Brexit Breakdown

How fucked up is the world economy going to be in the aftermath of the gun-to-its-own-head British state careering somnolently toward the nihilist culmination of Brexit a couple of weeks from now? The United States is particularly entwined with the fate of the financial instruments purveyed in the City, London's clearinghouse for global financial transactions. I have no idea if the markets have priced in the cost of disconnecting Britain from the global economy already. Even so, a jolt should be expected shortly, to the unhappy isle and associated parts of the wider world.

A Suggestion Is Corrected

CORRECTION (March 7, 9:48 a.m.): An earlier version of this article incorrectly suggested that an article in a conservative outlet suggested Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her top aide could face jail time over an FEC complaint. The article suggested that they could face jail time over ties to a political action committee named in the FEC complaint, not because of the complaint itself.

Jane Timms, NBC News

I Cried "Uncle"

John Phillips, of the Mamas and Papas Phillips's, wrote the song Me and My Uncle, a staple of Grateful Dead performances, becoming that group's most played song between 1965 and 1995, with 608 performances (a plausible though not personally verified by me amount), which is many more than necessary by my way of thinking, but admittedly offering up scores to choose from if the best ever among all the rest of them is sought from Deadheads who perforce would have experienced a decent sampling during any arbitrary stretch of time during those 30 years had they attended whatever the minimum number of shows it might take to be considered a Deadhead at the time.

I'm pretty sure I was at Winterland for what appears to have been the third performance of Me and My Uncle. I thought it was O.K., however much my pronounced distaste for cowboy music in general ruled against it. That was always going to be the best performance for me. The rest I managed to endure with what patience I could muster under the circumstances.

Suicide Is The Last Refuge Of The Cynic, I Hear

Hunter Thompson memorialized at University of California Santa Cruz's McHenry library.

The Recent Appearance of Original Intent In Jurisprudence

A Lexicon of Original Intent

Noted Cactus

Flower-armed Cactus

Treefall

Fallen tree blocks East Cliff Drive in Santa Cruz, CA, February 4, 2019

Eucalyptus is a monstrously invasive lifeform in coastal California, rivalling grasses and human beings for the title of most thoroughgoing colonizer of its lands. Here, nudged by insistent winds, unmoored from the rain-saturated soils on the edge of Twin Lakes Beach in Santa Cruz, a giant one leans across East Cliff Drive.

Counter-programing For An Otherwise Very Mueller February

Mick Mulvaney used Fox News Sunday morning to announce that Trump would use emergency powers to fund his wall. His comment was reinforced by the Wall Street Journal, reporting the president's words to the same effect.

This is the fuck Congress option of the many possible constitutional crises the body politic might suffer shortly.

"The RNC And Donald Trump, Sittin' In A Tree, K-I-S-S-I-"

Why, we ARE the grass roots! avers one member of the RNC, as the organization formally merges with Donald Trump's re-election committee.

Smell The Glove

Trump's man Cohen took $50,000 to pay another fellow to rig some polls prior to the 2016 election.

In The Long Run What Do We Mean By "We?"

Ultimately in almost every instance bacteria win out over time, bending the rest of the planet's life forms to that form's own multifarious purposes in the end. A planet's purpose is expressed by its bacteria time after time. It is the way of things everywhere and everywhen, generally. A robust simplification of the endless issues raised by life: bacteria triumphant. Given time.

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?