Buttermilk Sky

 We will hear (or refuse to listen to) a great deal of banana lubricant about the achievements of Henry Kissinger.  Here is another opinion. Shane MacGowan  of The Pogues is dead at 65.  He wasn't known for taking care of himself but for remaking Irish music in the 1980s.  We still have the music. I wish the  Huffpost  would be more circumspect in its headlines.  For example, "Joe Biden Scorches Lauren Boebert With Hand Gesture in Her Own Backyard" raises one's hopes since Boebert's use of her hand(s) is her best-known Congressional achievement.  According to the article Biden went to Boebert's district to praise passage of the Inflation Reduction Act without her vote.  And then...he made the sign of the cross.  Not the gesture I was picturing, while heads exploded on MurdochTV.  It's bad enough the President used a straw to drink a milkshake.  "Straws are for women and little kids," asserted funnyman  Jesse Watters ....

 The days grow short, the wind carries a chill, and like our remotest ancestors we wonder if we will see the sun again.  We perform rituals of renewal and rebirth.  We think of the unseen world.  And in the bleak mid-winter we get a little spooked.  It's no accident that our best-known Christmas story begins, "Marley was dead, to begin with."  A door knocker becomes a face becomes a knocker again.  We see what we want to see. Someone at InfoWars, where I turn for spiritual renewal, reported on the funeral of  Rosalynn Carter  yesterday, which was attended by all the living former First Ladies and Dr. Jill Biden.  All wore black except Melania Trump, but perhaps white is the color of mourning in Slovenia as it is in China.  We know from her White House Christmas decoration days that Mrs. T's color sense is -- idiosyncratic.  Light gray, actually, but when God caused his light to shine upon her... You probably thought it was her ...

 Merriam-Webster has announced that its  word of the year  for 2023 is authentic.   In the event authentic is unable to fulfill its duties, pusillanimous  will take over. "Then Nestor cut the gears/With his new-drawn authentic sword."  ( Iliad, tr. Chapman, 1598) The OED says this was the first use of "authentic" in written form, the translation celebrated by Keats.  Well, that's enough literature for today.  On to history! I'm not sure which is more humiliating, that  Kevin McCarthy  went to the Oxford Union to debate the question "This House believes US interventionism has done more harm than good" or that the House then voted 175 to 160 against the proposition.  That's right, he won.  Well, sharpen my head and call me Eberhard Faber. He won by asserting that "In every single war that America has fought, we have never asked for land afterward -- except for enough to bury the Americans who gave the ultimate sacrifice for free...

  You live and learn. Lots of people pray while flying, especially during turbulence and while landing.  British airports encourage prayer while waiting to board or claim baggage with designated "prayer rooms" at all the major ones I could research.  The structure above is in the  Bristol Airport  and is being criticized because it clearly started out as a shelter for smokers, or possibly a place to catch a bus.  Since it says "multi faith" I wonder what happens when members of competing faiths want to pray at the same time.   Those Pentecostals tend to be noisy.  A quick search reveals that American airports offer similar facilities, although  Lonely Planet  advises that "organized services" are no longer permitted.  I think my favorite is "Our Lady of the Airways" at Logan, which sounds decidedly Catholic.  How did I not know about this?  It's hard enough getting a cab.  Now I want to know about Russian airport...

 I wish I had something to contribute to the five million additional words that will be added to the JFK assassination archive today, but my memories are the same as everyone else's -- chiefly the discovery that television could go four days without a single commercial.  The funeral procession, the riderless horse, the world leaders walking out of the church like any other Sunday parishioners -- could never happen today -- Jackie lighting the Eternal Flame, all in glorious black and white.  I was twelve.   Steve Rose  in the Guardian does a good job of linking that day with our fractured, fractious present. Life goes on.  I guess I have to watch tomorrow's Macy's parade now that the  Moms for Liberty  have proclaimed it "a nonbinary and transgender extravaganza."  They don't consider this a good thing.  Just watching LGBTQ performers outdoors and from a distance can apparently "groom" children to demand gender therapy and Cher's ear...

 "We were in the clothes we'd been wearing for like twenty-four hours.  We get on this bus and it's a couple hour bus ride and people were kind of leaning on their spouse's shoulder and falling asleep.  And this idiot starts walking up and down the bus with his camera and anyone who fell asleep, he would put his finger in their nose and take a picture." Kathleen "Kappy" Trott, wife of former Rep. David Trott (R-MI), describing a trip to Israel in 2015.  The  idiot  she describes is then-Rep. Markwayne Mullin.  "I said to myself, if that idiot comes near me when I fall asleep, I'm going to punch him," Mrs. Trott went on.  Too bad she didn't. Ready for another? "The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him.  One feels it again when one sees his photographs...it is a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs.  In a rather more manly way it reproduces the expression of innumerable p...

 This is why other countries split the job of president/constitutional monarch from the job of running the country:  Joe Biden has to take time out from the climate crisis, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the  Houthi piracy  in the Red Sea -- yes, a new one --  the borderline treason of Tommy Tuberville and his own birthday to "pardon" a damn turkey.  Because people expect it.  This nonsense was started on November 19, 1963, by  John F. Kennedy.   Three days later he was dead, and it should have died with him.  Turkeys are ugly, overbred birds with bad tempers.  Nobody really likes to eat them but everybody does, because it's expected of us.  Which is almost never a good enough reason.  (I never ate good turkey.  Maybe it's all right barbecued.  My mom's was dry enough to inscribe with the Dead Sea Scrolls.)  If Biden wants to pardon someone, I nominate Leonard Peltier. You know how the ghost of Hamlet's fathe...

Hey, fellow travelers, any of you seen the sunlit uplands of peace?  I must have an old map. Want to bring Christmas to its knees?  Target has you covered.  For a little over ten dollars you can expose your innocent children to the gay agenda with this Pride Flag Nutcracker... ...and finish them off with Disabled Black Santa: What kind of hellscape are we living in?  What's next, Disabled Tim Cratchit? Too late for Satanic Halloween,  Clay Higgins , actually one of Louisiana's less deranged Republicans, grilled Christopher Wray about a nightmare he had after too much jambalaya, where FBI operatives dressed as MAGAts rode to the Capitol on January 6 in "ghost buses" to make Trump look bad.  Their red hats were a little too pristine and their Arbeit macht frei shirts still bore price tags, so they didn't fool Clay for a minute.  "Your day is coming, Mr. Wray," he said ominously, as the FBI director struggled not to laugh.  The chair of the select co...

  On campuses, in the streets and on the steps of the Capitol, people call ever more loudly for a cease-fire in Gaza.  The violence is so terrible that no further information should be necessary.  You can hate what is happening without hating Israelis or Palestinians, Jews or Muslim.  You must, or turn in your membership card in the human species. War is never a good time to expect rationality, much less truth.  But here is  Avi Dichter,  Israel's minister of agriculture and Likud party member, saying on television, "We are now actually rolling out the Gaza Nakba."  I thought they were.  Ethnic cleansing is another term.  "Nakba" (catastrophe) refers to the forcible removal of Palestinians in 1948.  Given the continued violence perpetrated piecemeal by "settlers" in the West Bank , is it time to talk about a final solution?  Too soon? Genocide has been around for centuries -- Carthago delenda est, remember? -- but the word was ...

 ...inherent in the system.  Yesterday, as a joke, I referenced Monty Python.  Today I wonder when the Party of Lincoln will start hurling cows at one another. Congressional violence has been around for a long time, and Preston Brooks would have laughed at Markwayne Mullin for his "consenting adults" challenge to Sean O'Brien.  Mixed martial arts?  There's prancing around a dojo in pajamas and then there's fighting, Markwayne, if that is anybody's name.  MMA is for boxers who can't land a punch so they kick you in the knee.  It wasn't the only time  Bernie Sanders had to separate them.  He told O'Brien to "answer the question" and O'Brien said, "I can't understand him, to be honest with you," because he does not speak Oklahoma.  That was cool. In an interview  Mullin  said, "By the way, I'm not afraid of biting.  I'll bite one hundred percent.  In a fight, I'm going to bite.  I'll do anything.  I...

 I wonder if the short days and miserable weather cause suicide rates to rise.  I refuse to look it up. Which of you is in charge of the lightning up there?  Some deity nailed the wrong Trump.   Judge Maryanne Trump Barry  has died at 86, unremarked by her kid brother who is too obsessed with his revenge fantasies to notice much else.  They did not get along.  ("Donald is cruel.")  But she was a true Trump, promoted to the federal bench with the help of Roy Cohn and forced to resign when rumors of tax impropriety emerged.   Tony Blair  has offered his services as a Middle East peace negotiator.  The response was more or less "Don't call us, we'll call you." Another ex-PM with baggage,  David Cameron,  has accepted the job of foreign secretary in return for a peerage.  He seems an odd choice, being largely responsible for the Brexit disaster. France  has pledged to spend a billion Euros researching the c...

 Trump's dementia broke through a wall on Saturday and discovered a room full of Nazi propaganda : "We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections," he told a mob in New Hampshire. "Our threat is from within.  Because if you have a capable, competent, smart, tough leader, Russia, China, North Korea, they're not going to want to play with us." Clearly this North Korean expected a handshake only. He repeated the same phrasing with random caps in a social media post, in case the Lugenpresse declined to carry his words, for once.  This one was couched as a salute to veterans. Given that his plans for us include a  politically vetted  secret army within the government and enormous camps for the undesirable, it might be time to explore the limits of political opposition and plan for the possibility that this creat...

 Largely unremarked, there were two food product recalls this week:   Tyson  pulled tons of chicken patties because pieces of metal were discovered in them, and  three companies  had something called fruit pouches removed from stores because they contained enough lead to make children sick.  Don't tell the Republicans or they'll cut the Secretary of Agriculture's salary to a dollar a year, which is their spiteful new party trick. Every time I consider subscribing to the New York Times they save me a bunch of money with an editorial decision that is completely unjustifiable.  This week they fired  Jazmine Hughes  for signing an ad that condemned Israel's actions in Gaza.  Then they paid someone to write an  article  praising the tasteful way Trump's spawn dressed when they went to court to testi-lie on Daddy's behalf.  This is not a serious newspaper. Right-wing financier Peter Thiel is saving money, too -- he's not sp...