Common ground in the Era of Trump & Republican child internment camps and baby jails

In this darkest moment of Republican children internment camps, this twitter post from Steve Schmidt is a must read. If Republican baby jails isn't a wake up call and turning point, America is doomed.

Steve Schmidt
29 years and nine months ago I registered to vote and became a member of The Republican Party which was founded in 1854 to oppose slavery and stand for the dignity of human life. Today I renounce my membership in the Republican Party. It is fully the party of Trump. It is corrupt, indecent and immoral. With the exception of a few Governors like Baker, Hogan and Kasich it is filled with feckless cowards who disgrace and dishonor the legacies of the party’s greatest leaders. This child separation policy is connected to the worst abuses of humanity in our history. It is connected by the same evil that separated families during slavery and dislocated tribes and broke up Native American families. It is immoral and must be repudiated. Our country is in trouble. Our politics are badly broken.

The first step to a season of renewal in our land is the absolute and utter repudiation of Trump and his vile enablers in the 2018 election by electing Democratic majorities. I do not say this as an advocate of a progressive agenda. I say it as someone who retains belief in DEMOCRACY and decency. On Ronald Reagan’s grave are these words. “ I know in my heart that man is good. That what is right will always eventually triumph and there is purpose and worth to each and every life.” He would be ashamed of McConnell and Ryan and all the rest while this corrupt government establishes internment camps for babies. Everyone of these complicit leaders will carry this shame through history. There legacies will be ones of well earned ignominy. They have disgraced their country and brought dishonor to the Party of Lincoln.

I have spent much of my life working in GOP politics. I have always believed that both parties were two of the most important institutions to the advancement of human freedom and dignity in the history of the world. Today the GOP has become a danger to our democracy and values. This Independent voter will be aligned with the only party left in America that stands for what is right and decent and remains fidelitous to our Republic, objective truth, the rule of law and our Allies. That party is the Democratic Party.

The crashing sky

Finally . . . 19:30 GMT (7:30 PM) . . .  and I have managed to crawl out from under the crashing sky of America one more time.

Seems I get sucked into that shit show at least once a day . . . 

... US Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III claiming he's doing "god's work" ripping children from their parent's arms at the border ... and Trump pretending Democrats are making them do it.

...Trump saluting North Korean generals and praising murderous dictator Kim Jung Un as a "pretty smart cookie" with a "very good personality"...

... lies swarming from his mouth are like great gray clouds of terminates rising from the foundation of a rotting house.

It's exhausting.

Through the glass

The South should just secede from the Union, erect a wall around itself and be done with it. They could have all the guns they crave ... machine guns, cannons, bazookas, ground to air missiles, bombs, whatever ... replace science class with bible study, deport anyone with skin darker than a peanut and worship Trump as the divine messenger they know him to be.

But I did go for a bike ride today. That helped. We're in Portland, Oregon at the moment. We rode down to the Sellwood bridge and along the way discovered the Portland Puppet Museum. That was a bright spot in the day. Swami would love it. Closest people to his friends at Artist's House in Bangkok.

Kafka

The girl who waits and watches

I got back on Wednesday after three weeks in Oregon visiting family. We unloaded the car and then I put a few peanuts out in the Bird Park. Good old Maggie, the 7 o'clock magpie. She showed up almost immediately. I love that bird. She's always appears with the 24 hours after I get home, even if I've been gone for months.

—William Moore—
Murdered between
the 9th & 14th of Dec. 1900

The next day Minerva the crow and her magpie partner appeared and, as I was watching them, it occurred to me that Minerva's companion doesn't have a name which is odd because they've been coming to the Bird Park together for years. He should have a name by now. For two days I couldn't come up with a thing then this afternoon, while strolling through the local graveyard, it came to me . . . Kafka, Kafka the magpie.

Au revoir

Henri, Le Chat Noir has retired. I weep.



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Henri's first video, 2006

Do

The word "do" entered our language sometime before 900 CE and although it's only two letters long it is incredibly nuanced. Whatever did we do before we got do?

There Is No White Jesus | Famalam

I doubt many in Trump's evangelical base realize that Jesus was a black man in the middle east . . .

Rest in peace, Sudan. I am so sorry.

Sudan, the last northern white rhino has died. His death leaves only two females of his subspecies alive in the world, his daughter and granddaughter and they are too inbred to conceive.

RIP Sudan :-(

Poachers and the black market animal horn trade is responsible for this pending extinction. And why? Because there is still a market for rhino horn on the bullshit folk or traditional Asian "medicine" market. Horns are believed to give a sexually impaired man big stiffies. It's a lie. Traditional "medicine" so-called doctors and herbalists add Viagra to the mix and sell the compound to fools and now the northern white rhino has paid the ultimate price. For this same reason, elephants are in line to go extinct as well as all the other horned animals in the world.

I just can not comprehend why we have not yet internationally stopped this criminal, immoral, unethical, cruel, deceptive trade. Oh, that's right! Unscrupulous shit-heel politicians are making money on it. The situation has reached such a critical juncture I seriously entertain the idea that idea that dealers and poachers should be sentenced to death and buyers should receive massive fines and serious jail time. Oh, and maybe give shit-heel politicians some or all of the penalties too. There's an idea.

Last moments of Sudan's life

Rest in peace, Sudan. Words cannot convey how sorry I am for what my species as done to yours.

Bird ways

Quail really don't mind body contact. In fact, bumping, cuddling and squeezing in is a major part of life in the covey. If two quail are drinking wing to wing at the water bowl, a third one would just as well squeeze in between them than find an open spot. Same when they are grazing seed under the butterfly bushes. They cluster and continually bump into each other and, except when they are chest bumping and chasing each other in dizzying circles, they act like one big soft gray feathery body sharing a single mind.

Nobody else who comes to the Bird Park does this. The magpie swoop and dive each other in a semi-congenial fashion, the lordly crows and ravens have the breakfast table to themselves, the little birds either battle or ignore each other all together, and the starlings gobble like they are competing for scraps in a madhouse. Only the mourning doves and pigeons eat together without boast or incident.

Cambridge Analytica

In like a lion

The little birds are eating as fast they can and the quail just arrived. Soon snow will cover everything and everyone will have to wait out the night tucked as best they can out of the wind. "In like a lion, out like a lamb" mother always said of March but who can be sure anymore? At least the hawk hasn't made an appearance yet this evening.

Stable genius

For your viewing pleasure, here is a short clip of the current Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau and Russian and alt.right America's favorite "Stable Genius" Donald J. Trump discussing "things". 

Wild Elephants salutes the men who rescued their baby elephant from a ditch

A little night music for today

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (A Little Night Music)
Dorothea Tanning, 1943, Tate Modern

1 Hour Sufi Music of Turkey | Hakan Mengüç

Gass's Invocation to the Muse

This quote from Biblioklept taken from William H. Gass, his book The Tunnel. It's fabulous and daunting and I'm afraid I have to add it to my already neglected reading list.

"An Invocation to the Muse

O brood O muse upon my mighty subject like a holy hen upon the nest of night.
O ponder the fascism of the heart.
Sing of disappointments more repeated than the batter of the sea, of lives embittered by resentments so ubiquitous the ocean’s salt seems thinly shaken, of let-downs local as the sofa where I copped my freshman’s feel, of failures as frequent as first love, first nights, last stands; do not warble of arms or adventurous deeds or shepherds playing on their private fifes, or of civil war or monarchies at swords; consider rather the slightly squinkered clerk, the soul which has become as shabby and soiled in its seat as worn-out underwear, a life lit like a lonely room and run like a laddered stocking.
Behold the sagging tit, the drudge-gray mopped-out cunt-corked wife, stale as yesterday’s soapy water or study the shiftless kind, seedy before any bloom, thin and mean as a weed in a walk;
Smell the grease that stands rancid in the pan like a second skin, the pan aslant on some fuel-farting stove, the stone in its corner contributing what it can to the brutal conviviality of close quarters,
Let depression like time-payments weigh you down; feel desperation and despair like dust thick in the rug and the ragged curtains, or carry puppy pee and plate-scrapings, wrapped in the colored pages of the Sunday paper, out to the loose and blowing, dog-jawed heap in the alley;
Spend your money on large cars, loud clothes, sofa-sized paintings, excursions to Hawaii, trinkets, knicknacks, fast food, golf clubs, call girls, slimming salons, booze;
Suffer shouting, heat rash, chilblains, beatings, betrayal, guilt, impotence, jail, jealousy, humiliation, VD, vermin, stink.
Sweat through a St. Louis summer and sing of that.
O muse, I cry, as loudly as I can, while still commanding a constricted scribble, hear me! help me! but my nasty echo answers: one muse for all the caterwauling you have called for! where none was in that low-life line of work before?
It’s true. I’ll need all nine for what I want to do—perhaps brand new—all nine whom Hesiod must have frigged to get his way, for he first spoke their secret names and hauled their history by the snout into his poem. For what I want to do …
Which is what—exactly? to deregulate Descartes like all the rest of the romancers? to philosophize while performing some middle-age adultery? basically enjoying your anxieties like raw lickker when it’s gotten to the belly? I know—you want to make the dull amazing, you want to Heidegger some wholesome thought, darken daytime for the TV, grind the world into a grain of Blake.
O, I deny it! On the contrary! I shall not abuse your gift. I pledge to you, if you should choose me, not to make a mere magician’s more of less, to bottle up a case of pop from a jigger of scotch. I have no wish to wine water or hand out loaves and fishes like tickets on a turkey. It is my ambition to pull a portent—not a rabbit but a raison d’être—from anything—a fish pond, top hat, fortune cookie—you just name it—a prophecy in Spengler’s fanciest manner, a prediction of a forlorn future for the world from—oh, the least thing, so long as it takes a Teutonic tone—a chewed-over, bubble-flat wad of baseball gum, say, now hard and sour in the street, with no suggestion of who the player’s picture was, impersonal despite its season in someone’s spit, like a gold tooth drawn from a Jew’s jaw.
Misfits, creeps, outcasts of every class; these are my constituents—the disappointed people—and if I could bring my fist down hard on the world they would knot together like a muscle, serve me, strike as hard as any knuckle.
Hey Kohler—hey Koh—whistle up a wind. Alone, have I the mouth for it? the sort of wind I want? Imagine me, bold Kohler, calling out for help—and to conclude, not to commence—to end, to bait, to 30, stop, leave off, to hush a bye forever … to untick tock."

Squirrels, squirrels squirrels

Today is the Big Day

Squirrel Appreciation Day!

Of course, it's best not to feed wildlife but I'm sure that if you toss a few peanuts to a squirrel, she wouldn't mind. In any case, remember they were here before us so at least let them pass in peace.

More squirrels, squirrels, squirrels!