Manafort and Podesta Group tied up in Mueller probe.

Like the author of a great epic story a rope is drawn around all the central characters, they're lassoed, the rope tightened and the characters drawn together to the center of action. ← I read that thirty years ago in a CliffsNotes to Victor Hugo's Les Misérables. You know, sometimes the CliffsNotes are better than the books they review, like Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier.

Unfortunately, no one will hang by this rope.

They won't even be discredited. Their party accepts these activities, their media gives them cover, and their voters are amoral, superficial with impressively varied and impossible emotional issues, their very identities. They need their party as weapon.

I'll tell you what this video says. I took notes. Here they are.

The Podesta Group has been sucked into the Muller’s investigation.

A man contacted Tucker Carlson and his staff (name cannot yet be revealed, but it will with more information to come) who is senior employee in Podesa group disgusted about the reporting being so off base that it's actually reversed.

There is Russian involvement in American politics but it has (almost) nothing to do with 2016 presidential campaign.

Paul Manafort is a central figure in Russia collusion investigation due to the several months he spent as Trump's campaign chairman. But that's only half true. Manafort is central in the investigation but not because of his ties to Trump. In fact, Manafort worked with the Podesta group on behalf of Russian interests for a very long time. The Russians sought to influence Capitol Hill, Hillary Clinton’s State Department, and the Obama Administration. Manafort brought a parade of Russian oligarchs to Congress where they met with members and their staffs. The central effort was extended to the Executive branch, the Obama administration.

The vehicle Manafort used was a shell company named European Center for Modern Ukraine. Ostensibly based in Brussels there are no employees there, the Brussels phones ring in Ukraine where an office is staffed with two employees.

The Podesta group was chosen by Russians because both Podesta brothers are close to the Clintons, that is, influence peddling by Hillary Clinton through her position as Secretary of State.

[For some strange reason this doesn't bother Democrat voters. The slime that gets on them from that doesn't bother them at all. Perhaps someone can explain that to me.]

Podesta hired a chief Clinton employee giving them direct access to Hillary. They used this connection to facilitate Uranium One. Manafort was clear that Russia wanted to cultivate ties to Hillary Clinton believing she would become president. The connection to Hillary was valuable to Russia, the payments to Podesta group greatly exceeds the 1,000,000 paid, the extra through kickbacks that would be difficult for investigators to trace. The source says the Podesta books are a treasure trove and highly secret. Podesta Group has no board overseeing it and all decisions are made internally by Tony Podesta personally. The group’s employees include a person whose only job is managing Tony Podesta’s art collection. It’s easy for an organization structured so loosely to conceal financial transactions.

The source has been interviewed extensively by Robert Mueller’s investigators.

Press accounts still frame Mueller’s investigation as a hunt for collusion between Trump campaign and the government of Russian. The investigators are very interested in Manafort’s activities during the period he ran the Trump campaign but otherwise that description is bogus. The investigation is more interested in which people and which organizations in Washington have been operating for years secretly as de facto operatives on behalf of Russian government and business interests. The Podesta Group chief among them. Investigators are more interested in facilitators of Russian influence than they are of election collusion. The Podesta Group is in their crosshairs.

A lot of this lobbying is not illegal in the United State, but if true, then what is learned overturns much of what we think that we know about Russian attempts to influence policy.

Then Britt Hume joins Tucker Carlson for discussion and the two bring all that down to earth.

I can see clearly now the rain is gone
I can see all obstacles in my way
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind
It's gonna be a bright (bright)
Bright (bright) sunshiny day.

Strangely, Jeff Bezos owned Washington Post has come way out of character.

It is not within them to frame an article damaging to Hillary Clinton. They simply cannot do it. Bezos is at war with Trump due to Trump's suggestion that Amazon runs roughshod over other retailers by not paying its due share in taxes.

They wrote an article Clinton campaign and DNC paid for research that led to Russian dossier published by Buzzfeed that's obviously bogus but still used to investigate collusion between Trump campaign and Russia to affect the 2016 election.

The judge in the case of the congressional subpoena into Fusion GPS bank records to discover financing for the bogus dossier gave Fusion until Friday to work out an agreement with Congress that would cancel the need for a judicial decision. So the article might have been advanced by Fusion itself because bank records will have a lot more information than Congress will ask for.

There is a possibility of other sources to finance the dossier including FBI, CIA, and an unhappy 2016 Republican candidate.

Fusion work researching Trump began during the Republican presidential primaries, when a GOP donor paid for the firm to investigate Trump's background.

They did not start out looking at Trump's Russian ties but quickly realized those relationships were extensive.

When the Republican donor stopped paying for research, a lawyer on behalf of Clinton campaign and the DNC agreed to pay for the work to continue.

Steele shared some findings with FBI so they launched an intelligence investigation into Trump associates and Russian government.

After the election the FBI agreed to pay Steele to continue gathering information, but FBI pulled their agreement after Steele was publicly identified.

Devin Nunes, head of the House Intelligence Committee is trying to get Fusion to identify the mystery client. And everyone is guessing while Fusion negotiates with Nunes until Friday.

And as usual, depending on the site, comments are even more interesting than the articles.

A sample:

A commenter asks a sincere but rather daft question:

*  If the dossier was paid for by the left or the right, why would it be illegal to have the opposition research done on a candidate? Did I miss something? Is it illegal to get information on a candidate. I’m just trying to put this new or existing revelation into some context.

The question is answered:

*  No it is not illegal to do opposition research. However, this was a Russian compiled piece of trash that was then used to try to subvert democracy in the USA. A sitting US President, duly and legally elected, has been undermined and maligned for close to a year now.
These lies were used to obtain FISA warrants to illegally spy on a campaign, used to unmask NSA captures… AND riled up the US populace to the point of anarchy.
 So, yes, you missed something.

They left out the dossier was used to fire up a special investigation of duly elected president of United States, to get him impeached, unlimited in scope and in financing, with tons of Democrat Washington insider lawyers. And the warrants were used for intimidating SWAT-like dead-of-the-night searches with computer confiscations.

*  Also, for a year or so, the Clinton/dnc camp has played innocent on the dossier and now they are exposed (again) as liars. 

* Sundance is correct that Perkins Coie admitted their role as bagman to create an excuse for the judge to quash the subpoena and for Dems to hammer Nunes to drop it. No doubt they expected to lose, and would rather get in front of the story. Hillary and the DNC must have agreed to this strategy; they are trying to get away with telling the partial truth in a gambit to hide the whole truth. Something much much worse lurks within those bank records. It is imperative that the subpoena be enforced and the entirety of the payment data be made public.

Throughout, the reporting on this is abysmal, America does not have a worthy free press. America has cages of clamoring monkeys.

Elizabeth Warren extends previous story to jump the "me too" bandwagon

Our favorite 100% Native American politician with fetching high cheekbones of the type generally seen among North American Amerind tribes, told an innocent story to amuse the mourners at law professor Eugene Smith's funeral. You know, to relax some of the pressure. She said he once playfully chased her around the desk in her office. Oh, those were the days of innocence and sunshine and youthful fun. How we all laughed together at such cheerful play. That was in a previous century, year 1977.

Her story has been updated for a new century to fit a new prerogative and to fit Actress Alyssa Milano's "me too" campaign revived from Tarana Burke's campaign of 2007 intended to give men a sense of the magnitude of the problem of sexual aggression. Now Elizabeth Warren's description of law professor Eugene Smith chasing her around his desk is a lot more menacing. The new version has her escaping quickly, sitting down in her office and thinking what did she do to bring this about and wearing a lot of brown thereafter. Warren neglects mentioning Smith lived with polio so however whatever happened it had to be awkward. Hard to tell by two distinctly separate versions.

This item was seen at Legal Insurrection where William Jacobson lays out all the steamy details, the full text of what Elizabeth Warren said both times. But who can even read all that knowing the woman lies pathologically? Good as it all is, Jacobson is always so thorough as law professors are wont, honestly, listening to children is much more interesting than reading Elisabeth Warrens words, children's fantasies pure without malice aforethought. But why should Elizabeth Warren stop when the left keeps rewarding her so richly for her distortions and her malevolence? You can tell Jacobson really doesn't like this woman. He's covered her a few times before.

His commenters over there are the same. They do come up with some good remarks. I tend to go straight to comments. Because Jacobson is so detailed and so lawyerly thorough whatever he says is mentioned in comments, so you'll know what he wrote without actually reading it. Plus some. Here's one such comment by member DanJ1:

Changing the tone of the story to meet a particular need is nothing new for these Leftists. I remember Me-chelle Obama telling a funny story on Letterman about going to Target incognito to rub elbows with the little people when a short woman asked her if she could help her get something from the top shelf. Scroll forward and when she needed to connect with blacks the story turned into a racist white woman assuming that this black woman would serve her.

That compelled guyjones to remark:

I remember when this story came out. It’s when I realized that Michelle Obama is a complete narcissistic sociopath who is transparently desperate to claim alleged “victim of racism” status despite her undeniably privileged, dilettante life. Because, only a total sociopath would unabashedly recycle a narrative that had been previously related with heartwarming undertones on the Tonight Show (i.e., the woman who obviously didn’t recognize her, asking for help in getting an item off the shelf), and, then, one year later, proffer the same tale, only this time, as alleged evidence of the woman’s racist behavior. The hapless woman went public with her protestations of innocence and her bewilderment that Michelle Obama would characterize her innocuous and innocent behavior as racist, but, her narrative received little attention. 

To falsely accuse someone of racism is contemptible, especially, when the accuser is a woman wielding extraordinary power and (undeserved) moral clout. 

Oprah did the same thing to a poor clerk in a luxury handbag store in Europe. 

Bandwagons are gauche. I too have anecdotes of unwanted sexual aggression, assertiveness actually, from both females and males, at work, at school, at clubs, and just out and about, but jumping a national bandwagon? How common. If I jumped on then I'd be just another person riding a train and there'd go my personal unique anecdotes to a trundling boxcar of similar tales. And they're too precious for that.

We know who Elizabeth Warren is. We know what she does. We know what her supporters are looking for. Why bother giving her the time of day? Her words are meaningless. We know Elizabeth Warren will never do anything for anybody unless there is something in it for herself that she can use. So, let's be of good cheer and just take something from Elizabeth Warren without giving her anything. I don't like talking about her any more than reading her. Let's use her instead.

Back on the Indian reservation somewhere desolate and without hope and without access to elite education, the noble savage Elizabeth Warren manages to scrounge up some interesting authentic Amerind recipes that are nothing at all like you'd expect. You might be thinking such basics as elk jerky, corn meal mush with wild goat cheese with berries and jalapeño peppers, pine nut and thistle salad with deer blood dressing, fried cactus, popcorn, and flat bread. No, not at all what you might be expecting, like river trout, bean soup with fried squash. Pure authentic full blooded natural born Amerinds like Elizabeth Warren are a lot more interesting than that.

From the Pow Wow Chow cookbook, real live 100% authentic recipes that positively weren't plagiarized from Pierre Franey of NYT published in Virgin Island Daily News.

8 eggs
2 Tbsp chopped parsley
1 Tbsp chopped tarragon
1/4 cup heavy cream
3/4 cup peeled, cubed tomato
4 tsp butter
Salt and pepper
1 LB crab with tomato mayonnaise dressing
More tomato
Parsley sprigs for garnish

Directions: Make a couple omelets, add the stuff.

If you need more words, there's a lot more words here on imgur

Reading the recipe kills me. It is to laugh. It's like expecting the reader never cooked anything before, doesn't know how to pour water without instructions to avoid spilling, or how to turn on the stove. As if cooking is a foreign activity like Elizabeth Warren telling the plain simple truth.

But a lot of people actually need that. Like young newlyweds, or teenagers just recently moved away from home. Latchkey kids. Or specialists in another field, scientists, left-brain people intensely concrete.

One time I watched my dad try to make scalloped potatoes by following a recipe. This episode went far in understanding my dad. An impressively smart man in his ways. But not when it comes to chopping vegetables and combining natural things to eat with various durations and forms of heat, frying, broiling, baking, microwaving, braising, roasting, stovetop, oven, grill, dry, in oil, steamed, boiled in water. It was all beyond him, so he read his recipe line for line performing each function as he encountered it. He did not read the whole thing through before starting, did not grasp what's going on, and then use the ideas presented as basis for his own ideas and on what he has on hand. So it couldn't occur to him to use cream instead of milk, or chicken or beef broth, or cheese of various types, or hot peppers, or garlic, or ham or bacon, or any other herb except what is specified and in the exact measured amount. He couldn't expand on the recipe, and he couldn't simplify the recipe. The recipe was law. Just like Elizabeth Warren unable to be original. And she, a professor.

On the shores of Gitche Gumee
Of the shining big sea water
Stood Eugene the old professor
Pointing with his crooked finger
Standing on his shrunken leg
Leaning on two walking sticks.

Leaning on his thick shillelaghs
Pointing to the fair ripe maiden
Lithely standing in his doorway.
"Come," said Smith the law professor
Creaking on his walking sticks.
pointing with his crooked finger
Should you ask me of your classes
I will tell what you must know.
I will answer of your grading.
I will say what you must do.

Come fair maiden of the mountains
Of the rivers running wild.
Maiden of the singing wind storms
Maiden of the open sky.
Fair one with the red hot embers
Woman with the fiery eyes.
I will tell you of your midterms
I will say what you must do.

Here's young Elizabeth Warren alluring in her primitive sensuality being chased around a desk by an old law professor with polio. Elizabeth is so playful and fun.

WKRLEM: Bannon speech to Conference

CNN hustles for legitimacy by launching credibility recovery campaign

CNN produced a video of a single apple. Now, that is top design school quality right there. Like a Japanese flag. Simplicity really is best. The voiceover is tautology, this is an apple, this is an apple, this is an apple, the simple truth is this is an apple. Some people will tell you this is a banana, and so on.

The video was presented on Twitter with the hashtag #FactsFirst, which was quickly hijacked and subverted to emphasize CNN has a dodgy relationship with facts. The rebuttals on their own hashtag are quite good. A sample.

* Some people might try & tell you it’s just a clump of cells. You might even believe it. But it’s not. It’s still a baby

* Here's a #TruthApple for #FakeNews @CNN's rebranding effort #FactsFirst  (picture of Adam and Eve in the garden with an apple and a snake.

* This is an apple, a criminal, a crime family, and a crime syndicate. Report accordingly. (picture of the same apple, Hillary Clinton, Chelsea Clinton, Bill Clinton.

* Even when @CNN tells you something is an apple...

... you still doublecheck it first before retweeting it!

* CNN needs to start following it’s own advice.  (photo of pregnant dude, captioned, “My body is awesome, Trans man expecting first child.)

* Shall we also apply this to gender dysphoria?

* 10 Times CNN Told Us An Apple Was A Banana! (CNN screenshot with chryon reading “Trump: election is being rigged by corrupt media)

* This is a baby. Some might try to tell you it's a clump of cells.

This is a man. Some might try to tell you he's a woman.

* “Some people might tell you this is a bump stock” (photo of a rifle with chyron reading Ryan:”We need to look into banning rapid fire bump stock”)

* Its just so cynical 4 a news organization biased as #CNN trying to preach #FactsFirst when their whole business model is #FakeNews

And so on.

Twitterers created their own hashtag to mock, #ApplesNotBananas, where the fun continues along the same line. A sample

* CNN #ApplesNotBananas #8: Experts in aviation 😂 Who knew? (photo of flight simulator with chyron reading “Boeing 777 will struggle to maintain altitude once the fuel tanks are empty)

* Truck Crash, (screen grab of CNN item titled “Berlin Christmas market: 9 dead at least 50 inured in [truck crash] ← wtf?

* You sure you want to anchor in on that one? (screen grabs of CNN politics page reading “Donald Trump just flat-out lied about Trump Tower wiretapping. Then another, “Exclusive: US government wiretapped former Trump …)

* Last Refuge posts a series of screen grabs this one titled #1

8 CNN t.v. screen grabs with chyrons reading Trump unlikely to discuss election meddling with Putin.

* CNN #ApplesNotBananas #4: "Putin did it"/"Putin didn't do it"
Screen grab CNN politics page. “Intel analysis shows Putin approved election hacking, the same article lower down, “But neither of the sources said they new of specific intelligence that directly ties Putin to the attack.

* CNN #ApplesNotBananas #5:  "Racial Profiling" (? - not even close)

Live CNN, Israel has done an unbelievable jos and they’ll profile. They profile. They see somebody that’s suspicious, they will profile. They wil take that person in. They’ll check …

CNN chyron reads “Trump says racial profiling will stop terror”

* Mass Extinction in Natural World

CNN Live presentation board reading Rising seas: flooding from NYC to haanghai, Dedlier heat waves, droughts, wildfires, Mass extinction in the natural world, Coral reefs, low-lying countries like Marshall Isl. would disappear. Chyron reads: White House tells lawmakers Trump ditches climate deal.

And so on.

Several sites agree the best video is the same voice and text as the CNN except with a banana substituting for CNN's apple to create the reverse meaning intended by the video about CNN's adherence to simple un-spun untainted straightforward facts.

I really like this cartoon by G.D. Trico, I think, that's what I make of the signature.

But, come on. Enter [political cartoon 3 monkeys] and see what happens. You cannot say it's all that original. Still, he sure can draw amusing monkeys.

One day I'll tell you about the time our Boy Scout troop camped at the outskirts of Nikko Japan. We had no idea that's the place with the Shinto shrine with the original monkeys carved right into the architecture.  Now (then) the entire town is given into the monkey souvenir trade. Almost every shop sells statues of these monkeys. And bears. (!?) They're all over the place.

We found out on the way back. Okay, fine. I'll just tell you right now.

There we were on a bus slowly climbing the narrow wending road up a mountainside in the fog. It was frightening. Sharp turns all over the place, nothing but curves and turns, upward, ever upward. Very slowly. Very carefully. Occasionally the fog broke and we'd get glimpses of mountainside but that was it. The road was not constructed for buses. Then suddenly on a right turn around a hairpin curve the fog lifted to reveal through the left side windows a lake just floating in the clouds. We could have driven straight into it. I suddenly realized how Japanese produce all those paintings of floating lakes, and floating mountain tops, and trees growing from clouds. This was it! We were actually traveling through a Japanese painting. It blew my mind and the experience left an indelible impression. Our view from the bus momentarily looked exactly like a thousand Japanese paintings.

Our bus continued to a field surrounded by trees where we set up camp. We had the worst little Army tents.

I hated campouts. I just did. Bootcamp is not for me. Whatever fun we were having we could have in the comfort of home. We could wake up in bed. We could use electricity to fix breakfast. We wouldn't have to clean up so assiduously and we'd have hot water. I didn't care for the smoke, for looking for wood, the cold, the gray skies, the dirt, the hard dank surface to sleep on. I didn't like the discomfort. I didn't care for scrounging for food. I didn't like singing their songs. I hated marching. The activities did not appeal to me. But I was copying my older brother who did like all those things. So I followed.

He likes to explore so a claque of us, not the whole troop, set off to see what kind of trouble we could get into, and that's how we discovered that peanuts grow underground. I don't even know what possessed one of us to uproot some farmer's plants to find that out. It's not the sort of thing I would do. Nevertheless we were delighted. They tasted disgusting. It was just so surprising to discover peanuts growing in Japan. That's something they didn't teach us in Japanese Culture class. See the things you find out by being a little punk?

We also discovered a nearby resort. The scoutmaster did. We'd have preferred to avoid it. I don't know how our scoutmaster managed this, I don't have any idea how he arranged this ad hoc addition to our campout, but he wanted us cleaned up and this resort was the perfect solution. I do not think this was planned. It was sprung on us. The next thing I know is we're all naked and running around a sauna with separate pools for different intensities of heat. There were a couple of old Japanese men in there too, visitors at the resort, who were fascinated, amused, interested, appalled, delighted, miffed, surprised and angered and tolerant of twenty or so American boys suddenly and noisily invading their peace and their meditation.

We thought they were pervs.

What are they doing in there anyway?

And stop looking at us so much. Gawl!

Whatever. It remains the most beautiful hot sauna pools that I've seen. It has not been topped. Its location is outstanding. Now whenever I see photos of hot tup pools, I'm taken back through the decades by memory as if that moment exists with present day time. It was simply beautiful. A natural wonder. And I still think about if our scoutmaster paid the hotel, or what. He said we were invited.

Onto the bus to go home. The ride down was not like the ride up.

But first a quick stop in the small mountain town to shop around and to take in what's going on. I don't recall how we came up with money to shop. I always needed more money. Our dad did teach us how to earn money, mowing lawns and washing cars, and generally making ourselves useful doing things people don't want to do. What a way to go. I resented that too. I resented having to do physical work for money. I vastly preferred he just give us some but he was such a miser with us all the time. We did go shopping. I did buy three monkeys and a bear and an original painting of a colorful dragon that the guy painted in a single stroke by loading a wide brush with rainbow colors and dragging the brush across the slippery paper just so, to deposit the pigments evenly until they run out, in circles over previous circles, so the rainbow crosses over itself, and jiggling the brush as he goes to leave marks in the pigment that resemble fish scales. The head was painted in black with wild whiskers  already drawn in, and the clawed feet and legs were added when the colorful curves were finished. The artist did this right before our eyes. I stood mesmerized watching him work. I took home my painting and studied it. I marveled at the man's technique. What an amazing place. This place, Nikko Japan, kept blowing my mind.

So that's Nikko Japan from a boy's point of view.

Here's Nikko Japan from the writers at Wikipedia.

Yes, I like G.D.Trico's three monkeys quite a lot. This was 2009, and I added a monkey. The Shinto priests were not concerned with depicting actual monkey behavior. What a sense of humor. They presume to instruct people how to behave while referring to their subjects as monkeys.

Whose that girl?

She is not in the Fortune Five Hundred but she got a lot more money than she is worth. A former news bunny she cashed in before the rush of Me Tooism hit the courts. Now she is sitting pretty and keeping quiet.

Whose that rich bitch.

Example 69 why bitches just can't along....not even for a potful of money!

Kim Cattrall says she was ‘never friends’ with ‘SATC’ co-stars

By Paige Gawley  New York Post October 23, 2017

Kim Cattrall is not friends with her “Sex and the City” castmates. “We’ve never been friends. We’ve been colleagues and in some ways it’s a very healthy place to be because then you have a clear line between your professional life and relationship and your personal,” the 61-year-old told Piers Morgan in an interview for ITV. 

Though there has been buzz for years that Cattrall didn’t get along with co-stars Sarah Jessica Parker, Kristin Davis and Cynthia Nixon, the apparent quarrel resurfaced recently when it was confirmed that a third “SATC” film was no longer in the works.

Christie Brinkley almost misses boat bash......due to unavoidable circumstances

New York Post Page Six by Emily Smith October 23, 2017

Christie Brinkley nearly missed the boat for a starry dinner to celebrate Andrew Saffir and Daniel Benedict’s 20-year anniversary.

The supermodel was stuck in Manhattan traffic Saturday night en route to the fancy floating celebration for Cinema Society founder Saffir and Amplify co-founder Benedict, who originally met while both working for Ralph Lauren. She could not move forward because a love struck Vietnam Veteran and farmer who laid in front of her SUV until she would agree to date him. She finally agreed and they will be going to the Packers Game next weekend since so many seats are now available.

presidents unite for hurricane fundraiser

Then blow that goodwill propounding their globalist politics and chiding voters for rejecting their conceits while mischaracterizing voter's values. The voters have spoken and they know whereof they speak. What happened is no accident. The political pontificating that comes with this fresh and carefully plotted showing is rejected and the sentiment of dissatisfaction is returned with interest.

And don't allow Clinton anywhere near the money. Doesn't Bush II learn anything about joining Clinton in fundraising?

When I was young and presidents united like this I thought it was neat. I felt lucky to have them all still alive and offering their unique wisdom gained from high office.

And now I feel only extreme distaste.

The feeling matches the mixed bag of feeling that arises from viewing homes that our family lived in. It's hard to explain the peculiar discomfort. Especially when others don't feel it. The itchiness comes from evolving past that. It's a 'that was then and this is now' feeling mixed with sadness about being a different person back then and in knowing none of that can be recaptured even if we did want to. The trouble is in the past. The particular good that occurred there is in the past. And the security and the insecurity of the now, that was then, is also locked in the past.

A friend drove me past a house that I lived in and lingered there even though I said that I didn't care to see it. He was more interested in noting changes than I was or ever could be. Then again, last weekend my brother stopped by our previous family home in the foothills because we were near it and to show his wife and their kids and I felt great discomfort with the gawking and the discussion. It's a beautiful home but I did not like being there, even as Alona and the kids were fascinated. James went on and on about the place and I couldn't get out of there fast enough and so relieved when we finally left.

Also, I couldn't believe the new owners have a big ass touring motor van parked in the front even worse than the one that my dad had. Taller and longer and wider and more gas guzzling. I argued with him about having it in the front driveway.  I thought it must have made the neighbors angry having a huge white elephant just sitting there. A garish symbol of ostentatious opulence. And the new owners made the oversized driveway even wider right to the property line. My dad had already enlarged it ridiculously. Just to store their more massive white elephant. Money to burn so just burn it. It's truly an eyesore. And it changes the whole nature of the neighborhood. Seeing such a huge ghastly thing kept right in front of the house intensified my discomfort tremendously. No. You really cannot ever go home again. Good thing. Because I don't want to.

Same thing with these presidents.

We've evolved since then. Greatly changed. Their messages come pre-rejected. They have no idea how their entire view has been purposefully smashed and for very good reasons, and their expressions of what they think is desirable and them talking about not liking the voter's choices, their discomfort in how things are turning out, turning against their values, reminds everyone who insisted on those changes how wrenching it was to move on. And leave them behind. It's been a horrible divorce. To all you ex-presidents, you nagging ex-wives, take your alimony and shut up and leave us alone. And as far as your nearly dead presidents show, we paid more for your protection getting here and assembling than you raised for charity. So spare us your sermons. You're billing us to annoy us. While leaving the real work of rebuilding after hurricanes to street-level down to earth everyday and un-awarded Americans behaving as genuine Americans. True grit. You cannot even do a charity without also reminding us we made the right decisions.

And thinking about who these people beat for office makes everything even worse. Worst political class ever.

KLEM TV

Lest we forget...

link

I once had a brother...

...who knew every aircraft ever produced, by sight. He really liked airplanes. Back in late 1960 he put together a science fair project for high school that he kept working on and used as a project to get into a good engineering school. The project was a wind tunnel that he built from scratch and once that was completed he started testing airfoil designs. He found a wing cross section that he liked then built a hang glider based on the work of Otto Lilienthal. We pronounced that "Lil-en-thal" back in those days, but who knows how it is pronounced now.

Anyway, he used aircraft grade Baltic birch plywood, vertical grained spruce for the stringers, waterproof two part adhesive, and planned on covering all the wing surfaces with cloth and treating the cloth with cellulose nitrate dope, WWI era style.

He documented his work as he went along and sure enough got accepted into a fine university. He never did finish the plane, and when I asked if he was ever going to fly it he said "Hell no, Lilienthal died flying his!"

So he stowed the pieces parts in the attic and once he went off to school I snagged the tail section and installed it on our Radio Flyer.

But that's not what I am here to talk about today. You know how I do. I was out walking the dogs Friday and I heard the unmistakable deep roar of four radial engines approaching overhead. Wha? You don't hear four engine prop planes every day, so naturally I was enthralled by the approaching aircraft. Not being my brother, and having never bothered to learn one airplane from another because I could rely on his encyclopedic knowledge (well, that's not strictly true, a DC-3 is readily identifiable) I just kind of stood there in awe and wonder as this massive bomber lumbered overhead. The thing was huge. I tried to pick out a detail that would allow me to identify it later and I settled on the vertical stabilizer. Very distinctive shape, it was.

I took some pictures, none of them very good, and started doing some research. I posted my lousy pictures on social media and got some feedback. That allowed me to do further research. Saturday dawned and I kept hearing that same plane. Every time I heard it coming I went outside and took more pictures, which I also posted.

At this point I positively identified the aircraft as a B-17, AKA The Flying Fortress. Friends helped me pin down why it was here and what it was doing, and now I know it is a B-17G, Serial # 44-83575. You can look it up if you want to know more.

In any case, it has moved on to its next barn-storming tour stop and I am thankful I got to see it.

At this point I should post something like "A Mighty Fortress is Our God" but that's been done. How about something different. How about something featuring a baritone sax, which my niece, daughter of the brother in question plays. LINK

Context lost on Wilson

I saw this on a tweet...

To which I tweeted back...

When context is turned on it’s head.

— Lem (@Lemang01) October 22, 2017

And...

Usually comedy or tragedy ensues. Lost on congresswoman Wilson.

— Lem (@Lemang01) October 22, 2017

Until Wilson leaves.... well, not really...

Trump wants Justice or FBI to release who paid for Steele dossier

Trump tweeted about a lot of things recently. This seems important because it signals something that's actionable. While his other tweets get greater response.

These departments are under him, usually a president needn't coax them to do what he wants them to do, just tell them to do it and if they refuse then fire them. He need only to tell Wray and Sessions to release this information, since Fusion officials, Fritsch and Catan, took the fifth under subpoena to Senate Judiciary Committee, stating they consider the whole thing an indignity.

That will play well with Trump detractors and the entire Democrat party however meaningless outside their impervious dome of blinding hatred.

Trump merely has to call Wray and Sessions into his office, or even by phone, and say he wants the information released in the hour and boom the information is produced and disseminated. So who is he talking to directly besides us? In a radio interview Trump did just mention in reference to John McCain that at some point he (Trump) will have to start fighting back. We expect Trump already knows who paid for the dossier, since FBI and Justice already know and they are Trump's departments. It's possible Trump is telling McCain that he knows McCain's depth of complicity goes further  than already reported and when it's revealed the information is damaging to all parties who bought it. After all, the dossier was used as reasonable suspicion to justify the investigation.

Trump supporters get restless for taking too much time to act decisively. While noticing he allows his enemies enough rope to hang themselves. He has a cunning sense of timing with his actions. If he acts quickly he lands a few swamp creatures and the rest scramble into hiding. When he waits they get bold and he lands a lot more and he does greater damage to their malevolent insularity. He is signaling to all that if Wray and Sessions do not do as he says then he can properly remove them, and the people who paid for this garbage are about to be known.

What does Fusion even do? Who are these people?

Fusion was founded in 2009 before social media destroyed the remnants of 20th century journalism by two Wall Street Journal reporters, Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch. Adding former colleagues Tom Catan and Neil King Jr.

Opposition research and communication shops like Fusion GPS became the news-rooms with investigative teams and foreign bureaus that newspapers could no longer afford. By then Facebook became publisher of most of the news that Americans received. Fusion knows precisely what their former colleagues need to package stories to sell to their editors.

They are guns for hire. They were paid to dig up dirt on donors to Mitt Romney's campaign and they were hired by Planned Parenthood following the videos exposing their controversial and illegal practices.

They worked with Russia and other foreign countries, and campaigns creating news that further the aims of the people who hire them using the fractured news field to extend lobbying efforts in ways that news consumers are slow to comprehend.

So you see how damaging knowing who paid for this obviously fraudulent reporting will be for them. It was key to Muller's investigation. And that's why this tweet is important while other Trump tweets get more comments, retweets, likes, and more attention.

aquarium plant tissue samples, two weeks.

It's been two weeks since I showed these. So probably close to a month total.

They begin as tiny samples rooting in gel in tiny jars.

A container like this can be divided into, say, ten or more plugs.

This next photo was already shown here.

Today, two weeks later the plants look like this.

Most have grown taller, some wider to fill in, others grow more slowly.

 

Some of the plants produce more oxygen than other plants do. Look how active they are.

CO2 is added via regular baking yeast, a scant 1/4 teaspoon, plus 1 cup sugar and one teaspoon baking soda to slow it down. It lasts a little less than a month. The CO2 is delivered by aquarium hose to a power head gently shooting out water that is aimed at another powerhead, so bubbles come shooting out and across the tank far as they can go, not very far, about 1/4 the distance across the tank  before rising to the top. There is no outside filter hooked up yet. When fish are introduced then the water filter will be put on and then CO2 hose can be pushed directly the filter's intake to be mixed with the water circulating in the filter  then shot out after the water is filtered. That has the advantage over bubbling directly into the tank by mixing the C02 more thoroughly in tinier bubbles, and holding the bubbles in circulated water in the tank for longer. 

North Korea sends Australia unprecedented letter about Trump

In September North Korea sent a letter to Australia imploring them to distance themselves from President Trump.

The letter conveyed the usual current derision we recognize from North Korea, low grade as it is still a tremendous improvement over what we've grown up with, China's "running yellow dogs" characterization of United States. North Korean diplomats, operatives, whatever, are attempting to split U.S. led coalition applying sanctions against North Korea.

Australian leadership just laughed and laughed. I made that up. The article at the Blaze says something more prosaic.

But Kim Yung Un's pleasant corpulence. And his skin, blemish free, pure and smooth as a baby's ass freshly washed and powdered. He's irresistible. To Photo poop on. I meant Photoshop. And his hair! His compelling and luxurious glorious, perfectly groomed and utterly unique, foremost among world leaders, combed up and back and moussed through stiffened, thick shining healthy flowing stygian waxen, give me down to there, hair.