Fun & Games with Skeezix

 

This is Skeezix. At rest, artified, and posing.

I’ve mentioned him before, but we’ve had a fun morning. More fun anyway than reading stories about the morally superior people among us who are busy celebrating the death of Lindsey Graham, laying in party favors for the upcoming death of Mitch McConnell, making up new scenarios about how the Israelis killed Charlie Kirk instead of the confessed shooter, and saying their daily prayers for the assassination of the President of the United States. Impressive focus but it gets old, you know. Too much of a good thing gets stale after a while.

Why I’ve wandered over here to talk about something less lofty than the violent deaths of my political enemies. Maybe that’s what this new network is really going to be about.

Another use for this site, now that the immediate danger of FB page hijacking has been quelled, is to serve as a get away from it all refuge, kind of like my old Deerhound Diary site. Which this post reminds me of pretty directly. It’s not about sighthounds and the iconic pug Eloise, but cats. Cats who have invaded our rural retreat courtesy of people who are at least above drowning the feral felines they wish to be rid of. There were a couple of Toms on the Orange side and a gray female of feisty mien, all of whom were smuggled in downstairs (where I am only a pass-through these days in Marge’s life); they settled in, the gray grew pregnant by-and-by, and now we are buried in cats, downstairs and upstairs.

Mama. She likes to roost on the back of the couch.

The one we call ‘Missy’ or ‘Mama’ depending in her mood had four good looking boys, Peter, Ben, Franklin (since adopted to Marge’s brother), and Terwilliger. Plus Skeezix, who was a walk-in.  Mama and the last two spend their time upstairs with us. I think Terwilliger and Skeezix have different names downstairs, but as long as they respond to what I call them I don’t care. Pretty sure I have a different name downstairs too.

Terwilliger is white with an orange saddle. He has two modes. Placidly dignified and screaming at the door, which he does to get in and get out of the 2nd floor family room.

Terwilliger. Catjacking Mama’s roost.

They all three want to be there, right behind where my wife sits reading up on doings in Hungary and Russia. Mostly, Mama wins out and is actually becoming gentler than she used to be. No doubt that she’s had her feral times before arriving here, and she still has unexpected bouts of the crazies, when she rockets from one end of the room to the other like a runaway missile. She’s very pawsy and can snag your hand or finger with ease, though she’s learned not to claw you but pull your appendage to her tongue and lick. Endearing.

Skeezix is not her boy. Why I gave him the name, which means orphan. He’s not as big as Terwilliger, but he’s the most orange of all the cats and he has that orange swagger and self confidence. He’s been known to push Mama off the top of the couch when he wants to be there. Usually, she defers and finds other thrones to settle on.

Tommy the terrier ignores all this maneuvering. He does try to steal their food when he can, but otherwise he snoozes through even the crazies. Until last night that is. 

I had nodded off at my keyboard and was violently awakened at 2:30 am by a tremendous crash. Tommy was as alarmed as I was. Skeezix had pulled a lamp off the coffee table, as well as a box full of old computer plugs obsolete remotes, and sunglasses no longer cool enough to wear. I had to turn on the lights to see what was going on. Skeezix was preparing some new attack on my book stack, which is when I barked the one word I’ve been able to reach him in addition to his name.

“No! No, dammit!”

He glided off the table and wandered away. I nodded off again, restored lamp still on, and slept for maybe another hour when I was awakened again, this time by Mama, who had exhausted her usual patience with Skeezix. He was in her place on the back of the couch and she wanted it back. Her quick paws were trying to land on Skeezix, who was lying mostly on his back, parrying her swipes at his head. 

That’s his best thing actually. Fighting on his back, like the early MMA star Boyce Gracie, happiest seeming vulnerable on the ground before wrapping you up in a vise that made you tap out instantly, of course, Skeezix does it all with head feints and quick-quick paws. I watched him land about four times on Mama’s cheeks, just to sow her he could keep it up all day. She relented and retreated to an old speaker behind where I was sitting. She was still watching him. She didn’t like it. Not one bit.

Something I never do. Involve myself in a cat fight. Once had an orange boy named Webster, many years ago, and he taught me how to spar in a paw-finger fight. I was in a mood myself, awakened for the second time by cat antics, not acceptable to a dog person like myself. I intervened on Mama’s behalf. We went at it for a full minute or so. He lay on his back, trying repeatedly for my jabbing finger and missing. He got to a half sitting position, his balance on couch back not ideal. I alternated between pokes at his face and pushes at his side, until he got whopper-jawed on the edge of space and I shoved him off onto the floor. He made a noise, not pleased, but didn’t jump back up.

I looked over at Mama. She had been watching intently. She cocked her head at me and a waved a finger indicating she should reclaim her spot. She seemed to be thinking about it. Somehow I lapsed back into a doze before she moved. When I woke again, about an hour later, some time after sun-up, she was sleeping regally on the back of the couch and Skeezix was nowhere to be found.

Then I saw him, sleeping on my wife’s old desk, rarely used anywhere. The morning light showed him stretched out with his head on a book. It looked like one of my books. I quietly grabbed my iPhone and sneaked up on him, but he lifted his head as I took my first picture.

One of my better books. What’s that on binding? Tape?

Of course I assumed he had decided to do some research on this human who had outboxed him. Wrong book, I thought. This would have been a better choice. Curious about strip that looked like tape, I tugged on it. He gave me room but didn’t leave the desk, just resettled himself when I’d identified it and smoothed it out.

It turned out to be a rare find. A 40-some year old 

manuscript page from a favorite story of mine.

Couldn’t resist. Let him go back to sleep on the book and I took a photo for posterity of the beat-up old page.

Then, you guessed it. Fell asleep again. I told you I keep the same kind of hours ‘That Man’ does. Everyone’s happy now. All’s well that ends well.

See you next time.

You’re sure he wasn’t just clearing his throat…?

 

Meeting of the Mopes

 

Warner and Clayton, Two Old Peas in Stale Pod

Personally, I think the patriotism and loyalty of anyone who has spent a significant amount of his career in the U.S. Intelligence community is automatically suspect. This is the ultimate secret society, full of code words and subtle handshakes, old boys more unified by their membership in the club than their allegiance to cornball naïfs in the flyover states. 

Trump’s two attempts to replace the outsider Tulsi Gabbard with a Director of National Intelligence who can penetrate that black box without being subsumed or destroyed by it were doomed. Intel is the chess master of the Deep State, playing intricate games designed from the outset to produce stalemates and standoffs between the global players who have their own secret handshakes to offer in return.

I have actually imagined the look on Trump’s face when he is forced to name a new figurehead for positions like DNI, Director of the CIA, and the various military chiefs of black ops and elaborately misleading reports to the eternal Temp called the President of the United States. Whatever they think they’re doing, their prime directive is covering up the endless screwups perpetrated by corner-cutting spies no one can outwit when it comes to the dirty stuff.

Somebody suggested Pulte, who was a bust because not a professional creep. Warner saw right through him too:

Next came Jay Clayton, who just blew his cover spectacularly under questioning by one of the Senate’s most grandiose phonies.

Gateway’s pretty upset about how that encounter went:

Sorry everybody, but both these guys are empty suits, overdue to be given their fifties shirts and relegated to yacht clubs in gated TDS Senior centers.

Hot buttons? Wall Street (Bloomberg), University of Pennsylvania (CHYOS), Cambridge University (Oxbridge), and the Commonwealth of Virginia (See Mark Warner).

Oh yeah. Mark Warner. Senator from the state that just elected the most shameless TDS hooker occupying any of the 50 statehouses. She said she was a moderate and didn’t even wait for the Inaugural hangover to wear off before she proved herself a liar on every single position she took. Warner was a Governor of Virginia, too, at one point, which is how he became a Senator, but here’s the background nobody looks into too deeply:

Highlights? He’s been an insider in DC politics since he was in college. He interned with Chris Dodd, the eminent statesman most famous for being Teddy Kennedy’s partner in 3-way sex with waitresses. He has worked for the government, specifically the Democrst Party, for 50 years. He has never practiced law.

Why is that important? The man has somehow accumulated three doctorates in law just by showing up for the various ceremonies. 

Showing up and mouthing off in Democrat-approved ways is all he has ever done.

Now who cares about a supposed showdown between the lackeys Warner and Clayton?

I’m guessing Trump does. But where in the hell do you find a spy you can trust in this global cesspool of mindless welfare states called Western Civilization? If you have an answer, please pencil it in in the Comments…

What FB would call a “Reel”

 Via the Daily Wire…

Her name is Gwen Moore. House Rep.from Slobbovia*

Here’s the money part of the the post:

Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI) encouraged members of her party to embrace the term “socialist.”

Moore made an appearance on C-SPAN, where she claimed that Republicans argued that any government regulation of any industry — particularly for environmental reasons — amounted to “socialism,” and said that Democrats needed to stop being “shy” about owning that.

“Regulating industry so that they don’t dump poison into the water and the air, they want to call that socialist,” she said. “To try to have alternative energy sources and to diminish our fossil fuel imprint, they call that socialist.”

“So I think that Democrats have got to stop being shy about that term,” she said…

In the same segment, Moore was asked to respond to a caller who’d said that all Democrats had become socialists — and to the fact that socialism, across the board, had failed everywhere it had been tried.

Moore responded by referencing a comment from former President Bill Clinton, saying that he’d pointed out the fact that “if we were in Europe as Democrats, we would be five different parties. We’d be the Labor Party, we’d be Democratic Socialists, we’d be the Progressive Party, we’d be the Liberal Party, so we are a big tent.”

But while some within the Democratic Party — like Moore — defend the rise of socialism in the ranks, others are sounding the alarm. Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) has been a vocal critic of the socialists in the party, as have Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA), former Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), and even comedian Bill Maher.

The self-described Democratic Socialists aren’t hiding their agenda, either: targeting established Democrats in safe blue cities and states, they are rapidly taking control of the party from within. And according to the co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America — a group with which many of these candidates are affiliated — the group’s goals include major changes, such as abolishing the United States Senate to make the nation “more democratic.”

There you go. Gwen Moore doesn’t know she’s the point of the spear in a textbook Communist Revolution. She’s just repeating her talking points. There’s absolutely no secret about the playbook from here. Capture the whole party from within by making bigger fancier promises than obsolete Progressives have been unable to deliver on in the cities and states they’ve been running (down) in this young century. Intimidate and sabotage any of the Old Guard who are too timid to blow up the Constitution outright. Win elections with millions of illegal immigrant and soft-brained ‘Look at Me!’ female and other niche victim votes. Then systematically destroy the careers and, if necessary, the lives of everyone on the Left who isn’t towing the Marxist line.

Absolutely nothing new or crazy conspiratorial about that playbook description. Those of you who still know how to read should buy this book and get one of your Ivy League literature professors to explain it to you:

“Some animals are more equal than others.”

Since this is the inaugural post of the refuge Facebook has driven us to, it’s a good time to point out what can be done here that antique FB software won’t do. We can easily hyperlink anywhere from inside the post (like this ref. to the latest at Instapunk Returns); We can use boldface and italics and font changes within posts. We can give you more than one graphic in a single post. We can title a post. 

What we can’t do, or do as easily, as Facebook — Show you pics of all our friends; Notify you automatically when there’s a new post; Show you our location in the social network you belong to with a single click.

Those may be important criteria to you. But for the hangers-on at Facebook, here’s the bad news. Facebook is falling apart, More and more rapidly as junk AI “enhancements” are piled on top of a creaky software infrastructure that has never been upgraded except by ad hoc tweaks that keep making it more complicated and confusing to use. Eventually, you will discover that AutoCorrect is blowing up even your own attempts to post your thoughts.

Think about it. Remember how to get here: robertlaird.blogspot.com.

One more thing. We can also give you footnotes and endnotes and sidebar material without having to offload it to a Comment the MetaBosses don’t really want you to find or see. For example, here’s the explanation of the asterisk we included in the caption of our top graphic.

*Slobbovia. The map of the mindspace where the dim, dumb journeyman lefties follow their faceless leaders to Obblivia.

Welcome to My Network

 

He’s not the only one.

They’re telling me I forgot my password. Not true. I’ve changed it at their behest several times this year, and each time they say the new one is saved with the other passwords on my device. Then, when Chrome loses its lunch and forgets about my FB page, they try all the saved passwords and pronounce them all incorrect. But I’ll go along. I forgot. Why I’m here.

This software can do some things as well or better than Meta’s, some things not so well. The clumsiest part will be linking to the other news sources I frequent. I’ll use several workarounds depending on which is easiest and most effective.

Posts will always be in reverse chronological order, that is, newest first.

I’ll need your help to make this work. The address is easy. robertlaird.blogspot.com.

You will not be notified when I post. If you’re interested, check in here at intervals. I work at all hours of the day and night, so there’s no telling what will be here. Signing on below as a Friend/Follower will be motivational for me, especially in the early going. Please feel free to comment on anything and everything. Just click on the ‘No Comments’ button at the end of the post to receive a EZ fill-in form. Emojis are fine. I don’t believe the email prompt is required, although experience may prove me wrong. To be clear, I don’t need your email address. 

As we go, I will be adding sidebar material and links to other interesting sites, not all of them my own. Let me know if you think I should pursue this course. I’ll be paying close attention to your reactions. 

That’s about it for a first post. There may well be a real post here later this evening or tomorrow morning. Hope to be seeing you all around.