Religion Pales Next to the Continuity of Dogs

The Continuing Trump Shit Show

I’ve been knocking around the zoo of DC public policy and law for a long time, so I have stories….

The latest story is an old one about Pam Bondi, Trump’s latest throw up (yes) for Attorney General.

Back in 2010, I got an e-mail with the subject line: “Crazy with hot sauce, and a dog story too”.

Eh?

When I clicked on the link, I got  a little video view of Pam Bondi, the new Attorney General of Florida.  I assumed she was the hot sauce? 

As for the crazy part, I assumed that was because Bondi is a right-winger who courted the “tea party” seeking their endorsement?  That's not crazy if you are a Republican seeking office.  It's only crazy if you are a member.

So what's the dog story? 

That was a little farther down in the Wikipedia article where we learn:

“Bondi adopted a St. Bernard dog, after he was rescued from St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina. When the original owners located the dog and attempted to reclaim it, Bondi did not return the dog. In July 2006, a lawsuit was filed by the dog's original owners against Bondi seeking a transfer of custody. In May 2007, Bondi agreed to return the dog to its original owners.”

For the record, the St. Bernard Parish family that owned this dog did not want to leave it.  When they themselves were rescued by boat, the human rescuers threw the dog out of the boat and handcuffed the owners for trying to dive back in and get it.  Last they saw the dog, it was swimming after the boat. 

The owners, undeterred, sent a cousin out to leave food and water for the dogs, which he did.  On September 18th, the dogs were picked up by pet rescuers and taken to a Humane Society shelter set up for Katrina dogs.  The dog was then transferred from Louisiana to another Humane Society shelter in Pinellas County, Florida where, despite clear records indicating that the dog was owned by a responsible owner, it was put up for adoption.  Bondi adopted the dog on October 15th.

In the interim, of course, the owners were trying to find their dog. They eventually tracked it over several states and located it, but Bondi fought returning the dog for 16 months, first arguing that it was a case of canine mistaken identity, and then arguing that she would be a better owner for the dog. 

Only after losing in court, did Bondi relinquish the dog.  Now, in 2010, she was the new Attorney General of Florida.

My next hearing about Pam Bondi was when she was flying to the Caymans to get married with a retinue of 60-70 people including the Governor of Florida and the mayor of Tampa. By the time she landed, the wedding was off, and no one would say why.  Suffice it to say that Bondi had two failed marriages that preceded this failed attempt.

Bondi later appeared on my radar when she was caught taking gratuities from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in the form of fancy travel to golf resorts. Later, she was given a $25,000 re-election check from one of Trump’s fraudulent “charities” so that she would not investigate his fraudulent “university”.  After receiving the check, Bondi almost immediately dismissed the fraud case against Trump. 

Then, in 2020 Bondi joined Trump’s legal team where she fit in perfectly with an accused rapist, a person who bungled the sexual assault charges at Baylor University, and two lawyers for pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

Today, Pam Bondi was tapped by Trump to be his new Attorney General, after accused pedophile rapist Matt Gaetz withdrew his name from consideration rather than have all the evidence against him (including pictures, depositions, and cancelled checks) come out.

The bar is so low in Trump World that I expect a merely corrupt lawyer will sail right through unless drug use, pedophilia, foreign bribes, and cannibalism charges can be sustained.

I would not rule anything out; I’ve been to Florida.

The Future

Obsession

The Lying Police of the Police State

It is always good to remember that in the warped world of policing, lying to witnesses is considered a core competency of the job, and lying to the public is seen as an essential element of their shield of infallibility and impunity.

The Founders of this great nation understood the capricious violence of the police state.  This was not a theory or a rumor.  It was a very real element in their world, and they knew it would always be lurking in ours.

And so they decided that the right of the people to assemble and protest would not be restricted (First Amendment), and that the only way that  right could be guaranteed in a creeping police state, was to make sure the right of the people to own guns for self-defense could not be abridged (Second Amendment).

This is an important point.  In a creeping militarized police state, if only the police have guns, and the courts themselves are part of the problem, then the only safe-check left is People Power, secured by force if necessary.

Let's hope it doesn't come to that, but push has come to shove in almost every other country of the world at some point, and it's a bit naïve to think it could never happen here (since it already has).

Robots as Leader

Source: https://scitechdaily.com/researchers-use-robot-fish-to-lead-golden-shiner-school/

Fighting the Great White

“A painter's got a canvas. The writer's got reams of empty paper. A musician has silence.” – Keith Richards

Snitches Everywhere

Billionaires Create the Frame

Keeping Up with the Apps

▪️I'm on Threads as >> terrierp.burns 

▪️I’m on BlueSky as >> terriermanpburns

American Evangelicals

You will obey your führer! 

You will not question authority, you will believe in the absence of evidence, you will donate without audit and without even asking where the money is going.

Plunder As a Way of Life

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” — Frédérick Bastiat (1801 - 1850)

Puppy Killer to Head Homeland Security

Kristi Noem is perfect.  If she’ll shoot her young dog in the head because she could not train it, you know she’s perfect for massive detention camps and civil rights violations.

And guess what? Trump has tapped Elon Musk and Vivek
Ramaswamy to lead a does-not-exist “Department Of Government Efficiency”.

You know what’s way more efficient than due process and housing millions of immigrants for an undetermined period of time? Bullets and gas chambers. That’s what Trump’s hero, Adolph Hitler did. Think that’s not coming? Why?

Other Cabinet picks:

▪️Matt Gaetz: Nominated for Attorney General.  Just resigned from the House to, reportedly, block a damning report from the Ethics Committee, which was investigating him for sexual misconduct (paid sex with a minor, sex trafficking, drug use).

▪️Tulsi Gabbard: Nominated for Director of National Intelligence Secretly met with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in 2017 and blamed the U.S. and NATO for Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Former cult member, QAnon conspiracist.

▪️Pete Hegseth: Nominated for Secretary of Defense. Lobbied Trump to pardon U.S. service members accused of war crimes and has argued women should not serve in combat roles. White supremacy tattoo on chest, brags he has not washed his hands in a decade.

▪️Robert Kennedy Jr as Secretary of HHS. Kennedy is a former heroin addict who has lived off his name for several years, serving as a tout and door-opener for tort lawyers suing chemical companies and vaccine makers.  A certifiable loon, he has no science or medical background at all. He is anti-vaccine, anti-fluoride in water, and if confirmed he will destroy the CDC and public health in the US while ushering in a new era of measles, polio, killer covid and influenza, tooth decay, and cancer. 

The American Cult of Ignorance

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” -- Isaac Asimov (1920 - 1992)

If I Were a Rich Man

“Indian Reserve”

A 1775 map of British North America, with the Thirteen Colonies shown in red.

From Wikipedia:

The Royal Proclamation of 1763 was issued by King George III on 7 October 1763. It followed the Treaty of Paris (1763), which formally ended the Seven Years' War and transferred French territory in North America to Great Britain.^[1] The Proclamation at least temporarily forbade all new settlements west of a line drawn along the Appalachian Mountains, which was delineated as an Indian Reserve.^[2] Exclusion from the vast region of Trans-Appalachia created discontent between Britain and colonial land speculators and potential settlers. The proclamation and access to western lands was one of the first significant areas of dispute between Britain and the colonies and would become a contributing factor leading to the American Revolution.

AKC Registrations Back in Decline

Dennis Sprung, Chairman of the AKC, writes in the current (November) “To the Core” email:

“AKC registrations are down significantly from the peaks we experienced during COVID. 

“Individual Dog Registrations are minus 14% from last year and litters are down 17%.

“In fact, 2024 Litter Registrations have now fallen below the levels we experienced in 2018.”

 So what are the actual numbers?

 Mr. Sprung  does not say, but a 14 percent decline in registrations from last year would put 2024 registrations at around 690,000.

How does that compare to the past?

AKC registrations this year are about 45 percent of what they were in 1992 (1.53 million). 

When you factor in the 34 percent US population growth between 1992 and 2022 (257 million to 346 million), we find the relative decline in AKC registrations in the last 30 years is actually about 66 percent.

To put it another way, if AKC registrations had flat-lined in 1992, and kept pace with US population growth, they would be well over 2 million a year, not 690,000.

Your Ancestors Needed to Go Somwhere Else

“What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors. It’s astounding to me, for example, that so many people really appear to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free. That happens not to be true. What happened was that some people left Europe because they couldn’t stay there any longer and had to go someplace else to make it. That’s all. They were hungry, they were poor, they were convicts. Those who were making it in England, for example, did not get on the Mayflower. That’s how the country was settled. Not by Gary Cooper. Yet we have a whole race of people, a whole republic, who believe the myths to the point where even today they select political representatives, as far as I can tell, by how closely they resemble Gary Cooper. Now this is dangerously infantile, and it shows in every level of national life.” -- James Baldwin in a Talk to Teachers working in the New York Public School System on October 16, 1963 discussing the American Identity

American Suicide

"The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power." — Vice President Henry Wallace, April 9, 1944

The View Across the Road

The farm across the road is always beautiful at sunset, with the mountains in the back, rolling meadows and a small stock pond, and a hedgerow cutting through the middle. 

Farms around here are very diverse and apparently prosperous.  Most land is in corn, soy, and winter wheat, but we’ve got a lot of beef cattle, dairy cattle, sheep and goats, pig production, chickens and eggs, horses, orchards, turf production, commercial landscaping production, and even a few vegetables and hemp farms.  And did I mention woods?  Yep, we’ve got lots and lots of that as well.

Last of the Soy

Combine taking off the last of the soybeans this evening. 

The fields are well groomed after harvest, and I suspect no-till winter wheat will go into the stubble. 

I love the bright green sway of winter wheat when it begins to mature in April and May.

Paddle and Peddle With the Wee Wolves

I paddled 10 miles down river and then peddled on bicycle 10 miles back up to the car. The dogs were passengers on both legs. 

A crew was attacking the huge log jam up against the canal aqueduct with chainsaws and heavy equipment.  Not my place to offer advice, but i think a double cable way run through blocks and anchored to massive trees on each bank is the only way to go.  They’ll figure it out.  I noticed they had unboxed two brand new sets of waders.

All I’ve Got Today

Celebration :: David Mallett

The Trash of Billionaires

“The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied... but written off as trash.” - John Berger

23 Bushes In, 25 More to Go

Four potted bushes in, four pots of rocks out.

I'm digging holes three times bigger than the pots, and filling in with soil from the hole, cleaned of all rocks, and mixed with old composted mulch.  

After digging the hole, and before planting and backfilling, I am slamming the adze blade of a pick into the side and prying it up to split and loosen the clay-like soil all around so that the roots can find a way outwards as well as down.

Pit Bulls Are a Type Older Than Jesus

This Sicilian mosaic is over 1,700 years old, and shows the same dog, of the same size, used for the same purpose that it is today.

A Nugget in the Pan Is a Good Prospect

IOWA HAS SWUNG 22 POINTS since June, and Harris is now in the lead.

Amazing.  

Iowa is as rock-ribbed Republican as any state in the nation.

Have you ever *been* to Iowa?

It’s farmer conservative. Deep red. 

Every job in the state is connected to farms, pigs, cattle and crops.

You cannot get elected to home room monitor in that state unless you are pro-farmer and pro-agricultural livestock production.

This is a state with 3 million people, 4 million cattle, and 19 million hogs.

You want to talk chickens? Fine. Iowa leads the nation in egg production with 52.4 million chickens producing 13.9 billion eggs a year.

You want to talk turkey? Fine. Iowa, produced 274 million pounds of turkey last year.

All told, over 6.6 billion pounds of red meat were produced in Iowa last year, as well as 4.28 billion pounds of milk.

If Harris is ahead in Iowa (and she no doubt is, as the Des Moines Register poll is famously good), then the campaign signals from Texas and Florida may mean what the pipe smokers suggest, which is that Texas and Florida are in play.

Iowa!

The mind reels.

American Girl

Love this!

An Existential Election

Every Text Message These Days

“We’ll be blunt. We’re worried about the quarterly fundraising reports that just came out.

“We can catch up in these final hours, but we need to have a massive fundraising surge before Election Day to do so. 

“Can you rush a contribution to me right now?”

Gone, But Not Forgotten

Roman marble gravestone for a dog named Aminnaracus. From Rome, 1st-2nd century AD. Located in National Museum Wales.

Seven In, and Forty-One To Go

One Week to the Election

It’s one week to the election, and I am *guaranteed* to be wrong, but here’s how I think it’s going.

▪️I’m expecting an early evening i.e. I’Il be in bed and drifting off to sleep by 10 PM. 

▪️I think there are three things happening that could drive the election.

1. The first is that a significant number of Trump supporters now know he’s a bad guy, and that he’s both physically feeble and mentally demented. They see and hear him as he is now, and they remember January 6th. Those 34 felony convictions are real, as is the sexual assault finding, and the huge financial liabilities Trump now faces. Trump is set to be sentenced on those 34 felony convictions in three weeks. What’s that mean? I suspect 5 percent of Trump’s old supporters will simply not turn out to vote.
2. The second issue is what I will call “cut and fill” on the Republican side.  A Republican not voting is *half* as good as Republican switching sides, because he’s not only *not* voting for the Republicans, he’s voting *for* the Democrats.  I think perhaps 5 percent of Republicans will switch sides. That would be enormous. Under this scenario, Trump would hold 90 percent of his 2020 voters and lose 15 percent of “his” vote to Harris.
3. The third factor is Democrats are pretty energized. Non-voters are the biggest political party in the US, but the GOTV efforts by the Dems is pretty impressive, while the Republican operation appears to be in chaos or non-existent. The NRA is broke, the veterans are being insulted, and the economy is roaring under Biden-Harris. I suspect Trump will lose white women voters for the first time. He won white women in 2016 and in 2020 — and by a larger margin in 2020 than in 2016. At the same time, black women are incredibly energized, and are taking leadership positions to turn out the vote. Big stuff is happening!

The real issue is the Senate. Hogan will lose Maryland, and I think Cruz will lose in Texas. Tester will hold Montana. The Dems will lose WV.  I think Osborn might win Nebraska. Casey will hold PA.  Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin are nail-biters, but women and the unions may help hold all three. Gallego will win AZ. In the end, when the dust settles, we *may* hold the Senate, but it’s too damn close to bet.

I think the Dems will take the House (barely), but I haven’t been nose counting.  The Democratic money train is flowing, and the GOTV push at the top will help lift all boats.  The race I’m most interested in is the Alaska seat, as it’s a ranked choice race, which is unusual.

My Enthusiasm Exceeds My Capacity

I picked up 48 potted bushes acquired by online auction, sight unseen, from a Virginia nursery going out of business due to a road expansion.

I thought these shrubs were in 10” pots, but a lot were in 14” pots.  I barely got them all into the two SUVs. 

26 of these shrubs will grow up to at least 7 feet by 6 feet.

I placed 34 of the shrubs this morning, and by “place,” I mean I just moved them to a location for consideration.  

Digging the holes is going to be a voyage of the damned due to the massive amount of rock on the knoll.

This mushroom was with 5-6 others of similar size right where I intend to drop a hole for an American Cranberrybush 'Redwing’ Viburnum.

.

Temp Job

Titanic’s boiler rooms. There were six boiler rooms that held 29 boilers manned by 179 men who moved 600 tonnes of coal a day.

Sic Semper Tyrannis

The Immortals Live Among Us

See >> https://tinyurl.com/55sku9ny

Trump Backer Meets Trump Banker

Flip The Script

Walking Cures a Lot

"Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right." -- Søren Kierkegaard

New Camera Trap Manual

Cris Wemmer, who is a biologist, wildlife conservation consultant, and retired Smithsonian scientist who ran the rare animal Smithsonian Conservation and Research Center in Luray, Virginia, has just put out a new manual on camera trapping with game or trail cameras. Available on Kindle or in print. 

Chris knows this topic backwards and forwards, as anyone who has visited his excellent blog, Camera Trap Codger, can attest.

Time for me to break out my game cameras!

The Best Hitler Is a Dead Hitler

UNLIKE TRUMP, I don’t like Nazi generals that lose.

I LIKE AMERICAN generals that win by killing Nazis.

These are the generals of Antifa, 1945:

Standing (from left to right) Ralph Stearley, Hoyt Vandenberg, Walter Bedell Smith, Otto P. Weyland, and Richard Nugent. Seated (from left to right) William Simpson, George Patton, Carl Spaatz, Dwight Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, Courtney Hodges, and Leonard Gerow.

American bad asses.  Certified Nazi killers.

Two that I know of were famously devoted to their terriers, as was the American President they fought under.

Bottom line:  VOTE.

Coffee Is America’s Favorite Bean Soup

Legend has it that the coffee plant was first discovered in Ethiopia by a goat herder who found his charges a little too animated after eating beans from a local bush. 

The coffee plant (and the drink) eventually made its way to Yemen and the Arab world via the Sudanese slaves that were forced to paddle boats across the Red Sea to the Arabian Peninsula.

With alcohol banned, coffee quickly became the "drug of choice" in the Arab world. While an alcohol-besotted Europe struggled in a drunken haze through the Dark Ages, the Arab world became caffeinated and invigorated. Soon after they started the first coffee houses in the world, Arabs began creating grand libraries, universities, new mathematical equations, and amazingly complex architectural designs. Such is the power of coffee.

Coffee houses hit Europe around 1600, and there they had the same effect they had in the Arab world -- a spectacular growth in intellectual clarity and output. From the enlightened coffee houses of London grew the first newspaper divisions (business, style, overseas news, etc.), the first organized scientific associations, and Lloyds of London -- the first international insurance cartel.

Coffee consumption took off like a rocket in Great Britain, and in 1796, when the British took over Sri Lanka (Ceylon) from the Dutch, the new settlers began clearing land for coffee plantations.

By the 1860s, Sri Lanka was the largest coffee producer in the world.

In 1869, however, a lethal fungus known as coffee rust had shown up on the island causing premature defoliation of the coffee plants, and dramatically reducing berry yield.

By 1879, the rust fungus had spread across the island and into Indian plantations as well, with the result being a collapse of coffee production across the region.

Unable to grow coffee in the face of a devastating rust fungus epidemic, Ceylonese and Indian plantation owners began to rip out their coffee plants in order to grow tea.

Within a few decades, tea consumption in the U.K. had surpassed coffee consumption, and it has remained so to this day.

While tea is the national drink of Great Britain, coffee remains the national drink of the United States, where we consume vast quantities of it. In fact, though coffee is the second most internationally traded commodity in the world (after oil), the U.S. consumes one-quarter of the world's coffee beans.

Coffee came to the New World via the French, who introduced it into the Caribbean in the mid 1700s, and the Spanish, who brought coffee plants to Latin America a few decades later.

By the mid 1800s, coffee plantations had been planted in Central and South America, and these coffee plantations were greatly expanded after coffee rust decimated production in Sri Lanka and India.

Coffee plantations in Central and South America were diverse operations that grew, rather naturally, out of the multi-storied small-patch gardening operations that had been successfully employed by the native Indians for several thousand years before Columbus.

These small patch gardens were created by removing large trees with little agricultural value, but leaving those that might yield a nut harvest, good wood, seasonal fruits, or which had the lucky property of fixing nitrogen in the soil.

Under these large forest trees were planted shorter citrus and cacao trees, and between these were planted bananas. Underneath and between the bananas were planted coffee bushes and vegetable crops for local food consumption.

Multi-storied "shade coffee" plantations were miracles of production. When coffee prices fell (as they often did), other crops provided sustenance and cash, ensuring that the locals could always eat and pay for things made elsewhere.

Because multiple types of plants were found on shade-grown coffee plots, multiple types of insects and birds were present. The result was not only less overall insect predation on any one crop, but less erosion and slower evaporation as both rain and sunlight filtered through multiple vegetative layers.

Shade-grown coffee plantations were particularly rich in bird life -- especially neo-tropical migrant song birds such as redstarts, Tenessee warblers, Baltimore Orioles, yellow-throated and solitary vireos, wood thrushes, catbirds, ruby-throated hummingbirds, Nashville Warblers, and oven-birds.

All told, more than 150 bird species are known to winter or live year-round in shade coffee plantations, making them the most bird-intensive agricultural areas in the world.

Shade coffee production thrived.  

But something wicked this way drifted. The coffee rust fungus that had been seen in Sri Lanka 100 years earlier, was discovered in Brazil and Nicaragua. This discovery caused a panic, not only in the coffee industry, but also among the economic and political elite that run such major banking and development policy shops as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The fear was that coffee rust would soon sweep through Central and South America. If that happened, not only would the coffee crop be destroyed, but so too would the economic base of entire countries and many millions of people. If that happened, not only would we not have coffee in New York, Paris and Vienna, but billions of dollars of foreign loans would go unpaid.

Something had to be done.

What was done was massive, mechanical, and swift. 

Under orders from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the large cartels that control much of the world's coffee market, coffee plantations in Central and South America were systematically ripped from the ground and replanted.

The idea here was a simple one: by growing coffee in direct sun, rather than in the shade, coffee plants could be made safe from the coffee rust fungus. The prescription for salvation was destruction, and entire mountain sides were plowed clear of their multistory canopies and the detritus burned. In their place was planted dense hedgerows of a dwarf variety of coffee that could withstand direct tropical sunlight.

With the loss of a diversified shade forest cover, bird populations that had once thrived in the rich overstory of coffee plantations plummeted.  At the same time, with the absence of trees to provide vegetative nutrients to the soil and hold back erosion, the fertilizer needs of coffee plantations skyrocketed. Mono-cropped sun coffee plantations proved far more susceptible to insect infestations than shade plantations, so insecticide inputs also increased. The open sunny soil between coffee plants proved susceptible to weed infestations, so herbicide use also increased. Finally, though the new coffee plants produced a great number of beans, the plants themselves were not as hardy as the old shade-grown varieties, and an additional expense had to be factored into the equation -- the cost of periodically replanting large numbers of exhausted plants.

Ironically, all of the devastation and destruction was not needed. It turns out that due to the peculiarities of Latin America's climate and the timing of rain, humidity and mountain temperature, coffee leaf rust has not been able to proliferate in either Central or South America.

Adding insult to injury, it turns out that the new dwarf varieties of sun-grown coffee are not less susceptible to coffee leaf rust than the older varieties. When a fungus outbreak does occur, as it sometimes does, it is generally localized and easily treatable with a copper-based fungicide.

Sadly, however, the damage to the once-vibrant shade coffee plantations cannot be rapidly undone. Forests that took decades to grow were razed to the ground in hours, and will now take decades to grow back, if they ever do.

Have things turned around at all?  Sadly, they have not.  Between 1996 and 2014, the proportion of land used to cultivate shade-grown coffee, relative to the total land area used for coffee cultivation, has fallen by nearly 20 percent.

The Tree of Life is Self-pruning

Lizard Brains Armed With Chainsaws

“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.” — E. O. Wilson