Video Thread 4/17/22

 Posted by at 11:50 am  Open Thread, Politics
Apr 172022
 

(Putting this before Glenn – because it was recorded before the verdict, and Glenn recorded after it)
Ring of Fire – MAGA Rioter Says Trump ‘Authorized’ The Attack On The Capitol

Glenn Kirschner – Insurrectionist Dustin Thompson Testifies he was following Trump”s Orders, Jury Finds Him Guilty

Meidas Touch – CAUGHT: Top Republicans Endorse Putin | #PutinsParty

MSNBC – What’s Behind The RNC’s Decision To Quit Presidential Debates

NJ Spotlight News- Creating Pysanky: The Unbelievable Art Behind Ukrainian Easter Eggs

This Is The Tiniest Baby Bunny In The World (of course you knew I had to)

Beau – Let’s talk about Russia’s long-term futures….

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Open Thread April 17, 2022

 Posted by at 6:44 am  Open Thread, Personal, Politics
Apr 172022
 

Yesterday, the opera was “Elektra,” by Richard Strauss, about one of the earliest and most dysfunctional families. They weren’t doing so badly until Paris met Helen, whose brother-in-law was Agamemnon (a much better general that Menelaus, Helen’t husband), who in irder to assure victory in Troy sacrificed one of his daughters, Iphegenia, for which his wife, Klytemnestra, (understandably) never forgave him. So in the ten years he was gone, she took a lover, Aegisth, and when he got back they mirdered him. This did not sit well with the children – Elektra, Chrysothemis, and their brother Orest (who had fled in fear for his own life), but Elektra and Chrysothemis did not feel competent to kill their mother and stepfather so they were stuck waiting for Orest to return. And here the opera begins. Chrysothemis really just wants a normal life; it is Elektra who is obsessed with revenge, and rants a lot to anyone who will listen, and to the gods. Eventually Orest does return and kills the guilty pair (off stage, thankfully), leading to Elektra’s final rant, a dance of victory. (Incidentally, the situation put Orest into a bind with the Furies – he was cursed if he killed his mother, but equally cursed if he failed to avenge his father’s murder. His trial by the gods is how the Furies got their other name of Eumenedes, and their other mission of resolving impossible situations. But that trial was after this opera ends.) Nina Stemme, who sang Elektra is probably the top dramatic soprano of today, as were Kirsten Flagstad and Birgit Nilsson before her. And a soprano really needs to be at the top to sing this part. But the rest of the cast cannot be slouches either. It also demands a fair amount from the audience – as do all Greek tragedies, whether spoken or sung. They weren’t intended as entertainment.

Cartoons

Short Takes –

Crooks and Liars – Russian Wife Laughingly Authorizes Her Husband To Rape Ukrainian Women
Quote – A conversation in which a woman invites a man to rape Ukrainian women was published by the Security Service of Ukraine on April 12. From the recording, it can be assumed that the published fragment is part of a longer dialogue. The man turned out to be Roman Bykovsky, a former conscript of the Russian Guard, and then a soldier of the 108th Guards Airborne Assault Regiment, which participated in the annexation of Crimea. It was here that he recently moved his family from Russia.
Click through – if you have a barf bag. I am not making this up.

Daily Beast – FDA Grants Emergency Authorization to First COVID-19 Breath Test
Quote – The first breath test for the virus collects a sample in a manner similar to blowing up a balloon, and can be analyzed for results in under three minutes. “Today’s authorization is yet another example of the rapid innovation occurring with diagnostic tests for Covid-19,” Jeff Shuren, the director of the F.D.A.’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, said in a statement. The company behind the test, InspectIR, reported that, in a study of just under 2,500 people, it could correctly detect a COVID-19 infection 91.2 percent of the time
Click through for details. I just received my first shipment of four free tests (rapid, swab in the nose) which take about 15-20 minutes. I can handle the annoyance if necessary, but this is a great development for peole for whom the discomfort is a deal breaker.

Daily Kos (Marissa Higgins) – Watch openly gay Democrat tell anti-trans Republican colleague exactly what he needs to hear
Quote – [Mackey (D)]: “I recall a story you told. About your brother….And I remember you said that your b[r]other, or, rather, your mother called to tell you that your brother had some news that he was afraid to tell you…. And your brother wanted to tell you that he was gay, didn’t he?… Can I tell you, if I were your brother? I would have been afraid to tell you, too.” [Basye (R)] “Well, I’m sorry.” And that was meager remark was enough to let Mackey really unleash the heart of his argument.
Click through for full argument. You might need a tissue.

Food For Thought:
Peace
I think thr author would give me permission to republuish it. But I want to share it today, on Easter. And this is a short and easy-to-save link. (The picture is not of the author’s property, but it is of a place within the historic Onondaga territory.)

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Open Thread April 15, 2022

 Posted by at 6:37 am  Open Thread, Personal, Politics, Religion
Apr 152022
 

Yesterday I overslept – the only surpise there is that it didn’t happen sooner after the weekend. But at least I had gotten pretty well caught up the previous day, so I was able to keep up.

Cartoon

Short Takes –

Why ‘bad’ ads appear on ‘good’ websites – a computer scientist explains
Quote – Programmatic advertising is a powerful tool that allows advertisers to target and reach people on a huge range of websites. As a doctoral student in computer science, I study how malicious online advertisers take advantage of this system and use online ads to spread scams or malware to millions of people. This means that online advertising companies have a big responsibility to prevent harmful ads from reaching users, but they sometimes fall short.
Click through for more detailed explanation, I used to see people in comments complaining about site advertising (and assuming everyone else was seeing what they were seeing) on a daily basis Nowadays I don’t. But the problem is still real – in fact worse, because not it has infested newsletters (from large sites which use a mail service to send them out.) Not that anyone here ever does … but never click on an ad in a newsletter, even from a trusted site.

Dr. Seuss’ Banned Anti-War ‘The Butter Battle Book’ Is Now a Netflix Kids’ Show
Quote – Written in 1984, The Butter Battle Book centered around the war between an orange race called Zooks and a blue race called Yooks. Their countries were divided by a wall over a disagreement on which was the right way to butter bread: Yooks preferred them butter-side up while the Zooks preferred butter-side down. Given the time of the book’s publication, The Butter Battle Book was considered a direct commentary on the Cold War. Seuss unapologetically delved into exploring the consequences of nationalism and the nature of war via the military-industrial complex. Most of the book focused on a heated arms race that got so deadly, it ended with a dour, open-ended conclusion.
Click through for synopsis of original, synopsis of adaptation, and a trailer (plus a link to a John Olver video torching Ted Cruz ove Dr. Seuss which is probably not new.) Theodor Geisel was not a perfect person … but his propensity for making people think (which too many people don’t like) was a great gift.

truthout (OpEd) – Republicans Refuse to Name Courthouse After Black Judge in Overtly Racist Move
Quote – Hatchett retired from the court in 1999 and went into private practice. He passed away last year at age 88, a widely praised and highly admired jurist. “Joe Hatchett is a person who lives and has lived by the ethical precepts which have historically guided the conduct of truly great judges and lawyers of our past and present,” said former American Bar Association (ABA) President Chesterfield Smith when Hatchett was awarded the Florida Supreme Court Historical Society’s Lifetime Achievement Award. “Joe Hatchett to me exemplifies what is best in an American judge, one who is sometimes lonely, but one who never shirks standing alone.”
Click through for full opinion. Yes, this is truthout, and yes, truthout is pretty far left. Bu there’s only one phrase in it I could conceivably disagree with, and that because it is too kind to Republicans. See what you think.

Food For Thought:

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Open Thread April 1, 2022

 Posted by at 7:03 am  Open Thread, Personal, Politics
Apr 012022
 

Yesterday was Transgender Day of Visibility, often abbreviated as TDOV. My Women’s History short date was not picked to celebrate it, because i didn’t know or remember it, but it did just cross ay mind that she might have been trans. But she also might have been gender neutral, or neither of those. It was just a[n interesting] coincidence. Today, to make up for it, I am featuring a real-life transgendered person from history. Some of you may remember seeing or hearing about her during her lifetime. I do. At that tme transsexuality (as it was then called) did not have the entire religious right line up against it She was more or less accepted on her own merits – not that she was universally acclaimed, but she did enjoy notable successes. I’m proud to say that I was not brought up to think of trangender in any negative way – just as something that sometimes happens.  BTW, I will have no April Fool’s pranks in either post today.  Reality is prankish enough.

Cartoon

Short Takes –

The 19th – What Transgender Day of Visibility means for trans Texans this year
Quote – Transgender Day of Visibility (TDOV), celebrated annually on March 31, is a moment to celebrate the lives of trans people and to raise awareness of injustices they face. This year, it carries a special significance for some transgender Texans: Trans people still living in the state, as well as those who have moved away for school or work, told The 19th that they are thinking about how to use their own voices to uplift trans youth — and about what being visible ultimately means to them.
Click through for much more. Most straight people would benefit from a lot more analysis and contemplation of our own sexuality. Those who instead focus on others are wasting a lot of time and energy which could more profitably be ised to improve their lives. (Just my opinion.)

Colorado Public Radio – New Colorado law bans people from openly carrying firearms near voting locations
Quote – Gov. Jared Polis signed a bill into law on Wednesday that bans anyone in Colorado from openly carrying a firearm within 100 feet of a voting location, unless their property falls within that buffer…. It passed with no Republican backers, who argued it infringed on 2nd Amendment rights.
Click through for story. If “No electioneering within a hundred feet of the polls” doesn’t violate the First Amendment, then this doesn’t violate the Second. Ideally, all states should have this law on the books (not that there shouldn’t also bemoe voter protecton.)

Wikipedia – Christine Jorgensen
Quote – Jorgensen was drafted into the U.S. Army during World War II. After her military service, she attended several schools and worked; it is during this time she learned about sex reassignment surgery and traveled to Europe, where in Copenhagen, Denmark, obtained special permission to undergo a series of operations beginning in 1952. She returned to the United States in the early 1950s and her transition was the subject of a New York Daily News front-page story. She became an instant celebrity, known for her directness and polished wit, and used the platform to advocate for transgender people. Jorgensen often lectured on the experience of being transgender and published an autobiography in 1967.
Click thrugh for details. There was much more to her life. People – most if not all – sometimes feel trapped. I don’t know how one could feel any more trapped, inside their own body, than a transgendered person, and particulrle in our current culture.

Food For Thought:

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Open Thread March 17, 2022

 Posted by at 6:37 am  Open Thread, Personal, Politics
Mar 172022
 

Yesterday, aas you will see below, i had a story fall into my lap (so to speak) at exactly the right moment. That doesn’t happen very often. I also spent more time looking for parody and satire for the video thread, since the parodisis and satirists are often in sync with each other. (If you missed Randy Rainbow and Betty Bowers in yesterdas video thread, click back to it.)  I found a few, which will show up in due course … but I didn’t find a new Rocky Mountain Mike, which I was hoping for.

Cartoon –

Short Takes –

Crooks and Liars – 300K Hackers Come Together Online To Fight Russia
Quote – Kali – and many others who contributed to this article – declined to share his real name because some of the action he is taking is illegal and because he fears Russian retaliation. He is one of about 300,000 people who have signed up to a group on the chat app Telegram called “IT Army of Ukraine”, through which participants are assigned tasks designed to take the fight to Vladimir Putin. In so doing, they are trying to level the playing field between one of the world’s superpowers and Ukraine as it faces bombardment and invasion.
Click through for C&L story, and through again to the Guardian if you want more. I find this very sweet … but sweetness doesn’t always also have teeth. This does.

Mother Jones – Invoking Pearl Harbor and 9/11, Zelenskyy Issues Extraordinary Plea for Help
Quote – During his speech, Zelenskyy urged Americans to recall the panic sparked by the attack on Pearl Harbor and the September 11 terrorist attacks. “Our country experienced the same every day,” he said. “Right now. At this moment, every night for three weeks now.” To conclude, Zelenskyy switched from Ukrainian to English, calling directly on President Joe Biden to become the “leader of the world.”
Click through for more excerpts, analysis, and a link to the full speech. I really couldn’t ignore this. It’s also noteworthy that on Tuesday the Senate voted unanimously to censure Putin as a war criminal. Sure, talk is cheap – but not as cheap as we used to think before TFG.

Colorado Public Radio – Without Ouray, Colorado, there’d be no ‘Danny Boy’
Quote – It was [in Ouray] in 1913 that Weatherly, the wife of a patrician miner from England, linked an old Irish tune to a poem that had been written by her brother-in-law, Frederic Weatherly, an English barrister and lyricist. The poem was written in 1910 as Frederic mourned the deaths of his father and his son. He intended for it to be a song, but no one had succeeded in coming up with the right melody to suit the sad words. That is, until Margaret Weatherly thought of a tune she had heard her father, who immigrated from Ireland, and other Irish railroad workers play when she was a child in California.
Click through for story. Who knew that a story combining Women’s history and irish culture would fall into my lap. I knew Ourau was historically significant (it’s named after a chief of the Tabeguache band of the Utes), but I certainly did not know this. (Ouray is also absolutely gorgeous, and photographs do not do it justice.)

Food For Thought:

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Open Thread for February 21, 2022

 Posted by at 7:00 am  Open Thread, Personal, Politics
Feb 212022
 
Yesterday, I worked on cutting my hair – not for appearance particularly, but to prevent it from landing in my eyes, or (in soe ways worse) in my mouth. I made progress … but it’s still a work in progress.

Cartoon –

Short Takes –

engadget – QAnon founder may have been identified thanks to machine learning
Quote – With help from machine learning software, computer scientists may have unmasked the identity of Q, the founder of the QAnon movement. In a sprawling report published on Saturday, The New York Times shared the findings of two independent teams of forensic linguists who claim they’ve identified Paul Furber, a South African software developer who was one of the first to draw attention to the conspiracy theory, as the original writer behind Q. They say Arizona congressional candidate Ron Watkins also wrote under the pseudonym.
Click through for more. This story made the New York Times, but I didn’t have a gift link to read it there. This was the best I could find.

The Conversation – Physics abd psychology of cats – an (improbable) conversation
Quote – We’ve had cats as pets for, like, 14,000 years. And in 14,000 years, the cats have told us that they want to live with us, and that they would like a comfortable bed, and they want food, and they want us to snuggle with them. In other words, the cats have really communicated all of their interests and needs such that we’re running around doing whatever they have in mind. So they’re doing a very good job.
Click through. You may remember I mentioned that a webinar was scheduled with the IgNobel Prize paople on this subject. It was held, and it was taped in full. And a snippet of it has been transcribed here, with a link to the full video (with CC).

Black History – Wikipedia – Bessie Coleman
Quote – She was the first African-American woman and first Native American to hold a pilot license. She earned her license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale on June 15, 1921, and was the first Black person to earn an international pilot’s license…. She then became a high-profile pilot in notoriously dangerous air shows in the United States. She was popularly known as Queen Bess and Brave Bessie, and hoped to start a school for African-American fliers. Coleman died in a plane crash in 1926. Her pioneering role was an inspiration to early pilots and to the African-American and Native American communities.
Click thrugh for article. These days, Earhart gets all the attention as a pioneering aviatrix, yet Coleman actually preceded her. (And Earhart did not have to travel to France – twice – to get her flight instruction.) In their own day, during the overlap of their careers, they were about equally prominent.

Food For Thought:

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Video Thread 2/14/22

 Posted by at 11:41 am  Open Thread, Politics
Feb 142022
 

Glenn Kirschner – Two Standards of Justice: Fed Worker Jailed for Mishandling Classified Docs, While Trump Golfs (Apparently, that was the only crime in the completed case. It does take limger to write a term paper than it does to write a 500-word essay. Just a thought.)

Meidas Touch – Exposing Alabama’s RACIST Gerrymandered Maps

Lincoln project – Trump** v Toilets

Thom Hartmann – GOP’S Shocking Database Of Pregnant People

Look What These Pitties Did For Their Veteran Dad

Mrs Betty Bowers – Dealing With Annoying People

Beau – Let’s talk about Trump’s Truth Trouble….

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Open Thread for February 14, 2022

 Posted by at 6:39 am  Open Thread, Personal, Politics
Feb 142022
 

Yesterday, as much time as I spent trying to get organized, all I really accomplished was putting together my pills for the next tao weeks – and was happy to do that.

Cartoon –


Short Takes –

Lwtters from an American – February 12, 2022
Quote – Lincoln figured out the logic of a world that permitted the law to sort people into different places…. “It is color, then; the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own. You do not mean color exactly?—You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and, therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own.”
Click through for the complete essay. The way Lincoln put this huge moral and ethical leap inot words strikes me as very similar to Freya’s method of demolishing the individualism myth.

The Hill – A retired Russian general’s criticism may signal a larger problem for Putin
Quote – Retired Russian Colonel-General Leonid Ivashov, the head of the All-Russian Officers Assembly, has gone public with a statement that calls for Russian President Vladimir Putin to resign over the confrontation involving Ukraine. To remove any doubt as to his message, Ivashov, 78, followed the public statement with an interview on a liberal Russian media outlet, Echo Moskvy, insisting that he was speaking in the name of the assembly of retired and reservist Russian officers which he heads.
Click through for story. I know what you’re thinking, because it stunned me too – “What? There’s a liberal media outlet in Russia?” But seriously, Putin may just have triggered his country’s equivalent of our Smedley D. Butler. And with that at his back, he may very well reconsider marching forward into Ukraine.  We can certainly hope so.

Black History – Wikipedia – Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks
Quote (from Brooks, not from Wiki. Probably her best known.) –
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
Click through for full bio. She is better known than most of the people I am featuring, but I’m including her today because I once had the privilege of meeting her. And that is a sweet memory.

Food For Thought:

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