths of the court did not sign on to such specious, quaint, clanking, antique notions.

Wher thar's life, Ma, they say ther's hope.

whose refugees?

2 my friend solfeggio

Sofeggio, maybe your Jesus is a nice Jewish boy. Mine based on what little we know of him, was a dangerous radical who made a big enough ripple to get himself picked up and executed.

The Jewish Hierarchy didnt like him at all. He was always creating disturbances by bending the rules, inviting all manner of inappropriate people to his endless dinners, incuding (shudder) women and (gasp) people with skin problems. It seems his ministry involved a lot of time banqueting, for he has every appearance of what his unlettered & rude companions would call "a party animal."

They must have carefully marked his progress toward JERUSALEM, followed by a horde of wretched proles and ordinary working people. First thing when he gets to town is he leads this enormous crowd up the hill and pulls that business at the temple. That was what sealed his fate, for even though the high priests didn´t know what to think, he let them know what HE thought of THEM with that little escapade.

After that it was pretty much standard operating procedure. So the head guy goes to Pilate, who´s been portayed as hesitant because of the obvious innocence of the man brought before him. The real Pontiffs Pilate didn´t give a damn about that, and probably signed the death warrant without reading it. Caiphas brought him some crackpot rabble rouser, and Pilate´s m.o. was to nip all and any problems of that sort in the bud, and in a way that would insure they were never heard from any more.

The Christians´ God was a social revolutionary. His earthly  

revolution was extremely short, but his shadow proved very long.

                                               Jeziz, smokin a cig & drinkin a brew.                                              

president former resident

                 

Apparently one of the hosts on Foxist News Network is asking whether the lost e-Mails will lead to Obama's resignation. I can answer that.

No, they will not.

mediamatters.org/video/2014/06/21/fox-ho...

This has been another segmrent in the ongoing series, "Simple answers to stupid questions."

This is really just another ODS fantasy. And the teacher asks, "Why do some people appear to be afflicted with an irrational & all-consuming hatred of Barack Obama?

"Oooooooh, I know. I know. Call on me!"

It's time for America´s backward elements, aka the dirty one-third, to make the big switch from irrationnal and obsessive negrophobia to an even more primal fear -- that of being swallowed up by Hillary Clinton´s big lesbo vagina.

Most of them are so practiced I´ll bet they´ll be able to do so without missing a stroke.

strange bunkmates

Proving once again that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," The Iranians on Thursday sent in a couple thousand fighters to help the US and the Iraqi Shi'a try to get  a handle on the Sunni/ISIS insurgency. 

The confirmation comes as the Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, said Iran was ready to support Iraq from the mortal threat fast spreading through the country, while the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, called on citizens to take up arms in their country's defence.

www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/14/ir...

In Iran, Rouhani raised the prospect of Teheran cooperating with its old enemy Washington to defeat the Sunni insurgent group – which is attempting to ignite a sectarian war beyond Iraq's borders.

The Guardian story calls this "a fragile alliance," & will have heads spinnng in the  US considering the 1984-like change of Iranian fortune. For the Iranians, who have had two US Navy carrier groups parked on their front doorstep in the Persian Gulf for years, it's an opportunity to reset the global pecking order. 

It will also bring back Iranian memories of the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88, in which Saddam Hussein, at the urging of the Reagan administration, invaded Iran and set off a fire he couldn´t control. The US lost close to 5,000 troops killed in the 8 years of our Iraq War; Iran lost 300,000 dead and 5,000 dead for them was a bad day, not a bad decade.

It´ll be fun to see the reactions of the guilty. For example, that insufferable twit, Tony Blair is all over the news this morning loudly proclaiming that the current Sunni offensive has nothing -- but absolutely nothing -- to do with Bush's (and Tiny Blair's) 2003 invasion of Iraq.

scapegoat

Back in the day, when those old Hebrews were doing battle with the Edomites & the Jebusites & the parasites, they kept track of their sins in a daily register. Every year on the 10th day of the 7th month, the high priest would select two goats to sacrifice for the corporate sins of God´s people, Israel. One of these, ¨the Lord´s Goat,¨ was immediately killed on the altar, and the other, the scapegoat, driven into the wild desert.

The chief priest then carried some of the sacrificed animal´s blood into the room where only he could go, the Holy of Holies, and only on this one day of the year -- Yom Kippur, the day of atonment. Going behind the veil, he sprinkled blood on the Mercy Seat, the lid of the Ark of the Covenant. Then he would confess to Jahweh the sins of the nation, figuratively transferring them to the scapegoat who carried them off into the desert, where they were never heard from any more.

Today, A scapegoat is someone designated to carry our shit for us. Rather than personally answer to God or humans for our greed, envy, pride, or anger, we load it all onto the head of a. specially-chosen human. 

Such is the case of Sgt Berghdahl, who now carries our collective frustrations and sins not just from the past year, but the last dozen or so.The frustrations of stalemate in Iraq & Afghanistan, the bewildering array of ideological freaks parading across the public's TV screens, & the continuing & accelerating erosion of our "way of life," so-called, escalate social tensions & pressures to the point where people begin to actively search for the goat.

And suddenly there he is, the reverse messiah, the great unleader, and one upon whom we can load all our resentment, fears, and saliva. And this one comes with a dad who "looks like a Muslim" -- a big bonus which helps spread the hatred a bit. It seems people instictively recognize the goat when he appears, and everyone piles on for an opportunity to churn the stick around in the barrel.

There's not a more animalistic & primitive behavior than modern-day scapegoating.

dirty-minded

If we put ourselves in the hands of autocorrect, we find ourselves with a risqué interlocutor.

Have you ever texted someone with the news that "my boyfriend just left with his mom's corpse,
When what you typed -- or thought you had -- was "his mom's Camaro?"

Or you ask a guest whether "chicken fajitas sound OK." But the text he receives invites him for chicken vaginas, which leads to the rejoinder, "No, not really...and ROFL by the way."

See the full text of these & 33  more gems.rat cheer.

my kinda town

Herewith, a faithful copy of a huge hit song of 1927, rendered from English to Japanese by the Google translator, then back into English again.

Old Savannah, the "Savannah I, 
In this case, south brand. 
Climate mentioned that there is a warm"
 weather is to say, something that I do not understand.
They have a gal
gal quite there are,  
Who is cold than the storm in the Arctic. 
I got a heart like a stone just. 
But, plural form of iceman leave her alone.

They are tough town leather nasty gal to call hard-core Hannaher, the VAMP of Savannah, but the heart of Hannah is tough. She's the kind of gal like to see men suffer. 

They say, is the joy of her to EM thrill,
To torture them, and kill the EM and EM 
Tease, thrill, Su them and tease them.

Well, I pour water to those who drown there
-- She saw her on the beach in a huge pot.

bowsnerds

Back on The Salish Sea




We left Mesa, Arizona in mid-May, when temps were in the low nineties. Six days on the road and we dropped lightly into Port Orchard, Washington, with its cool, cloudy mornings, warm, sunshiny afternoons, & lovely blowboats.

If your objective is experiencing a beautiful day every day of your life, become a snowbird. You´ll be resented by the poor working people who broil through the Arizona summers. or those who mildew through Seattle's winter glurk, but just tell em they´ll get their chance.

Retirement is for the fotunate. Everybody worries about money, but the main thing is to have a car that works, and medical insurance. You stay home a lot, and figure out ways to cut corners. For example: Bought about $100 worth of lumber, dirt, manure, plant starts, and seeds the last couple days. We´ll have a lot of fun on that C-note, and in the fall won´t be buying many groceries for a couple of months.

And when we go back to Arizona in the fall, the citrus crop will be imminent, and the 110-degree days gone for another eight months.

different day, sos

Here's how they do it, straight from the textbook: you start with outrageous crimes purportedly committed by the people you want to whack.

The world's attention is currently divided between an outbreak of celebrity fisticuffs on an elevator (useful only to advertisers) and the kidnapping of over 200 schoolgirls in Nigeria by a shadowy outfit called Boko Haram.

Over the next few weeks, that second item will grow fangs and claws, as "Boko Haram" becomes the most frequently-heard 4 syllables on your teevee. Good bye al-Qaida, hello Boko Haram.

By the time our managers in the Pentagon reveal to us that at least one or two of these missing, innocent moppets died under horrible circumstances, our fellow Americans will be whipped into such a froth that the boyz in the Pentagon couldn't prevent their invading Nigeria, even if they wanted to.

But of course, they don't want to. And by the way, did anyone happen to notice that Nigeria is 7th or 8th on the list of the world's top oil-producing countries?

That's all you really ned to know. By the time the American public figure out they've fallen for it again, the gasoline refined from Nigerian crude will have gone through their gas tanks and into the atmosphere as fumes.

Rather than remembering the Maine, or Belgium, or Pearl Harbor, or even 9/11, I would much rather my fellow citizens remember how they allow the brass hats to manipulate their emotions, and work them into a frenzy of war fever. It's not hard, and it works every time. Until it doesn't.

For all any of us knows, Boko Haram might be a fiction cooked up in the Pentagon basement. Please, let's not be credulous dorks again this time. Let's avoid having to confront the fact, one more time, that we were gullible enough to fall for the same old shit -- again -- and the result is tens of thousands dead from bombing runs and drone attacks, all because we got fooled one more time.

wonder bread

I got my DNA profile yesterday. What a disappointment.

3/5ths of my ancestors were Hinglish.





The remainder were from western Europe (21%, mostly French), Ireland (11%), & Sweden (9%).

I was hoping to find at least one or two Mestizo, African, or Native American ancestors, but no such luck. The great thing about DNA profiles is they're completely truthful, since wishful thinking and 

ideology have nothing to do with reality.

I've heard that one American in four has African ancestors, and since numerous among my (English) forebears owned slaves, I always assumed I had a little bit of Ibo or Fulani blood. Assumptions can't compete with evidence, however, and it would require a comprehensive DNA record of US citizens to determine whether this country is truly a "melting 
Pot" or simply a collection of ethnicities living side by side -- "multi-cultural" as we say these days.

 The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski said that "When races meet, they sometimes fight, but they always breed." I'd say that's usually, but not always true.

Many of my ancestors were white supremacists. My paternal grandfather had a world history text on his shelf, published in the 1880's, which says "The only historic race is the Caucasian. The others have done little worth mentioning."

That's typical of the cultural blindness that informs the universal white attitude of that era -- a kind of racial "exceptionalism," dependent on a habit of studied non-observation -- which persists even today, and explains why my ancestors had no knowledge, carnal or otherwise, of nonwhite people.

joe gets called in again

The air was thick and heavy in the summer heat, and sound was muffled, as if one's own footfalls were far away, when Pharaoh slept and dreamed, and saw Egypt, and then the entire world falling into pieces, as if the glue holding everything together had given out.

So Pharaoh called in his wise men and soothsayers, saying, "Say some sooth, you suckahz!" And they were all there, the Baptist preacher, the Pope from Rome, the "Proud to be a Mullah from the Umma" guy, chanting Mahayana monks, and the editorial page writers from the Wall St. Churnal, and none could say the meaning of Pharoah's dream.

And they said, "We cannot understand the meaning of it."

And then the Pharaoh waxed wroth, and little bricks shat he. And he saith, "Get rid of these fakers. It looks like we gotta call in Joe."

So in comes Joe, campesino, illegale, hombre muy sympatico, and hears old Pharaoh's dream. "Sounds like a money problem," say Joe.

"What you say?" the file voiced Pharaoh rasps.

"You're gonna reach that point where we don't even know what money is any more," says the seer. "At that point, things fall apart."

Ain´t nothing we can do about it this time, ´cause there´s been too much water under the bridge.