Garden, currently being guarded, is in the background.

The biblical mandate from Walters

Now faces a lawsuit and falters.

“But I ain’t forlorn.

My obsession with porn

Sustains me against all assaulters.”

Stage One: Clear a biggish circular area at the very top of our property. Decades of twigs, vines, trash trees, and odd elements (some previous owner lay down a small square outlined in bricks) had to be raked and lopped through, leaving a well-established vinca/English ivy ground cover. A rough circular dirt path already sort of exists; parts of it also need to be cleared.

Happy Soldier Mr UD carries a red rake full of leaves away from the garden (on the left).

Dog poses in the garden-to-be, amid stumps and bricks.

This stage will continue for awhile. In line with the garden’s purpose, I listen to Life Wisdom (Alan Watts, Carl Jung, the Stoics, others) while I work. One immediate problem: They mainly disagree with each other.

I’m thinking a lot about elements. A fountain definitely appeals. A fire pit. Solar lamps. Aromatic plants. Grasses for motion… Yet the place is pretty shady, closely circled by very big old trees…

‘So why are none of its executives going to prison?‘

News reports … said the city could be short as many as 300 police officers… Birmingham was [in fact] short [only] 63 “patrol officers,” [insisted the mayor]… [Later that day he admitted] the number was actually 172 patrol officers… That number didn’t include other officers such as homicide detectives responsible for investigating the city’s record-setting murders. 

… Between 2021 and 2023, the city lost 200 police officers.

That’s 24% of its police force gone in just two years.

The department is losing civilian employees, too, but more steadily and over a longer period. Between 2014 and 2023, the department dropped from 277 civilian staff to 177.

By the summer of 2023, combining sworn officers and staff, the Birmingham police department had at least 294 vacant positions.

***************

Bama thinks it can pass laws making guns of any kind available to people of any kind, at any time, and NOT have trouble attracting police to its municipalities. You got idiots shooting off guns all over the place, and you think rational people will take jobs that put them in the way of all those bullets every single day? Bama is SOOOO STOOOOOPID.

So this guy helpfully explains that banks can’t really do that much drug money policing; so UD assumes that TD Bank will now reform itself by issuing stern warnings to employees that they MUST NEVER exchange emails about drug money.

While we understand that our laundering of vast amounts of drug money is amusing, there is nothing amusing about the penalty you will receive (instant firing) if our surveillance of your work as well as private email/texts/etc uncovers even cursory use of words like COLOMBIA GET AWAY WITH LOLOLOLOL DRUG MONEY BAD GUYS EASY LOOK OTHER WAY VENEZUELA DEPOSITED A MILLION BWAHAHAHAHAHA.

In Howard County – a locale mere miles from UD‘s Montgomery County – Howard High has among its students a seventeen year old who wears an ankle monitor because of unspecified criminal activity, carries a loaded gun in his backpack, and just got arrested for murder! If he makes bail, will Howard High put him back in class – loaded gun, ankle monitor, murder arrest, and all?

It had to happen. America now has gun diffusers.

What a scent! Gentle notes of sulfur and ammonia.

You can dress a guy up in a Cybertruck, but when push comes to shove, it’s that most venerable form of American self-expression!

To the long list of shootings/mass shootings during homecoming festivities we can now add Tennessee State University, whose parade fireworks turned out to be – natch; it’s Tennessee – guns. Various celebrants are currently bleeding out in local hospitals.

Much of its asset base comes from accepting gobs of cash from international drug cartels, which you and I know as money laundering, but which at TD is considered plain old customer service. For ten years the bank (which sends transfer your accounts letters to Les UDs all the time — perhaps it has fingered us as people in search of a hiding place for criminal gains) has happily reached out and washed billions of dirty drug dollars; and now that it’s been caught it has to pretend that for a decade THE GOODIES at the bank had no idea, and THE BADDIES at the bank were ingeniously unspeakably undetectedly evil and we promise we’re going to fire all of them and pay a big fine and all.

But what you have to understand is that no one of any importance at the bank had anything to do with the drug shit. The entire insanely profitable and systemic scheme was hatched by a bunch of underling nonentities so don’t even think of putting any of the bank’s executives in jail or anything.

Pay no attention to that massive Ponzi scheme we were involved in last year, by the way! Again, we paid a big fine; a few underling nonentities took the fall, etc. etc. We are a dignified illustrious upstanding financial institution.

Well. Yes. A traumatized resident of bloody Birmingham poses the essential question. What sort of city routinely grants operating licenses to establishments expressly designed to attract killers?

… but one or both might have been alcohol-related accidents… Yet let’s assume they were suicides… Were they connected?

It seems so unlikely – two student suicides on the same campus on the same day – that one wonders if this was a dark love story or whatever.

Helpful hint: If your house looks like this, it isn’t a house.