Hand-sitting

Memo to “Normal” Republicans: if you are silent, sitting on your hands and waiting for the storm to blow over, you are complicit in and partially to blame for whatever Cluck is thus able to send our way.

Memo to Democrats: if you are silent, sitting on your hands and waiting for the storm to blow over, you are complicit in and partially to blame for whatever Cluck is thus able to send our way.

Memo to Independents: if you are silent, sitting on your hands and waiting for the storm to blow over, you are complicit in and partially to blame for whatever Cluck is thus able to send our way.

Memo to those who consider themselves above the political fray: if you are silent, sitting on your hands and waiting for the storm to blow over, you are complicit in and partially to blame for whatever Cluck is thus able to send our way.

This is no time for silence. Silence is complicity. Silence is collaboration. Silence is capitulation.

There, got it off my chest. Now I can blather on to other matters.

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The header photograph today is of author Alexander Solzhenitsyn and it was taken on the day of his liberation from the Soviet gulag in 1953, after eight years of imprisonment. He went on to write several books, and the one that is considered his masterwork is The Gulag Archipelago, where he describes the system of forced labor camps that existed in Stalinist Russia and continued until it was officially abolished in 1960.

It doesn’t take too much imagination to see parallels between that system and the camps that the Cluck administration is establishing around the United States to house immigrants who are being deported. The most glaring example being perhaps “Alligator Alcatraz,” in Florida.

In effect, they can be considered our political prisoners. They are being transported and incarcerated in these places at the whim of the Cluck regime. No habeas corpus. No due process. No recourse to the protections of our justice system. It is ugly and it is illegal.

To add to the rottenness, these people are being rounded up by our very own newly-minted secret police squads, which we euphemistically call Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

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I subscribe to the “Cooking” section of the New York Times, and I’m not quite sure why. I rarely use their recipes for a number of reasons, the most common is that so many of them call for ingredients that are simply not available in our corner of the world. Another is that some authors are almost unbearably precious and full of themselves. Where a more straightforward person might write “and then simmer for two hours,” their instruction might be paraphrased as “and then simper for two hours.”

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I think that if my last name were Epstein I would change it ASAP. Perhaps to something lighter, like de Sade or Dahmer.

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A gallery from Scotland. Makes the signs I’ve carried so far look a bit wimpy. There were others that were even more colorful, but there are words a gentleman like myself does not employ.

Not that they weren’t correct, mind you.

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A One-line Curriculum Vitae Created For He Who Will Not Be Named

Cheatliardelusionalrapistabuser
whorermongerbigotbankruptfelon
traitornarcissistdraftdodger
pedophileimmoraldisloyalhypocrite
fascistdementedbullyscoundrel
adulterersoullesspeckerwood.

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No breaks from the plus-90 heat here in Paradise. But my kids and friends living in Minnesota and South Dakota recently had to deal with heat and then some. There were tornadoes, thunderstorms, Biblical-style rains, and a by-god derecho. (These pix are not mine, but no matter. The view is the same)

Now, I make absolutely no claims to meteorological expertise beyond phrases like “When the rain is from the East then the fishing is the least.” But if I should ever look up and see something like in these photos, I’m pretty sure it would be quick-step to the root cellar for me. Even if I couldn’t explain what I saw, I would take it as a direct message from the Almighty that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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There are blogs that I follow that from time to time provide absolute gems for me to read and thing about. One of those came along this week. It included this poem, which I found quite beautiful and provocative (that is, it provoked me to actually think). The author is Mick Canning and he lives in the UK. He is a real writer, as opposed to a trafficker in poppycock and dither like myself.

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