Tag: tyranny

Hand-sitting

jono55

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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Living Well Is The Best Revenge, by R.E.M.

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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.

Cluck’s Visit to Alligator Alcatraz, July 2025

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.”

But we’ve just been enjoying a NYT recipe, a superior vegetable chili that stars black beans and mushrooms and that is very tasty indeed. It is not difficult to make, does not involve using a single word of a foreign language, and is ready in only an hour. It is economical and nutritious to boot, unless you go too crazy in the variety of mushrooms that you use.

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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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The Internationale, by Ani di Franco and Utah Philips

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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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La Marseillaise, by Isla St. Clair

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The Sound of Both Hands Clapping

jono55

May all sentient beings praise Senator Cory Booker. He is a good man who has now broken the record of a very bad man (Sen. Strom Thurmond) and delivered a more than 25 hour-long speech in the Senate. All of it directed against the destructive and corrupt Cluck regime.

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This is not right or left, it is right or wrong. This is not a partisan moment. It is a moral moment. Where do you stand?

Cory Booker

Not every man or woman can do something as strenuous and public as what Booker has done, but every man or woman of conscience can now see where we are and what is happening and be disgusted on the one hand and encouraged on the other, because if sacrifice is called for we don’t have to hunt for the reason – it is there right in front of us.

Easy for me to say? I am only a coot in the corner with little to lose? Not true. Each one of us has only the day in front of them to do what is right. Only that moment. In that way we are all alike, as not one of us can see tomorrow.

If anyone in America can be arrested by masked men, thrown onto an airplane, and transported to a foreign country, all without due process, we are all of us vulnerable and should not be fooled into believing otherwise. These are the tactics of despots, of tsars and fuehrers. No one’s life or liberty is safe in such a country. A man called Martin Niemoller put it so very well, back in 1946, as he described Nazi Germany.

“First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a communist. Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me.”

As you read this they are already coming for Hispanics, for Asians, for Muslims. We’ve had our wake-up call, folks.

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From The New Yorker

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Comic relief. Josh Johnson.

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Saturday afternoon Robin and I participated in a political rally/march here in Paradise that was directed against the Cluck administration and its policies.

It was part of a demonstration by worried, frustrated, appalled, and just plain fed up people across the country, and which was coordinated by Indivisible.org. Robin and I were amazed at the turnout, 1200 people in a small town. It seems that there are few things that make people angrier than an attempted coup being prosecuted by an incompetent delusional.

The signs on the street today ranged from really imaginative and attractive to my own blunt message scribbled with a fat black marker on a hunk of white poster board: IMPEACH.

A guy can dream, right? Here’s a few pix.

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From The New Yorker

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We don’t eat many casseroles here at Basecamp. That’s okay with me because they were constantly on the menu in my family of origin. But a ripple of nostalgia moved me this week and I decided to make a salmon loaf, which turned out not to be half bad.

What one does is take a single 16 oz can of salmon and throw a bushel of bread crumbs at it. It’s probably the back story for that famous episode in the Bible.

Matthew 14:17-19 KJV

And they say unto him, We have here but five loaves, and two fishes. He said, Bring them hither to me. And he commanded the multitude to sit down on the grass, and took the five loaves, and the two fishes, and looking up to heaven, he blessed, and brake, and gave the loaves to his disciples, and the disciples to the multitude.

My own guess is that they made salmon loaves. You could definitely feed a multitude this way. And there would be plenty of leftovers because of that irreducible group that always says in such instances: “It tastes fishy,” and won’t eat it.

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For What It’s Worth, by Lucinda Williams

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A friend sent along this gem of a link. We liked it very much. It is entitled “Twenty Lessons.”

https://snyder.substack.com/p/twenty-lessons-read-by-john-lithgow?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&triedRedirect=true

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