Sunday Serendipity

40 thoughts on “Sunday Serendipity”

1. Everyone is made to forget their cares and to sing and dance
   By the air which is tempered with pleasure

   ahhh, yes, finally Fall has fully fallen upon us after such a sweltering summer.

   thanks, jack.

2. NYT best of late night:

   The 51 Percent

   A new Fox News poll found that 51 percent of Americans surveyed believe President Trump should be impeached and removed from office.
   “Damn, and that’s a Fox News poll. So you know they only called landlines, CB radios and V.F.W. halls.” — SETH MEYERS
   “Fox News is what Trump watches to feel good about himself. That’s like if a kid turned on ‘Sesame Street’ and Big Bird was just smoking a cigarette going, ‘Face it, kid, you’re never going to learn how to spell.’” — SETH MEYERS
   “If Trump can’t rely on Fox News to make himself feel better, what can he watch? His aides are going to have to replace his TV with a mirror and hope he doesn’t notice.” — SETH MEYERS
   “Which is a big deal coming from Fox News. We can’t even get a majority of Americans to agree on who should play Batman.” — JIMMY KIMMEL
   “I would love to have been with him when he saw this. He’s sitting there, enjoying Lou Dobbs time, this pops on the screen. I bet he spit his McFlurry all over the room.” — JIMMY KIMMEL
   The Punchiest Punchlines (One-Way Ticket Edition)“According to prosecutors, two associates of Rudy Giuliani who were arrested last night had purchased one-way airline tickets out of the country. But of course, Giuliani’s most dangerous associate has his own plane.” — SETH MEYERS
   “These guys also helped Giuliani collect dirt on the Bidens in Ukraine. They are literally dirtbags.” — JIMMY KIMMEL
   “The men have been advised to get themselves a good lawyer, which immediately rules out Rudy Giuliani.” — JAMES CORDEN
   “But who could have ever guessed Rudy Giuliani would have two henchmen named Lev and Igor? Not only does Trump hire the worst people, he hires the worst people that go on to hire more of the worst people. It’s like a worst-people nesting doll he’s got.” — JIMMY KIMMEL
   “I can’t believe a guy who looks like a vampire had a henchman named Igor. Is this a Mary Shelley novel? What was Igor’s job? To open Rudy’s coffin? ‘Master, arise.’” — SETH MEYERS
   “I love to watch Trump turn on these guys who would kill for him. We’re about three weeks away from him claiming he never met Rudy Giuliani.” — JIMMY KIMMEL

3. Jack

   Thank you for the wonderful music selection.  Autumn is my favorite season of the year and Vivaldi a favorite componser.  This Sunday needed some beauty.  thanks for providing it. 

4. wapo:

   BEIRUT — U.S. troops withdrew on Sunday from another town in Syria as Turkish-backed forces pushed deeper inside Syrian territory, seizing positions along a major highway that serves as the U.S. military’s main supply route into Syria — potentially cutting off U.S. troops further west, according to a U.S. official.

   [continues]

5.  
   Barr’s liddle speech

   How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape. ― Christopher Hitchens

6. Sounds like the little fat man is trying to establish religion. It’s just a ploy, of course, but still so repugnant as to be Satanic.
   pig man

7. So question of the day
   What’s for breakfast?
   The reason I’m curious is in my morning reading I ran across an old Wapo article about a survey that ask how Americans like their breakfast cooked. The problem was they limited it to bacon, eggs, toast and coffee.
   As the article pointed out the American breakfast is more complicated than that.  In fact, I would say that breakfast was  my father’s eat out at the diner breakfast.  At home it varied although my father always wanted meat with every meal.  I think it was from depression era thinking. My father may not have been able to provide us with much but at least we had meat on the table. 
   So I tend to favor a meat/eggs breakfast but I’m not opposed to oatmeal either.  Which reminds me for the 10 years I knew him my father in law ate oatmeal for breakfast, every day. He may have done that for his whole life. 
   Today, my breakfast, I made biscuits for 1 with blackberry jam and a slice of aged gouda from Holland. Of course strong black coffee. I’ve got about I cup left in the pot I may give myself  Sunday treat and put a shot of orange flavored brandy in it. Then sit back and relax.
   BTW, brown beans with ham are simmering on the stove so I need to make some cornbread.  That is dinner and supper.
   Jack

8. And I can’t forget my morning shot of insulin waiting for it to kick in gives me time to make my biscuits. Gotta love evolution, after all you only need a few old people to pass on the wisdom. Look at all the degenerative diseases  out there to thin us out.
   Jack

9. If it’s a real breakfast it’s steak and 3 eggs over medium with hash browns, toast, a large milk, and coffee.
   Most days it’s either a sausage biscuit from the little store, or bagel with cream cheese at home.
   Mostly never lunch.

10. Hey Jack, good question.
    I don’t always eat breakfast, but when I do it’s a varied selection. My go to is a lightly toasted blueberry bagel with cream cheese. We never get caught without bagels and cream cheese in the house. Pam prefers a plain bagel with a slightly heavier toasting than I like.  Next choice would probably be oatmeal. We enjoy Quaker instant in the single meal packages to which you add water and nuke – most often banana nut but we also enjoy maple and brown sugar. A third selection might be pre-cooked crispy bacon wrapped in a warm tortilla with a bit of shredded cheese and maybe a dollop of sour cream or squeeze of ranch dressing. We rely very much on the microwave and toaster. 
    Yeah, I guess breakfast is varied. Even though Pam is retired now and I’m working full time from home, we still don’t really cook breakfast. I guess that’s a hold over from getting up at 0530 to be at the office by 0700. I can never eat that early.
    If we go out to a nice sit down, we enjoy panCAKEs or waffles or your standard eggs with hash browns. I like scrambled and Pam prefers over easy. Oh and some good sourdough toast. And maybe some fresh fruit. Fast food breakfast of choice is supreme croissant from JITB. Or bacon/egg/cheese McGriddle from McDs.
    Happy Autumn to all on the trail!

11. I put away the oatmeal as soon as I became somewhat autonomous and have never looked back.   I assigned religion to the same trash heap probably about the same time.

12. So is Heinlein right we are destined for  religious dictatorship?
    “If this goes on”  hum it took me 40 years to realize what that title meant.
    From wiki:
    “If This Goes On—” is a science fiction novella by American writer Robert A. Heinlein, first serialized in 1940 in Astounding Science-Fiction and revised and expanded for inclusion in the 1953 collection Revolt in 2100. The novella shows what might happen to Christianity in the United States given mass communications, applied psychology, and a hysterical populace.
    If you have not read it Here

13. Trump’s Betrayal of Kurds Will Echo For Generations

    Kurds have come to deeply value their collective memory. The next generation won’t forget U.S. support for Turkey’s bloody move into Syria.

     

14. While I’m not in favor of the forever war, the way Trump did it sucks and makes it more likely that that we will have to put Americans in harms way in the future. F**king idiot.
    Jack

15. Jack

    Heinlein is my favorite Science Fiction author and he dealt with the theme of religion often;

    Stranger In A Strange Land and Time Enough For Love are two of my favorite novels.  

    History does not record anywhere at any time a religion 
    that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not
    strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But, 
    like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time 
    and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure 
    from fiddling with it. 
    
    Here are more of his quotes on Religion.  All are applicable to idiots like Dominionist William Barr:  https://www.learnreligions.com/robert-a-heinlein-quotes-4011979
    
    

16. Haven’t read that one, but when I was a kid I joined one of those science-fiction book clubs which were running around back then. It was hard to get out of but while it was there I got THREE BY HEINLEIN,  which contained “The Puppet Masters”, one other,  and the exquisite, (and as it turns out Novella of the Week), “Waldo”.
    They stuck with me, and became regular Pards on the long and winding trail.

17. mass communications, applied psychology, and a hysterical populace.

    He just didn’t understand how mass it would get with the internet. Rabble rousers used to have to get in the middle of the crowd to do their dirty work, now they can be from anywhere and anonymous. 
    Jack

18. Read the Stranger etc later,in a different era,  and while it was Super Heinlein it didn’t really stick.
    Time Enough was a great yarn also. Cant talk science-fiction without mentioning THE SIRENS OF TITAN and such by Kurt.

19. Breakfast is the one meal I try to never miss.  I might get too busy for lunch and then something comes up and dinner is skipped.  Not too often now, but it still happens.  Coffee, a pair of eggs (fried, scrambled, soft boiled), a meat of some type with a slice of buttered toast.  Basic and definitely enough to survive on.  Add in a stack of pancakes covered in a fried egg and maple syrup with link sausages, a small plate of hash browns and corned beef, along with another egg and you have what I ate when I had to do heavy labor in jobs I held when I was in my twenties and early thirties.  Burned a lot of calories back then.
     But, breakfast can be leftovers from dinner, a frozen TV dinner, or some pizza.  That is what happened back when I worked midnights.  Even now I do not discriminate against something good, perhaps left over kimchi jjigae, or even grilling a fish for the plate.  Breakfast is how the day starts and sometimes ends.

20. Kurt caught the basic irony of just how nuts we are. 
     

21. Ah, cold pizza for breakfast, yeah!

22. Yup on Kurt.  A literal giant of the written word.

23. I think my favorite Vonnegut has to be  “Mother Night” but my favorite ending of any novel  has to be “Breakfast of Champions”(I think gotta go down to the basement and get it off the shelf)  where after the revolution and destruction of the machines, those that destroyed them are picking up the pieces envisioning how they can take the parts rebuild it all over again. As I said ……..
    Jack

24. I know people who simply have not read a book since high school or college for some, and probably didn’t really read them then, just Cliff Notes or Classics Illustrated.    I always just wonder what colors their thoughts.

25. My favorite Kurt this week is GOD BLESS YOU MR ROSEWATER

26. Brewster, the dog is telling me it is really nice outside and we need to get out of the house and enjoy the day. I think I’m going to listen to him.
    See y’uns later.
    Jack

27. Also on KVjr……he covered a convention in print for a magazine, either “Ramparts”, “Esquire”, or “Atlantic” or one of those.   I think late sixties which would make it 68, but it could have been 72…..it was masterful coverage and I remember being astounded by his accounts of the goings-on.

28. Discipline and the Media
    Barbara Walters invited me to appear on the Todayshow. I told her that I had nothing to say. The convention had left me speechless. It was so heavily guarded, spiritually and physically, that I hadn’t been able to see or hear anything that wasn’t already available in an official press release. “It’s Disneyland under martial law,” I said.Article essay in “Harper’s Weekly” 1972“In a Manner Which Must Shame God Himself”
    https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2005/1/14/85582/-
     

29. Divine Right of Presidents
    Dr. D. Elton Trueblood, a Quaker and Professor at Large of Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, was the main speaker at the pre-convention Sunday Worship Service. 
    Dr. Trueblood’s sermon surprised me at one point, because I thought I heard him say that the sovereignty exercised by American politicians came directly from God. Some other reporters there got the same impression. He was speaking extemporaneously, so no copies of the sermon were made available for a detailed check.
    But I interviewed him afterwards, and recorded our conversation, which went like this:
          “After your sermon this morning,” I said, “I heard someone say that you had traced sovereignty from the President directly to God. We are usually taught that the sovereignty of the President resides in the people. I was wondering, since you are a theologian–”     “I said nothing about the President,” said Trueblood. “I said the sovereignty is God’s, not ours, that all we do is under Judgment. This is a way to have a non-idolatrous patriotism.”     “So the circuitry would go like this,” I said, “if we were to lay it out like a wiring diagram: the President draws his sovereignty from the people, and the people draw it from God. Is that it?”     “No,” he said. “I would put it another way: that God alone is sovereign. I accept Luther’s doctrine of the two kingdoms of the Church and State, both under God. So that everything we do as a state is under Judgment, therefore derivative.”     “So the President is simultaneously responsible to the people and to God?”     “But even more to God than to the people, of course,” Dr. Trueblood replied.
    I set this down so meticulously and without elisions because I think it proves my claim that on August 20, 1972, the Republican National Convention was opened with a sermon on the Divine Right of Presidents.

     

30. It’s difficult to finish a novel, lately, when everyday one has to read 100 articles on how Trump and the Republicans broke something, ruined something, rigged something, hurt somebody, slandered somebody,  undermined something else, lied about this, lied about that, hired a skunk, fired a hero…
     
    I could go on, but i have 100 articles to read.

31.  
    If I were a visitor from another planet, radioing home about Earth, I wouldn’t call Americans Americans. I would give them a name that told a lot about them immediately: I would call them Realtors,

    KVjr, 1972 Harper’s

32. Pity is like rust to a cruel social machine.
    —-KVjr 72

33. that operation bone spurs cartoon on bugging out of Syria calls for a repost of a parody produced in 2017

34. Sturgeone – I am sure when SFB is conversing with his god, while sitting on his gold throne, he reminds his god that he is the stable genius and that his god needs to dig up dirt on Biden.

35. wash examiner quotes mattis:

    Speaking on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday, Mattis avoided delving too deeply into political commentary but said people should refer to his resignation letter to get a sense of his take on Trump’s decision to move troops out of northern Syria, allowing Turkey to attack Kurdish allies.
    “It’s a page and a half long. It talks about our security being tied inextricably to our alliances. And I don’t know what more I can say about how I think we ought to treat allies and how we should treat those who are our adversaries,” the general said.

    […]

    “One core belief I have always held is that our strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships,” Mattis wrote in his resignation letter. “While the U.S. remains the indispensable nation in the free world, we cannot protect our interests or serve that role effectively without maintaining strong alliances and showing respect to those allies.
    “We must do everything possible to advance an international order that is most conducive to our security, prosperity and values, and we are strengthened in this effort by the solidarity of our alliances,” he added.

     

36. if I were Ukraine (or for that matter any ally of ours – say So. Korea & Japan) seeing the bug out and betrayal of the kurds would worry me.

37. Would love to know if Rudy’s indicted clients were paying him with Russian money. 

38. Maybe Alan Dershowitz will represent Trudi

39. Amy Holmes — geez can’t you find a better gooper than some washed up Glen Beckite

40. Real Russian money is still dollars

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