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!