30 November—Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born 190 years ago today and in his 74 years as Josh, Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, and Mark Twain imparted lots of wisdom. Here’s some of it:
Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial “we.”
I don’t give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner.
Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.
The lack of money is the root of all evil.
Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.
It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.
Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.
There is no distinctly American criminal class—except Congress.
If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.
We have the best government that money can buy.
Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
Man was made at the end of the week’s work, when God was tired.
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.
Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.
There are basically two types of people. People who accomplish things, and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded.
It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.
A man’s character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation.
Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.
The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d rather not.
I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.
Buy land, they’re not making it anymore.
A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.
It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.
The secret of getting ahead is getting started.
When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.
Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.
All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.
Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.
Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.
I never smoke to excess—that is, I smoke in moderation, only one cigar at a time.
Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times.
Humor is mankind’s greatest blessing.
Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.
A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.
Don’t let schooling interfere with your education.
Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.
Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
When angry, count to four; when very angry, swear.
There are lies, damned lies and statistics.
Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.
It is easier to stay out than get out.
It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.
The main difference between a cat and a lie is that a cat only has nine lives.
A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.
Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing wrong with this, except that it ain’t so.
It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.
George Washington, as a boy, was ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of youth. He could not even lie.
Laws control the lesser man. Right conduct controls the greater one.
It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.
Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.
Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed.
Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.
The more things are forbidden, the more popular they become.
The more you explain it, the more I don’t understand it.
Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.
Often it does seem such a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.
Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.
When in doubt tell the truth.
“Classic”: A book which people praise and don’t read.
Necessity is the mother of taking chances.
Honesty is the best policy—when there is money in it.
Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.
Civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.
The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.
If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve man, but deteriorate the cat.
Prosperity is the best protector of principle.
Familiarity breeds contempt—and children.
Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.
Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other, so we can have some conversation.
The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then stop.
Few of us can stand prosperity. Another man’s, I mean.
The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year.
I have been complimented many times and they always embarrass me; I always feel that they have not said enough.
When your friends begin to flatter you on how young you look, it’s a sure sign you’re getting old.
I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.
All generalizations are false, including this one.
29 November—A Waterbury police detective who in February shot at but missed a man who had shot and hit him in the thigh was justified in discharging his firearm, according to a ruling issued on Wednesday by the state’s inspector general. Wow, you’re thinking, so what’s the big deal?
Well, first, Connecticut’s Office of Inspector General was established by legislation only a few years ago—largely as a reaction to public outrage at abuse and misuse of force and lack of accountability by law-enforcement personnel, including prosecutors—specifically to investigate incidents in which police and corrections officers use “deadly physical force” which may or may not result in the death or injury of a person in or intended to be in custody. In other words, it doesn’t matter whether anybody is actually injured or killed, only that force was involved in the incident.
So that’s why the shooting was investigated even though the actual victim of deadly force was the police officer rather than the criminal (technically the “alleged” criminal because he hasn’t been convicted yet) and the facts aren’t in dispute—until a defense lawyer enters the picture, of course, and the felonious shooter gets off with a slap on the wrist, as is not uncommon in Connecticut.
But why has it taken the inspector general the better part of a year to determine the obvious? Since the notorious slug of Connecticut justice crawls very slowly, it probably has nothing to do with the fact that the current inspector general came on the job mid-inspection, as it were, while his staff was presumably performing due diligence on the Waterbury incident as well as the score of others they’re charged with investigating, most of which may be less open-and-shut.
And the unlucky Waterbury cop who presumably has recovered by now and is back on the job may actually have been lucky that he missed his target. Because the new inspector general is Eliot Prescott.
You may recall that Prescott was the presiding judge on the Robert Fisher trial. After a six-person jury in Torrington convicted physically unfit septuagenarian Bob Fisher of first-degree manslaughter for defending himself against a young, physically fit, alcohol-crazed attacker, Prescott refused to do the right thing and overrule the anti-lawyer jury, even though it was his responsibility to nullify an unjust verdict and within his power to issue a so-called judgement notwithstanding verdict. And then Prescott added injury to insult by sticking Fisher behind bars for two-and-a-half years and refusing to grant appellate bond.
It’s not unlikely that Prescott would have been similarly unjust to a police officer for defending himself with “deadly physical force” . . .
28 November—So the latest intelligence is that in his vain and vainglorious crusade for the Nobel Peace Prize Donald Trump is prepared to recognize his BFF Vladimir Putrid’s control over all the land Russia has so far been able to occupy and subjugate in Ukraine. For the record, recognition of territorial gains captured by aggressors through force is against diplomatic convention and international law and is specifically prohibited by the United Nations Charter and virtually all treaties. But why should that silly technicality bother Trump or Putrid? It’s only a law, after all, and we know how they deal with laws that get in their way.
Ukraine, her allies, and all non-scumbags naturally don’t like Trump’s unbelievable and unacceptable “peace plan” that appears to have been dictated by Putrid to Trump’s inept peace envoy and son-in-law with no input at all from Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy or anybody not connected with Putrid. (It’s worth noting parenthetically that Trump’s peace envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner are in the real estate business.) But little things like that have never deterred—nor even bothered—Trump. Following his usual modus operandi, then, he’ll just bully Zelenskyy and Europe until he gets what he wants.
Back home, Sportsman’s Warehouse was good enough to send an email this morning that gives us another view of our local snipers. At the risk of being bloody minded—hypercritically judgemental—is adventuring like a local by sniping at your neighbors any way to make friends? Or keep them?
27 November—Just before Donald Trump began plotting with his appropriately hyperbellicose warlord to invade Brasilia in order to spring disgraced former Brazil president Jair Bolsonaro—his BFF who had been convicted of the very things Trump himself would have been convicted of had not his pals on the Supreme Court sprung to his unworthy defense by nullifying America’s system of justice—he pardoned two of the very few individuals who actually deserved to be pardoned by him.
In the lavish, cleverly staged annual White House turkey-pardoning media event that’s nothing but a sham to divert attention from the cruel, inhumane abuse that turkeys and all other animals raised on factory farms are subjected to—as well as all the other crap the administration would rather not deal with in public, of course—Trump commuted the death sentences of a pair of broad-breasted white turkeys imaginatively named Gobble and Waddle through a poll conducted by Melania Trump’s office.
Truth be told, Gobble and Waddle had from their youth been destined for stardom rather than the typical fate of the 46 million American turkeys selectively bred, inhumanely raised, and savagely murdered just to be devoured by ignorant, thoughtless gluttons in specious observance of a spurious holiday. Because Gobble and Waddle were lucky as poults to have had the looks and personality (really) to be selected for the privileged “presidential flock” on a North Carolina factory farm 99.999 percent of whose inmates are destined to become Butterball turkeys.
The presidential Thanksgiving turkey pardon actually had truly humane roots as a Christmas turkey pardon when Abraham Lincoln’s youngest son, Tad, grew fond of an intended Christmas dinner and named him Jack. Tad’s understanding father spared Jack and he thus became the first fowl turkey to live in the White House. But many foul turkeys have lived in the White House since then, including the present occupant. With apologies to fowl turkeys, of course.
So much for the annual fowl turkey pardon. Trump’s massive foul turkey pardon is another matter entirely.
Like virtually all living creatures raised for meat, factory-farm turkeys are bred to “grow-to-death” so large—Gobble weighs 52 pounds, Waddle weighs 50 pounds—and so fast that their organs can barely keep up, if they keep up at all. In fact, turkeys on factory farms are so unnaturally huge that many can’t even stand up without experiencing pain. As if anybody gives a damn.
Moreover, contrary to the reprehensibly misleading whitewash slathered on the gullible, uncaring public by the White House and the National Turkey Federation, after the cameras and recorders disappear the “pardoned” turkeys suffer essentially the same fates as their less photogenic brethren. The turkeys may not find themselves stuffed on the dinner table after five months of torture, but rather than living out their short, stressful, unfulfilled, painful lives at luxurious sanctuaries, they’re actually sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau facilities, typically for no more than another six months till they die of unnatural causes, often being imprisoned in inappropriate solitary confinement and subjected to so-called “research” sponsored by the food industry.
Wild turkeys who survive predation have been known to live for ten years.
So there’s no better time than Thanksgiving to suggest several more great reasons for you to not eat turkey. Ever.
In addition to the 46 million turkeys murdered to celebrate Thanksgiving, over 600 million are murdered to be eaten by gluttons the world over just for the fun of it. Modern domestic turkeys, which are twice the size of their ancestors of less than a century ago, are selectively bred to maximize meat production and are forced to grow so big that they can’t do normal things like walk and breathe properly. And the hens are artificially inseminated. Forcibly, of course. It’s not IVF. Is that a life for any sentient being?
Like humans, turkeys form strong bonds with other turkeys, animals, and people. And like our pets, turkeys enjoy playing and are curious. And lovable. But the ones bred for you to eat never get to experience natural things like spreading their wings, running around, or being treated kindly. Let alone humanely. Does that bother you? Silly question.
Turkeys are naturally affectionate and smart. Like any animals. Wild turkeys, like the ones I photographed in my meadow, love to forage, build nests, and roam around their natural territories. Domestic turkeys bred for meat, on the other hand, are forced to live in cramped conditions inside dark sheds with nowhere to roam, forage, or build nests.
Wild turkeys enjoying the good life in Litchfield
Turkeys suffering on a factory farm
Aggressive behavior is common in those high-stress conditions. But instead of raising turkeys in less crowded conditions, greedy factory farmers reduce the risk of turkey-inflicted injury by searing off their beaks, cutting off their toes, and slicing off their snoods without anesthetics. Mutilating birds so they can’t mutilate each other? Factory farmers should be mutilated and tortured. Without anesthetics. Those bastards deserve it.
Besides being inhumane, factory farms are filthy and unhealthy. Infections are common among the turkeys, like the severe skin infection pictured here, which probably started when the victim was pecked by another stressed turkey in the cramped quarters.
Turkey on a factory farm with a severe skin infection
Electrical stunning is supposed to render the victim turkeys unconscious before they meet their maker. But the stunning actually causes epileptic-like fits. Among the so-called humane methods of slaughter are neck cutting, dislocation, gas killing, and concussion stunning.
Turkey in a killing cone praying for death
The most common form of stunning in this country is electric immobilization. The live turkeys are shackled by their ankles, which usually breaks their bones. Then they’re run along a conveyor belt through electrically charged water, which is supposed to render the poor captive birds unconscious. But often the electrical charge is too low and the victims are fully conscious as they get their throats slit by a rotating blade.
And if the blade misses, the living turkeys are dumped into scalding water anyway to loosen their feathers. Talk about being boiled alive.
The Humane Slaughter Act of 1978 requires what’s supposed to be humane handling of animals before and during slaughter. But it doesn’t apply to turkeys or chickens. And is it really enforced? Poultry birds and factory-farmed animals have virtually no legal protections. Kind of like undocumented immigrants under Trump.
The people who slaughter the animals suffer all manner of injuries, including burns, fractures, and amputations. Some even die from their injuries. Great. No problem there. Unlike their victims, those buggers certainly deserve to suffer, suffer, and suffer even more. They tend to be inhumane brutal sadists who delight in inflicting pain on their innocent, helpless victims any way they can. Kind of like ICE. And people who consume animal-based products merely encourage that inhumane, unnecessary brutality.
Keep in mind that humane slaughter simply does not exist. For any animal. Keep in mind, too, that animal-based meat is not—repeat, NOT—required in a healthy human diet and that there are very tasty plant-based and other non-slaughter meat alternatives that are also healthier than cruelly manufactured animal-based meats.
And don’t forget that turkey meat wasn’t even served at the first alleged Thanksgiving dinner . . .
Savor the flavor of cruelty
26 November—This morning I rescued a little slug who must have been wondering how to get off the front steps, back down to the lawn he/she had strayed from during last night’s rain. Slugs are hermaphrodites, with both male and female reproductive organs that produce both sperm and eggs. Hence the he/she pronoun.
Slugs can self-fertilize to propagate the species and do so when no mates are available. That’s called selfing. (For some reason, taking a selfie isn’t called selfing. Why not?) Slugs also can masturbate, of course, since they’re known to experience intense satisfaction, particularly from eating and sexual stimulation.
So Donald Trump fancies himself as the President of Peace. He brags that he has “ended eight wars in just eight months.” Of course, in that boast (as well as most others) he’s as full of shit as he is of himself. Six of one, as they say. In all events, Trump desperately needs to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to maintain his narcissistic self-esteem.
And since Trump is a vindictive, power-crazed, thin-skinned despot, if he doesn’t get the Nobel he and his fan club reckon he so richly deserves, he’ll declare war on Norway. Wait and see. Well, not war exactly, since the Constitution vests the power to declare war solely in Congress. For all the Constitution is worth these days, to be sure. But he and his idiotic power-crazed warlord will trump up some patently lame excuse to murder and otherwise wreak havoc on innocent Norwegians. And innocent Swedes while they’re at it.
On the subject of murder, this is the bottom half of a Sportsman’s Warehouse ad that arrived in today’s email. Even considering that Sportsman’s Warehouse customers these days tend to be hunters and other murderers who like to pass themselves off as sportsmen, captioning a picture of what appears to be a sniper team—shooter and spotter—aiming for the kill “ADVENTURE Like a local” is at the very least rather disturbing. Think about it.
Locals taking out neighbors indeed. Is that what America is coming to under Donald Trump?
25 November—Donald Trump needed to win last year’s election for three reasons, here listed in no specific order: to reinflate his incredibly fragile narcissistic ego that had been embarrassingly and painfully (for him, at any rate) deflated by Joe Biden’s decisive, rather impressive—seven million popular vote and 74 electoral vote—victory in 2020; to avoid the embarrassment, expense, and possible (but not likely) prison sentence(s) resulting from his aberrant, abhorrent, unlawful, in all events thoroughly disgraceful behavior before, during, and after his first term in office; to exact revenge on all the institutions and individuals of any consequence who were at all critical or otherwise disrespectful of him in any way and at any time, but especially his past and future terms in public office—i.e., then and now.
Trump’s primary weapon in exacting revenge is his depoliticized and deweaponized department of justice, managed and (after undeserved firings and regrettable but understandable retirements) largely staffed by inexperienced and incompetent but—the only thing that matters to Trump—unswervingly loyal flunkies appointed by him and, where necessary, confirmed by the Trumpublican Senate majority.
Given the ineptitude and sheer incompetence of Trump’s DOJ, then, is it any wonder that the totally trumped-up case against Jim Comey, the FBI director Trump fired for doing his job, was tossed—by a judge guided by loyalty to law rather than Trump?
Comey put it this way: “I’m grateful that the court ended the case against me, which was a prosecution based on malevolence and incompetence and a reflection of what the Department of Justice has become under Donald Trump, which is heartbreaking. But I was also inspired by the example of the career people who refuse to be part of this travesty. It cost some of them their jobs, which is painful, but it preserved their integrity, which is beyond price.
“The President of the United States cannot use the Department of Justice to target his political enemies. I don’t care what your politics are, you have to see that as fundamentally un-American and a threat to the rule of law that keeps all of us free. I know that Donald Trump will probably come after me again, and my attitude is going to be the same. I’m innocent. I am not afraid. And I believe in an independent federal judiciary, a gift from our founders, that protects us from a would-be tyrant.”
Donald Trump’s press cutie already has made it clear that her boss hasn’t given up on persecuting Jim Comey.
And, sad to say, Jim Comey’s last sentence is more wishful than realistic because—as he must be aware—Donald Trump is well past the would-be tyrant stage and has become a fully developed malignant despot who has, among other evils, effectively vitiated the independence of too much of the federal judiciary by packing it with judges whose primary qualification isn’t respect for the Constitution or the law. Thus the Trump federal judiciary is the scumbag’s second line of offense . . .
24 November—Remember David Cameron? Lord Cameron, as he is now, was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2010 to 2016. He’s 59 years old and has just announced that he’s been successfully treated for prostate cancer and is cancer free. Unlike Joe Biden, whose prostate cancer wasn’t diagnosed until it had metastasized to his bones in stage four, David Cameron is lucky that his cancer was diagnosed in stage one, before it had metastasized, and therefore was readily treatable.
Evidently Lord Cameron has Lady Cameron to thank for that, because it’s she who recommended he be tested. In the UK, for the same absolutely ridiculous reason men over 75 in the US aren’t routinely given PSA tests, PSA tests aren’t recommended for men of any age—even over 50 or 55—and therefore aren’t covered by the National Health Service (NHS), their single-payer socialized medicine scheme, which is imperfect but better than nothing. Presumably the Camerons have private health insurance to supplement the fairly basic and crummy coverage offered by the NHS. And that’s not irrelevant in the circumstance.
The absurd anti-PSA rationale on both sides of the pond is that the PSA test isn’t accurate—only 93 percent accuracy in detecting prostate cancer—and may produce false positives (all of six percent) that can but not necessarily do or will lead to over-treatment and anxiety for slow-growing cancers.
You’d think it’s better to be safe than sorry. But it’s actually lies, damned lies, statistics, and intransigent bureaucratic bungling and rationalizing.
On the other hand, while it’s mostly older men who develop prostate cancer, it can affect younger men, like those under 50—the age American men normally start their annual PSA tests and prostate pokes, formally called DREs or digital rectal examinations. Sir Chris Hoy, for instance, a Scottish Olympic champion cyclist and automobile racing driver, who is only 49 now, was diagnosed two years ago with stage four prostate cancer which, like Joe Biden’s, had metastasized to his bones. But Sir Chris’s cancer is considered terminal.
Given damned lies and statistics, then, it’s understandable why Sir Chris Hoy’s cancer wasn’t detected at an early stage. But in that case shouldn’t routine annual prostate screening be recommended for younger men? After all, it’s recommended that women start routine annual screening for colorectal cancer at 45, breast cancer at 40, and cervical cancer as early as 21 . . .
23 November—When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 Joe Biden talked big about supporting Ukraine but along with everyone else who talked big about supporting Ukraine provided no more than half-assed support to the victim defender by limiting matériel and restricting its deployment, thus prolonging what has amounted to an extended pissing contest with her big bully neighbor.
Big bully naturally takes us to Donald Trump. He’s pretty much continued Biden’s half-assed support of Ukraine and forced a mineral swindlel in the process. And now, to nobody’s surprise, Trump has colluded with his fellow scumbag dictator Vladimir Putrid to screw Ukraine eve more. You’ll recall that Trump’s initial contact with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in 2019 is what led to his first impeachment.
Of course, Zelenskyy and Ukrainian-American Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, among others, did absolutely nothing wrong. But Trump is a vindictive paranoid narcissist who never forgets or forgives. Like you know who. And him too. So count on Trump doing everything he bloody well can to screw the good people he perceives as his enemies.
Thus Trump is now screwing Ukraine—and Zelenskyy—with a 28-point so-called peace plan that’s effectively—and in reality—Ukraine’s unconditional surrender to Russia, the unlawful and sanctioned aggressor. That’s not at all surprising, mind you, since Trump’s flunkies concocted the ludicrously one-sided treaty with Putrid’s flunkies, with no input at all from Zelenskyy’s representatives.
Trump’s intention clearly was to intimidate Zelenskyy into accepting the unacceptable terms by next Thursday. But because of negative reaction from all over the world, even including Trumpublicans on the home front, his flunky secretary of state is walking back the travesty and now claims that his Führer is willing to make concessions. Mighty white of him, wouldn’t you say?
So we don’t know exactly where anything really stands at the moment. Not that we ever do with Trump, mind you. But it’s a sure thing that Ukraine isn’t going to spread her legs to be raped by Russia.
Meanwhile, here’s Ukraine’s national anthem, played by soldiers taking a break from cleaning up after another Russian bombing of Kiev. The words, freely translated here, were written in 1862, when most of what was then called the Ukraine was under the control of—you guessed it—the Russian Empire. Plus ça change?
Ukraine’s freedom has not yet perished, nor has her glory.
Upon us, fellow Ukrainians, fate shall smile once more.
Our enemies will vanish like dew in the sun.
And we too shall rule, brothers, in a free land of our own.
We’ll lay down our souls and bodies to attain our freedom.
And we’ll show that we, brothers, are of the Cossack nation.
We’ll stand together for freedom from the San to the Don.
We will not allow others to rule in our motherland.
22 November—Marjorie Taylor Greene is to be commended for daring to disagree with and criticize Donald Trump, causing him to excrete his customary feculent verbiage on his disgusting website:
“Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Brown, because of PLUMMETING Poll Numbers, and not wanting to face a Primary Challenger with a strong Trump Endorsement (where she would have no chance of winning!), has decided to call it ‘quits.’
“Her relationship with the WORST Republican Congressman in decades, Tom Massie of Kentucky, also known as Rand Paul Jr. because he votes against the Republican Party (and really good legislation!), did not help her. For some reason, primarily that I refused to return her never ending barrage of phone calls, Marjorie went BAD. Nevertheless, I will always appreciate Marjorie, and thank her for her service to our Country!”
Is Trump clever or is Trump clever? Taylor into Traitor, Greene into Brown. Wow! That certainly is creative. And imaginative. For a kid in junior high school. And throwing in Congressman Tom Massie and Senator Rand Paul for exhibiting some principle and scrotal content in not following the tyrant’s orders is . . . typical Trump.
At least Trump thanks Marj for her service. What a guy!
In all events, it’s a signal honor to have one’s name included in Trump’s shit list. How long before Trump’s nonweaponized justice department is sicced on Marj and Tom and Rand? Trump’s misfit attorney general has probably already ordered her unqualified shysters to start trumping up indictments.
In her frankly self-serving riposte to Trump’s typically self-serving attack that he obviously crafted all by himself, Representative Greene says she gave him her loyalty for free but that “loyalty should be a two-way street, and we should be able to vote our conscience and represent our district’s interest because our job title is literally ‘Representative.’”
Marj makes a very good point about loyalty being a two-way street. But does she really believe that Trump gives a damn? And she must know that while Donald Trump values—make that insists on—unconditional loyalty from his flunkies, as soon as they stray one nanometer from his crooked and narrow path—regardless of the reason—their loyalty to the master disappears and as far as he’s concerned never existed. There’s no middle ground for Donald Trump nor reasoning with him.
Trump is that simple. We could evoke Hitler and Stalin here, or Putrid, for that matter. But we won’t. And Trump hasn’t disappeared any formerly faithful flunkies. As far as we know, anyway.
As for Marjorie Taylor Greene, don’t be surprised if she strategically keeps a low profile until Trump disappears from the scene one way or the other—and good people don’t care how he disappears as long as he disappears—and resurfaces at the right time for her comeback. In the meantime, Marj’s seat is certain to be filled by another MAGA maniac . . .
21 November—On his 83rd birthday yesterday, Joe Biden was looking pretty good at Dick Cheney’s funeral. Especially compared to . . . In all seriousness, it’s good to see Joe looking better than during his last campaign. If only . . .
Today, in addition to being Monsignor Bob Tucker’s 83rd birthday, is Voltaire’s 331st. Msgr. Tucker is enjoying his retirement with the ladies at the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem. Voltaire, on the other hand, who died at 83 in 1778, never retired but enjoyed the ladies.
Voltaire was the nom de plume (as opposed to the pen name, since he was French, even though he became fluent and wrote in English during his three-year exile in London) of Francois-Marie Arouet, a brilliant, liberal, prolific, versatile writer, satirist, philosopher, historian, and anti-religious biblical scholar who nevertheless believed in a deistic—creational but non-interventional—god. “If God did not exist,” he wrote, “it would be necessary to invent Him.”
While critical and dismissive of the violence, contradictions, myths, and associated nonsense of the Old and New Testaments—and mercilessly condemning the “infamy” of organized religion—Voltaire was also critical of atheism because he believed that a supreme intelligence, while not sticking its or His nose in human affairs, had actually created the universe and was in fact necessary to explain things like order and morality. Thus, like many of his enlightened Enlightenment contemporaries, Voltaire had no patience with the mainstays of organized religion like miracles, superstition, and dogma. Reason over faith, was where it was at.
Voltaire was an outspoken advocate of freedom of speech, religious tolerance, and limited government. Although he derived income from the slave trade, he condemned slavery. Not unlike Thomas Jefferson’s hypocrisy on the issue. Voltaire died before Jefferson got to France, by the way.
When Voltaire met Benjamin Franklin in Paris in 1778, a month before his death, he told Franklin that if he were 40 years old, he’d cross the ocean to settle in what he called “America’s happy fatherland.” Yet he distrusted democracy, which he feared could lead to the “idiocy of the masses,” and believed that a constitutional monarchy—“enlightened despotism,” he called it—was the best way to effect positive change. He wasn’t wrong about the idiocy of the masses or the enlightened despotism. But how many despots are enlightened? Certainly not the current American one.
Among Voltaire’s numerous aphorisms, then, here are two that are particularly relevant today:
“Think for yourself and let others enjoy the privilege of doing so too.”
“It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.”
20 November—Happy Birthday to Joe Biden on his 83rd. We wish him many more, as well as full recovery from the prostate cancer that evidently surprised the shiftless quacks at Walter Reed who should have caught it well before it had metastasized. No excuse for them or the screwed-up system that effectively allows older men to fall through the cracks simply because of their age.
So metastatic cancer naturally brings to mind Donald Trump and the criminals and other incompetent, unqualified-should-be-disqualified misfits he has appointed to mismanage his unprincipled, unstable, ineluctably corrupt administration that’s an embarrassment to America and an insult to Americans.
If you’re wondering, there actually are orange-colored metastatic cancers. But we won’t go into clinical details.
It’s common knowledge that the primary—it wouldn’t be far from the truth to say the only—qualification for a Trump appointee is blind, unwavering loyalty to the big thin-skinned tyrannical bully. But Trump’s female hires must also meet another criterion, one that’s not typically found on résumés: Trump has to find the women attractive. He doesn’t seem to care what his loyal male flunkies look like, mind you. (But that’s purely an editorial judgement.)
No problem with aesthetic discrimination (in the positive sense of appreciation, of course), to be sure. But when an individual’s personal taste in whatever it may be negatively affects the functioning of government (or any entity, for that matter), it should never be a consideration.
Tell it to Donald Trump. And consider his front-line females. In addition to all his other disgraceful quirks. The narcissistic nabob’s personal taste, personal needs, personal peeves, personal agenda—like those of any dictator—are precisely what motivate and empower his chaotic administration—to the clear detriment of the nation and the world. Personal and above the law.
Tangential to Donald Trump’s taste, then, here’s what he told New York Magazine in back 2002 about Jeffrey Epstein, with whom he was still (obviously) quite friendly: “Terrific guy . . . He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”