All the Troubles in the World

 Ugh. Sooooo late.

A section of the historic carousel in the little Willamette Valley town of Albany

Sorry. Sorry; I know, I promised something right after my latest "WTF is wrong with these people?!?" rant back in June. Had some ideas for that post, too, and then...

Well, life got in the way.

Since then things have changed enough that the central idea of the original post has been blown apart and shattered by the month-and-change of utterly nutty nonsense that passes for U.S. "politics" and "foreign policy" (if such terms can be used to describe the idiocy, stupidity, and the random free-association that dominate both of them), that being what you get when your national government is dominated by an addled moron and his remoras looking for loot, power, plus whatever loathsome ideas are leaking from their heads.

But let me try to get back to where I was originally starting from and see if I can rebuild something out of what I've got now.

Crystal Springs Garden in Southeast Portland

Okay. So. 

The last time I sat down to type I wrapped up that post with... 

"Looking at this Sunday evening's trashfire at the supposed People's House, it's hard not to believe that the white trash is winning. And difficult to imagine how the rest of us can fight our way out of the binding they're working constantly to impose on all of us they hate and despise.

(Next: Okay, well...how's it going out in the People's Republic of Portland, then..?)"

At the time I had a specific Portland thing in mind; this.

"It is in the public interest to avoid supporting animal cruelty, unsustainable environmental practices, and zoonotic disease risks by removing force-fed products from the marketplace. It is also in the public interest to codify values related to the humane treatment of animals, public health, and environmental stewardship. Therefore, the Council finds it necessary to enact this regulation in the City of Portland in order to achieve these goals."

This is the concluding paragraph of Portland City Ordinance 192190, enacted into code on June 4, 2026.

What it does is ban the sale of foie gras.

 

Tom McCall Natural Area, Mosier, Oregon

Okay then.

I honestly have no dog (or goose, or duck) in this fight. I don't have the taste for, or the grocery budget for, the bloated internal organs of domestic fowl. But I also don't think that all the other aspects of commercial poultry production, from the chicken farm through the poultry processing plant, is anything but an enterprise that needs to be punitively overseen and regulated.

Commercial aviculture, like a lot of other commercial food production, is about making foods relatively cheap and affordable. A lot of the things that everyone involved has to do to make that happen, from the farmers/ranchers through the transporters to the meat-packing plants to the groceries, ranges from quick and dirty to downright revolting. There's a reason that parents don't encourage their kids to dream of working in a North Carolina chicken plant. Gross.

But...cheap and available food? Ask any peasant or smallholder or urban laborer in a pre-industrial or early industrial society how they'd respond to knowing that their lives weren't liable to be upended at any given moment by a killing frost or an avian flu or just a series of poor decisions by their lords and masters. Wars. Famines. Shortages that raised the bare-minimum cost of even the most basic foods like bread beyond the means of the common folk - which in most societies in most of human history meant something like 96% of everyone in that society - and meant that you starved, or rebelled (and were killed anyway, after you starved for a bit...).

So I kinda get both viewpoints.

Making intentionally-diseased bird livers by tube-feeding ducks like suffragettes in Holloway Prison?

Ew.

But if you like and want to buy and eat that stuff?

Whatev'. I don't see the point in making law about it, and here's why it did make me swear and take the piss.

Portland City Council has a whole lot of shit it needs to deal with.

We're stony broke, for one thing. Just like always. If you believe what out local pols tell us about it.

Bills don't stop coming in - roads, schools, fuckin' cops (remind me, Siri, what completes the following statement: "Portland Police Bureau is fucking _________"), firefighters, public buildings - while everybody pisses and moans and, most importantly, votes against raising any sort of tax revenue. 

The constant message coming out of City Hall (and the County offices, and fucking Salem, for that matter...) is "OMFG we just have to cut (insert public good here; parks, pools, roads, daycare, mental and physical health service) because we don't have enough money!" 

It's the same we hear from here all the way to D.C.; fuck your medical care, Gramma, don't you see that Elon Musk (fill in the plutocrat name here) needs another trillion bucks?!?! 

So it kinda chapped my ass that, in the middle of this usual annual budget-crisis-oh-woe-is-us-athon that City Council had five minutes to waste (and money to spend, mind you; someone is gonna have to deal with renegade duck liver pate' smugglers and underground foie gras dealers. I'd love to be a fly on the wall as the Central Precinct command group assigns coppers to the undercover Foie Gras Squad) fucking around with poultry guts.

Adorable child meets adorable woman with fanciful ornament, Cathedral Park Jazz Festival

 
Okay, but.

That was before this bullshit blew up all over the front page:

"The (Portland Trailblazer’s) majority owner, Tom Dundon, is trying to iron out a deal with the city for a major, state-of-the-art renovation of the Moda Center that could cost (the public) more than $600 million."

Now this joker Dundon?

He's a reeeeeal piece of work.

A perfect symbol of the Trump Era, a human-shaped cockroach who made his pile off shitty payday-loan-style predatory loan-sharking and now looks for stolen glory off owning sportsball teams. In this case, Portland and Oregon's only "big" major league sport, NBA basketball.

The scumbag has serious fuck-you money - serious as in this $600M is kind of a rounding error of his tax accountants -  and so far his whole "negotiating" approach to this whole I-need-you-proles-to-gimme-money-for-my-basketball-hobby-farm with the public has been pretty much just "fuck you".

Here I have to confess: I'm totally not a basketball fan.

Despite having spent a chunk of my young-adulthood around Philadelphia in the Seventies and early Eighties glory years of the Julius Erving 76ers...not a damn thing. Not so much as a trickle of hooping excitement trickled into me.  

I had to go to my friend Will, Portland native, massive Blazer fan (as in "still remembers vividly every moment of the 1977 NBA Finals and Championship") and stand-up civic and social justice soldier. I figured if anyone would be in the "let's-do-what-we-need-to-keep-the-team" house it'd be Will.

Nope.

It didn't take ten seconds for my friend to express his down-to-the-ground conviction that our new basketball billionaire can fuck right off with his "pay me you scum" shit.

Which, yeah. I totally get. It took me less time that that. Seriously, Oregon and Multnomah County and Portland pols. You're gonna tell me we're broke, we can't afford to find the jack to do so much as the "something" about the horde of homeless gomers you keep freaking out about 24/7, but somehow we can find enough spare change in the sofa cushions to pay this plutocratic fuckstick to keep keeping his basketball toy here?

My ass. 

And, still...here we are. The public, the City Council, the County Commissioners, even the State legislature and the governor, they're all still dicking around with this damn thing, trying to find a way to ease some simoleons out of the public vault instead of telling the Dundon Organization to either pay for the damn arena themselves or shut up and fuck right off.

Random barn along Highway 99W, somewhere in Polk County

 
You want more? Ohfuckyes there's more.

From the statewide ballot in November there was this:

"The People of Oregon therefore propose the People for the Elimination of Animal Cruelty Exemptions (PEACE) Act to amend Chapter 167 of the Oregon Revised Statutes—which currently provides unnecessary exemptions to laws governing animal abuse, animal neglect, and animal sexual assault—in order to reduce the suffering of animals and improve their quality of life."

That's right; the idea was to allow the Good People of Oregon to vote to outlaw hunting, fishing, livestock raising, chicken ranching, pretty much all meat and poultry production, from your "pets or meat" rabbits in the backyard to the King Ranch.

Driftwood patterns, Otter Crest, Oregon

I have no words for how fucking pointlessly stupid that is beyond "Wow, that's amazingly fucking pointlessly stupid." It's like making hamburgers illegal. Or vodka. Or shoes. Even if it was politically do-able, it's economically and socially impossible. 

And, just here in Portland, was this:

"The ballot proposal aims to use 25% of the Portland Clean Energy Fund’s annual revenue to hire 400 officers. That would divert roughly $50 million from climate programs to hire more officers and provide training."

Riiight. Siri, what was that line about the fucking useless Police Bureau again..?

And this, too:

"Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process where residents of a municipality deliberate and directly decide how to spend a portion of a public budget."

(I got to talk to an actual person who was collecting signatures for this one.

(Oh, right. You might not have these "direct democracy"/ballot measure things where you live. The basic deal is that there has to be a "petitioner", an organization, or individual, who draws up one of these proposed pieces of rule- or legislation-changes or additions.

The language has to be approved by whatever the political authority of the polity you want the thing to apply to - the "PEACE" thing was statewide, so the Oregon Secretary of State's office, the other two were City of Portland, so some suit at City Hall - and then you have to get enough valid citizen signatures to get the wording on the ballot. I ran into one of the people they hired - and these folks are almost always paid temps - and we had a long talk about it.

And I kinda-sorta didn't hate it. But. I had and have real questions and problems with the way the proponents and my signature guy hand-wave away the whole issue of "how to these "PB proposals" actually work in practice?" How do you get the public involved? How does the whole "refine ideas into feasible projects or programs" process work?

My concern is that, watching the U.S. public loll about in the firehose of idiot shit issuing from the government, the government's ass-kissers and fluffers, and the "news media" stenography of the two, without so much as a skeptically raised eyebrow, the chances of this process becoming a nutzoid Skinnerbox of foie-gras-sale and dairy-cow-insemination criminalization seem insanely likely.)

"Corgi Beach Takeover", Seaside, Oregon

 
Well.

What's the sitch on all this political galaxy-brain nonsense?

Two of these proposals  - the PEACE no-chicken-schwarma thing for the state ballot, and the cop-fluffing "Safer Portland" one for the City - died stillborn for lack of valid signatures, and I'm not sure how.

Supposedly both petitions had more than the required minimum when they were turned in to the various elections people, but what I'm reading is that the State and City's name-checks (presumably to ensure that the signatures belonged to living people who are actual citizens of Oregon and/or Portland) tossed so many that the both were 86ed.

(Oh, and the cop-fluffers were bashed repeatedly for their paid harvesters just blatantly lying their asses off about how the funding gimmick actually worked. Which would certainly fit with Portland Police Bureau's methods.)

The PB/community funding one made it, I think. We'll see if it shows up in November.

The foie gras ban is in effect, so no fatty goose liver will henceforth soil our Portland charcuterie anymore. 

St. Johns City Hall (1907), North Portland, Oregon

 
The basketball arena tax-money-giveaway scheme?

Oh, Christ, no; nothing definite and all parties are still dicking around about it. The usual "business community leaders" are still trying to stuff dollars in Dundon's pockets, but every dickish move the team owner makes (and he's made a lot) clarifies the suspicion that, yes, he's just an ginormous dick who can't be trusted. Neil deMause over at Field of Schemes has the deets if you care enough. 

This has all been entirely too verbose, but I hope you get the gist. We really are living through the shittiest timeline. 

We've placed far too much power and influence in the keeping of far too many people who are unscrupulous, or foolish, or ignorant, or greedy, or shortsighted, or simplistic, or some combination of all the above, and we've forgotten that one of the hardest parts of citizenship is that you can't just ignore what those fucking people are up to. Citizenship requires the citizens to stay alert, stay informed, stay involved, and, if it comes down to it, stay - or become - fiercely protective of their rights and duties.

Sometimes...that means a violent - emotionally, politically, and, yes, physically, if it comes to that - collision with the "authorities" that you've elected.

The alternative?

They are your kings, and you are their subjects.

Or their slaves.

Portland Japanese Garden, winter, 2026

(This one was so depressing I didn't have the heart to illustrate it with political imagery. So these are photos from my expeditions out and about my hometown. I hope you like them. At least more than the tales of wretched scum and villainy they illuminate.) 

Whooo?

It's suddenly early summer here in North Portland, so I drove up to the north end of North to see if there were any fun new birds showing up to enjoy the weather.

New? No, but I did find these two, a couple of new local residents, along the path to Smith and Bybee Lakes;

Great Horned Owl(lets). This one was a better photo op - the other owlet was tucked in tight next to a nearby tree trunk and screened by branches. So here's the other brother (or sister).

Both were still fairly downy, suggesting that they were no more than a day or two out of the nest. The parents were, or a parent was, probably nearby but were more experienced at hiding. Didn't see 'em.

I'm kind of foolishly pleased with this picture, because I don't have a good "birding camera", i.e. one with a telephoto lens to get up close to birds that, like the owlets, are uninterested in providing good snapshot poses. I have a cheap little phone camera, which when tried captured only a dark blob on a dark tree limb.

So I took my binoculars - and I do have good binos, Swarovski 8x42s, since while I'm not a bird photographer I am a birder and good optics are kind of a basic must-have for that - and held the phone camera up to one of the eyepieces.

It took a good bit of fiddling to get the camera and eyepiece lined up, and that doesn't even count the finger-stretch needed to push the "shutter" button, but the result is...pretty damn good. Particularly given what I had to work with.

 Other than that just the usual suspects. Looks like migration hasn't really reached us yet.

Soon...

 

I love this so much.

This awesome piece of Nevermore is by Jim Wright, of Stonekettle Station, on Twitter, proving that, just like I said; if you don't go looking for fucking Nazis there's still lots of good stuff over there.

Winter garden (冬 庭園)

いざ行かむ　雪見にころぶ　所まで

"Let’s go out
To see the snow view
Where we slip and fall"

Since we didn't get the February Snowpocalypse we anticipated, I took advantage of the sunny midday and went to the Japanese Garden.

初雪や　聖小僧が　笈の色

"The first snow
That the young Hijiri-monk has
The color of the wooden box"

The color of the wooden box perched on the bamboo post isn't a Hijiri-monk, but a common Northwest forest thrush. But perhaps since it's a Hermit Thrush it is monastic enough.

市人よ　此笠うらふ　雪の傘

"Hey, townspeople,
I’ll sell you my woven hat,
The snow umbrella"

初雪や いつ大仏の 柱立

"The first snow,
When is the pillar set up
For the Great Buddha?"

箱根こす 人も有らし 今朝の雪

"Some people
Would cross the Hakone Pass
Even though the moaning snow"

All of the poems are by Bashō Matsuo (松尾 芭蕉), as they were the last time we visited the Garden.

108 Years of Silence

Fascinating collection of composite photographs of San Francisco; juxtaposing scenes from the city today with the way they looked after the April morning in 1906 when the world changed for the City by the Bay.

Lovely, and yet ominous.

Living on the edge of the great abyss as we do here in the Pacific Northwest we often ignore how close we all live to the Day of Wrath. Our own fault, like the San Andreas, the Garlock, the White Wolf and all the others, waits silently with the patience of all true predators for the moment that it is no longer patient, the moment when it will reap whatever it will.

Camera Obscura

I will admit to being largely unfamiliar with the work of Andrei Tarkovsky.

I know he made the original Solaris, which I have seen bits and pieces of. It is one of those films I find lovely, and intriguing, and yet impenetrable; I have not been able to sit all the way through it simply because I can't keep my mind from wandering. But it is lovely and meditative, and I appreciate the director's eye for image.

Turns out that the guy was a pretty slick hand with still photos, too. Anyone who can produce arresting images out of a cheesy Polaroid camera? Hmmm.

I think I should go watch one of his flicks. There seems to be something there.

(h/t to the gang at Lawyers, Guns, and Money for the link)

Un dimanche après-midi à l'Parc des Donnezsur

Hmmm. I think I wanted to take a moment from all the angst and provide a post with no meaning beyond the sensual;

That, and every so often I take a genuinely good picture; I just love this snapshot of our Overlook Park on a sunny Sunday.

For all our troubles and toil, the world is often a lovely place. It is unfortunate that we are often to harried and busy to stop and notice that. I hope you have a moment today to do so.

A look back from overhead

The photo below is of the neighborhood I live in taken from an Army Air Corps aircraft recording the conditions of the Willamette River channel and Swan Island in 1936.One of the things I get paid for is looking at these old photographs. I'm usually looking for evidence of past landslides, or long-lost grading. But this was pure indulgence, culled from the files of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers files during a long day of researching a nearby site.

Our little house is under the orange circle. Here's the same neighborhood today:Stop for a moment and compare the two images. That's okay, I'll wait a while.

The modern image is just what you'd expect; little brick (or in our case, wood) houses for you and me, right? That's my University Park neighborhood in a sentence, no different from any other urban Portland neighborhood. The big white-roofed building to the east? That's Astor Elementary, where the kiddos go to school. Go, Astor Eagles!

But look at the top image for a bit. Here; I'll give you a little bigger view of a portion of the southwest corner of the same photo:Our house (built only about fourteen years before the photo was flown) is still under the orange circle. We understand that the little building at the corner to the west was some sort of mom-and-pop corner store, selling Coke in bottles, and penny soap to the good working-class folks of Depression-era North Portland. And note a couple of other things; the big pale farm fields down a block to the west, with some sort of long white barn or shed along McKenna Street at the southeast corner. And notice all the little footpaths and tracks that meander through the center of the blocks; in a lot of ways this part of NoPo was still pretty rural in '36 - rural enough for folks to follow the old cowpaths rather than stay on the sidewalks.

OK, now here's an enlargement of the next Corps photo flown, from 1940:One thing I picked out here was the garage - that's inside the orange box. See it? The thing is, Portland City code requires you have a garage. No shit. Seriously. If you park your car on the street more than 48 hours you can be cited for something called "in lieu of garage" and that's a fineable offense.

Really.

So back in the day all Portland houses had garages. Ours did. But at some point prior to the 1960's the thing either burnt or rotted away and fell over. I've found bits of it under the backyard sod. But there it is in 1940, keeping the summer sun off someone's 1938 Ford Twodoor.

Here's the larger 1940 image. One thing - look at the color of the streets. See how dark they are? Now look back at 1936. See the difference?The thing is that the 1936 sidewalks look about the same color as the streets, and the streets themselves look too regular to be unpaved. See that curvy line above the farm field in both 1936 and 1940? That's N. Yale Street between McKenna and Wall, dirt then and dirt now. But the regular street grid looks paved - just not paved with asphalt. Y'know what I think happened?

I think the streets were paved in the late Teens and Twenties (when this portion of U-Park was first really developed) with concrete.That's surprisingly common for Portland; in many of the older neighborhoods in the inner East side you can still find some of those old concrete pavements exposed. But they're brittle, and usually end up covered with asphalt before too long. I think by 1940 the City had decided that they weren't going to pay for any more concrete and laid down the macadam on top.The funny thing is that when I started doing this sort of overhead window-peeping in the early Nineties there really wasn't any other way to do it; the information was either in the files at places like the Corps or proprietary to private aerial photo companies. But Google Earth and similar applications have changed all that dramatically. The image above is a larger-scale view of my home from GE, circa 1952.

Note that you can barely see Astor School, the larger H-shaped dark block east of the circle that marks our house, but the long arc of Mock's (or Waud's) Bluff, the steep cut bank of the old meander of the Willamette River that encloses Swan Island is easily seen.In the old photo you can see the "island" - the rectangular peninsula that projects up to the northwest. This had been used as Portland's airport in the earlies, and was just then beginning to be developed as the industrial area it is today - here it is in 1925, probably not long after Lindbergh visited.Note that in the aerial photo the Union Pacific line running towards the long tunnel under North Portland is still an embankment surrounded by wetlands. And here is the same view today;A little busier, isn't it?

The wetlands are gone, the swans are gone, the concrete streets are gone, the old farm fields, the cowpaths, the garages...all gone but where they remain crystallized forever in silver salts and black.

Потерянный мир

This is Pinkhus Karlinskii, the supervisor of the Chernigov floodgate, who was 84 years old in 1909, which would make him 187 years old today.He lived and worked the width of Asia away from these unfortunateslocked in their zindan, a hole in the ground with a door and a adobe roof over it, described as a "traditional Central Asian prison" in the Library of Congress website devoted to the work of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, who roamed pre-Revolutionary Russia in the first decade of the Twentieth Century.And none of them were aware of these people, a family-mining operation in the Urals.

Fascinating, lovely images more than a hundred years old, of a place and a time as unrecognizable and vanished as the dark side of the Moon. And yet, the same roof in Bukhara probably still roosts the same stork, or another so like it that the picture might have been taken yesterday rather than one hundred and three years ago.Lovely, fascinating exhibit; well worth a moment to look.

(h/t to Ed at Gin and Tacos for the link...)

Save the date

Barbie and Ken's wedding album.Perfect.

Worth a moment or two to enjoy the absurdity.And, Jesus, Ken, what? You can't wait for the wedding night at the Dream House? The least you could do is keep your hand off the poor woman's ass in public. You horndog; if I didn't know you weren't anatomically correct...

(h/t to Glamour mag for the sense of humor...)

The Sex Goddess' Thumb

While researching the preceding post (on the Battle of Chipyong-ni, 1951), I spent some time scrounging the Internets for illustrations. While doing that I found this, a snapshot taken of the three-day USO tour Marilyn Monroe did in February, 1954.As I was looking over the picture (and, quite unexpectedly, oogling La Monroe in a sadly goatish fashion of a man of my age and weight) I noticed an odd little thing.

Her right thumb is bandaged.

Enlarge the picture and look for it. See it?

I don't know why that struck me as so odd and interesting. Possibly because I'm accustomed to the current seamless ability of the entertainment industry to make boo-boos like that disappear. Have you ever seen a current star, or even a starlet, with band-aids, bruises, bad hair (seen outside of the paparazzi sections of the checkstand rags, I mean)?

I was fascinated. What had happened? Fight with new hubby Joltin' Joe? Slipped on a microphone cable? So I went back to the 'Net, and...

Turns out that the Sex Goddess of the Fifties was cutting a cake for some soldiers when the knife slipped and she cut herself, quite badly, by the look of it.But no matter - the show went on and, apparently, went like free beer. Both the troopers, and the star, loved each other. It's kind of a nice story.

And Heaven knows if anyone needed a nice story it was Norma Jean, whose short life contains entirely too much unhappy drama.Nothing deeper than that; just a tiny bit of trivia for a Thursday evening.

Dance for joy

I've never really "gotten" dance the way I get music or drama or film. Stories told by Terpsichore have just never worked for me. And, yes, the "Nutcracker" is very pretty, yes, thank you. I do have a four-year-old who loves princesses and ballerinas.So while I don't get the princessy part what I do get is the dancer as athlete. Which is why I wanted to repost this photograph of the dancer Naiomi Goldberg's battered feet.

Often the price of knowing the truth, or attaining beauty, or achieving mastery in anything, is pain.

And often the pain must be given freely for to attain the true mastery, the true beauty, the requisite suffering must be a gift that does not count the cost.

(h/t to Kevin Rolly, whose image this is)

Garden of Lost Tanks

Thus.In the Kuwaiti desert near Al Jahrah.

More at the site below; fascinating.

From Yann Arthus-Bertrand

Through the Lens with Little Miss

So...

...young Missy took control of the camera the other night. She took so many pictures that I thought I'd post a selection of her snapshots to let you see how the world looks to our little girl (who, we now know, probably sees most of it as a blur...) when she can make a record of it.

"Here I am. This one is by Daddy, who just took off my shoes and said I had the stinkiest feet of any three-and-a-half-year-old in history. I don't! Smell my feet and see! (Daddy: if you value your life, don't. She does, and it's a horrible miracle that such a sweet little girl can have such stanky dogs.)Here's Mommy being funny.Here's Daddy. He's going to be prey for Miss Lily Kitty in a couple of seconds, see her in the background? Bite Daddy, Lily, hee hee!!!And here's some impressionist images of my living room, starting with my feet again what as NOT stinky! (Daddy: yes they are, sweetie. You should wash them.):


Daddy's dirty shoes.
I hope you enjoyed this look into the world of Little Miss; I sure did.