Yesterday, Trinette was by. She took my old printer out of its site, put my new one there instead, and also took out an old (50 years) stereo/tape/AM/FM player which was state-of-the-art in its day. Also, I saw this at DU and found it to be a great relief. I hope you will also.
Yeah. There’s no way I could cover all of this in separate articles – assuming I could find them – and separately, it’s harder to discern a trend. But this from The Root does all that I can’t.
OK, I admit that I picked this article from The F* News because of the title. But it’s also current and important.
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Here’s another multi=purpose article. Some of the full articles it references I have previously shared but most I haven’t. If you only want to look at one of the individual articles, may I suggest “Moving the Window”? The Overton Window is real, and people trying to move it to suit themselves can really be dangerous.
Yesterday, the radio opera was Wagner’s “Die Walküre”. Since the German article “Die” can be either feminine singular or all-gender plural, it may be confusing whether he meant just one or all nine, but I have it on good authority he meant just one, and that one is Brünnhilde. She is the kind of fighter we want all our elected Democrats to be – which just occurred to me. Wotan is only concerned with getting back the Ring, and even his own children (which she, Siegmund, and Sieglinde all are) are just pawns to him in getting that done. Brünnhilde, ordered to make sure Siegmund loses his duel with Hunding, is instead so impressed by his devotion to Sieglinde that she changes her mind and instead attempts to make sure he wins. She fails at that, but then determines to save Sieglinde and with her Siegmund’s just-conceived child, and at that she succeeds. Of course she is punished by Wotan, who turns her from a goddess into a mortal woman, but she has no regrets for doing what she believed to be the right thing. The morality, or lack of it, all through the Ring cycle is, to say the least, weird. But at least in Wagner’s mythical world, NO ONE – not even the gods – is above the LAW. In his pursuit of the Ring Wotan tries to take a step that is outside the law, Fricka reads him the riot act, and he MUST back down. I searched for synopses just to check my memory, and found that some are highly inaccurate – not so much in the action but in the motivations and back story (The one at The Met website is accurate). It certainly is thought provoking. Also yesterday, The Conversation’s newsletter included the quip “AI is CliffsNotes on crack.” I couldn’t agree more.
I would not normally call this good news, but I do think it’s a good (maybe great) response to ignorant racists and it did make me smile and even chuckle.
This is good news. There’s not a paywall if you allow ads. As an alumna, I was wondering when Stanford would get in on this. It does sound like “The Stanford Daily”‘s long reputation for sass is still deserved.
I have mixed feelings about this – as much pleasure as I have gotten from Zoos in my life, I also really think wild animals should be allowed to be wild. On the other hand, I don’t want any species to go extinct, and zoos, if they are well run, can help to prevent extinction. And then there’s the additional fact that babies are adorable.
In case anyone doesn’t recognize, or doesn’t remember “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” …
Yesterday, it was brought home to me just how crazy our beloved country is now – it’s been over a month now and I only just learned the Grand Canyon is on fire.
From HuffPost. Shared without comment. I don’t have the vocabulary to do it justice
I could wish I hadn’t seen this in The Root. If you haven’t heard of Prager, it would be because I try to keep all religious stuff – Christian (real and fake), Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, Confucian, Taoist, Shinto, indigenous faiths, everything out of politics, as it should be. Clearly Prager does not agree.
I just couldn’t leave it at those two travesties when Joyce Vance had this to say. Incidentally, the staffer who writes the Trump**(*) parodies is named Camille Zapata who leads a team of three. They really have him nailed.
Yesterday, I tripped over this on Democratic Underground and found it fascinating. Joyce Vance tackles a subject which requires a whole lot more analysis than I could ever hope to give it in this blog. World history is already full of non-factual “facts,” and don’t get me started on the interpretations of both real and fake facts – if I live to be a hundred, I would still not have enough time to do justice there. And explaining why it matters – to be very brief, if every human being has the right to be judged on the basis of actual fact, I believe that applies to the dead as well as to the living. But there’s more to it, including the harm done to living people sucj=ked it to admiring the evil and disdaining the good.
After that highly abstract article and analysis from Joyce Vance, Steve Schmidt gets very concrete and specific. How this government is making even us who did not vote for it complicit in murder.
Yes, a third article, this one from Wonkette, because we needed something on the lighter side, even though it’s not yet Sunday. (The content is serious but the tone is hilarious.)
Yesterday, my email lightened up a little (though i still deleted more than I didn’t.) One that I didn’t (actually I received more than one – this link is to the info from the first one I read) was regarding another National Day of Action for this Saturday. I’m not going to cite a group, because all of these efforts are being sponsored and organized by too many groups to list. True grassroots. I look forward to seeing photos of the signs.
This from The Root – I am not even going to quibble that a whole lot of sane white folks have been sounding the same warning. If white MAGA idiots are willing to give the Black Community credit for anything, I’m all for it.
Colorado Public Radio reports a drastic gubernatorial executive order by Jared Polis. It’s very bad that it is necessary – but apparently is it, and if so, it’s very good to see it happen.
This Robert Reich video is probably nothing new to those of us who have read the Constitution. But it’s also short (3 1/3 minutes) and very clear. It’s made for sharing with vulnerable people so they can be prepared for the infringements (a word which is throwing roses at it. You may prefer “abuses.”)
Yesterday, I overslept the way I usually do on Mondays. Most Mondays are not as stressful as this Monday was, though. Also yesterday, an email from Just Foreign Policy (which links only to a donation request dressed as a petition) that “Israel just killed 5 journalists in a single strike…. Their names join a devastating list: nearly 270 journalists have now been killed over the course of this war – the deadliest conflict for reporters ever recorded.” I hope no one tells the Mango Monster, or he’ll try to break the record. And one other thing – if you have been worried about me in connection with Colorado’s wildfires and smoke particles, all of them are on the opposite side of the peaks of the Rockies from me. Yes, all of Colorado is at a pretty good altitude, and the prevailing winds go towards me from the fires, but there’s still roughly a 7000 foot (2134 m) barrier between them and me. I have not noticed anything, and I think they are going over my head.
https://thefuckingnews.substack.com/p/senate-hopeful-calls-national-prayer
And Jordan Good, as reported by The F* News, is 100% correct. He is running to unseat Susan Collins, and we (and by we I mean all the sane people in the US) desperately need him and more like him. So I hope his honesty does not hurt him at the ballot box.
joycevance.substack.com/p/when-the-president-becomes-the-police
Joyce Vance runs through the cold, hard realities of he law regarding the Golden Godzilla’s latest power grab in DC. It’s a pity we didn’t listen to voices recommending statehood for DC and Puerto Rico before he .took office. If we ever get even the slimmest trifecta again, that is something that needs doing.
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-trial-run?
Robert Reich, on the other hand, runs through what to look for and how to interpret how bad it is and why, depending on the responses to the attempted takeover. The two together appear pretty comprehensive to me.
Yesterday, I wanted to start working on some things like persona paperwork I have been putting off, But a lot of it I couldn’t fund. When I finally did find one important document, I discovered that when my printer malfunctioned, it took the scanner with it (probably the fax also, but I never use that any more.) Very frustrating. And as if thet weren’t enough, my refrigerator is acting up. I’m sure everyone notices i was very, VERY late posting. Sorry about that.
This is good news, and I don’t want to wait until Sunday to share it. Perhaps the best two word in it are “automatically suspended.” He is currently the Acting Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at the Office of Management and Budget. I don’t know whether that person needs to be a [not disbarred] lawyer, but it sounds possible, perhaps even probable. We shall see.
I thought Joyce Vance had done a “The Week Ahead” e ither Friday or Saturday night. Either i was wrong, or she did another one Monday evening, which is about as current as it gets.
Fortunately i did not have any liquid in my mouth when I read this – I would surely have spit it out.
Yesterday, Virgil and I played cribbage as usual. It took about half the visit for the cards to “warm up” and give either of us a hand over 10 points. I was pretty tired out when i hot home so this is very, very late. Sorry.
This from The Intercept does not have a paywall. It just has a popup which you can close. The article is short, but there is a list of related, or at least contemporary, articles below it (also short.) GEO has a point that they are nor as bad as CECOT – but that’s a remarkably low bar.
Joyce did publish a “The Week Ahead,” But I thought an overview of last week would be at least s helpful in grasping what is going on with the people who appear to be fighting harder than anyone else – courts and judges.
