I see The Media have a couple new chew toys this morning — a brain-dead SecDef and a completely dead pope.
That should fill The Void for a nanosecond or two.
Now we await the various conclaves. If we see black smoke from the Pentagon, that means that SecDef Yog-Sothoth has burned his Signal passwords and has gone back to using NextDoor for all secure communications involving war plans, pub crawls, and no-strings hookups.
White smoke means that Baby Daddy Musk has sent him on ahead to set up shop on Mars.
Red smoke from the Office of the Vice President means that Hillbilly Boy has failed to convince his god that he had nothing to do with his pope’s death, even though he was one of the last people to see him alive.
Fwooosh! Straight From servicing Beelzebozo to serving Beelzebub in one seriously hot DeeCee minute. Not exactly upward mobility, is it? Sure as shit ain’t the golden escalator Beelzebozo rode down back in 2015, either. More like that elevator ride that Mickey Rourke took at the end of “Angel Heart.”
And the pope? Well … Dad was a ring-kisser, Mom was a Presbyterian, and I turned out to be neither. So I haven’t paid much attention to Holy Mother Church since 1978, when I was still a newspaperman in Bibleburg and we burned through a couple of popes in a month.
If I recall correctly, which is unlikely considering the circumstances, we had finished newspapering for the evening and had retired to Jinx’s Place for cocktails.
A late arrival burst in, as they will do, and told us the pope had just died.
“Catch up,” we replied. “That was last month.”
“That was the old guy,” our informant revealed. “This was the new guy.”
And soon we had a new new guy, to be dubbed “J2P2,” because back then newspaper people knew how to treat anyone who claimed to speak with God’s voice, whether they were in Vatican City or DeeCee.
Mad Blog Media 
I ain’t going anywhere near this veep. Eve only had three faces, but this guy got a hundred of ’em.
Speaking of literature, and Yeats’s poetry in particular, his poem “The Second Coming” inspired a song that my buddy Jon played during his concert at the Arizona Folklore Preserve yesterday. The song, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” by Eliza Gilkyson, has a verse that goes
He’s coming in the name of high finance
Corporations, religion and violence
Countin’ on collusion and silence
Slouching towards Bethlehem
I thought Jon wrote that verse for dumpster, bit it’s part of the original song.
Thanks. That’s a new one for me, and the whole poem is worth posting here.
What kind of beast comes slouching
What kind of beast comes slouching
What kind of beast comes slouching
Slouching towards Bethlehem?
People get ready cause it won’t be long
Before the hurricane will be blowin strong
And the chance to rise will be come and gone
When he’s slouchin towards Bethlehem
What kind of beast…
He’s comin in the name of hunger
Draggin all the poor folks under
Who stands behind him I wonder
Slouchin towards Bethlehem
What kind of beast…
He’s comin in the name of high finance
Corporations, religion and violence
Countin on collusion and silence
Slouchin towards Bethlehem
What kind of beast…
You better stand with your shoulder to the wheel
You better band together at the top of the hill
You better blow that horn much louder still
When he’s slouchin towards Bethlehem
What kind of beast..
The original William Butler Yeats poem is killer too:
Definitely killer. I figure people knew that one.
Actually, those are the song lyrics. Joni Mitchell put “The Second Coming” to music.
Speaking of security, I sure feel more secure, don’t you?
Christ on a bike! Why would anyone walk around with $3000 and a passport in a purse. Maybe she was going to defect to Canada, heh? I also think she uses the same makeup artist as the dumpster. Gives pancake a whole new meaning!
Makeup by Earl Scheib. Any face, any color, just $29.95!
He shoots, he scores!
Heh. So much for “Homeland Security”
Pope Frank was one of the better ones. He was handed a raw deal, between inheriting CEO-ship of the Church of Childhood Molestation and his predecessor being a former Hitler Youth guy who was theologically, way too conservative for my tastes.
Pope Frank was a Jesuit, and as close as Mother Church got lately to the Liberation Theology stuff that had me captivated for a while back in the eighties. One of our Newman Center priests at the U of Hawaii had done service down in Central America, where being too outspoken for the poor and downtrodden could get you a bad case of lead poisoning. It was an interesting time.
Yeah, Signalgate just keeps getting worse, along with the rest of the news out of Dee Cee. I wonder if the latest leak on Hegseth was because he put both his wife and his mistress on the same Signal chat group. Try this shit with a real country rather than a ragtag bunch of towelheads and there might be serious consequences to the folks Over There. No one seems to give a shit about that.
He completely blows operational security in real time with pilots in the air and targets in motion. Real people putting their lives on the line, and real people getting killed on the ground, including bystanders. And these assholes are high fiving and sending each other emojis like they were playing an on line video game. I would like to gather them up in a ball and beam them into the ready room on that carrier that launched the attack. Mark Kelly gets it. He’s flown missions like this. I don’t think he is done with these clowns yet.
Perhaps put them all in the belly of a plane and send them over hostile skies, with their time and place of arrival transmitted over open channels in advance.
Used to be known as the “Executive Branch”. Now it’s known as Sad Clowns University where admission is free to billionaires and cretins who will kiss the Dean of Clowns ……
Earl Scheib eh? Wow POG there’s a blast from the past.
Missing from Noemnuts list of reported stolen goods were the pistol she likely carries, ya know, in case she needs to lay a dog down. And the mandatory knee pads all current administration staff are required to have in the presence of his Lardship.
Exactly where was her bodyguard….wait I think we can guess….he likely borrowed the kneepads which is why they weren’t on the report.
That purse of hers must weigh a metric shit-ton, what with the hand cannon, extra magazines, fat wads of cash, badge, passport, keys, quart jars of war paint, hardback copy of “Art of the Deal,” burner phone for ringing up various fuck-puppets, large tube of Doc Johnson’s Sta-Long Love Lube, double-headed dildo, emergency pint of tonsil polish to make it all bearable, and aspirin for the inevitable aftermath.
Ft. Huachuca soldiers coming to New Mexico.
https://www.myheraldreview.com/news/border/new-mexico-border-area-designated-fort-huachuca-extension/article_a6e35688-875c-454a-8bc4-f0cd7e4f5ef7.html
Oho! Nothing about it in the New Mexico press yet. Hope they’ve had their measles vaccinations. …
Got some troops from Fort Cartoon down there too.
So did anyone go out and buy a Hummer for Earth Day? I find much of today’s treatment of Earth Day long on bullshit and short on serious contemplation. I left my own virtue signalling on my blog, here:
https://labikes.blogspot.com/2025/04/earth-day-bike-ride-those-multiuse.html
Interesting perspective from your bike path ride Khal. You’d think it was more American Capitalism Day from your photos. But that is the point of functional bike paths – To get people to and from places of society – grocery store, bank, sports store, pet shop, cannabis shop, etc. Normally several hundred thousand dollars of public funding is not spent building pathways in out-of-the-way locations. Unless you get mega-tech center funding and build one along some radioactive waterway.
Typically on Earth Day I try to practice the “tread less” philosophy. Drive less, buy less, and perhaps get out and enjoy the parks and outdoors more. The idea of cleaning up litter or doing some yard work is great but I don’t like to think of Earth Day as a day of litter clean up (something we should always do) or gardening (mega home store support day). I like to think of Earth Day as a slow down, look around, take a deep breath and appreciate the environment that we have around us. I typically try to get a bike ride in on Earth Day, and since it was for selfish recreational reasons said ride was made in my view of the spirit of Earth Day. I also took the dog to two parks and appreciated all the money spent on turf and the associative “greening” chemicals. Rachel Carson would find it amusing. I enjoyed the day so much that I think I’ll enjoy it for today too!
Would anybody else here find it amusing if the smoke that comes out of the conclave stack is rainbow colored?
Hi Shawn
Good point on American Capitalism Day, and I had not thought of that being how it would be seen but there you go. But I do have to say that having been in the bike-ped advocacy and advisory bizniz for about 30 years, I’ve seen more than a few facilities put where it was convenient to put them, rather than where they would do the most good. Money and land access are factors.
What I find sad is that although the path system in Fanta Se takes you right to all those shopping and medical centers and close to banks and coffeehouses, and is being expanded to more outlying areas, it is rare to find a bicycle, or shit, even a decent bike rack at many of them, including DeVargas Mall, a stone’s throw from my place. So to me, those paths are underutilized as far as using them for green transportation rather than the equally valid reason of just enjoying them.
The one exception here is the Solana Center, less than a mile from where I live. This is an old community, built circa 1960 by Allen Stamm** in the model of Levittown in its original incarnation: small, affordable homes for working and middle class people on lots big enough to enjoy but not huge. Our place is a little short of 1300 sq. feet. People used to raise families in these homes! The Solana Center is part of the community and is an easy and safe ride from most places in the NW part of the city I live in (as long as one avoids St. Francis Drive, aka St. Francis Killway); the bike racks are well located and often pretty well subscribed.
** https://sflivingtreasures.org/index.php/treasures/132-stamm-allen-.html?showall=1&limitstart=
Convenience is … well, convenient. Here in ’Burque the best off-street paths parallel diversion channels through industrial neighborhoods, roofs ’n’ retail, or suburban backyards. And eventually to get where you’re going you have to leave them for a “bike lane” with all the protection of a Kleenex condom.
In doing so you may find yourself at the intersection of Death and Dismemberment, with cut-outs, bulb-outs, bike-ped signals that don’t work, left-turn arrows that don’t recognize bicycles, psycho motorists who likewise, oblivious pedestrians in various states of jogging, dog-walking, and playlist-selection, e-bikes, whose operators have all the skills of what remains of the U.S. State Department, and a surface that looks like Dresden after the bombing.
You should see the northbound bike-ped crosswalk at Comanche and Tramway. I’ll take a picture of it one of these days, if I can do it without getting killed to death.
Railroad rights of way, diversion channels, river banks, and other opportunities are great, but they have to connect to where you need to go.
I’ve sort of fallen out of activism lately, given my ancientness, but back when I was more involved in bike advocacy and activism, the going belief was you could have the greatest bike system in the universe but it was only as good as its weakest link. If it dumped you onto the intersection of Death and Dismemberment Roads, most folks would predictably say No Fucking Way. I’ve sort of thought the St. Francis Drive/Cerrillos Road intersection or the at grade St. Michaels Drive crossing of the Rail Trail were the test of that theory. We burrowed under St. Francis, but still, crossing Cerrillos and the RailRunner or the mad dash across six lanes of St. Mikes makes life interesting.
If we really want a system where people think getting around by bike is a good idea, we have to fix it so you are not at the mercy of speeding F-150 drivers taking pictures of their dicks. I used to ride Nimitz Highway in Honolulu, which would give 99.9% of cyclists The Fear. But somehow, I’ve aged, and St. Francis Drive worries me and I avoid it.
Ayuh. Out here in The Duck! City foothills, I can do some of my bidness on the bike, but I have to make a fairly large number of concessions to the Kings of the Transportation Jungle. Circuitous routes on back roads, treacherous intersections, indifferently maintained bike paths, and the usual lack of bicycle parking.
The bike rack at the neighborhood Sprouts seems to have been placed by a bike thief. It’s the perfect workplace for a methhead with a bolt cutter and/or grinder.
At least your Sprouts has a bike rack. Up here, the best you can do is chain a bike to the shopping cart corral metal guide structure. I noticed one of the employees does that, so I do too. It partially blocks the sidewalk but given one usually has to dodge randomly ditched shopping carts, a bike doesn’t really stand out as an annoyance.