No, this isn't hell. Hell is having to listen to supermarket music.
"Those who cannot remember George Santayana are condemned to misquote him." I asked a tour guide at San Simeon if the madonna above the main entrance of La Casa Grande was the one Dorothy Parker had written about, and he said, "Who's Dorothy Parker?"
307 followers 1 following 2,082 posts
view profile on Bluesky
No, this isn't hell. Hell is having to listen to supermarket music.
If Giuliani dies of his injuries, Trump will sign an Executive Order canonizing him as a saint.
I fondly recall policing up cottonwood fluff at Fort Sill in the spring of 1966.
If Giuliani dies of his injuries, count on Trump to sign an Executive Order canonizing him as a saint.
And if questioned by the press, just say "No condiments."
The Book of Durrow is a beautifully illuminated medieval book of the gospels. A 17th-century farmer used it to cure a sick cow by immersing it in water and giving the water to the cow. The effect on the cow is unknown, but the book was badly damaged. I think of this whenever I hear or read "RFK Jr."
It's something she caught inspecting public restrooms.
Is that just a misspelling of "immoral"?
You may have noticed that Trump is fat. And having noticed that, it may dawn on you why I wrote what I did. The capacity to notice things like that is called, in English, "a sense of humor." Many people don't have one, either because they were born without it or because it's been surgically removed.
There's a reason that Ralph Barton titled his history of the US God's country (1929). He writes, among other things, that the members of the sect established by Joseph Smith after being visited by the angel Moroni is called, to honor that event, Morons.
For those that haven't studied French, XIV is pronounced /fatorz/.
I wonder if Trump is aware that "tariff" is an Arabic word. No, actually, I don't. That was a rhetorical "I wonder."
I think it was in 2012 that the Washington Secretary of State sent out a voters' handbook prior to the election that year containing a 10-question quiz on US history. The "correct" answer to one question was that slavery was ended by the Emancipation Proclamation.
You just can't tell the difference between "decent" and "assed." Get the wax out of your ears.
Always with the apocalyptic language. Trump just got through saying that the US will be utterly destroyed if his tariffs are undone. Every time they predict The Rapture, I look around and fail to see chunks of the sky lying about the landscape. There must be something wrong with their picture.
Because my ETS fell on a Saturday, I served in the Army one year, 11 months, 29 days. When I retired as a federal civilian employee, I got credit for only 23 months of military service because my last month was a day short. So my pension is a few dollars less. They chisel you at every opportunity.
Albert Speer described himself as the only person who could be called a friend of Adolf Hitler, if Hitler had been capable of having friends. It was Speer who saved Germany from the total destruction ordered by Hitler — who had billed himself as its protector — toward the end of the war.
As individuals, humans have IQs ranging from idiotic to genius. As a collective, humans don't have the brains God gave to a goose.
That may be, but what Trump is planning is still ethnic cleansing.
The only reason we have any viable ocean fisheries in the US EEZ is that since 1976, their management has been regulated on the basis of scientific information provided by NMFS scientists. Without their guidance, food fish would have been replaced long since by trillions of jellyfish.
it's easy to distinguish between vaccinated and unvaccinated children just by looking at them. You can tell the difference by whether they seem to confirm your preconceived notions or not.
"Temporary relocation" is a euphemism for ethnic cleansing. Does anybody seriously believe that the gleaming golden hotels with TRUMP emblazoned on them are going to employ Gazans or that Gazans will be permitted to be within a ten-mile radius thereof? I don't.
Never mind that general law enforcement is not part of Noem's portfolio. Her remit includes immigration law enforcement, not the laws against burglary, fraud, and mopery.
I took a course in totalitarian government at Berkeley in 1960. One sentence from a lecture is burned in my brain, re Hitler's appointment of Hermann Göring as economics minister: "Göring knew as much about economics as a dog knows about astronomy." It comes to mind whenever I read or hear "RFK Jr."
Where does she get that figure? The NG has been in DC for twenty days. Is she comparing those three weeks with the previous three weeks? Three months? Three years? Darrell Huff's How to lie with statistics has been around since 1954. Some of us have read it and recognize bullshit when we see it..
…with a barrel of brain worms.
The Book of Durrow, a beautifully illuminated medieval book of the gospels, was used by a 17th-century farmer to cure a sick cow. He immersed the book in water, then gave the water to the cow to drink. The effect on the cow is not recorded, but the book was badly damaged. That's RFK Jr's model.
I won't settle for anything less than an angel with a flaming sword writing on the firmament in mile-high letters whatever this AI image portends. I'd really like it to be ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA etc. but maybe that's asking for too much.
The amount of time spent by soldiers picking up trash is an inverse measure of idle time. The more time spent picking up trash, the less actual work they have to do. The NG in DC obviously has nothing better to do with its time. I'm speaking from personal experience here. 2/2
"With the hell of war he's come to grips/policing up the filter tips," written by Tom Lehrer, is a poetic reflection of the reality that US soldiers spend a significant part of their time on police detail — "police" in the sense of "clean up." 1/2
I went to every home game at Berkeley in the fall of 1958, and then the Golden Bears went to the Rose Bowl for the first time in decades. In 1959 and 1960, I went to all the basketball games, and UC not only went to the NCAA, it won both years. Obviously, I was the deciding factor for both teams.
I was suspended from Twitter for writing that the Republicans were shooting themselves in the foot. This figure of speech was interpreted as advocacy of self-harm, and I got the axe.
I attached a round drawer pull to a length of clothes hanger wire and moved it back and forth under a ceiling light fixture. One of my cats sat still, looked up, and chittered at the drawer pull; the other chased the shadow and pounced on it tirelessly. One was a Realist, the other a Nominalist.
I'm afraid you're right.
Video games? What happened to blaming everything on same-sex marriage?
"Those who do not remember George Santayana are condemned to misquote him."
In Samuel Butler's satire Erewhon (1872), illness is a crime. Get sick, go to jail. Crime is an illness. Defraud people of their money, and you have to see a psychiatrist. Butler isn't usually thought of as a futurist, but we're headed for something similar to his satire.
Looks very tranquil. Time to send in the National Guard!
Don't jump, JD! Live is worth living!
But it's very lethal mulch!
"Join us…join us…"
I'm trying to work out the secret significance of clock time 5:44.
Not necessarily. I refer to Operation Mincemeat (1943).
In my boyhood, "JD" stood for "juvenile delinquent." But I guess that's not very cheerful.
But see Dave (1993).
It's bad enough that they arrested two firefighters. Worse, they lined up the entire crew — dozens of firefighters — and spent hours interrogating them, thus keeping them from doing their job. Someone has lost the plot when it comes to the purpose of government.
When does he start eating brains? (Although come to think of it, he may already have eaten the brains of millions of Americans.)
It took Francisco Franco forever to die (1975). One had the impression at the time that his doctors were making heroic efforts to keep his big toe functioning so that it could rule Spain. They buried him under tons of granite, reputedly to keep him from rising from the grave.
"Here's looking at you, Fed."
Why does he need a name tag on his shirt? So that if he gets lost, the police can get him home again? Or is he like the protagonist of Memento, who can't remember who he is without writing it on his skin? Do you really need a US flag on your clothing to be patriotic? So many questions.
One of my great-great-grandfathers was a slave owner (seven others were not); two of my great-grandfathers wore the blue (one of them a Southerner). I'm not ashamed of slavery — I had nothing to do with it. What shames me is our failure to deal once and for all with its lingering aftereffects.
The next time I get married to a woman with a $1.6 billion net worth, I'll make a point of telling her to be submissive.
I remember when skinny ties came in during the 1950s. We were advised we didn't actually have to buy a red tie: a short nosebleed would do the job.
"Extremely alarmed" is just one step above "troubled," which in turn is one step above "concerned." She has a way to go.
Trump would put ketchup on poutine.
It would be simpler for Trump just to annex Norway and award the Peace Prize to himself.
My sources tell me that Trump will soon sign an Executive Order filling DC grand juries with National Guard personnel.
Or as someone else* put it, there is no I in "needle." *me
RFK Jr's appointment to HHS Secretary was a reward for endorsing Trump in 2024. Now that he's served his purpose, he's disposable. Besides, Trump, for all his talk about bleach and Ivermectin, likes to take credit for the Covid vaccine; keeping an anti-vaxxer on the payroll conflicts with that.
Sarah Palin was prophetic. There really will be death panels. She just got the timing wrong.
What do "morals" have to do with history? And where does she get her statistics (2%, 98%)?
What does Portland being a sanctuary city have to do with its crime rate? Enforcement of immigration laws is indeed within the federal government's bailiwick, but enforcement of state law is not. Trump and his minions routinely conflate the two.
Hidden in a closet somewhere there is a portrait of RFK Jr that gets better looking with every passing day.
There is a third type of film, discussed by Carol Clover in her book Men, women, and chainsaws: gender in the modern horror film (Princeton University Press, 1992), in which a woman, exceeding the monster's capacity for homicide, emerges alive at the end; the terminus technicus is "final girl."
It would have to include a sandwich-throwing demonstration for the benefit of the jury, and the sandwich thrower would have to wear pink.
My stepfather slept with a pistol under his pillow, and when he went dotty, he built a fort in the driveway and sat in it all day long with a loaded rifle to defend his home in California from the Wehrmacht. Some people live in abject fear every minute of their wretched lives.
For all its faults, the US military has always been a source of colorful phraseology. I fondly remember my first sergeant defining "sissy" as "somebody who gets out of the bathtub when he has to take a leak."
Steven Soderbergh's Contagion (2011) was made with the active participation of the CDC, whose consultants on the film even reviewed dailies to vet them for plausibility. Speaking of history, that's what the CDC is as of this week.
Shumer isn't icumen in, lhude sing cuccu.
Dr. Houry is wrong. It isn't a "bat signal;" it's a *batshit* signal, used to call for help when the guy in charge has gone batshit crazy. It's a "Steve Marek, take the helm before 'Old Yellowstain' Queeg sinks the ship!" cry.
Trump ought to flood RFK Stadium and stage a naval battle there. Why is it I have to do all his thinking for him?
I am calling on the people of Hawaii to change the name of their state back to the Sandwich Islands to honor DC Sandwich Man.
This wouldn't have happened if Washington state raked its forests.
Look at the positive side. Our President is far more creative in his crusade to destroy the US than we gave him credit for.
I am calling on the people of Hawaii to change the name of their state back to the Sandwich Islands to honor DC Sandwich Man.
Trump is not only not playing 4D chess. He's playing 1D checkers.
Divine Right, primogeniture, and inbreeding got us idiot kings in Europe. So we came over here and instituted democracy, which has produced exactly the same result. Why the fuck did we even bother?
My daughter and her idiot boyfriend took the ferry to Victoria. He had weed on his person, and what do you know? the Canadians have sniffer dogs! She went ashore and spent the day sightseeing while he stayed aboard the ferry going back and forth like The Man Without a Country. I'm still laughing.
Tom Clancy's Moby Dick.
If Andrés gets the Nobel Peace Prize, Trump will annex Norway and give himself one.
www.oed.com/dictionary/p...
Policing up trash has always been military SOP when soldiers have nothing else to keep them busy. I once spent two days guarding a branch PX with a rifle at Fort Dix and another day at Fort Sill policing up cottonwood fluff because I was temporarily idled.
Jukes, Kallikaks, and Juke-Kallikak crosses.
Few people — even historians — are aware that the salami sandwich was invented by Themistocles while he was waiting for the Persian navy to sail into the trap he had set for them. Linguistic change over the centuries has changed "Salamis ambush" into "salami sandwich."
It's routine in Republican circles to blame Biden for everything that happened in 2020. Look at it as the political application of negative numbers.
It's clearly open sandwich season in DC.
Himmler was a chicken farmer. Miller is just chicken.
It's obviously open sandwich season in DC now.
I'm thinking that everyone has forgotten the election of 1930.
They're doing landscaping and trash removal because they have nothing else to do. The Army hates idle hands; there isn't any crime to suppress, so they get leaf-raking jobs. I once guarded a branch PX with an M-14 rifle for two days because I was temporarily out of work.
Somewhere there is a closet in which a portrait of Donald Trump is growing more handsome with every passing day.
George Soros ought to copyright his name and charge people for royalties when they use it in baseless accusations. My analysts tell me he could double his net worth in a couple of weeks.
Maybe the Trump administration could dissolve the population of DC and replace it with a population more to its liking. The current population could be deported en masse to Uganda, and the media could call it "Gazafication." Looks like a win-win to me.
They're doing landscaping and picking up trash because they have nothing else to do. In the Army, idle hands are given make-work jobs. I spent two days guarding a branch PX at Fort Dix with an M-14 and policed up cottonwood fluff at Fort Sill because I was temporarily out of actual work to do.
If "undersea drone" means an autonomous vehicle operating underwater, it would be undetectable by radar with or without wind farms, since water absorbs radar. Burgum is babbling about something he knows nothing about.
I took a year of mechanical drawing in high school and discovered block printing. Since then, I have block printed every letter, every examination, every application form because my handwriting is atrocious.
Does anybody have an insight into what getting "gas cans flowing faster" or the "annoying start/stop feature in vehicles" means, or is it just that the speaker has never driven a car in his life and has no idea what he's babbling about?
Yeah right, Charlie. Tell the lady with the $1.6 billion net worth that she isn't in charge.
My unit at Fort Sill underwent an Annual General Inspection in May when the cottonwood trees were trying to mate with each other, and the Battery Commander had the 250 soldiers under his command policing up the cottonwood fluff. It was kind of like King Canute commanding the tide to stop rising.
Trump could kill two birds with one stone by changing the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of Robert E. Lee.