The Tiny Tyrant: Sucking Marrow from Bones.

The Secret Service has a problem – they can’t pay their employees. The Tiny Tyrant’s profligate habits, and those of his family have sucked the bones dry. While there is an obligation on the part of the service to protect key people, the sheer amount of money wasted by the Tiny Tyrant is overwhelming. Three million dollars for every weekend jaunt. Millions more for every vacation the Kushners take, and they seem to take a lot of vacations every year. Millions more for overseas coverage. Millions more for Ms. Trump and the kid to stay in NYC for months on end. Then there are the little things, like $60,000 in golf cart rentals. This from the idiot who could not stop talking about President Obama golfing now and then. Sixty Fucking Thousand Dollars. And since the Chief Idiot won’t golf anywhere except his properties, guess where the money is going? Quite the fucking racket.

WASHINGTON — The Secret Service can no longer pay hundreds of agents it needs to carry out an expanded protective mission – in large part due to the sheer size of President Trump’s family and efforts necessary to secure their multiple residences up and down the East Coast.

Secret Service Director Randolph “Tex” Alles, in an interview with USA TODAY, said more than 1,000 agents have already hit the federally mandated caps for salary and overtime allowances that were meant to last the entire year.

The agency has faced a crushing workload since the height of the contentious election season, and it has not relented in the first seven months of the administration. Agents must protect Trump – who has traveled almost every weekend to his properties in Florida, New Jersey and Virginia – and his adult children whose business trips and vacations have taken them across the country and overseas.

“The president has a large family, and our responsibility is required in law,” Alles said. “I can’t change that. I have no flexibility.”

Alles said the service is grappling with an unprecedented number of White House protectees. Under Trump, 42 people have protection, a number that includes 18 members of his family. That’s up from 31 during the Obama administration.

Overwork and constant travel have also been driving a recent exodus from the Secret Service ranks, yet without congressional intervention to provide additional funding, Alles will not even be able to pay agents for the work they have already done.

The compensation crunch is so serious that the director has begun discussions with key lawmakers to raise the combined salary and overtime cap for agents, from $160,000 per year to $187,000 for at least the duration of Trump’s first term.

But even if such a proposal was approved, about 130 veteran agents would not be fully compensated for hundreds of hours already amassed, according to the agency.

“I don’t see this changing in the near term,” Alles said.

USA Today has the full story.

Exploring Japanese Hell.

“God of Heavenly Punishment.” From the scroll “Extermination of Evil” ( 1127 – 1192 AD).

As a child, growing up in Japan, there was one book that terrified me. Luckily, I didn’t own it. The red hardback sat on the bottom shelf in my friend’s room and every time I went over to play I could see it, out of the corner of my eye, staring me in the face. Once we pulled it out and flipped through the pages; each featured a grotesquely illustrated realm of hell with scenes of fire, torture, and suffering. It was, I assure you, a children’s book. But it was made for parents to use as leverage whenever their child acted up, or misbehaved. And boy was it effective.

These concepts of hell (jigoku; 地獄 in Japanese) are derived from ancient Buddhist scriptures, and I’m ceaselessly amazed by the imagination of the monks and artists who came up with so many different forms of punishment. The range from the fairly standard – being eaten alive by demons and dragons, or being torn apart at the crotch – to the more inventive – being forced to hold large stalks of daikon radish in your mouth and being used as a drumstick. Then, there’s my favorite: being flattened out by a roller and then cut up into soba noodles.

Now, a new art book that’s being released in October has collected a wide range of images that depict hell in Japanese art from the 12th century to the 19th century. The massive single-volume collection consists of almost 600 pages of works designated as Japanese National Treasures and features the various depictions of hell by artists such as Kazunobu Kanō,Yoshitoshi Tsukioka and the master of horror Kyōsai Kawanabe.

It’s currently available for pre-order on Amazon. Essays from historians of both Japanese art and Buddhism are also included in bilingual text. If you have kids you may (or may not) want to leave this book sitting around.

You can read, and see much more of the always gruesome hell at Spoon & Tamago.

Sunday Facepalm.

Wallnau, again. Lance is the gift of never-ending eyerolls. Now it’s Jehovah playing with the stock market, just to fuck about with a few people.

Wallnau was outraged by the fact that several business leaders had resigned from presidential advisory councils in protest of Trump’s comments in the wake of the violence that had occurred at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia last weekend, which ultimately forced Trump to disband the councils entirely.

“They insulted the president and his base,” Wallnau declared. “It doesn’t surprise me [that] the stock market had its first setback today. That’s not a coincidence. That’s not a coincidence, that’s a prophetic response to the uprising and insult that came from these CEOs.”

Uprising? Really? I wouldn’t characterize resigning as an uprising, those are different things, Lance. How is this a prophetic response? Has someone had a nifty prophecy about this, and what, just forgot to say? If there’s insult to be had, it’s on the part of the Tiny Tyrant and his base, asshole bigots, nazis, and your garden variety evil fuckers. Every single one of you is an insult to humanity, and to anyone with actual morals. You have all the benefit of a boil on the arse.

“When those CEOs mocked Trump and made this a political issue, the judgment would come where their pocketbooks are,” he continued. “How fast does God sometimes settle accounts.”

They didn’t make this a political issue, Lance. They simply could not walk past the “presidential” standard of hey, nazis are fine people! Naturally, the Tiny Tyrant could have kept his mouth shut, but no, he had come out with just how awful all those people of colour and their allies are, persecuting those poor nazis. I expect the stock market will be fine, it’s the nature of the beast to fluctuate. As for Jehovah being all speedy and stuff, I guess you don’t subscribe to The Mills of God. That, and the very old concept of ancestral sin is more Jehovah’s thing, y’know, just read your book of psychopathy. Not that any of it originated with your particular god, but it was certainly adopted with enthusiasm.

There’s video at RWW.