Samode Haveli

Samode Haveli
280 piece jigsaw puzzle

Samode Haveli is a 19th Century palace in Jaipur, India, about 150 miles southwest of New Delhi. Jaipur has some very fancy buildings.

War and Remembrance

The word 'Remember' in Russian is lit up as the date of Nazi Germany's 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union is commemorated in Moscow. © Sputnik / Evgeny Odinokov

The US and Russia mark Pearl Harbor and Hitler's invasion very differently – that tells us a lot about national identity - Scott Ritter

Scott Ritter has appeared here before.

Wrong Side of the Tracks

Wrong Side of the Tracks ( ENTREVÍAS ) Trailer YouTube | Drama Movie
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This is a great show. Remember Clint 'Get-Off-My-Lawn' Eastwood in Gran Torino? Well, Wrong Side of the Tracks is the Spanish version expanded to an eight part series.

We have Jose Coronado playing Tiros, a hard-as-nails grandfather to Irene, his teenage, adopted, Vietnamese granddaughter. The entire family is dysfunctional. Tiros is a big fat jerk. He has driven all his family away. His daughter isn't much better, so Irene is a bit of a mess. So doing what stupid teenagers have done since time immemorial, she makes it worse.

Tiros runs a hardware store in a section of town that is slowly sliding into a slum. According to Tiros it is all because of the Spics, Spanish speaking immigrants from South America. Who knew Spaniards could be racists against people who are so similar to themselves? Reminds me of the Emo Philips story about the heretic scum.

We've got Amanda, a good, pretty cop and Ezequiel, a flamboyant bad cop, Sondra, the local drug kingpin, a bunch of high school kids, and Tiros and his old war buddies. The show bounces around from the cops to the kids to family arguments to sleazy thugs and the mood changes with each bounce, from serious to terrifying to cringe-inducing to very, very funny. It's a great show.

Netflix, in Spanish with English subtitles.

Update August 2025 replaced missing video. Replacement is dubbed, not the way I watch foreign shows. Stupid marketing pukes.

What's Happening?

I have a whole boatload of problems, just like you, me and everyone else. Some are unpleasant and some are annoying, but hey, that's life, you deal with it. So I got plenty to think about, so why do I keep going back to the debacle in Ukraine? Do I have valid reason to focus on it, or is it just some quirk of my personality? Near as I can tell it's because our support of war in the Ukraine doesn't make any sense. 

We went in there and started poking the bear at least eight years ago. That it's taken this long for Russia to react tells me this is a measured response. Putin knows exactly what he is doing. It may not all go as well as he'd like, but it's starting to look like he going to achieve his objectives. A solution we could probably have achieved years ago through diplomatic channels, if we had wanted to. Obviously we didn't.

Could this be the act of some rogue faction in the Pentagon that wants to wargame a conflict with Russia, but with real people, real weapons and real carnage? People worry about the influence the big drug makers have on Congress, but I suspect the real king of the hill is the Military-Industrial Complex.

The whiz kids keep coming up with new, exciting ways to kill people, and the military, once they've seen these weapons, they want them. Whiz kids are expensive. Being able to destroy your enemy? Priceless.

Weapons have been advancing at a rapid pace. Faster computers, better sensors, better algorithms have made them much more efficient at being deadly. But many of these weapons have never been tried in combat. Are they really worth making more of them? Well, how bout we gin up a little war someplace, someplace where we can't get involved, but against somebody with some power. Hey! I know! Ukraine! We can subvert the government and then proceed to poke the bear. Eventually Vlad will have had enough and he'll wade it, and we'll have our war. And then we get to see if any of these new-fangled weapons are any good.

Archbishop Viganeò versus The Empire of Lies Part 2

JMSmith has a post up about Archbishop Vigano's interview with Steve Bannon. It's short and will give you something to think about.

The War Room has a transcript of the interview. It's kind of long. He basically condemns all the leaders of the western world as being agents of the devil. I tend to agree. I can find no other explanation.

Archbishop Vigano has appeared here before. Not everybody spells his name the same way.

The people in charge really are trying to kill us all.

If you are pro-abortion don't let the Catholic opposition to abortion influence your opinion. The abortion issue is insignificant compared to the damage these shitheads are doing.

Steve Bannon is something of a gadfly.

Tekoi - Solid Rocket Motor Test Facility

This abandoned shed may yet help end the world
CGP Grey

A look inside some of the technical work done during the cold war to ensure we could destroy our enemies.

Tekoi Test Range

You can still see the burn marks on the ground from old test firings.

Elvis and the AoG

Bayou Renaissance Man has a post up about the guns of Elvis. Sam commented:

Elvis learned his music at his mother's knee, she being a Holy Roller. She was AoG, but here's a sample of Holiness music:

Brother Claude Ely, Little David Play On Your Harp & Ain't No Grave, There's A leak .
Jean Allen

Brother Claude puts a lot of energy into his music. I don't know how long I can listen to it, but I certainly like it much more than the classical stuff that Bayou usually posts.

But what is this AoG? Wikipedia gives a laundry list of possible meanings, including:

• Adventures of God, a Belgian webtoon series
• Army of God (United States), a Christian terrorist organization in the United States
• Assemblies of God
• Australian Christian Churches
• Assemblies of God in Great Britain

I suspect the AoG in Sam's comment refers to Assemblies of God, but you will notice that AoG could also refer to the Army of God. What in tarnation? A Christian terrorist organization? Oh, anti-abortion zealots. We like to think we are in control of our actions, and those actions are determined by rational thought. Well, some us like to think that anyway. But we are driven by our emotions and beliefs and those often overpower any rational thoughts we might have.