"catapulted" during sex

A woman left paralysed after being “catapulted” to the floor during sex has lost a high court damages claim against the company that supplied her bed....
[Judge Barry] Cotter said he was not satisfied the bed was defective, adding: “It required a most unfortunate and unusual combination of positioning on the bed and movement which I do not believe would have been foreseeable by any reasonable person prior to the incident.”

I wonder if there are para-olympics for the sexually athletic... or a gold star for judicial decorum and restraint in describing the difficulties life can provide.

world chess championship

The reigning world chess champion, Magnus Carlsen, with Fabiano Caruana (right). Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA

The last time an American challenged for the world chess championship it was seen as an almighty clash of civilisations: west versus east, capitalism against communism, a cold war by proxy fought over 64 squares between Bobby Fischer and the Soviet Boris Spassky.
Chess has never been as cool or relevant since that epic contest in 1972. But at the launch of the 2018 world championship match between the Norwegian champion, Magnus Carlsen, and his US challenger, Fabiano Caruana – which begins in London on Friday – organisers promised that a global audience of millions would tune in for the most anticipated match in a generation.

Todd Snider

For whatever reason, I discovered/encountered Todd Snider for the first time today. And since it's a political season, here's a not-necessarily-typical political musical rumination:

a press briefing to which no one came

Does anyone else wish, as I do vaguely, that the White House press corps might start defending the body politic it claims to defend by declaring such-and-such a day a time when no one in that press corps would show up to one of the so-called White House "press briefings?"

Yes, declare a single day of surrender to Donald Trump and his accusations of "fake news." If it's all fake news, there is no need for news outlets to attend the "briefings" that are already as sanitized as a monthly tampon. Let press spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders lecture the ether. Let Trump have his way ... but how would he disseminate it? No matter -- he knows the truth that lies so far from the "fake news" he can ballyhoo. Let him ... indeed help him ... speak the 'truth.' His truth.

But wait -- his "fake news???"

Hell, it's just one day.

If the press corps simply didn't show up one day ... well ... quoi donc? What then? The obligatory news cycle would be reduced and hence the "fake news" with it. Citizens might be allowed to breathe free of a news industry that could probably use a breather of its own.

Is it possible that the best defender the public weal might have is a press corps that simply refused to be party to an on-going fiction?

True, leaving all the seats empty at the "press briefing" might leave news organizations confronting the issue of how to earn their daily bread -- where's the income stream? -- but a day on behalf of the body politic might look good on the media's curriculum vitae.

"What would happen if they announced the war and nobody came?

"What would happen if they announced the press briefing and nobody came?"

Roald Dahl and anti-Semitism

Plans to celebrate the life of Roald Dahl with a commemorative coin were rejected because of concerns about the author’s antisemitic views, it can be revealed.
Official papers obtained by the Guardian using freedom of information laws also disclose that the Royal Mint dropped proposals to issue a coin to mark the centenary of Dahl’s birth because he was “not regarded as an author of the highest reputation”....
In 1983, against a backdrop of widespread criticism over Israel’s invasion of Lebanon a year earlier, Dahl told the New Statesman: “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews. I mean, there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”

[A pretty savvy friend of mine once observed that one of the probable (if lesser) reasons Hitler targeted the Jews for vitriol and horror was that the Jews claimed to be "the chosen," a label Hitler reserved for his Aryans. There could not be two "chosens," so something, obviously, had to give.]

I like Roald Dahl's output. "Nonpareil" might be a word for those works. Imaginative, quirky, and lying in some hidden valley between fairy tale and real life.

But my teeth itch when someone starts running the "anti-Semitic" schtick. No where have I seen the word defined or delineated. It just seems to morph from person to person with little or no recourse to a meaning other than the speaker's preference. The phrase "lack of generosity towards non-Jews" hits a mark for me. Not one quibble about Judaism -- and by extension Israel -- is allowed without arousing the door-slammer, "anti-Semitism." Why?

Why is there no agreed-upon definition that would allow for some reasonable discourse? Is it anti-Semitic to ask why Israel feels no compunction about using live ammunition when facing down Palestinian protesters wielding stones and knives? Even the most lawless American police force can do better than that. When it comes to Judaism, too often there seems to be a presumption of righteousness -- no need to explain or define ... our cause is just and long-suffering and woe betide the anti-Semite who questions or even inspects the particulars.

What, specifically, constitutes anti-Semitism? Will someone define it clearly? Why is it not anti-Semitism when Israel dispossesses Arabs who might prefer to remain in their homes or villages? No, never mind my particulars, just lay out a clear definition ... with positive and negative aspects duly noted.

Roald Dahl is a hell of a writer who, for my money, deserves kudos, even if he doesn't need them. It is conceivable to me that he is an anti-Semite, though not in the raucous-disparagement-sense that hangs from the word when used by an American.

Good and (maybe) bad -- is there any person or subject that does not contain both and that cannot be leavened by a decent definition of any and all aspects of the discussion? A "one-sided discussion" is an oxymoron ... and moronic into the bargain.

let things be light and fluffy and weightless and clear.

OK, I am a racist.
OK, I am a sexist.
OK, I am a bully.
OK, I am whatever other rubric anyone might care to lay at my conversational doorstep.

But it occurred to me today that it would be nice to take five minutes in some nearby day and acknowledge the fact that it is possible neither to accuse nor to be accused, that there is no coat hook whatsoever on which to hang the latest coat.

I mean, doesn't anyone else get sick of it all? All these teachers and priests and actors and politicians shriveling like a caterpillar on a hot griddle ... disappearing themselves not in shame but in the knowledge that once the accusation is made, they're fucked and there is no point in prolonging the agony.

Well, take back what rightfully belongs ... a place in which accuser and accused are erased for some small period of time. Let things be light and fluffy and weightless and clear.

Poof -- just like that.

Poof -- just for a little while.

Go ahead. No one will know.

I won't tell if you won't. It can be our little secret.

photos in the Guardian

A strange and strangely-evocative photo array from the Guardian includes:

A declaration of independence for the Republic of Finnskogen takes place every July. It is a three-day celebration, complete with an outdoor play 

Portrait of Rahilii, a healer and clairvoyant living in the Swedish part of Finnskogen. Forest Finns are often associated with magic and mystery

John Oliver on 'immigration' politics

Of all the issues and lies being considered in tomorrow's mid-term voting, I find none more compelling than the idea of taking children from their parents as a point of political leverage:

Bernie Glassman dies

A friend sent along email word that Bernie Glassman (Roshi Tetsugen) died Sunday/yesterday at 79. Wikipedia entry is here and Tricycle notes are here. Wikipedia, while hasty, is a bit more abundant.

I feel, somehow, that I should feel more, but the plain fact is, I don't especially. Bernie was a slender thread in my memory cloth ... a part of the past. I met and chatted with him a couple of times in my Zen adventuring, but I didn't take to him much. (Full disclosure, I was no doubt an even thinner thread (if thread at all) in his memory banks.)

Bernie had long been filed in my mind under "macher" -- a hubba-hubba business man whose teacher, Taizan Maezumi Roshi, was said by rumor to be pleased as punch when Bernie moved himself from Taizan's West Coast and took his business interests with him. Bernie became an unqualified success on the East Coast. True tales, false tales, true rumors, false rumors, true labels, false labels, Zen labels, no-Zen labels ...

Bernie is a small thread in my memory weave. Another thread down. He once, when I mentioned wanting to change my Dharma name, offered to do exactly that. "I can do that," he said. But I demurred with a thank you. Somehow he didn't feel right/credible to me.

I guess I would like to feel something today because I would like to feel something or something more about my own sometimes energetic years embroiled in Zen practice. I admired Bernie's work in the market places of the world -- a lot of earthy stuff -- but..... It's hard to take up enthusiasms for my own past: Perhaps that excuses my inability for enthuse for Bernie's.

I have no doubt he did good stuff. Probably bad stuff too, since it comes with the territory. But I don't much care except to the extent that another thread in the weavings of my past has been removed. My palette of memory is now missing another small bit of hue.

I hope he is happy ... the same hope I have for anyone who has joined the majority. I am mildly weakened, but I suppose it's not the end of the world. From color to tinting to sepia to black-and-white -- that's the way things go these days.

Guardian photo

A photo from the Guardian web site:

Coast and marine winner: Storm Gull (Lesser black-backed gull), New Haven, East Sussex. 

Photograph: Craig Denford/BWPA 2018

what day of the week did you say?

If even an intellectual can know that naming the days of the week is mere convention, it can't be rocket science. And yet it is so strong a convention that I continue to marvel and flutter at the recognition that I have forgotten what day of the week it may be. You might think I'd be a-twitter that I had remembered and not that I had forgotten.

Today is Sunday, but of course it's not really Sunday except by social convention. Social convention weaves us together, so convention has some peaceful purposes. But still, you might think we could keep things honest, with or without social convention. Let us bond and cling and hug, perhaps, but "Sunday" is not actually Sunday, right?

And by extension, I am the amalgamation of my conventions -- conventions that make me socially acceptable, perhaps, but not assuring any sort of actual-factual truth. In a conventional sense, I am Sunday -- I am I -- but must this recognition eradicate or dispose of the facts? I don't think so. A pulsing and insistent convention is just that. But the fact that it is "just that" needn't necessarily turn its nose up to the fact that Sunday is not precisely Sunday any more than I am actually I.

Increasingly, these days, I have to check in with someone or some computer thing to recall my social convention. It's Sunday, I am informed. OK, no need to worry. I am on terra firma ... except that the terra firma, while being terra, is much less than firma.

I guess all of this jibber-jabber takes root in the fact that daylight saving time is about to reverse course in the wee hours of tomorrow morning: Clocks will be set back an hour to accommodate the farmers of yore.

"Tomorrow" -- another social convention that's hard to break away from however intellectually obvious it may be. I am the sum of my conventions and my conventions need readjusting.

autumn winds

It is hard not to want to personalize the wind that seemed to descend with pinpoint purpose on the Tree of the Hanging Squirrels in my neighbor's yard. Yesterday its not-really-vermillion (but I like the word "vermillion") leaves (it's a Japanese Maple) were there. Today the ruddy-reds are all but gone ... with the wind. The tree is all-but nekkid with the coming of a ground-zero wind that seemed to "do it on purpose."

What link this has to other hanging-chad thoughts in my head is not entirely clear. It's in the same head. Maybe that's my excuse:

Those chads include:

1. I wonder what would happen if what happened in the second grade were fast forwarded to today. Back then, it was an occasional bit of tom-foolery for one student to put a literal thumb tack on another student's chair; for the victim to be victimized (ouch!); and for life to move on without a backward glance.

Everyone just sucked that one up. It was part of the second-grade agenda. Analysis or adult lectures were the furthest thing from anyone's mind: There was stuff that hurt in life and that's just the way things were -- even a kid (even the victim) knew that... joke or no joke. Making a touchy-feely federal case out of it was for nitwits. Today, of course, we'd probably need a TED-talk bit of psychoanalysis to squelch and explain and improve. Let's form another study group. Everyone deserves to be safe. Everyone wants to suppress the fact that life isn't safe ... and even a kid knows that. OK ... let's talk it to death.

2. My left index finger has an x-worth of three scars on the outermost phalanges. The scars bear witness to the fact that in the fourth-grade, the boarding school I was at did not frown on kids carrying knives. By knives, I mean sheath knives. I mean that over time more than one of the knives I owned reached from my belt line to the raw hide tie just above my right knee. I mean a knife ... not some dinky pen knife. I carried more than one such sheath knife as the years passed -- a real knife. I carried it not least because bales of hay needed to be cut open during barn chores. Or maybe mumbletypeg. Or throwing it at a tree. But there were accidents and often I was the victim of my own accidents ... and hence the X of scars today. One of those scars, I believe but don't know, cut into a tendon. A slight lump remains together with the scars.

That, like the tack on a seat, was the price of doing business ... the price of being alive. No one ever threatened anyone else with a knife that I knew of and I think every student would have been surprised if such an event occurred. Today, of course, we need to mull and discuss and make life safer for little Johnny or Sally. Oh yes -- girls carried sheath knives as well if they wanted to. No one blinked or looked askance. It was just the lay of the land. Accidents happen -- hell, life happens.

Just mumbling and muttering and hanging the chads of no particular connection.

Trump awaits Netanyahu tutorial?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump on Friday backtracked from his suggestion a day earlier that U.S. troops sent to the U.S. border with Mexico would be free to fire on migrants who throw rocks at them, saying that rock-throwers would only be arrested.
“They won’t have to fire. What I don’t want is I don’t want these people throwing rocks,” Trump told reporters outside the White House. “If they do that with us, they’re going to be arrested for a long time.”

Won't people just cut poor ol' Trump some slack?! He hasn't yet had much practice in doing what Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu and his minions have done routinely to the Palestinians for years.

When I was a kid, there was a wry bit of praise/disparagement that ran, "Slicker' 'n snail snot."

all in all, this morning

Ralph Steadman art

Even as U.S. President Donald Trump stirs up an unconstitutional stew (“This is an invasion,” he said) as regards the migrant caravan making its way through Central America en route to the Texas border, so I find myself swept up in the diminution of the flying squid catch in Japan.

It's not that I balance one human tragedy against another, but has something to do with individual suffering and statistics. Generations of comprehensible Japanese families are swept up in the loss of a living that derives from the sea. Human beings. The caravan, at 7,000 or 2,500 or whatever the guesstimated number is today, is made up of individuals but the mass seems to oil the way towards a statistical sweep of the generalizing hand.

I wonder if those who don't see human adventures as being composed of human beings find it easier to bring a political twist to the discussion. Or, as Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was alleged to have said, "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic." 

Trump is constitutionally incapable of imaging other, individualized human beings. The caravan is a "national threat," a statistic against which he will deploy -- either by optics or reality -- the National Guard.

The loss of flying squid and those it affects is ... well, affecting, in ways I can get my mind around.

Oh well, this is leaving me confused about what I am trying to say. I did read the flying squid story. I didn't read all of the several caravan stories on display today.

Lazy as charged, I suppose.

fake news from the realms of fake news?

Passed along in email ... it's so stupid it beggars the imagination that even a Trump supporter could have thought it up, let alone created it:



Honestly, I can't figure out ... I'm left gobsmacked ... wubba-wubba.

"The Spoon Lady"

This morning I was distracted from Trump, distracted from horror and bloodshed, distracted from lie heaped upon lie, distracted from war and hunger and dessication ... and instead read pretty thoroughly a Washington Post story (amorphous around the edges for me, but still interesting) about The Spoon Lady and her fellow musician.



Playing the spoons is not new to my vocabulary, but the adventure and struggles and observations of the article sunk their hooks in.

lobster boom, lobster bust

Ted Ames, a former commercial fisherman who became a scientist and helped found the Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries, is worried about lobstering’s future here.

The thriving crustaceans have created a kind of nautical gold rush, with some young lobstermen making well into six figures a year. But it’s a boom with a bust already written in its wake, and the lobstermen of the younger generation may well pay the highest price. Not only have they heavily mortgaged themselves with pricey custom boats in the rush for quick profits, they’ll also bear the brunt of climate change – not to mention the possible collapse of the lobstering industry in Maine as the creatures flourish ever northward.

It's nice to read something about people with an honest profession, whatever the dangers.

choosing life companions

Of all the companions anyone might choose in life, I vote for attention and responsibility. Setting aside the snuggle-bunny philosophies of classroom discussion, these two, while not perfect, are as close as I can figure to something like common sense.

This thought dropped in on me again last night as I watched a documentary about the treatment/internment of Nisei in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on Dec. 7, 1941. The attack prompted a willy-nilly, outraged and in some sense understandable rounding up and interning of anyone who looked Japanese at the time of the attack.

I watched the show and felt my 20/20 hindsight kicking in.

Every sweeping and sometimes 'democratic' action has collateral damage. Innocent or guilty, a generalized guilt was imputed to those linked in any way to the perfidious Japanese. Mob rule... if we all agree, that's democratic; democracy is a good thing; therefore interning those tarred with the 'enemy' brush deserved it ... no need to think about it.

I found myself, not for the first time, suspecting egregious agreement. Easy in hindsight ... though it did make me wonder a bit about the Me Too movement of late or the clerical abuse in the Roman Catholic church, among others. So much that is innocent and beyond undoing is thrown to the wolves in an effort to punish the guilty. Lord knows the pain is real and wracking, but is that an excuse for forgetting a variety of less-crystal-clear backgrounds? ... as for example that the bird-dance of sex is, well, fun or part of the human skein ... yes, yes ... and potentially cruel and manipulative.

So on the one hand, I distrust what often passes for democracy. Someone's got to straighten out this easy-peasy group hug.

And that someone is, as often as not, those group-hugging in the matter of exclusivity. Dumb-bunny hoorahs need a few smarts and there is always someone around to claim those smarts ... often to the point of demagoguery and dictatorship.

So, on the other hand, I distrust exclusivity and smarts.

As a personal matter, as I say -- not just as a classroom philosophy. Everyone would like a rock-solid solution and direction, but it simply does not exist: You cannot embrace the honey if you cannot likewise embrace the raw wrecking ball of the shit. Those laying claim to exclusivity -- America is the best; smart is better than dumb; a college education counts; a 17-year-old war in Afghanistan is good for a few more years, etc. ... ah, a rock-solid support and applause section in which participants seldom do the bleeding.

Looking back on the Nisei and their travails, I am once again horrified. This...is...wrong. But so many agree that suddenly democracy/mob rule/man is a social animal is suspect. And likewise suspect are those who toot their own Pied Piper horns: "We'll make it better/kinder/more compassionate ... maybe."

I dislike the stupidities that hurt others, which, as often as not, means the intelligently-confected bits of wisdom. Winston Churchill (is often said without proof to have) observed, "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the rest" in an effort to cover the collateral damage that comes with every good and caring idea. It didn't work.

Bit by bit, I slip back to my own best (which is not to say it is best) experience: Attention and responsibility are the best companions. To agree is OK. To disagree is OK. But to agree merely because others agree is highly suspect and is bound to leave you in tears. Naturally, an assured (winner's) payoff is longed for when taking up a cause or course of action. I want to be at peace with my own oh-so-peacefully-inclined decisions. Gimme the silver bullet. Gimme plaudits and hugs.

But only attention and responsibility can do that ... and that not fershur. If things are a crap shoot, it's better to make it your own crap shoot and not just some warm and fuzzy classroom crap shoot. True, it's exhausting. True you can never get it "right." But you can stand a little straighter for having owned what you have chosen to own ... the action from which there is no turning back.

Yes, I do things because I think they are right. But likewise, I do things -- often the very same things -- that I know are wrong.

coal miners back Democrats

Is it possible that Trump supporters are getting it and that talk is cheap?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The top U.S. coal miners union has put a larger share of its campaign donations behind Democrats ahead of the Nov. 6 elections than in 2016, as dimming hopes for a coal industry revival led by President Donald Trump reinforce fears about the safety of worker pensions.
The United Mine Workers of America has donated nearly 84 percent of its money to Democratic candidates and committees in national races, according to a Reuters analysis of campaign finance data. That is a roughly 20-point jump from 2016, when Trump courted coal miners with promises of an industry comeback....
While the Trump administration has rolled back some environmental protections in its first two years, the promise of a coal comeback has yet to be fulfilled.

Instead of the war chant directed at Hillary Clinton -- "Lock her up!" -- perhaps a new chorus and signage will read on behalf of the Liar in Chief: "Full of shit!" Just because someone is stupid doesn't mean they have to be stupid.

a little Burma Shave doggerel

Sleep and sleep
And sleep some more.
What is now is
What was yore.
Not much difference
At the core
Less to work with,
More to soar.
Lambs are bleating,
Lions roar.
Things implode
In neither-nor.

Quoth the raven, "Burma Shave."

getting acquainted with "mook"

Reading a pretty good cop-shop novel called "The Force," I run across the word "mook."

"Mook" seems to mean a show-off, an asshole, an incompetent loudmouth ... something along those lines. Slang being the apex of any language from where I sit, a part of me wants to incorporate "mook," to learn its appropriate uses and not just run around like some daft teen who has discovered the word "fuck."

But there are so many meanings and permutations to "mook" that I am not sure I am swift enough to catch up with its eddies and waves.

Maybe that makes me a mook.

Anyway, I like its flavor and leanings ... mook.

good worker

Yesterday's plopping rain drops -- drops that seemed to beg for a degree or two more cold so they could turn into sloppy snow -- have moved on today. Splunge, splunge, splunge -- the non-word tickles across my mental tongue. Skies are grey today. Lowering. But the splunge is elsewhere, I guess.

Out back, my neighbor Joe's son Matt has been doing a good job shoring up the deck I no longer have the wherewithal to attack. The uprights are slip-sliding off the concrete pilings. A good job means he is thinking of the best options, the ramifications of cost, and a willingness to do well what he promised to do at all. Thinking on my behalf and then delivering -- that's a good worker.

I am at pains to pay him well for a job I am pleased with -- a job in the middle of a middle-class-and-better community that construction workers are not shy about gouging. None of the work is exactly rocket science, but those around here willing to make rocket science out of simple repairs seems unending.

It's happy-making to find a good worker and not just someone with a cap-toothed smile and a fruit suit who talks about a project and uses phrases like "moving forward" ... but lacks the understanding/willingness/sweat glands that go with a hammer.

robots to make robots

Humanoid robot YuMi conducts the Lucca Philharmonic Orchestra performing a concert alongside Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli (unseen) at the Verdi Theatre in Pisa, Italy September 12, 2017. REUTERS/Remo Casilli/File Photo

Was there ever a question that this was in the offing?

ZURICH (Reuters) - Robots will make robots at a new ABB (ABBN.S) factory in China, which the Swiss engineering group said on Saturday it plans to build for $150 million in Shanghai as it defends its place as the country’s largest maker of industrial robots.
The factory, located near ABB’s China robotics campus, is due to be operating by the end of 2020 and will produce robots for China as well as for export elsewhere in Asia. China is ABB’s No. 2 market after the United States.

the 0.00215384615385% immigrant caravan

Lost in the racist subtext of a Central American caravan of migrants to the U.S. border these days is the simple math NYTimes columnist David Brooks referenced tangentially on the Public Broadcast System last night ... we'll survive such an influx he said. I looked up the numbers:

The caravan numbers are put at something like 7,000.

The population of the United States is 325+ million.

Donald Trump and his allies have referenced -- and will continue to do so, I imagine -- the illegal immigrants (but suggesting that the only crime of the caravan is being poor and brown) who may pepper the caravan stew. Like the illegal voting that barely exists in the U.S. and yet is constantly used as a touchstone by Democrat-wary Republicans who fear the voting proclivities of minorities ... BLOCK THAT VOTE!... gerrymander them out of existence; require an ID that is complex to get; one-man-one-vote means white men and right-thinking one-women.

Donald Trump has labeled the caravan a national emergency worthy of calling up the National Guard ... purely in a support role, of course, since only the Congress can authorize a military action of this sort: Rile up the Trump supporters who live in the United States, a country of 325 million. Get your gun! "Defend" your country!

Reuters has noted a surge in Republican spending on mid-term election advertising that references immigration.

Seven thousand into a pool of 325 million.

And perhaps there are a few devious apples in the bunch. So what? We've let crooks in in the past ... look at the Kennedy clan, the Irish, the Italians, the Jews. Seven thousand people, most of whom want to work and be secure and bring up their families ... but 325 million cannot accommodate them? True, they speak other languages. True, they are largely other colors. And there are probably a share of drug-dealers and other criminals, but even if a perfect wall existed, the United States would already have its quotient of those.

Seven thousand into a pool of 325 million. That's 0.00215384615385%

And Trump supporters, if I had to guess, would be people who counted themselves as "Christians." Christianity, the last time I looked, is based in "caritas," a word sometimes too loosely translated as "charity" or "kindness." Please tell me how all the anxiety about immigrants, whether manufactured or home-grown, is not largely based in a racism that is unwilling to take responsibility for its leanings.

I wouldn't be happy having to whine with some liberals, "Can't we all just get along?" But there is no whining about the math and no whining necessary about history.

But whining about stupidity and the kind of bonfirey agitation that Trump and his followers dance around and promote?

I woke up this morning wanting to tip my hat to Donald Trump for inspiring some poor schlub to create a series of explosive devices sent to left-leaning high-profilers. My only complaint is that the apparent perpetrator was captured so easily because he was careless in his creations. If his efforts had been a little more wily, the what-did-you-expect outcome that can be laid at Trump's doorstep might stay in the news longer.

Immigrants are brown and they're illegal. Nuff said, I guess when it comes to supporting Donald Trump. They are fleeing what Trump has referred to as "shithole" nations and will turn the U.S. into something similar....

If Trump doesn't beat them to the punch.

looking back, I guess

From my constricted and increasingly-backward-looking point of view, it is a time of revisions and nudgings that don't sit very well.

-- Tattoos are ascendant with more and more people getting more and more of them. I'm still stuck marveling that people would actually wear shirts that advertised the shirt-makers ... Izod Lacoste, Under Armor, or whatever. Suddenly my identity is not good enough. My tattoo helps me talk louder and therefore more convincingly.
-- TV offerings include more and more survival-mode activities like fishing, hunting, making shelters. Which in turn suggests that hunting a fishing skills may be necessary in a financially-divided population.
-- The word "fuck" and its various permutations is increasing exponentially on various cop-show dramas.
-- Bare breasts are becoming routine as the line between porn and entertainment blurs. Who's got a clue that sexy isn't what you can see, but what is covered up?
-- Wan, harried and conflicted characters gain more and more traction on story-telling adventures. It's truer to life, to be sure, but many of the wan look a lot like the other wan's... same as with the previously well-appointed stars.
-- Marriage still pulls people in but increasingly spits them out as well ... a "blessed" union is a quaint and simultaneously magnetic notion. A resting place, a safe place is increasingly a dangerous constrictor as well ... just like always.
-- Religion takes a hit even as loneliness -- inspired by the likes of Facebook on the internet -- swells.
-- Everybody has rights, especially if that somebody is me.

Oh well, my kids will catch the brunt of it. As the playwright Dylan Thomas once wrote more or less, "Time passes. Listen! Time passes."       

autumn leaves

fall foliage as once

Right around Oct. 10 used to be the time when the leaf-peepers descended on my neck of the New England woods. The hills would be alive with yellows and oranges and still-a-bit-greens and Hallmark calendar photographers would be out in force. A barn or small corral would be backstopped by a panoply of homespun color.

My wife and I took a drive the other day in search of leaves to photograph and send along to my son who is living in Georgia. They weren't there. There were yellows and browns and a spotting of evergreens, but the tourist-friendly vistas could not be found.

The color has, as it seems, drained away.

bombs added to balmy political times

Pepe Le Pew

It smells somehow callow -- a series of bomb threats against left-leaning politicians/players reported yesterday [10/24/18]. The threats were apparently short-circuited by canny federal watchdogs. None of the alleged explosive devices went off. But the collective announcement ratcheted up the tensions infusing a feeding-frenzy interest in the mid-term congressional elections in November.

Who benefits from bombs?

Who benefited?

It's not yet clear.

Bartolomeo Vanzetti (left) and Nicola Sacco.

Are we tip-toe-ing up to a latter-day version of Sacco and Vanzetti? ... hang-first-adjudicate-later.

And yet the fact that no explosive device went off suggests a half-baked plan intended to frighten but not actually hurt anyone. Alternatively, it speaks of stupidity. The whole thing seems to point to a need for centralized power.

NEW YORK (AP) — The discovery of pipe bombs targeting prominent Democratic politicians and CNN is raising the threat of election-season violence largely unknown in the U.S. — and prompting uncomfortable questions about the consequences of leaders’ increasingly vitriolic rhetoric.
Coming two weeks before midterm elections, the thwarted attacks Wednesday caused renewed soul-searching — and finger pointing — about whether President Donald Trump has fanned passions to dangerous levels. Democrats swiftly pointed to his remarks seeming to condone violence against reporters and belittling political opponents, including some apparently targeted by the devices. Trump decried all political violence and issued a broad call for unity.

Trump's divisiveness has been palpable so a call for unity basically means to vote for him and his agenda. His supporters more often than not take his word as writ. Life is easier when no proof is adduced and your point man ... well ... points: "Drain the [political] swamp!" "Lock her [Hillary Clinton] up!" In short, fuck 'em all -- listen to me. And the excuses run rampant when criticisms arise -- "well, he didn't exactly mean that. We know what he means and he's right because we agree with him."

But if you really wanted to deliver a pipe bomb, wouldn't you be more circumspect? The internet that may tell you how to build a bomb probably offers wily instruction about how to sidestep detection. Wouldn't you think? Don't make large-scale purchases in one place ... with a credit card ... etc.? No need to be dumber than you already may be... which suggests haste and carelessness of the sort that those who are merely angry might display. As I say, it smells callow and thereby, perhaps, useful to someone. "That'll show 'em!" "Make America great again!" "I'm so angry, I must be right!"

It is a confusing and on-edge-putting time. No one is ashamed. Everyone else is to blame. Resentment and victim-hood -- not bitcoin -- is the common currency. A drained swamp needs re-people-ing.

It is hard to remove the skunk's scent once s/he sprays you.

PS:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump said on Thursday [today, 10/25/18] he was “bringing out the military” to protect the U.S. border as a caravan of Central American migrants continued a slow trek through Mexico toward the United States, but provided no details....
“I am bringing out the military for this National Emergency. They will be stopped!” Trump wrote on Twitter, referring to the migrants.

As a matter of curiosity, I wonder how many legal Hispanic-origin immigrants will be scared off voting (often Democrat) for fear of federal reprisal. The "illegal voting" in the United States is demonstrably minuscule:

Sensationalist claims have circulated this election season about the extent of voter fraud, with some politicians going so far as to tell voters to fear that this November’s election will be “rigged.” Because electoral integrity is one of the elements necessary to making America the greatest democracy in the world, claims like this garner media attention, and frighten and concern voters. But putting rhetoric aside to look at the facts makes clear that fraud by voters at the polls is vanishingly rare, and does not happen on a scale even close to that necessary to “rig” an election.

 

Trump Tyranny is on a roll ... get used to it

As President Donald Trump continues to turn America into a "shithole nation" he once excoriated, a migrant caravan moves north through Central America ... headed for the United States. Trump suggests the Democrats may have facilitated the caravan's efforts, but there is no doubt that that march benefits Republicans who may think building a wall along America's border with Mexico (the caravan's likely exit) is what the United States should have done long since ...  à la Trump's encouragement.

Racism is never far from the mid-term elections due next month and cranking up Trump's sub rosa racism helps to keep uncertain immigrants who may have the right to vote away from the polls where they might be labeled and perhaps, under a Trump regime, sent back to lands they fled. Trump sends the message: "Blacks and browns, stay home. Don't even think of voting Democrat or for anything remotely smelling of labor improvements."

The Democrats are keen to win back a majority in the House of Representatives. They may ballyhoo a "blue wave," ("blue" indicates Democrats or so-called liberals, while "red" denotes Republicans and so-called conservatives) but never put it beyond Democrats' reach to screw up their own advantages. And re-balancing the Senate is even a more implausible likelihood.

The Trump Tyranny has to be ranked, on my odds chart, as an unqualified success. As was once the rallying cry, "Hoch der Kaiser!"

It is hard not to agree with the notion that the press is interested in funding the press rather than 'preserving democracy' or some similar high-flying-but-dimly-defined principle. Ad revenue is down, fewer people read, much less think; and the volume-spells-veracity touchstone has taken root with two years of Tyrant Trump at the helm. Who but Trump could manufacture as much "fake news" as he generates ... and then debunks as if he had not manufactured it? As of Aug.1, 2018, with 558 days of Trump rule, the president has made 4,229 false or misleading claims -- an average of 7.6 claims per day, according to the Washington Post. And...

Judy Woodruff (pbs News Hour) I should say that ...The Toronto Star ... keeps track, has been for many months keeping track of the president's statements. There are other news organizations doing that.

Did you have any idea when you were assigned to cover the Trump White House that you would be doing something like this?

·         Daniel Dale (Toronto Star bureau chief):

No.

So, I started this in September 2016, two months before the election, because he was just being so incessantly dishonest then as well, that I thought that there needed to be a way to focus attention on this, separate from the day-to-day news coverage that I was doing.

And then, like many people, I erroneously thought that Hillary Clinton would win the election, and that I would be freed from this task. Of course, the president surprised many of us and won.

And I thought his dishonesty continues to be a central feature of his rhetoric. And so, therefore, I had to continue as long as he's in office.

There is something almost quaint after almost two years about the thought that a lying president might be worthy of news coverage. At least in the United Nations there was a grown up in the room who laughed when the president of the United States made his assertions.

And here I sit -- dumbass liberal that I am -- still wondering and whining about how it can be that Trump supporters are routinely unwilling to consider the propositions Trump hosts and they stand behind. And the money-starved media fall dutifully into lock-step, covering and thus further elevating this Big Daddy.

stop and frisk

Joe, my good-natured and decent-hearted-Christian neighbor from across the street, recently returned from a trip to Europe, largely in Italy. He came back with a bit of a tan that contrasts nicely with his full head of white hair and white beard that flows downward over part of his throat. Joe is 5'6" to 5'8" at a guess and has a pot belly that allows kids to imagine he is Santa Claus. He loves that. He's in his early 70's, and shuffles a bit from the elements of aging that the two of us occasionally bemoan together.

"Did I tell you what they did to me in London?" he asked this morning. Not that I recall, I replied. Well, what happened was that he was taken out of the airport line, asked to strip to his skivvies and then asked to remove his "trainers," which, as it turned out, referred to his sneakers or running shoes. The difficulty lay, as it seemed, in the fact that his passport showed him without a beard and the beard now clearly on his face was ... well ... apparently suspect. And he was sort of tan.

Joe the bomber ... my neighbor.

Joe told his tale while laughing. A more unlikely 'terrorist' you couldn't pick ... which was why, of course, he was picked. You just can't tell, can you? Kindly old men are the perfect cover for dread 'terrorists' who provide fodder for a lot of police state jobs.

Needless to say, the authorities looked him up one side and down the other and he did, eventually, make it home. He and I had grown up in another era. But that era is not this one. We agreed that our scare-'em-silly president will deploy troops to the Mexican border to ward off the mass migration from central-American countries the U.S. helped destabilize ... make more dangerous ... and prompt a flight away from the violence.

Last night, on public television news, a commentator noted that after two years in office, Donald Trump's approval ratings are almost exactly as the same as they were when he won the presidential election in 2016. Men, women and whoever else feels left out of the gravy train still lean towards his brash, racist agenda. And Trump is doubling down on that plurality as the mid-term elections near -- traveling to parts of the country to stump for those who voted for him in the past... betting that the magic is still there.

I am afraid he is right.

In the then-Communist U.S.S.R., a young fellow once told me in 1968 that a lot of Russians favored a strong (dictator strong) leader. Look at Stalin, he said. Even an insane daddy is still a daddy.

In the meantime:

A white woman accosted a family speaking Spanish at a Virginia restaurant, demanding they show their passports and shouting vulgarities in the latest incident of anti-immigrant sentiment to go viral on video.
The incident, which comes as Donald Trump has injected a stream of invective against immigrants into the midterm election campaign, happened at Andy’s restaurant in Lovettsville, Virginia, on Friday.
The video, obtained by Telemundo 44, shows a sunglasses-wearing white woman wagging her finger and shouting at the family to “show your passport” and “go back to your fucking country.”

When it comes to beards, I've got to say I feel uncomfortable. But I don't mean it by race. If I cannot see a person's -- any person's -- face, I feel short-changed. It feels like brinksmanship and I really don't want to play. It's like people with aviator sun glasses -- kool cops, that kind of thing -- who fail to take them off when addressing me. How do I go about trusting anyone whose first implicit presentation is one of hiding and one-upsman-ship?

The simplest explanations are not always the best, but oftentimes they'll do. And in that regard, I will stick with the Somali security officer who observed when addressing the pirates who targeted oil tankers off his shores, "If you do not share your wealth we us, we will share our poverty with you."

who's your daddy, Donald

By BERNARD CONDON, STEPHEN BRAUN and TAMI ABDOLLAH Associated Press 

Oct 13, 2018

NEW YORK (AP) — He's booked hotel rooms and meeting spaces to them, sold an entire floor in one of his buildings to them and, in desperate moments in his career, gotten a billionaire from the country to buy his yacht and New York's Plaza Hotel overlooking Central Park.

President Donald Trump's ties to Saudi Arabia run long and deep, and he's often boasted about his business ties with the kingdom.

Now those ties are under scrutiny as the president faces calls for a tougher response to the kingdom's government following the disappearance, and possible killing, of one of its biggest critics, journalist and activist Jamal Khashoggi.

"The Saudis are funneling money to him," said former federal ethics chief Walter Shaub, who is advising a watchdog group suing Trump for foreign government ties to his business. That undermines "confidence that he's going to do the right thing when it comes to Khashoggi."

In the Constitution, the word "emolument" is a fifty-cent word for what dime-based guttersnipes like me call a "bribe."

Unless you were paying very close attention, you may not have seen that Trump’s legal difficulties worsened considerably while the eyes of the nation were on his embattled Supreme Court nominee.
For the longest time Donald Trump has been flagrantly flouting the Constitutional proscription on taking gifts from foreign governments in exchange for services rendered.  He knew that maintaining direct control of his business empire while serving as President would subject him to potential impeachment proceedings, which is why he promised to put all of his holdings into a blind trust managed by his family.  He, of course, did not do that and instead brought his daughter and son-in-law into the highest levels of the government. He simply made the bet that Democrats and the law itself would never be able to hold him accountable for it.
The biggest challenge in bringing a suit over emoluments (outside of impeachment which is a political function) is that of “standing.”  Is there any entity that can prove it is sufficiently directly harmed by Trump’s behavior to bring a civil suit?  That question has been open for the better part of two years now.
Yesterday [Sept. 28, 2018], that obstacle was blown to bits: 

A federal judge has ruled that 200 Democratic members of Congress have legal standing to sue President Donald Trump for allegedly violating the emoluments clause of the Constitution by doing business with foreign governments while in office.

The emoluments clause bars presidents from accepting gifts from foreign and domestic interests without consent from Congress.

 A president of the United States points out in the presence of a benefactor some of the 'benefactions' (above photo)... and he even does it in front of the camera .... with pictures ... and the benefactor feels himself secure enough to let this guy with a wig talk up a storm. Who's your daddy, Donald?

Don't get me wrong -- I appreciate the $40 annual pay rise for those of us receiving Social Security. It ain't exactly the tax cuts for the wealthy that it might yet be walked back to fund, but it's a whiff of the green ... not a taste, but a whiff. And I surely am grateful to all the upstanding virtue mongers who were so notably slow to call out the emoluments they themselves might yet get. Don't worry, guys and gals, the Saudis have something like $1.4 trillion in to buy out those who feel they have been overlooked.