boscohorowitz
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Oops. The story staked upon the Spanish flu epidemic:
“Your tunnel vision”
I think it’s usually best to address whom you’re talking to by name when speaking in a group discursive forum. Since I’m the only poster so far, I tend to assume it’s me, which only adds to my WTF is he talking about?
I’d hoped the image posted would help, but it’s unavailable.
So I light a Kanji and caress the darkness…
Also:
“Scientists offer several possible explanations for the high mortality rate of the 1918 influenza pandemic. Some analyses have shown the virus to be particularly deadly because it triggers a cytokine storm, which ravages the stronger immune system of young adults.[15] In contrast, a 2007 analysis of medical journals from the period of the pandemic[16][17] found that the viral infection was no more aggressive than previous influenza strains. Instead, malnourishment, overcrowded medical camps and hospitals, and poor hygiene promoted bacterial superinfection. This superinfection killed most of the victims, typically after a somewhat prolonged death bed.[18][19]”
Sometimes we just don’t know, but I’ll make this prediction: a major public health awareness PR program is likely in our near future. LIke they had in the 1920s, when my Mum was deeply indoctrinated with the importance of washing hands suystematically and throughly, etc.
I think it’s more like 2% mortality rate Dr. D, and that’s 2% of a very small test sample of possibly dubiious provenance. Even test samples acquired with impeccable data hygiene have much wider error boundaries than larger test samples.
2% of a billion people is 20 million people.
Then there’s the time factor: how fast/how many people die. (Like the old cyberpunk t-shirt that asked How Fast? How dense? regarding data transmission.)
Then there’s the cost to those who didn’t die, the myriad connections between the living, the dying and the newly dead.
Then there’s how many people are laid up how long to keep from dying, and how many don’t die but recovered seriously weakened.
(Regarding that, here is a pretty good short someone wrote recently that uses this as its central plot pivot.)
The Spanish Flu is estimated to have had a 10-20% mortality rate.
Some context a la conspiracy thought motifs:
“To maintain morale, wartime censors minimized early reports of illness and mortality in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States.[10][11] Papers were free to report the epidemic’s effects in neutral Spain (such as the grave illness of King Alfonso XIII).[12] These stories created a false impression of Spain as especially hard hit,[13] thereby giving rise to the pandemic’s nickname, “Spanish flu”.[14]”
The problem with conspiracies isn’t that they aren’t common or insidious or secret or… the problem is that meanwhile, life is going one and life at best is difficult unto death. Meddling ruling elites’ worst sin is that while they’re creating havoc they’re inadvertantly breeding havoc via their incompetence, inciompetence which results from, if nothing else, the fact that they’re too busy screwing the pooch to notice the problems occurring while they screw said pooch, some of which they are directly responsible for, many even most of which are simply the result of ignoring the facts until the facts no longer ignore you.
The problem with consistently paranoiac explanations involving hidden puppet masters is that it assigns responsibility for events that said puppet masters are unaware of and to which they often fall prey themselves. (Like King Alfonso above.)
Never mind. Stupid robots. The internet and digitech in general are already broken but the announcement has not yet been made.
With Twitter as the silk screen from behind which she directed her “puppy emperors”. Oh, it’s a convoluted metaphor, but these are convoluted times.
For example:
Real or photoshopped, this image seems apt:
““The system of multilateral cooperation, which took years to build, is no longer allowed to evolve. It is being broken in a very crude way. Breaking the rules is becoming the new rule,” he said.”
from Putin warns of financial crisis , an almost two-year old article. From the damage of war-by-sanctions to the folly of trade protectionism in an economy dependent upon globalism (which sucks but that’s what we’ve made and mostly still believe in), he’s right.
This is nothing new to most readers here, but I find it a useful restrospective anchor.
While I appreciate Trump’s willingness to avoid antagonizing Russia, I personally see him as the USA’s Empress Dowager.
I am surprised to see no photoshops of Trump’s face under the Dowager’s headress. The internet is slacking off, it seems.
“Tea began as a medicine and grew into a beverage. In China, in the eighth century, it entered the realm of poetry as one of the polite amusements. The fifteenth century saw Japan ennoble it into a religion of aestheticism–Teaism. Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order. It is essentially a worship of the Imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life.”
from The Book of Tea by Kakuzo Okakura. I correlate Kakuzo with, say, C.S. Lewis or G.K. Chesterton, a person who takes ancient traditions and codices and relates them to modern times in language as luminescent as the original scriptures and sacred secular texts they build on.
““For viewers, the result is the equivalent to watching professional wrestling with the same fake matches but without the thrill of an occasional pile driver.””
“One striking finding of such complexity studies is the apparently ranked order among all known material systems in the universe. Although the absolute energy in astronomical systems greatly exceeds that of humans, and although the mass densities of stars, planets, bodies, and brains are all comparable, the energy rate density for humans and modern human society are approximately a million times greater than for stars and galaxies.”
Our candles burn at both ends…
“Don’t underestimate the U.S. culture; it was once as conservative as the Asian cultures; being the best mix of numerous European cultures; tolerant and also conservative, in the best of ways.
How else could the U.S. achieve what it has?”I adore USA culture, for sure. Alas, it fell victim not only to its own unique success but also that of Enlightenment<>Modernism’s self-deluding narcissistic grandeur. It peaked at Woodstock, which was a populist expression of the naive wisdom of children raised on that extravagant excess. We were trying to get across the idea that it was, as Bucky Fuller said so well, Utopia or Bust, and Utopia requires a healthy respect for each other, nature at large, and whatever divbine intelligence might be lurking amid all the gorgeous cruelty of Big History.
G.K. Chesterton wrote somewhere that (paraphrase alert) ‘The average American is just fine; it’s the ideal American who is the problem.’
Now we’re all Ideal Americans whether we want to be or not. It’s mandatory, like the useless vote in Australia. Forced dreams become forced nightmares like the American Dream (which was always a weird mirage like Bali Ha’i on the movie screen).
But, uh, you got to have a dream, right? We humans live in a dream world called civilization, one that has its head in the clouds, where they should be but has its feet on rotting pavement because waking up was too much work, or something.
“Basically I got all the crappy stuff genetic wise. In addition to Ushers, I got also got cronic nose bleeds, severe allergies (food & environmental), and severe eczema or dry skin. The allergies caused cronic red rashes/hives all over my body making “itchy” my middle name!”
Speaking of coin cidences, it’s very timely for me to be reminded how lucky I am. While HHT ain’t no fun, things could be so much worse for me. I am doing a major uplift of my life after several years of just hanging on, and it’s good to be reminded of my relative blessings. I did phone survey work for a psoriasis/eczema foundation and the stories I heard made me weep.
Youa re obviously a very tough hombre.
While the Ushers in Ushers syndrome appears to be the last name of a researcher who first identified the illness, I like to think of it as a folk name referencing the advantages of having deaf-blind church ushers who don’t hear the money hit the collection plate nor see when it is safe to pilfer bills from same.
“while driving into work at GM. Yeah, he gets to crash cars into the wall as part of his job! ”
Adds new meaning to “driving into work”.
“So I investigated it, it was too expensive, so then I built my own UV B light fixture for $400 and that, after 64 years of living hell, has made my skin behave itself! ”
More coincidence: I turned 64 this month. Not only does She still need me and feed me, but this is the year I plan to be able to return the favor with some major publishing success.
Happy Talk (Very unlike me not to post the original of such vintage treasure, but this Captain Sensible guy has a parrot and, it seems, lots of fun. Plus, the displayed lyrics show how the lyrics have standalone power.)
I don’t think I want to see a remake of this chestnut, though:
My father says that children keep growing,
Rivers keep flowing too.
My father says he doesn’t know why,
But somehow or other they do.
–They do! some how or other they do.–
A hundred million miracles,
A hundred million miracles are happ’ning ev’ry day,
And those who say they don’t agree
Are those who do not hear or see.
A hundred million miracles,
A hundred million miracles are happ’ning ev’ry day,
–Miracle of changing weather:–
When a dark blue curtain is pinned by the stars,
Pinned by the stars to the sky,
Ev’ry flow’r and tree is a treat to see,
The air is very clean and dry.
Then a wind comes blowing the pins all away,
Night is confused and upset!
The sky falls down like a clumsy clown,
The flowers and the trees get wet.–Very wet!–
A hundred million miracles,
A hundred million miracles are happ’ning ev’ry day,
And when the wind shall turn his face,
The pins are put right back in place!
A hundred million miracles,
A hundred million miracles are happ’ning ev’ry day!
In ev’ry single minute so much is going on,
Along the Yangtse Kiang or the Tiber or the Don.
A hundred million miracles!
A swallow in Tasmania is sitting on her eggs,
And suddenly those eggs have wings and eyes and beaks and legs!
A hundred million miracles!
A little girl in Chungking, just thirty inches tall,
Decides that she will try to walk and nearly doesn’t fall!
A hundred million miracles!
A hundred million miracles, a hundred million miracles,
A hundred million miracles are happ’ning ev’ry day!
My father says the sun will keep rising over the eastern hill.
My father says he doesn’t know why but somehow or other it will.
–It will! somehow or other it will.–Oh, we’re depraved vicious beasties, we homo saps. But we’re not without virtues.
SP fwiw, WES, I’d say your arrow hit its mark, assuiming that your aim was to console and inspire.
P.S. Can’t stop myself. For all that was wrong with the 20th Century and American dominance in particular, the era produced some of the finest dreams art could conjur and USA, at a time when the Melting Pot was still a swirl of color not the dreary grey of today’s phony rainbow of faux diversity, stood high on that stage:
“You learn something every day!”
btw, I wrote “I learn something every day” before reading your remark. Little copincidences make my day (and your average fiction plot).
“I find Thai culture very much to my liking. The language is daunting, but doable with willing teachers; the people.”
I’ve heard good things about the IndoChinese peoples in general. But then, they have a genuine culture percolated through millennia. America is a hothouse experiment in ambitious escapism.
“When editing, scroll down to this box and text;
Keep a log of this edit:Uncheck the box and your edit will be fine.”
Thanx. I learn something new every day.
Regarding climate disruption, remember when this album turned the non-academic mainstream music world inside out? If, back in 1938, Benny Goodman Band’s live Carnegie Hall performance of Sing Sing Sing provided the rimshot that was heard around the world, this song provided the bass solo that turned bassplayers from well-intentioned harmonic grounders best felt and not heard into the star of many bands:
“So eat a burger, stand in the middle of the road on a high hill in Aleppo with an umbrella.”
That sentence has a unique and curious charm. Like Kurt Vonnegut being channeled through a reanimated George Carlin. If I had a bucket list, fulfilling that sentence’s content would be on it.
“If one could manage the long flight of stairs to the 2nd floor restaurant, then you weren’t too drunk.
It was a favorite because the staff didn’t give a shit how drunk (or stoned) you were as long as you behaved yourself; we never got kicked out…”I have never been inside but heard a story or two. I plan to use it in a story someday, and am sad I wasn’t able to insult my body and mindt here in the glorious fashion it seemed to encourage.
Portland now is just another urban nightmare, an over-priced and over-crowded cram of people, money, and utopian delusions. But I’m glad to be here, and there an awful lot of sincerely kind people.
I live in Beaverton, so there is a healthy neo-redneck counterbalance and a residue of general old-school urban dirt and disarray to preserve my sanity.
When we first moved here, however, we stayed in a nicely provided company apartment smack on the edge of metastasizing Slabtown. If not for the vacated industrial property literally across the street from us, I would’ve had a rough go of it. But the industrial wasteland had genuine old-fashioned winos and such amid genuine rust and machinery that used to perform industrially meaningful work not directed by robots.
“My nose bleeds were so bad that my Mother, a nurse, would pack my nose with 5 foot long narrow strips of cotton coated with vasoline just to stop the bleeding! They stayed there for days before being removed.”
Horee sheeyit. The discomfort and depression of that is beyond my comprehension.
“I remember that visit very well! The doctor used the medical equivalent of an electrical soldering gun to burn the skin over the blood vessels! I got to smell my own burning flesh!”
My nosebleeds didn’t manifest seriously until my late 20s. I had, I dunno, 4-5 electro-cauteries, some with caustic agents as well. Yeah, smelling your nose burn is different.
Then we learned I have HHT and those rude electrocauteries had created scar tissue that only made the HHT worse as I grew old. Fortunately, by the, they were learning how to use lasers to gently bake the offending bleeders shut instead of searing them like steak.
I’d say I’m the luckier man in that my childhood was mostly carefree. I ran and played like any kid. It wasn’t until I settled in the arid West in the mid-80s (Yakima, WA, a natural resting place for lost vagaabonds such as I was) that the bleeding became significant.
We moved to Portland last year, once opportunity arose, for the chronic humidity, which really helps.
Three days plugged. (shudders)
One wonders if this will actually strengthen the Chinese people. After all, as America amply demonstrates, nothing degrades quite like an addiction to success.
I note:
“Professional firefighters represent just 16 percent of the 247,000 firefighters in France, with the remainder comprising volunteers and military personnel.”
France’s internal sructure has fully eroded. It can only collapse. When you fuck with firefighters, you fuck with serious trouble. They’ll have to remove the Velvelt Glove entirely now, revealing the Iron Claw, to maintain power, and that is merely a strategic retreat.
France has a knack for leading the radical way. After all, their nation is based on the kingdom of Charlemagne, who first made it clear that Europe was European not Roman.
Resent because the edit function sucks, like most things digital these days:
Perhaps a good place to survive a pandemic would be places where habibs are common apparel. More effective and elegant than plastic&paper face masks.
I will attempt to be moderate and what is called ‘reasonable’, and suggest that the kung flu will not become a sweeping killer like the Spanish flu, nor will it be contained. It will persist and make the rounds and add to the weight already dangerously sagging the rafters of modern civilization’s sheltering roof.
I suspect we’ll soon dispense with the absolute protection from disease transmitted by hand, that disposable latex gloves provide, and resume rigorous hand-washing with stern soap.
It makes me all itchy and scratchy (moderate reasonableness not the corona virus).
***
Less moderate but not necessarily unreasonable, I will ponder if dear Prince Andrew is following orders: keep your mouth shut. If he confesses to his own sins of privileged sex trafficking, said confession will want to leak onto others.
I wonder if he won’t come down with the flu and be quarantined, and if that flu won’t manage to kill him despite advanced medical treatment. I don’t see any harm in lining one’s chapeau with tin foil, although I think that the fashion potential of brainwave protective gear has been neglected.
But let’s get serious:
MIT tests tinfoil hat radio protection
I always wanted to see Dave Grohl in tinfoil. How about you?
I loved this:
“The helmets shielded their wearers from radio waves over most of the tested spectrum (YouTube user Mrfixitrick likewise demonstrates the blocking power of his foil toque against his wireless modem) but, surprisingly, amplified certain frequencies: those in the 2.6 Ghz (allocated for mobile communications and broadcast satellites) and 1.2 Ghz (allocated for aeronautical radionavigation and space-to-Earth and space-to-space satellites) bands.”
***
While the knee-jerk ‘Trump is bad/Obama-Dems were good’ tonality mars this otherwise nifty comic (I suppose the artist knows what sells to his primary audience), it is nonetheless nifty. The crow drawings are priceless, but then, I’m a big corvid fan:
***
Regarding Orlov’s blog: while his erudition and analysis are superb, he seems obsessively fond of vinegar as a mouthwash. His humor is pretty good but leans too heavily on sarcastic bite. But that’s not why I don’t subscribe to his blog.
I don’t subscribe to his blog because, when I did, I discovered that, as a moderator, he is heavy-footed, even an ass, in that regard, altho I suspect he’s mostly a mensch in the flesh. (And, while the articles are very good, the fun is in the comments section.)
One of the difficulties in being so very right so very often in so many ways, especially regarding things that are sacrosanct, taboo, and wrapped in normative tinfoil, is that one tends to succumb to the bitterness of ‘victorious defeat’: no matter how accurate your assessment is, the drumming of herd hooves will generally drown out your message.
Now that he wears a Russian Orthodox beard https://i.pinimg.com/originals/07/5b/15/075b15eff566af7fafae6b3b146bd683.jpg , I see him as an Old Testamental prophet of the curmudgeon variety, standing atop a city’s walls, hollering, “Woe unto Babylonistan! For you will not stop fucking sheep, and that’s why you all have the clap!”
I finally got some money coming in soon and will send some Raul’s way. Maybe enough for him to replace that worn-out cranial colander and replace it with something elegant, like this:
I wonder if there will be something like an Arabian Gandhi or such. Just idle speculation driven as much by the weirdness factor as by similarities between USA now/Britain 1930s-40s.
Regarding “good weather”:
“Rainfall from October to mid-November was as much as 300% above average.
Locusts thrive in wet conditions.
A single swarm can contain hundreds of millions of locusts.”Good weather is relative to inclusive fitness. Super good weather for locusts means bad weather for a species itself breeding like a runaway locust plague.
The problem with global climate disruption isn not so much the much-touted, supposedly terrifying consequences of climax results. By the time sea levels have risen to here or shrunk to there, ice caps shrunk to here or risen to there, a whole buncha people gonna die because our civilization requires as much external stability as possible. This is because we humans living within civilization are ridiculously unstable.
Like (segue alert). remember how outrageous it was that the Taliban was explosively destroying those Buddha statues in one of my favorite romantic locations? But we didn’t say much about the USA directly and indirectly stealing/bombing the fuck out of irreplaceable Syrian/Iraqi artifacts going back to the early Fertile Crescent’s Dawn of Western Civilization era.
What kind of crackpot species does that?
***
Everybody was kung-flu flighting… if the government let them.
***
It’s a shame the church I attend isn’t one of those End Times/ Rapture congregations. I could hear some godamighty Prepare Ye for the End pulpit braying if it were. Locusts! Plagues! War! Rumors of wars!
Waiting for some serious famine so we can all get jiggy with eschatology.
From the side of a Ukrainian Baptist Church in my former town of residence, Spokane:
It’s starting to become an icon. Back when, my skate-punk son and his buds enjoyed it as their private circle’s little joke.
But all things must pass. When I first visited Portland in 2004 for a laser zap inside my nostrils (I do this every year or so), the following still existed in its original deacadent glory as shown here:
Now it is gone, although dear old Chinatown still has a block or three of seriously seedy slum streets, bless it’s heart. Gotta have some place to warehouse drugs and hookers, I reckon.
***
Meanwhile, we are steadily being kicked out of the Middle East, and there ain’t a durn thing we can do about it except retreat to Saudi Arabia for awhile before going home, sulking like Great Britain yearning for their old queen:
***
One more thing. Someone expressed absolute dismissal of the Nazi death camp thing. While I fully agree that the Shoa PR Industry is real and pernicious, and that Zionists were a part of exacerbating the Jewish Problem in Nazi Germany, there’s no doubt that there were death camps as classically described. How many Jews were actually murdered this way, can’t say, and don’t care. A single death is a tragedy, and a thousand deaths is far too often a damn good business for some buncha creeps, far too many of them Jewish (and if that sounds Anti-Jewish, I recommend a head count of ethnic affiliations of the reigning neocons back in the early 21st century when torture became the new (old) norm.
DO eyewitnesses count?
I’d forgotten about the thing, just about. Fwiw, here is my definitive take on Donald Trump and why I’m kinda glad he’s the boss, current circumstances and choices being what they are:
Apparently, people tried to visit me via the aunicator system of a blog of mine that has been moth-balled forever:
“C’mon, make it plausible. No, China knew instantly, and how serious instantly, in a vast land of bureaucratic denial instantly, and responded with shock and awe instantly, which means they knew something.”
Makes sense to me.
I wonder if Russia’s response to this might serve as a coal mine canary bellwether. Lord I love that word. I love it so much I actually looked it up. I’d thought it was an archaically spelt term meaning something like ‘weatherbell’ which, once I stop to think about it, is dumb dumb dumb of me.
A bellwether is “the leading sheep of a flock, with a bell on its neck; an indicator or predictor of something.”
.”US Economic Confidence at Highest Point Since 2000 (Gallup)”
Most of us here remember the gasoline price hike of 2008. I still see this as the primary causative trigger that ended the derivatives-of-derivatives-of-derivatives greed festival burning out the hamster cage bearings of the economy at that time (only to be replaced by more of the same with mutant hamsters on steroids).
I recall a tv news article showing your typical white collar white dude (dockers, unbuttoned burtton-down shirt, no tie) filling up his gas hog SUV as a reporter asked him if he’d seen this coming.
“No,” he replied blithely, no hint of embarrassment, perhaps a teensy bit peeved at the question.
Everything about him spoke of boundless confidence in the New Economy (or whatever was the popular bullshit designation tag of the time). If anything, he probably believed it was market manipulation by greedy speculators rather than fundamental reality catching up and biting out tushies while folks debated silly but damning stuff like “Is torture OK?” and “Who should we bomb next?”
Then everything crashed, including the price of oil/gas/rubber hoses up yer noses.
***
When I read revisionist Holocaust history, I often imagine what it would have been like had Jesus Christ’s advent happened not two millennia ago but, say, 1939. Despite hpotographs, newsreels, eye witness accounts up the yin-yang, our addiction to bullshit would have obfuscated the facts so much that by now we would find it rational to believe that the whole thing was a Zionist plot.
This is to say nothing against nor for the holocaust post above. I keep my mind so open I tend to cause fits of agoraphobia in unsuspecting souls should I speak my mind at social gatherings (I remember those, vaguely;) ). The sad fact is that, once one has been lied to chronically and even systematically, one who is honest with oneself dinds it very difficult to know what or whom to believe
***
My. Someone named Chris seems to be upset over the links associated somehow with some article, he didn’t bother mentioning which. He uses a neologism, sinoboob, which I infer means something like ‘Chinese stupidheads’ or perhaps ‘people who are stupid concernning China’.
What is it about Sundays? Is it something in the aether?
Speaking of which, I wrote a wee prayer this pre-dawn that some of you might relate to:
“O lord, help me tame my restless mind. Not tame as a captive horse that lives in a stable bounded by a corral, but tame as in willing to come when I call if I respect it and share the ride together, that is pleased as I am at ride’s end with the day’s ramble.”
Y’all hold still a moment, ‘k? I wanna take a pitcher of yez with this little flashy thing. Just stare into the neuro-laser… POP!
This intrigues me. The history itself I have no quarrel with, although I feel that attempts to define in B&W terms attitudes about the Negro Problem/Slave Issue fail. A people blowing smokes up their single and collective arse-holes are ambiguous at best.
But it’s funny how both parties that wish to claim themselves as advocates of freedom have been anything but going back to when Jesus first learned to masturbate.
As if there was ever a ruler who sincerely advocated freedom. Leaders? Yes. But rulers aren’t leaders. Big diff. Rulers make rules. It’s in their definition. Leaders are beings that other beings follow because they believe in them and their cause.
“and then next thing you know this seemingly rational person is talking about the “lizard people at the earth’s core in power”
Well, after all, soneone has to be pulling Putin’s strings. It’s puppets, puppets, puppets all the way down.
I mostly stopped watching the show when Bernie folded in ’16. I knew the odds were on his being a loyal sheepdog when push came to shove, but I also knew that dogs go rogue and Bernie really seemed to be doing that back then, so I banged the gong for him pretty hard until he folded after the DNC predictably gave him the official shaft.
I didn’t expect Bernie to save the country but I saw how indies gathered around him, and indies are the only relic of moral sanity left in the USA’s pathetic plebescite. I didn’t grieve his political demise as much as one, including myself, might suspect, for the Russophobic reasons cited by Daniel Lazare above. Bernie’s weakest attribute as a candidate, for me, was his milquetoast acceptance of USA foreign policy, and Trump alone, iirc, was the only candidate who didn’t make the canard that Russia/Putin are evil incorporated the cornerstone of their foreign policy outside the usual, no longer sexy, who gives a fuck? War on Terror drivel except for Ron/Rand Paul, who are generally noninterventionist in their foreign policy, period.
By fall of 2016, I was living alone in the woods of Pend O’Reille County, WA for several months per a colossal implosion of my marriage (now wonderfully restored and renewed to a very happy place). A man with daily, often severe nosebleeds living alone in a tent in the woods should be worried about things like bears but this area is also where the Air Force conducts survival school training and bears stay away. Too much disruption including fake bombs and lots of chopper traffic.
When I came out of the woods in December, I stayed with a friend who was very ill and slept mostly around the clock with MSNBC or CNN on 24/7. I stayed away from that hypnosis but learned via the internet that Trump had actually maintained word-to-action consistency regarding Russia, something he has done consistently since, with some mild military farces to make it appear he isn’t retreating from Russian military influence (which we of course are, thank Allah).
For all his saying this and doing that, Trump has done a fine job of reassuring Russia they won’t have to use those hypersonic missiles on us, and I find that alone reason to keep him in office under the circumstances. It’s not like the government will be able to avoid the main consequences of its Century of Folly (beginning, I say, with McKinley and the Spanish-American War, in which we showed the world we weren’t content to be a post-chattel slavery apartheid state willing to slaughter native populations if they don’t properly please us but were now determined to carry it abroad, although the policy-makers behind Commodore Perry’s trip to Japan deserve honorable mention). But we might, just might, avoid demanding the rest of the world nuke us into oblivion.
If a certified lunatic can keep us out of nuclear conflict for awhile, I’ll vote for that. Not at the polls. I’m done with that quaint exercise in ritual magic. But I could stomach another 4 years of Herr Donald if it forestalls nuclear conflict until Skynet takes over.
Lord help us when the videotapes from Pedophile Island get loose and make the rounds, which seems almost inevitable with so much chain-letter blackmail going on.
Now, that said, if an actual Lizard Person should run for office, I will of course have to vote for that candidate. The only way to defeat the Lizard People is to subject them to the paralyzing petty apathetic hysteria of the American plebiscite.
For Raul. This entirely lacks the philosophical and spiritual depth of wonder that the dog reflection photo has, but it is just as startlingly weird and wonderful if poshlost cubed.
This is probably old news to y’all, but I’ve been mostly living in a cave these days. I’d read bits and snips here and there about how Bill Gates and his fellow Bezos seemed to be up to more good than bad, but this person gave me what feels like a proper skinny:
With A Last Name Like That, Who Am I To Argue?
“proper skinny” sounds like “full monty”
