Good Times

The Soviet Union ceased to exist on December 31, 1991. That would be twenty-seven-years-less Soviet Union so far. Good times.

Happy New Year Yourself

Exiting Chief of Staff John Kelly propelled out of office by a firm pat on his own back.

Media Trouble. Please Stand By

Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one are capable of distributing one.

People Are Like Ferrets

Lengthy, expansive critique of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the Coen brothers' latest offering, including bonus heated remarks in the comment section about everything Coen posted at Lawyers, Guns And Money.

Annals Of The Preposterous

Post Toasties Contest, 1955

Hold My Scarf

Probably not going to catch on as a widely adopted warcry. Shows panache, though.

Hammer Time

George Bush (June 12, 1924-November 30, 2018)

Enacting the ADA was the most profoundly consequential piece of social legislation signed into law by a Republican president in modern times. George Bush, the one recently dead, did that. Thank you for that on your way to hell, you mannerly fellow.

The Emasculation Knob Goes To Eleven

Looking On

Trumponomics

You will hear everlastingly, in all discussions about newspapers, companies, aristocracies, or party politics, this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man.

G.K. Chesterton

How It Is Done

What you see is what you get.

Multitasking

Dogview 2018

The People's House Gets A Makeover

The terms of offices enumerated in the United States Constitution are two years, four years, six years, and life. Two year terms for the House, four for the Presidency, six for the Senate and life for the Federal Court.

In conjunction with one another, the States of the United States hold Presidential elections every four years, and at the same time, conduct elections to the House of Representatives, with each state allowed to elect its given portion of that 435 person body based on some recondite methodology which takes longer to understand than to dismiss once understood.

Each term of an elected Representative lasts exactly half as long as that of the President they've accompanied into office. Obviously in the middle of the President's term of office there will be another spate of elections in each state to fill the House with Representatives once again.

This year has given us such elections.

Recently Departed

Now, it may be that the New England branch of the Mafia, such as it is, figures somehow in the events culminating in the death of Whitey, that is to say, Jimmy, Bulger in federal custody in West Virginia this past week.

He destroyed a few of them figuratively and literally when he confided what he knew to the FBI, before he disappeared into decades of self-imposed witness protection, but not before he used the license granted him by his FBI connections to engage in horrific acts of murder and sundry other criminal deeds.

If no one wonders too loudly or for too long why Bulger was being transferred from his previous prison to the site of his execution West Virginia, or wonders whose brilliant idea it was and whose authority was used to set the whole thing in motion, then, well, then the whole episode will fade into the half-remembered background and eventually be forgotten. He was a bad man and came to a hard end, didn't he?

Noted: Lacuna

For some reason best left to him to explain, Robert Christgau skipped over Anthem of the Sun in his otherwise complete list of Grateful Dead albums he's listened to and rated over the years, starting with their first eponymous Warner Brothers release.

Somebody's Idea Of A Good Time

Request For Proposal

…"a prefix suggesting even greater ironic distance than irony on its own can supply"…

"Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied, Bitches!"

Probity-free testimony with a snarl, September 27, 2018

Ideally, The Nation Undergod Stops Sensibly Short Of The Greatest And Best God As Illustrated

Deo Optimo Maximo, Davenport CA, 2011

The Future of Antique Roadshow Foreseen

In Norman Spinrad's novel The Iron Dream Adolf Hitler emigrates to the United States in 1919, and turns to a career as a pulp SF illustrator and writer, the sort responsible for the cover of The Solarians, Spinrad's first novel:

The cover of my very own copy of Norman Spinrad's first novel

Noted

Wilco, February 15, 1997, at Irving Plaza, NY.

The Undergod Sensibly Stops Just Short Of The Greatest And Best God, as Shown Here

Deo Optimo Maximo, Davenport CA, 2011

Freeing The Press

David Pecker, CEO of American Media, has received immunity from prosecution for information about the president and Michael Cohen.

Given this freedom of speech, who knows, beside the president and his erstwhile lawyer, what Pecker might have to say?

American Media itself, meanwhile, is in a perpetual struggle to restructure about $1 billion in debt. American Media is a holding of Chatham Asset Management, famed recipient of Governor Chris Christie's heedless investment of New Jersey pension funds in 2014 . Chatham Asset Management basically used looted pension funds to acquire a major interest* in the company Pecker runs, American Media. Inc., publisher of the National Enquirer and a host of other magazines and tabloids.

*An interest which now included AMI's aforementioned perpetual struggle to restructure about $1 billion in debt, woe be to the pensioners.

Noted

Journalism's responsibility is to be accurate. This, accuracy, is as close to truth as journalism is ever allowed.

Forever succumbing to the temptation to serve up accuracy with a twist is journalism's original sin. Whether this twisting tends toward truth or away is for the letters to the editor.

Did Someone Just Says Insane Clown POTUS?

Trump and the Veterans revisit the smell of napalm in the morning.

Aretha Franklin (March 25, 1942-August 16, 2018)

The greatest singer of her time was 14 years old once and even then:

Is 70 Years Far Enough Away Now?

On August 12, 1948, activists of the Khudai Khidmatgar movement protested against the arrest of their leaders and the new ordinance enforced by the government. The unarmed protesters marched peacefully from Charsadda to Babrra ground. However, when they reached Babrra ground, Abdul Qayyum Khan Kashmiri ordered the police and militia forces to open fire on the protesters. They were killed in hundreds. Some females from the nearby homes rushed to Babrra ground, holding the Quran above their heads intending to stop the police and militia from mass shooting, but even these females were shot. Many dead bodies and some of the injured people were thrown into the Kabul River by the police and militia. Some of the injured drowned in the river. When the police and militia left, the bodies were recovered from the river by their loved ones and taken to Charsadda Bazar, although some dead bodies could never be recovered. About 600 or more Pashtuns were killed in the massacre, while more than a thousand of them were injured. Later on, those who were injured and those whose loved ones were killed in the massacre were fined by the government for the price of the bullets that the government had used in the massacre.

—Babrra

Louis Armstrong (August 4, 1901 – July 6, 1971)

Happy Birthday, you grand fellow.

Arrested

Dogview 2018

Ladies and Gentlemen, Your Social Media

True stories took, on average, six times longer than falsehoods to reach at least 1,500 people.

The reason false information does better than the true stuff is simple, say the researchers. Things spread through social networks because they are appealing, not because they are true.

—On Twitter, falsehood spreads faster than truth, The Economist, March 10, 2018

Cactus Interruptus

Flowering Cactus, October, 2008

Kidnapping Babies As State Policy One Week, Genuflecting before Putin the Next. Are We There Yet?

A good laugh:

With the exception of his Nazi association, Heidegger’s life was relatively uneventful.

—Martin Heidegger: The forgetfulness of Being,Times Literary Suplement, July 18, 2018

I Suggest Checking His Papers Very Very Carefully Before Letting Him Back Into The Country. Zero Tolerance

How do we know that the person we take to be "Donald Trump" isn't actually a trained impostor cleverly substituted for the original Trump by Russian agents during the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow back in 2013? Doesn't Ian Fleming demand this of us?

We should require DNA testing of the presumed president before letting "Donald Trump" return, just to be on the safe side.

Standards And Practices

I would append Dante to every comment deriding Trump and his Republican enablers I ever make now that I've run across it.

Tu stesso ti fai grosso
col falso imaginar, sì che non vedi
ciò che vedresti se l'avessi scosso.

—Paradiso, Canto I, lines 88, 89, 90

One Hundred Per Cent Outstanding

“I don’t believe them at all,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One, according to pool reporter Todd J. Gillman of The Dallas Morning News. “I believe him.”

“Jim Jordan is one of the most outstanding people I’ve met since I’ve been in Washington,” Trump continued. “I believe him 100 percent. No question in my mind. I believe Jim Jordan 100 percent. He’s an outstanding man.”

Outstanding man, that Jordan.

The San Francisco Giants ballclub recorded its 45th victory today by completing a sweep of a three game series in Arizona against the division-leading Diamondbacks. The victory lifted the team to five games over .500 for the season.

Last year, in a season left unremarked if equanamity is to be preserved, the club reached its 45th victory on August 8, never reaching .500 the entire season long.

Presently the lads are five weeks ahead of last year's pace, suggesting that last year's result will be surpassed as well.

Play Ball!

Holdings

Future Treatment

After Roe v. Wade was overturned, the right to an abortion devolved to the states, leaving much of the country without reproductive services of any kind that could be linked to the practice of abortion, and a few more fortunate states where women's reproductive rights continued to be respected.

Thus a ramshackle network of drivers grew up to serve the needs of women who wished to take advantage of services that could only be acquired in an often distant juristiction.

The drivers found themselves targeted by a self-described Christianist militia centered in the Southern states, whose purpose was to distrupt, fatally if necessary, the journey of these women.

SYFY network, 13 episodes…

Original Intent

No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, But shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.

Caught In Passing

Bear Up The Hill, September 2, 2007

Organizing Principles

The question of whether all the children recently kidnapped from their parents by ICE at the border as a feature of the Trump Administration's zero tolerance policy will ever be properly returned does occur.

I mean, didn't people who run the sort of outfit ICE aspires to be discover long ago that tattooing the arm provides ineradicable indentification?

(A simple bar code on the back of the wrist in this age might easily attach to all manner of information about its bearer, given the ubiquity of bar code reader technology. A properly labelled child would be difficult to lose track of given such a scheme.)

Any Headline Is Editorial

Text is always subtext.

Looking at you, journalism…

Bloomsday

Thanks again, Mr. Joyce.

Thanks, Comey

The Thankening

Wait, What?

Pentagon officials said that over the next three years, the Defense Department will take responsibility for all background investigations involving its military and civilian employees and contractors. But according to a U.S. official, the White House is expected to soon give the department authority to conduct security reviews for nearly all other government agencies as well.

— Pentagon to take over security clearance checks, Associated Press, May 31, 2018

Only The Good Die Young. The Monsters Retire To Miami

Luis Posada Carriles, February 15, 1928 – May 23, 2018

77

We have the unearned distinction of living contemporaneously with Bob Dylan, an artist whose creations are of such magnitude that from here on out his corpus will live as long as that of Shakespeare. Who in Shakespeare's day suspected his stuff would be carried to the end of whatever English is? But we know now that Dylan's will.

Happy Birthday, maestro.

Hey Trump Voter, Whatever Happened To That House of Yours That Got Foreclosed On In The Great Recession?

Sean Hannity snapped it up.

Sean Hannity And The Rule Of Three

Michael Cohen's attorneys have reluctantly revealed, when pressed by Judge Kimba Wood in Federal Court, that Michael Cohen's law practice extends to exactly three clients: Donald Trump, of course, Elliot Broidy, surprisingly, and, after a round of foot-dragging in court today, client number three.

So everyone knows the one about the Irishman, the rabbi and the Scotsman walking into a bar, or the Englishman, the priest and the zen master sharing a parachute, or the president, the adulterer and the broadcaster doing whatever the hell it was they were doing that made them clients of Cohen. The rule of three makes for solid jokes.

On A Happier Note

Newly added Andrew McCutchen had a career day at the plate for the San Francisco Giants this evening, going 6 for 7 with 10 total bases, four RBI's, 2 runs, and a game-ending 14th inning three-run walk-off home run. To beat the Dodgers.

In Keeping With Longstanding Practices…

The Quotidian insists it be included on the list.

This Post Is Hereby Retracted

Perhaps shipping containers full of human waste could be stacked along the southern border instead of parked in unlucky Alabama towns. Contributions in kind from all over the United States would eventually make possible as complete and repellant a barrier to entry as any nation state has ever assayed, and revive our nation's rail infrastructure to boot.

50th

I was drafted into the United States Army exactly fifty years ago today, on March 27, 1968. There was a war going on, and right then the Army needed more bodies: that week's haul of inductees was the largest haul to date, tens of thousands of poor fucks who weren't in college (maybe they couldn't afford it, maybe they weren't smart enough to go or smart enough to stay in once they got there, like me, maybe they'd just graduated and lost their student deferment) or couldn't get a doctor to write a note, or avoided the draft in any of the many other ways creative young men took advantage of at the time.

There I went, after a day at the induction center in Oakland, flying off, drafted, on the first jet plane I'd ever ridden in, flying up north to Fort Lewis.

Annals of Public Service

Nancy McFadden dies

A great talent, a good run, shortened.

Zeus As In Seduce

I,
oh I, can turn a gray sky blue,
you see, I can make it rain when I want it to
oh I,
can build a castle from a single grain of sand
you see, I can make a ship sail on dry land.
Ain't happy am I with all the powers that I possess,
girl, you're the key to my happiness,
and I can't get next to you, babe
can't get next to you.
I've been trying a long time
I don't know what to do
Oooooo
Let me say,
I,
I can fly like a bird in the sky
I can buy anything that money can buy
Oh I,
can turn a river into a raging fire
I can live forever if I so desire
Ain't happy am I with all the powers that I possess,
oh, you're the key, 'cause
I can't get next to you, babe
can't get next to you.
I've been trying for such a long time
…

Let me tell you that
I,
I can turn back the hands of time
you better believe I can
Oh I, you see, I can make the seasons change
just by waving my hand
Let me say,
I,
I can change anything from old to new, girl,
oh I, all the things I want to do the most, you see, I'm unable to do unimportant, all these things that I'm trying to do the other day, girl,
you see, I can't get next to you, baby
can't get next to you
I've been tryin a long time...
oh if somebody'd only help me...
oh, let me, let me go...
whooooo...
I,
I've been working on it baby
I've been thinking about it you see,
I've been trying to call you all day long but, you see,
I don't have your phone number, honey
I,
I've been thinking about you baby something awful,
you see, sometime I feel like I want to moan about it
and I just don't know what to say
and I say
Mmmmmm...

Larry Kudlow's Drug-Addled Career of Publicly Misunderstanding Economics Is Rewarded, As These Matters So Often Are

This message is brought to you as a public service.

Steven Hawking, January 8, 1942 – March 14, 2018

On his own terms, pretty often right. Now departed.

To Hawking's annoyance, his much-checked calculations produced findings that contradicted his second law of black hole mechanics, which claimed black holes could never get smaller, and supported Bekenstein's reasoning about their entropy. His results, which Hawking presented from 1974, showed that black holes emit radiation, known today as Hawking radiation, which may continue until they exhaust their energy and evaporate.

Politics Is Sharp Practices

The established facts of Russian meddling in the 2016 election were the causal basis that prompted the House Intelligence Committee's investigation into the matter early last year.

Tonight the Committee's Republicans have ruled that the established facts are not evidence, and wrapped up their work.

Whose Fair Lady Was That Again, International Women's Day Edition

On the Street Where You Live, the song of a stone stalker.

When she mentioned how her aunt bit off the spoon,

She completely done me in.

And my heart went on a journey to the moon,

When she told about her father and the gin

And I never saw a more enchanting farce

Than that moment when she shouted

"move your bloomin' " ....

I have often walked down this street before;

But the pavement always stayed beneath my feet before.

All at once am I

Several stories high.

Knowing I'm on the street where you live

Are there lilac trees in the heart of town?

Can you hear a lark in any other part of town?

Does enchantment pour

Out of ev'ry door?

No, it's just on the street where you live!

And oh! The towering feeling

Just to know somehow you are near.

The overpowering feeling

That any second you may suddenly appear!

People stop and stare.

They don't bother me.

For there's no where else on earth that I would rather be.

Let the time go by,

I won't care if I

Can be here on the street where you live.

Music by Lerner and Loewe, 1956

In Like A Lion And Out Like A Light

The thing of it is that getting Steele to spread the corrosive notion that the Russian Government had vetoe'd Trump's choice of Mitt Romney to be US Secretary of State is a perfect move for Russian policy whether or not the notion itself has a grain of truth to it. Once the seeds of such equivocalities are planted in the "proper soil," for which in this instance we will metaphorically substitute Mr. Steele, the transmission of those seeds by Mr. Steele will certainly serve to disrupt our polity, true or no.

If it can be taken as a given that post-Soviet Russian foreign policy includes a strain of sour-grapesist anti-Americanism, then this cleverly crafted imputation about Trump's willingness to do Putin's bidding is an enormous victory for Vlad's side.

Winter's Bonus

I didn't look in on the Olympics in real time, so I'm thankful for the folks at Botnik for taking a run at the event with their Predictive Writing app to supply me with what things might have been like over there if I'd bothered to.

Annals of Natural History

Viewers inspect the domed roof of the California Academy of Sciences Building, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, March 2009

occasional delusions of clarity

My take is that, clearly, Paul Manafort was desperately seeking a sequence of loans (backed by transparently fraudulent paperwork) to pay the vig on money owed to a connected Russian oligarch named Oleg Deripaska, a serious man, who wanted $19 million or so from Manafort for a relationship they'd established during Manafort's time in Ukraine, as reported here.

This activity was going on all through late 2015-early 2016, just before Manafort volunteered his services to the Trump campaign, gratis. He got on board in March of 2016, just as his latest loan application was turned down, and by June had replaced Corey Lewandowski as Trump's campaign manager.

He saw his erstwhile client's wishes granted when the Republican platform regarding Ukraine was altered at the convention just weeks after he replaced Lewandowski.

He lasted little more than two months in the job, although during that time he did in fact manage to convince an officer of an obscure Chicago bank that he'd be named Secretary of the Army while securing a $16 million loan from said bank.

Whether his debt to the Russian has now been settled or merely postponed is an open question.

Sign of the Times

We're delighted to announce that Quinn Norton has joined The New York Times editorial board as our lead opinion writer on the power, culture and consequences of technology…

— Ari Bervacqua, THe New York Times Company February 13, 2018

Uh…

NY Times Hires, Quickly Fires Journalist With History of Homophobic Tweets

Maxwell Tani, The Daily Beast

Would have lasted longer in the Trump White House, even without a security clearance.

Soak The Rich

The time-tested solution.

I am in favor of letting Donald Trump's kids go to state colleges for free, and increasing his tax rate to pay for the free college for the rest of the kids.

—Atrios, Eschaton, Feb 7, 2018

Apply As Needed To The Affected Area

“The higher, pretentious form of stupidity stands only too often in crass opposition to [its] honorable form. It is not so much lack of intelligence as failure of intelligence, for the reason that it presumes to accomplishments to which it has no right … The stupidity this addresses is no mental illness, yet it is most lethal; a dangerous disease of the mind that endangers life itself. … [S]ince the ‘higher stupidity’ consists not in an inability to understand but in a refusal to understand, any healing or reversal of it will not occur through rational argumentation, through a greater accumulation of data and knowledge, or through experiencing new and different feelings … We may say that the reversal of a spiritual sickness must entail a spiritual cure.”

—One crucial word from How to Be a Stoic, Jan 19, 2016

This is stupidity as the willful ignorance of the unwise. Not mentally ill, no, but seriously and actively and obdurately mistaken. ἀμαθίᾳ :Amathia.

In Other Other News

Today, Devin Nunes Peeks Out From His Recusal (Six More Weeks Of Malfeasance Foreseen)

Idiot Souffle

This is just weird: Russia's SVR chief allowed into US to meet with DCI Pompeo

The chief of Russia's SVR has been specifically and personally forbidden entry into the United States of America for his part in the recent Russian expropriation of Crimea from Ukraine, which the US formally opposes. Allowing him entry into the country requires by law a special exemption from the Secretary of State that a visa be issued.

Of course, it could just be Russia begging the Trump administration as pointedly as possible under the circumstances to please —please— avoid fucking with Korea, the likelihood of which happening increases by the hour.

In Other News. . .

Foreign Policy EXCLUSIVE: President Donald Trump pressed senior aides last June to devise and carry out a campaign to discredit senior FBI officials after learning that those specific officials were likely to be witnesses against him.

But his aides dissuaded him, and the Republic was saved.

Just kidding.

Whoa, Nellie!

Keith Jackson, October 18, 1928 – January 12, 2018

For decade after decade Keith Jackson was a delightful college and pro football announcer. He had a rich drawl that didn't downplay the drama of a football game, if any was to be had, but he never made it out to be anything but that, a game, an entertainment, a silly something he was happy to witness and transmit. Good night, nurse, he's gone for good.

Oh, You Mean THAT Kind of Racist, Special Shithole Edition

Earlier

Dogs Barking Idiotically Through Endless Nights

…endless saturnalia of bunk, of bluff, of stupidity, of insincerity, of false virtue, of nonsense, of pretense, of sophistry, of paralogy, of bamboozlement, of actorial posturing, of strident wind music, of empty words—even, at times, of downright fraud

I'm sorry, Mr. Menken, but you say nothing here to distinguish your era particularly.

I Am The Very Model Of A Modern Stable Genius