SmokeSound

Not a bad way to make the Club. The Tim Tolson Shift Just throw it! Told you it would happen! Just a second, here! Oh, oh. Gravity Calls.

There is a very good reason why Donald Trump is doing so well in his assault on the Republican primary race.  He isn't a politician. Well, listen to him!  No one could be more unpolitic than Donald Trump.  In effect, he is telling all the other candidates, as well as the Party itself, they are incompetent, impotent, and most likely a pack of lying jackals.  That is to say, they are politicians. The pack of lying jackals scorn politicians, too, and every one of them says they are not like the politicians they want to replace.  They just want to hold political office; to be in charge of the political system.  They are measuring every variable and maneuvering their careful way through the political process. Donald Trump actually has  a life outside politics.  He makes a lot of money; probably not nearly as much as he says he makes, but that is a trivial problem.  Everybody knows that Trump can afford to badmouth Mexico, or Lindsay Graha...

Last time I visited the dermatologist, she hacked out a part of my face that she said was cancerous:  not anything really troubling; just living a life of its own. "When you were a child, did you play in the sun a lot?", she asked. I was not sure how to answer.  Born in Tacoma, Washington, I could not remember whether it ever stopped raining, or not.  I suppose a lot of children do play in the sun.  I let it go. I returned, this week, for a new excavation.  I was reminded, by something she said, of all the people who think they are being very clever when they speak to people as old as I, who say things like, "How can I help you, young man?", or who follow-up a question about age by saying saying we are "eighty-three years young".   The law says old codgers may not whack such idiots with their canes. "You are in really good shape", she said; "I mean, really good shape!" OK. Then she added, "Are you able to take care o...

Donald Trump's big advantage is that he is never going to be President. I don't know whether Mr. Trump wants to be President but he is not going to be President.  Ever. As a consequence, it is safe to cheer him on. Immigrants from Latin America, Mr. Trump says, are criminals: rapists, drug dealers, and purveyors of filthy ceramics. He said, then unsaid, that we should build a wall along our southern border from Texas to California, and then we should force Mexico to pay for the wall. That is pure nonsense, of course, but since Mr. Trump is never going to be President it is perfectly safe to cheer him on. It is a free pass for stupid ideas. We won't really have to live with them. The Donald surely knows that, too. He is, himself, an example of what to do. He can say anything. It is not ever going to happen. His ego is larger than Mount Rushmore: even if it erodes a bit, he will think of himself grandly. As a consequence, people are coming up out ...

Hit Away! Getting Away Got it! Got Away 97mph.  Wicked slider.   Landed on the Batting Cage Doc  Detect language Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Armenian Azerbaijani Basque Belarusian Bengali Bosnian Bulgarian Catalan Cebuano Chichewa Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Esperanto Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician Georgian German Greek Gujarati Haitian Creole Hausa Hebrew Hindi Hmong Hungarian Icelandic Igbo Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Javanese Kannada Kazakh Khmer Korean Lao Latin Latvian Lithuanian Macedonian Malagasy Malay Malayalam Maltese Maori Marathi Mongolian Myanmar (Burmese) Nepali Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Serbian Sesotho Sinhala Slovak Slovenian Somali Spanish Sundanese Swahili Swedish Tajik Tamil Telugu Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Uzbek Vietnamese Welsh Yiddish Yoruba Zulu Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Armenia...

Republicans have Donald Trump, or more accurately, Donald Trump has the Republicans.   Even were he not running for the Presidency, he would be an embarrassment; an outrage; a shame.  But he says he is a Republican, and every day, recently, more Republicans say that they like what he says.  It is producing fault lines within the GOP. Democrats have Bernie Sanders, a Senator from Vermont who chooses to call himself a democratic socialist.  He wants to be President, too.  On a lesser important level, just the fact that he calls himself a democratic socialist is a problem because very many Americans have an almost knee jerk antipathy to the term, "socialist".  It is just a way of saying that Sanders believes that a democratically elected government has a very important role to play in establishing a military, a school system, parks, health care, a highway system, and so on.  What kind of a national parks would we have if we depended on oil companies,...

Donald Trump is all ego, arrogance, and contempt.  And orange lint-ball hair.  He will never be President.  He will quite likely drop out of the primary contest when he has satisfied the trinity of traits that drive him to pretend that he is serious about running. We need not, for a moment, worry that he will win the Presidency, or even the Republican nomination.  It is the Republican Party that ought to worry.  Donald Trump is saying out loud what the Republican Party needs to worry about:  racism, Know-Nothing politics, contempt for ordinary people, "Let them eat cake!" attitude toward the poor,  blowhard contempt for other nations and cultures, and such an astonishing ego that one does not know whether to kneel and bow, or to laugh until you wet your pants. Poll-takers report that 15 or 20 or 160 percent of all prospective Republican voters support Trump.  Let us plainly admit that those polls have very little to do with whether Trump will...

Joel called our attention to an article by David Pence, in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune titled, "These wars--they're religious.  Will the West take its proper side?"  A note says that David Pence is a physician and teacher, who writes about religion, politics, and men. It is an article that asserts that Americans tend to think of world affairs in terms of nations, but if we do that with respect to what is going on in the Mideast, we will not understand that religious loyalty transcends nationhood.  As Pence puts it, ". . . whenever you hear that some violence is 'senseless' look for a battle over religion or ethnicity.  More often than not, that will make sense of it." The basic conflict, Pence asserts--and he is by no means alone in saying so--is between Saudi-style Sunni, and Irani-backed Shia understandings of Islam.  So far, so good.  The origins of that split within Islam go all the way back to the time of the death of Mohammed in 632, and the ...

Sonoran Soccer Balls Stream in the Desert Owl Having Survived Collision with Saguaro "Before" Picture at Poolside Field Testing a New Shade Screen Gathering Storm Clouds Blue is the New Orange South Havasu Falls Invasion Force

Kurt Wallander is a Swedish detective in a series of books by Henning Mankell.  [Say after me:  "Vall-on-dr", and "Monn-kl".]  [You will just have to put up with it:  pronunciations attract me!] It is a series of wonderful books and movies for TV; some in English, some in Swedish, with subtitles. Anyway. . . . The new prosecuting attorney moved into a house near Wallander's, on the Baltic seacoast.  Kurt was noticeably interested.  She invited Kurt to have dinner with her and her two teenagers.  I think she said it was for "her famous lasagna".  One of her kids said--in the style of unbearably honest kids everywhere--that it was the only thing she knew how to cook. Ja vel.  [Say after me:  "Ya vell".  You get the idea.  You don't?  Nei vel.] "That it was the only thing she knew how to cook" is the much-disguised point I am trying to make.  I have long admired the fact that some people, and s...

"Sic transit gloria mundi." "That is how the glory of the world passes." In the 1978 movie, "Foul Play", Goldie Hawn plays a character named, Gloria Mundy.  I have resisted showing a recent photo of Goldie Hawn as an example of the passing of the glory of the world.  That would be unkind. What brings this nonsense to mind? I have just read a short essay by Stephen B. Young, in which he argues that our recent political and social divisions have been the consequence of the Industrial Revolution, which produced powerful examples of economic self-interest (enormous concentration of wealth and power), and a need for a correspondingly strong state to offset the effects of such wealth and power in a few hands.  Thus, the welfare state. Now though, Young says, we are seeing a global resurgence of tribalism.  Human beings have lived in tribes for thousands of years.  In a tribe, values are shaped by the group, the tribe.  One grows up defending the tribe...