1 August—We’re right smack in the middle of the dog days of summer now. Dog days are so named from Sirius, the Dog Star, the brightest star in the night sky, which rises alongside the sun during the hottest, most humid time of the year, which ancient civilizations ascribed to the astronomical juxtaposition. That was before global warming was invented, of course. It’s no surprise that dog days tend to be periods of inactivity and general torpor.
Legislatures, like Parliament in the United Kingdom and Congress in the United States, tend not to be in session during dog days. Even with air-conditioned chambers. Except, of course when war, cataclysm, or an intimidating strongman may call a special session.
Given what used to be the paucity of political news in the dog days of summer, then, newspapers and other media tended to run with less serious news to keep their respective audiences coming and advertisers happy. (Now, of course, most contemporary mass media publish and broadcast junk and opinion masquerading as news most of the time, to be sure, even though they’d never admit it.)
Brits thus have called the dog days “silly season” since at least the mid-19th century. Americans, on the other hand, tending as a race to take everything too seriously and being afraid to call anything silly (lest they be dismissed as silly), call the dog days “slow news season.”
Silly season sounds like a lot more fun than slow news season. So let’s import it from the United Kingdom. Since it has no intrinsic value, Donald Trump can’t unilaterally and illegally slap a tariff on it. So even though there may be nothing to gain, there’s nothing to lose.
On second thought, thanks to the Supreme Court Trump can do anything he damn well pleases, legally or otherwise, and get away with it. But we sill need silly season . . .
31 July—The good news is that The Litchfield Monitor has been screeding—i.e., disquisiting—for four years as of today—what semiliterate media call the four-year anniversary. The bad news is that The Litchfield Monitor will continue to screed—i.e., disquisite—until death, dementia, digital misadventure, or Trump’s flunky-goons do us part.
So the big news is that the latest ploy in the Connecticut Democrat trifecta’s continuing effort to divert attention from its continuing monumental mismanagement of everything and insidious strategy to divest towns of home rule, the Department of Motor Vehicles has begun to issue license plates—commonly known as markers in this forlorn state—touting it as The Pizza State rather than the Constitution State. Neither epithet is truly representative of the state, to be sure.
In fact, both sobriquets can be misleading. Connecticut as The Pizza State? A joke. And who cares anyway? On the other hand, the Connecticut Colony’s Fundamental Orders, adopted in 1639, are not infrequently cited as the first written constitution in the western world. (No, Magna Carta in 1215 wasn’t a constitution.) But the actual State of Connecticut’s first constitution didn’t come about until 1818, well after the U.S. Constitution had been drafted, ratified, and even amended. And Connecticut was only the fifth of the original 13 states to have ratified that one.
More important, of course, it wasn’t until 1974 that Connecticut license plates—commonly known as markers in this forlorn state—were mandated by the General Assembly to identify it as the “Constitution State” (in all caps, of course, with no definite article), at first at the top and lately at the bottom.
“The Pizza State” (in all caps, of course, with the definite article) is at the bottom of the new special license plates—commonly known as markers in this forlorn state. There’s a $65 fee for the pizza plates—commonly known as pizza markers in this forlorn state—which allegedly supports Connecticut Foodshare, according to the legend under the stylized slice of pepperoni pizza at the right of the plates. (The extra fees for all the special plates are supposed to support the specified organizations or causes, but the money amounts to bupkes.)
Perhaps the best thing about Connecticut’s fraudulent Pizza State markers–commonly known as license plates elsewhere–is that they replace the fraudulent Constitution State designation . . .
30 July—It appears that Russia’s irredeemably diabolical president Vladimir Putrid hasn’t given up his malevolent quest to destroy most of the world and annex the post-apocalyptic remainder. To wit, just yesterday he produced an exceedingly powerful earthquake intended to generate a cataclysmic tsunami. Putrid made his impressive 8.8 magnitude quake near Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky (literally the City of Peter and Paul on the Kamchatka Peninsula), a metropolis in Russia’s Far East, which happens to be in the North Pacific, only about 700 miles from Attu, the westernmost of America’s forlorn Aleutian Islands.
Stuff and nonsense, you’re thinking. Everybody knows that earthquakes can’t be caused by people but are in fact caused by the movement of the tectonic plates at and near the planet’s surface that are constantly shifting and interacting. The plates may collide, slide past each other, or pull apart, thus stressing the edges—popularly known as faults. When the stress exceeds the strength of the rocks that comprise the tectonic plates, they fracture and slip, releasing the seismic waves that cause the earth to quake—and not infrequently produce tsunamis.
But think again. Because man-made explosions are known to cause seismic activity: the bigger the explosion, the greater the seismic activity. Of course. Underground explosions are especially effective at generating seismic activity. So just think what underground nuclear and thermonuclear explosions can do.
And don’t forget that the biggest man-made explosion ever, a hydrogen (thermonuclear) bomb, was set off by Russia. Well, the Soviet Union, as it was in 1961, and what Putrid wants to make Russia again. The blast of the Tsar Bomba was so powerful that it registered as a 5.8 magnitude earthquake even though it was detonated in the atmosphere.
Better yet, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky is located on the Kuril-Kamchatka Arc subduction zone, a major fault line where the Pacific Plate is sliding beneath the North America Plate. So think what just a little underground nuclear blast up there can do.
And best yet, underground nuclear testing is in fact permitted under the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, the last one to be ratified by the United States and China, among others. No test-ban treaties since then. Not that anybody has ever taken any of those things seriously anyway.
But we have absolutely nothing to worry about because we’ve seen already that the destructive forces of dastardly Comrade Putrid’s earthquake and tsunami have been dissipated—virtually negated—by Donald Trump in his capacity as Poseidon. And it’s not at all surprising that given his legendary modesty Trump hasn’t taken any credit at all for saving Earth from the wrath of his former best bud.
We don’t need Superman. We have Trump . . .
29 July—Today would be Benito Mussolini’s 142nd birthday had he not been unceremoniously albeit understandably and justifiably offed by Italian antifascist partisans on 28 April 1945. We can be sure that Donald Trump won’t observe Il Duce’s birth. At least in public.
One of the edifices named after Mussolini during his fascist regime is a sports complex in Rome now known as Foro Italico (Italian Forum). It was built between 1928 and 1938 and originally called Foro Mussolini (Mussolini’s Forum). That’s what’s done in monarchies and dictatorships.
Many a German and Austrian city, for instance, had an Adolf-Hitler-Platz, Adolf-Hitler-Straße, Adolf-Hitler-Allee, and/or other geographical and monumental recognition of Der Führer—for reasons that included but were not limited to Teutonic Arschküssen (ass kissing). You’d be hard-pressed to find anything with Hitler’s name on it today, and most families with that surname have even changed it.
(That doesn’t justify the disgraceful and unacceptable modern American practice of “history correcting itself” by changing the names of whatever they may be because the namesakes are no longer regarded as politically correct.)
Joe Stalin also had lots of places and things renamed in his honor while he was ruling the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1953. They all were renamed again in the great Soviet de-Stalinization of 1961.
(Hitler may be unique among tyrants in having a bug named in his honor. Anophthalmus hitleri is a species of blind cave beetle found only in several humid caves in Slovenia. The blind beetle is predatory, so the adults and larvae are presumed to chow down on smaller cave inhabitants. It was named after and dedicated to Hitler in 1933, shortly after he became chancellor of Germany, by an Austrian admirer.)
Ass-kissing and a predatory bug naturally take us to Donald Trump. And, as it happens, Melania is from Slovenia. So a week ago Mike Simpson, a Trumpublican congressman from Idaho who chairs the House Interior and Environment Appropriations Subcommittee, excreted an amendment to whatever bill it may have been to rename the Kennedy Center Opera House, as it’s been called since it was opened in 1971, to the Melania Trump Opera House.
Why? Because, as A.K. Simpson gushes, “First Lady Melania Trump serves as the Honorary Chair of the Board of Trustees at the Kennedy Center. [Why would that be? Good question, since neither she nor her husband ever even visited the Kennedy Center during his first term polluting the White House and still would have nothing to do with it had he not usurped control this term.] Naming a theater after her is an excellent way to recognize her appreciation for the arts.” So A.K. Simpson is “proud to honor her support and commitment in promoting the arts and humanities.”
Well, Melania has supported and contributed to the arts at least by posing for some pretty good pictures.
But A.K. Simpson’s kiss planted on either or both of Trump buttocks is nothing compared to fellow Trumpublican Bob Onder’s tongue up the fat man’s crack—probably so far up that it’s coming out of Trump’s mouth. A.K. Onder, an inconsequential first-term congressman from Missouri, wants to strip John Kennedy’s name from the center and instead have it known as the Trump Center for the Performing Arts.
Playing on Trump’s stolen 2016 campaign slogan, A.K. Onder calls his vomitous bill the Make Entertainment Great Again Act—MEGA. He jokingly refers to Trump as “a patron of the arts and a staple of the pop-culture landscape.” And he “cannot think of a more ubiquitous symbol of American exceptionalism in the arts, entertainment, and popular culture at large than President Trump.”
Do we really want suck-ups like that running the country?
28 July—On this day in 1914, a month after Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand—heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian Empire throne—and his wife, Sophie, Duchess von Hohenberg, in Sarajevo, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Within a few days, Austria-Hungary ally Germany declared war on Serbian tangential allies Russia and France and invaded Belgium as a strategic move (the notorious Schlieffen Plan) to essentially screw France. It was Germany, after all.
Little Belgium was neutral and the 1839 Treaty of London obligated Britain to defend her. So within the week, Belgium, France, Great Britain, Russia, and Serbia declared war on Austria-Hungary and its ally Germany.
Thus commenced what at the time was known as the Great War and with the outbreak of the Second World War came to be known as the First World War and World War I, even though World War II hadn’t quite become a world war in 1939.
So what was Franz Ferdinand doing in Sarajevo in June 1914? Well, Sarajevo was the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which had been annexed (mostly by military rather than diplomatic means, of course) by Austria-Hungary in 1908 to assert her dominance in the Balkans. Officially the archduke was there to open a new museum and inspect his troops during summer exercises. Unofficially, to be sure, the whole thing was a show of military force simply to intimidate the nationalists who wanted unification with Serbia.
Nineteen-year-old assassin Gavrilo Princip was a fervent Serbian nationalist of questionable stability who was part of a conspiracy called Young Bosnia to end Austro-Hungarian rule over Bosnia and Herzegovina. Princip wasn’t at all remorseful about assassinating Franz Ferdinand but did regret killing Sophie as collateral damage. And the assassination was in fact seen by some as a legitimate (if not particularly appropriate) response to perceived oppression.
In all events, Princip and his accomplices were arrested after the assassination and tried for high treason and murder. The three over 20 were executed by hanging. Incredible as it may seem, the adolescents like Princip were too young for that under Austro-Hungarian law, so they were sentenced to prison terms of 20 years or less. One managed to escape to Montenegro.
And Gavrilo Princip himself—the actual trigger man—was sentenced to only 20 years, contracted tuberculosis which caused him to lose an arm, and died from it at the age of 23 on 28 April 1918. Just six-and-a-half months before 11 November 1918—Armistice Day, which marked the end of the war he had caused . . .
27 July—It’s time to take a brief break from excoriating totally self-dealing scumbag Donald Trump and his criminally disgusting personal marketing organization masquerading as the federal administration. So here are scumbags and something even more criminally disgusting.
The picture below shows a draft mare called Kachina being dragged behind a truck in Florence, Arizona, in August 2008. (The picture is on the envelope of a recent mailing by Equine Voices Rescue & Sanctuary in Pueblo, Colorado.)
The story, pieced together from the mailing and news reports, is that Kachina didn’t want to load into a trailer. That’s not unusual equine behavior and can normally be solved with a bit of intelligence, patience, and training—of horse and person. But Kachina’s owner, a scumbag called Gordon Allen Bates, was neither intelligent nor patient. So he tied Kachina to the rear bumper of his pickup truck with a tow strap and pulled her down the road. Because, as he said, he had to move her.
When Kachina could no longer keep up the pace, she collapsed. But the scumbag Bates didn’t stop and instead dragged her down the road for an unspecified distance, probably several miles. Luckily, somebody on the road saw the incredible brutality and called the Pinal County Sheriff’s office.
The scumbag Bates did in fact stop his truck. But only to have his 13-year-old daughter “get out and give her a good kick.” The scumbag daughter, whose name wasn’t released because of her age, did as instructed and kicked Kachina in the nose over and over. When Kachina couldn’t get up, the scumbag father took a pipe from his truck and beat her over the head while his scumbag daughter continued to get her kicks in.
Meanwhile, the sheriff’s deputy followed the trail of blood down the dirt road until he found the scumbag Bateses beating Kachina, who was bleeding from the nose and suffering from countless cuts, contusions, abrasions, open wounds, road burns, and everything else you can imagine.
The deputy witnessed the scumbag Bates father-daughter duo abusing Kachina and reportedly had to draw his weapon to get them to stop, after they’d ignored his repeated orders.
So scumbag Bates father and daughter were arrested on felony animal cruelty charges. But released on their own recognizance. No surprise.
The scumbags were tried in March 2009. Almost as criminally disgusting, then, after a three-day trial the scumbag Bates torture team were found not guilty by a local jury. That’s right, they got off scot free. Why isn’t that surprising? Unfortunately, the transcript of the trial (before 2010) isn’t available online.
Kachinas are Pueblo spirits of things in the real world and it’s unlikely that Kachina was so named by her scumbag abusers. Gordon Allen Bates is or was a geriatric nurse. One shudders to think of the fate of his patients.
The good news it that Kachina recovered from her torture and is now living a presumably good life at a rescue facility. That’s Kachina in the front . . .
26 July—Here are pictures of two generations and iterations of Blackshirts. The top one, from 1923, depicts Benito Mussolini’s Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale (Voluntary Militia for National Security), commonly initialized MVSN and unpopularly known as Camicie Nere (Blackshirts). Il Duce himself is in the middle and his thugs are actually wearing black shirts, or so it would appear in the black-and-white photograph.
The bottom photo, from 2025, depicts Donald Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Esecuzione dell’immigrazione e dogane and in the circumstance Einwanderungs und Zollbehörde), commonly acronymed ICE and unpopularly known as Blackshirts (Camicie Nere and in the circumstance Schwarzhemden). Der Drecksack Führer (essentially il pezzo di merda in capo in the circumstance) is not in the picture and his thugs aren’t actually wearing black shirts, as is evident in the color photograph.
The Blackshirt moniker for ICE thugs must therefore come from the color of the ICE ballistic-resistant (i.e., bulletproof) vests they wear these days.
Note that Mussolini’s Blackshirts in the picture aren’t armed nor wearing masks but are wearing medals for who knows what, while Trump’s Blackshirts are armed (the one in front appears to at least have a holstered Taser) and wearing badges and the very sort of masks commonly worn by terrorists and other criminals. In the interest of accuracy, however, Mussolini’s Blackshirts usually were armed and dangerous . . .
25 July—Does Donald Trump realize that Jerome Powell, while chairman of the Federal Reserve, is only one of twelve members of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) that pretty well—but not absolutely—controls interest by setting the target range for the so-called federal funds rate, which banks charge one another for overnight lending? More to the point, does he care? Is that a rhetorical question?
To refresh your memory, Trump appointed Jerome Powell to replace Janet Yellen as chair of the Federal Reserve in 2017 and after confirmation by the Senate Powell assumed office for his first four-year term in February 2018. Trump started railing against Powell from the get-go because it turned out that the bully-in-chief couldn’t intimidate the independent agency’s honest, upstanding, independent chairman who knew what he was doing.
When Powell’s first term ran out, Democrat Joe Biden reappointed the Republican banker and lawyer for another four years and he was resworn in May 2022, with his term in the Fed chair running through May 2026. After that, Powell will remain as a Federal Reserve Governor until January 2028. There’s no way for Trump to get rid of Powell or any Fed officials. Unless, of course, he can find some way to fire them “for cause,” which he’d trump up with the collusion of his flunkies in the administration and sustain with the cooperation of his pals and other enablers on the Supreme Court.
Largely because Donald Trump is a crass ass who has always blamed everybody else for his own monumental screw-ups, he’s called Jerome Powell a “major loser,” a “fool,” a “knucklehead,” and “stupid” for not cutting interest rates to counteract the inflation resulting largely from the notorious Trump retaliatory and punitive tariffs (as well as Biden’s ironically titled Inflation Reduction Act, to be perfectly honest).
When Trump bitched that talking to Powell was like “talking to a chair” one wonders whether the scumbag-in-chief realized he was punning.
Even after Powell is replaced by a Trump flunky as Fed chair in 2026, he can remain on the FOMC until the expiration of his term as a Fed governor. And given all the possible scheduled appointments Trump can make through the end of his unethical, corrupt tenure, he can’t lawfully put enough flunkies on the FOMC to do their master’s bidding and thus screw the country and the world even more. But you can bet that Trump will do anything to get his evil way . . .
24 July—With the Connecticut-New York pizza war dominating the headlines of absolutely no worthy news media, readers must nevertheless be curious about pizza in war. Well, pizza has never been an actual weapon, as far as The Monitor’s crack investigative reporters have been able to ascertain, but it has been used to sustain armed forces.
Grown-up readers will remember that in 1958 the U.S. Strategic Air Command adopted as its motto “Peace is our profession.” That irony was driven home at the beginning of the 1964 documentary film “Dr. Strangelove,” in which the conciliatory motto was displayed prominently at the entrance to Burpleson Air Force Base, which at the time was under siege by the U.S. Army.
The Strategic Air Command and “Peace is our profession” along with it were dumped by the Bush 41 administration in 1992, at which time the catchy motto was quietly adopted by a somewhat less belligerent brotherhood and amended to “Pizza is our profession.”
So that takes us to pizza in war. And, of course, pizza in peace. As opposed to war and pizza. Unlike aggressor Connecticut and victim New York, then, the several U.S. armed forces have never to our knowledge waged pizza wars against one another. And that’s doubtless because they all use the same pizza recipes graciously provided by the Armed Forces Recipe Service.
Yes, the Armed Forces Recipe Service actually exists and its “Index of Recipes” specifies the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps as beneficiaries of its toothsome nourishment. The Coast Guard isn’t included because it’s not under the Department of Defense except in time of war (perish the thought) and the Space Force isn’t included because it was formed only in 2019 and the index hasn’t been updated since 2003. But both services do in fact use the recipes.
When it comes to pizza, the AFRS offers a variety of recipes, including ones for breakfast pizza, hamburger pizza, pepperoni pizza, pourable-crust pizza, and thick-crust pizza, as well as recipes for pizza sauce. Two popular pizza recipes are reproduced here. One wonders if a military culinary specialist would be subject to court martial for not following (obeying) a recipe to the letter . . .
23 July—In a brief interview this morning included in one of the public radio network’s anti-Israel stories that are becoming more common of late, a Gazan woman allegedly ready to give birth was bitching that because of the famine and malnutrition intentionally and inhumanely inflicted by the nasty Israelis she wouldn’t be able to feed her baby when it’s born. War is hell.
But what the hell were that woman and whatever man may have contributed his sperm doing making babies in the first place—in a barely habitable war zone with a bleak future at best? While there’s no reason not to have compassion for all the victims of Hamas’s aggression on 7 October 2023 and its entirely predictable aftermath, enough is enough. Already.
Before leaving Israel, here’s a laugh courtesy of the Associated Press through the editorial in this morning’s Hearst Republican-American. The editorial, about Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is titled “A leader who can’t be trusted,” and it’s right on the mark.
The laugh is a comment by a 31-year-old ultra-orthodox (Jewish) yeshiva (seminary) student and presumed draft-dodger on Israel’s legislation, enacted just last summer, to rescind the draft exemption for the ultra-orthodox. Wait for it: “You have to understand, we are part of the Jewish army. . . . Some people serve in tanks. We serve in yeshiva.”
It’s not likely that the schmuck was thinking of “They also serve who only stand and wait,” from John Milton’s sonnet “On His Blindness,” about—guess what—his own blindness, in which he essentially rationalized whatever effect his blindness may have had on his ability to serve God. It was negligible, as it happens.
While stifling laughter, consider the pizza war that Connecticut has fomented against New York City. Of course it’s a marketing strategy to boost tourism and thus tax dollars by making the Unconstitution State a pizza destination. We have no idea at the moment how much the ridiculous campaign is costing taxpayers, what with billboards and other meaningless marketing crap. But are people really going to shlep to New Haven, say, from the Rotten Apple just to get a pizza? More to the point, will Connecticut taxpayers get their moneys-worth?
And does anybody really care if Connecticut rather than New York is the Pizza Capital of America? Ned Lamont’s marketing mavens don’t care either. Because the real purpose of the pizza war is to draw attention from the important things the state’s tripartite Democrat state government is doing to screw the state.
By the same token, outside of everybody’s prurient interest in the Jeffrey Epstein files, the real purpose of keeping the dead scandal in the headlines is to draw attention from the important things the tripartite Trumpublican federal government is doing to screw the country . . .
22 July—It speaks well of Federal District Court Judge Rebecca Grady Jennings that she didn’t cave to the corrupt Trump administration’s implicit order to sentence former Louisville Kentucky cop Brett Hankinson to no time in the slammer for his part in Breonna Taylor’s death—murder—by police screw-up. It speaks especially well because Judge Jennings is a Trump appointee, having been nominated in September 2017 and taken her seat on the bench in April 2018. (It’s not the first time Judge Jennings has done the right thing, by the way, but that’s irrelevant.)
Hankinson had been convicted by a jury on 1 November last year—just a few days before Trump’s catastrophic reelection—of depriving Breonna Taylor of her civil rights during the raid on the wrong apartment that resulted in her death. He didn’t kill her, mind you, and in fact none of the 10 shots (presumably the full contents of the magazine of whichever of his pistols he was packing at the time) he fired blindly through a covered window and glass door during the botched no-knock raid hit anyone. But Hankinson managed to shoot up an apartment next door, narrowly missing a neighboring family. What a cop! Thirty-two shots in all were fired in the humongously botched raid. What cops!
Had Hankinon’s trial been put off and he not been convicted until Trump slithered back into office, Trump’s politicized, weaponized flunky Department of Justice surely would have dropped the case, as it’s done with New York Mayor Eric Adams among other scuzz. But Hankinson’s laughably inappropriate non-sentence would have been almost as good in the Trump world.
Instead, though, Judge Jennings sentenced Hankinson to 33 months up the river followed by three years of supervised probation. Less than a third of the max suggested by the federal sentencing mavens, to be sure, not really adequate in the circumstance, but better than the insulting bupkes sentence suggested by Trump’s flunkies.
Judge Jennings had no hesitation expressing disappointment with the flunky DOJ sentencing recommendation, on the other hand, accusing it of treating Hankinson’s actions as “an inconsequential crime” and calling its arguments “incongruous and inappropriate.” And she made it clear, “This sentence will not and cannot be measured against Ms. Taylor’s life and the incident as a whole.”
Not that any of it matters, of course. Because it’s not unlikely that Trump will issue Hankinson a full pardon or at least commute his prison sentence (and supervised probation). As he’s done and will do with so many criminals. And if he hasn’t already done it by the time you read this . . .