… re-read my notes from yesterday… good notes… even though my morning process has been interrupted somewhat by the need to give medication to one of our dogs… today is the last day of that…

Letters from an American, November 02, 2022

… President Biden addressed the nation last night… he told the people, Democracy is on the ballot… yes it is… this morning’s HCR post is largely quotes from that speech… Biden urges voters to assess not the economy, not inflation, but whether the candidate they might vote for believes in Democracy… have they said they will abide by the vote, win or loose?… if not, if they are election deniers, then we need to turn our backs on them and vote for the person who will abide by the vote, by the will of the people… she quotes Joseph Nye Welch, who famously confronted Joseph McCarthy:

“Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness…. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

… i am feeling hopeful about the election… early voting has been enormous… in my mind, that favors Democrats… but we will see… we have voted… i voted a straight Democratic ticket… there is no other choice in my mind… Republicans need to be turned back… i will be more discriminating when i feel Democracy is secure and the lunatic MAGA people are no longer an issue…

… the work of artist Crystal Liu, a strong Chinese landscape feeling… i like them…

… i have been photographing with my Nikon lately… i get better quality color images from it… i don’t particularly like the 2x3 frame of the 35MM format… i have been cropping them to 4x5 which is quite a crop… still, if you are thinking about that crop when you shoot, you include more on the sides than you than the picture you are taking warrants… so you can crop… at any rate… i have been making some landscape photos in the vertical and was tempted to leave them in the 2x3 format… i didn’t… i can’t stand that proportion these days…

Reclaiming Our Human Potential in the Age of Technological “Progress”

… Maria Popova writes about and quotes Dervla Murphy, an Irish woman who rode her bicycle from Ireland to Afghanistan… it was a feat for a woman to do such a thing in the times she did it… i am not sure it would be possible in today’s political and social climate… it wasn’t really safe back then… it’s less so now… the point of the quotes shared though is about how technology has succeeded in separating us from nature and deprived us of the full use of our powers…

The more I see of unmechanised places and people the more convinced I become that machines have done incalculable damage by unbalancing the relationship between Man and Nature. The mere fact that we think and talk as we do about Nature is symptomatic. For us to refer to Nature as a separate entity — something we admire or avoid or study or paint — shows how far we’ve removed ourselves from it.

… there was a time, when i was young, that i believed in the promise of technology and science… i still do to some degree… i suppose it’s the combination of science, technology and capitalism that is the problem, and one cannot have any of these things separately, it seems to me… i wish i could somehow envision a society without capitalist greed… Buddhist Economics is what i would aspire to… would it work?… what is so good about all this science and technology anyway?… longer lives?… better health?… for what?… at this critical moment in the world, much is being challenged and challenging… what will the next few years bring?…

How to Be Un-Dead: Anais Nin and D.H. Lawrence on the Key to Living Fully

… embrace the wild and wonderful process of life… embrace it’s trials and tribulations… embrace the process and move through it without regret… do the best you can… accept the unfolding… be in the midst of it… whatever it is…

Bern and Hilla Becher’s Misunderstood Oeuvre

… the article, written by Julia Curl, takes issue with the idea that the Becher’s were aloof, emotionally disconnected from the work… from the world… how else could they produce such clinically sterile work?… i am with JC… no artist is emotionally disconnected from their work… they make art because they feel… i can’t think of an exception to that statement unless we are talking about AI generated artwork… am i aloof because i make photographs without people?… some might think so, but i feel the photographs… at least the ones that are most important to me…

Letters from an American, October 28, 2022

… Paul Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi attacked… all indications are that while the attacker may have been a little off his nut, he was steeped in right wing hatred and had been radicalized by conspiracy theories promulgated by the right… this puts me in mind of this quote from Don Quixote by Cervantes:

When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?

… HCR goes on to discuss the ratcheted landscape where violence ideation is running rampant… national security departments are all warning of a heightened threat environment surrounding the midterm elections…

… and then she turns to Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter… Musk has promised, threatened?, to allow 45 back on Twitter… pundits speculate that a content moderation free environment on Twitter isn’t likely as advertisers would run from the platform… General Motors has already paused its advertising until it sees what things look like under new management… right wingers seem to be testing the new management as there has been a significant uptick in antisemitic and racist posts on the platform…

‘Bros’ and ‘Ticket to Paradise’ Reviews

… Bros came to our local theater and i contemplated going to it… thought i should go to it just to take in a gay romantic comedy, but at the end of the day i really didn’t have much interest in watching guys get it on, romantically or otherwise… turns out i am not alone as the movie has been a box office failure… perhaps rom coms are not the best format for exploring LGBTQ+ love… still, i am aware that there are love comedies that i might enjoy, such as two women falling in love and getting it on… or, possibly a transvestite falling in love with a straight man… my kinky proclivities run in the direction of cross dressing, though i never have but in the most minimal way… sounds like i would enjoy Ticket to Paradise… hopefully that too will come to my local theater…

Everyone Agrees Democracy Is in Danger. No One Agrees Why.

… according to a recently released New York Times/Siena survey—that 59 percent of respondents in that category believe it’s the mainstream media that poses a “major threat.” That compares with 45 percent who say Trump is a major threat, and 38 percent who say Biden is.

… butchered as that first sentence is, its a bit astonishing that a far greater majority point to the mainstream media as a problem than in any other direction… as a liberal, i immediately think that this would be because moderates and liberals think Fox and (if they know a thing or two about media markets across the country), Clear Channel are the problem and there are more of them in general… i do think media and social media are a problem… even on the left, it is easy to get a bit siloed into looking at things through one lens only and all media does what it needs to do to gather peoples attention and this often means playing up the threat levels of the other side…

• 28 percent say Democrats pose a major threat

• 33 percent say Republicans pose a major threat
• 27 percent say the Supreme Court poses a major threat
• 33 percent say the federal government poses a major threat
• And 27 percent say the Electoral College while 20 percent say electronic voting machines and 33 percent say voting by mail pose major threats

In short, a whole lot of Americans—71 percent in total—think that our democracy itself is in peril, but there’s no consensus as to the source of the danger.

… although i had no idea of the diversity of options for democratic failure blame, i was very certain that when MSNBC cited polls suggesting that the preservation of Democracy was a top concern for voters across the country, that did not represent a consensus on what the problem was… right wingers are being told democracy is threatened and believe it, just as much as left wingers are and do… personally, i think the case left wingers make is more substantial at the present moment… even so, there is not national clarity on this issue…

Imagine back in 1941, on the eve of Pearl Harbor, if roughly equal percentages of Americans had been as worried about at attack from Britain as they were an attack from Imperial Japan.

… how does one find a way forward when there is no consensus?… in this regard, my plan has been to refuse to talk about my side vs your side, my guy vs your guy… i instead want to focus on particular issues and discuss feelings and ideas about them… our politicians and the media have pressed us into being team players… we need to resist that…

Ruben Östlund on the Realism and Black Humour of Triangle of Sadness

… this movie actually sounds pretty interesting… it makes the to-watch list…

Daily Notes

I’m Jewish and I Don’t Want to Leave Again

… that an American Jew felt the need to write this post is itself disturbing…

When to leave? That’s the question every Jew has embedded in our DNA. When did people know to leave Germany? Russia? Where do you go? What do you take? What do you leave behind? How will you live, if you live?

We are waiting for the midterms and then we will decide. 

They say antisemitism is the oldest hatred. But it is hard to know who is historically more hated: Jews, women, or homosexuals. There is the problem of human nature and the question: Why do things never really change? But having those three giant targets on my back, the time might be now.

… i worry about the midterms too…

The Art World Reacts to Ye’s Hateful Comments

… what the fuck is Ye up to?… a black man hating jews, selling “White Lives Matter” t-shirts, purchasing Parler and just being an all round shit?…

It’s been a long October in the realm of Ye’s erratic, attention-seeking behavior. In the last three weeks, Ye has had his “White Lives Matter” t-shirts delivered to Los Angeles’s homeless population in Skid Row, made moves to purchase the conservative social media app Parler, and made a series of antisemitic comments and theories publicized on social media (on now blocked accounts), and the Drink Champs podcast interview that has since been deleted. Several companies affiliated with Ye and his projects have woken up from their daze and severed ties with the disgruntled artist at last.

… i am just as baffled with black people becoming 45 supporters and election conspiracy hawks… do they understand that any Christian Nationalist government is not going to hold them in high esteem?… already doesn’t hold them in high esteem…

“I’d Read Her Grocery Lists.” On Cooking with Sylvia Plath

We know, from the dates on her entries, that she made lemon pudding cake on the day she wrote “Lady Lazarus”—in which she grapples with her own repeated, unsuccessful suicide attempts. “Dying / Is an art, like everything else / I do it exceptionally well” she wrote, while beaten egg whites stiffened in the oven. In the process of drafting “Death & Co”—a poem as cutting and nihilistic as its title suggests—she prepped tomato soup cake, blood red and bittersweet. A signature recipe of hers, it requires, among other things, two cups of butter and one can of condensed tomato soup.

… tomato soup cake?… i wonder if i can find a recipe for that… and there is…

The kitchen was the axis on which her whole world spun. It was where she wrote, stood, boiled, diced, longed, mourned, revised.

… i think of my own kitchen existence… right along side the photography work and my writing…

It’s not lost on me that looking for cooking inspiration from a woman whose last great baking project was, well, her final act, is a questionable project (whether or not we can joke about the matter is another complicated question). But for Plath, the stovetop was an altar of a kind, the kitchen, a chapel—the whole room wreaked of guilt, shame, wickedness, tomato soup—as restrictive as it was holy.

… i seem to be on a food binge this morning… on making a map of Toronto identifying all the various places one can get dumplings…

Versatile, Universal, and Delicious: Karon Liu on the Magic of Dumplings

Toronto is the perfect city to create such a map: a metropolis that has evolved to be one of the most diverse culinary destinations in the world, thanks to waves of migration resulting in cuisines from disparate parts of the world commingling with each other. This place is a mix of cooks practicing centuries-old techniques learned from previous generations, innovators sharing new creations in the age of TikTok, and cooks embracing their third-culture cooking—combining what they learned from their parents with the new flavors and methods that come from living in a city where a roti spot, a sushi restaurant, and a souvlaki joint can all be found in a single plaza.

Letters from an American, October 23, 2022 #american-history #voting-rights #voter-intimidation

… HCR offers a history lesson about how white southerners intimidated the vote in the aftermath of the Civil War and managed to establish one party (Democratic) rule across the south… she tells us the same thing is happening again, except more broadly…

Over the weekend, the Maricopa County Elections Department announced that two people, both armed and dressed in tactical gear, stationed themselves near a ballot drop box in Mesa, Arizona. They left when law enforcement officers arrived. At least two voters later filed complaints of voter intimidation, both complaining that they were filmed dropping off ballots. One complained of being accused of “being a mule,” a reference to people who are allegedly paid to gather ballots and stuff drop boxes for Democratic candidates.

The great triumph of Movement Conservatives in the 1980s was to convince Republican voters to ditch the ideology of their founding and instead embrace the ideology of the old Confederacy.

And now, we are in the next stage of that pattern: Republicans are using intimidation to keep Democrats from voting.

If we continue in this direction, we already know how it turns out: with a corrupt one-party government that favors an elite few and mires the rest of us in a world without recourse to legal equality or economic security.

… i don’t know that i will encounter voter intimidation when i go to vote, but, if i do i will walk right past it and cast my ballot…

This Close-Up of an ant’s Face Will Scar You Forever… indeed… #nature #macro-photography #photography

Eugenijus Kavaliauskas’s terrifyingly close-up photo of an ant (all images courtesy the artists and Nikon Small World)

… fabulous images from Nikon Small World competition… they are not all so scary, mostly beautiful…

Rare 2,700-ear-Old Stone Carvings Discovered in Iraq… #art #archaeology #cultural-heritage #iraq #isis #mashki-gate #nineveh #middle-east

Eight marble slabs were excavated underneath the Mashki Gate, partially destroyed by the Islamic State in 2016. (all photos via Iraqi State Board of Antiquities & Heritage on Facebook)

… the slabs were found at Mosul’s Mashki Gate (Gate of God)… part of the effort to conquer and subjugate peoples is to destroy their history by destroying their cultural artifacts which is what ISIS militants did in 2016… the slabs were buried which saved them from damage…

In total, eight stone slabs were uncovered by a team of scholars and researchers affiliated with the University of Mosul and the University of Pennsylvania’s Iraq Heritage Stabilization Program. The excavation is being undertaken as part of a collaboration with antiquities authorities in Iraq, with the end goal of converting the vandalized Mashki Gate monument into an educational center exploring the history of Nineveh. The slabs will stay in Iraq.

Since 2014, the Islamic State has ravaged Iraq and Syria’s museums, libraries, and cultural heritage sites.

[The Most Important Poem of the 20th Century: On T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” at 100] #literature #poetry #ts-eliot #the-waste-land #to-read

… this article is a long read, but very illuminating of Eliot and the poem…

It’s as if this poem can give anything—a cry, a list of place-names, a snatch of conversation, a Sanskrit word, a nursery rhyme, an echo—an almost infinite and carrying resonance that brings with it unforgettable intensity.

Certainly, poetry was not the same after _The Waste Land_; at the same time, it’s perhaps more difficult to trace the influence of the poem than it is with Pound’s experimentations.

_The Waste Land_ has seeped into culture as a moving set of referents to describe urban alienation, fracture, cultural collapse. It also has a striking ability, inherent in its form I suppose, to speak across cultures.

I think Jahan’s recent lecture on “Burying the Dead: The Waste Land, Eco-Critique and World Elegy,” which I was lucky enough to hear in London at the International T. S. Eliot Summer School, and which, I gather, is available to read free in volume 4 of the _T. S. Eliot Studies Annual,_ is the most brilliant recent piece of Eliot criticism. It shows strikingly just how relevant the poem is to a great range of contemporary poets.

… the Chinese have a curse, so it is said, “may you live in interesting times”… boy are we living in interesting and unsettling times… Heather Cox Richardson, reviews Joe Biden’s speech from the Roosevelt room in which he made his case to the American people that his economic policies really are better for the country and the nations’s economic performance demonstrates that… unemployment at all time lows; infrastructure getting repaired and improved; the deficit coming down (which it has also done during the last three Democratic presidencies, while going up under every Republican president since Reagan)… Steve Bannon received a sentence at the upper range of guidelines for his refusal to respond to a subpeona from the 1/6 committee… former President Trump received his own subpoena which made a detailed case for his being at the center of the the January 6 insurrection… news also broke that some of the documents that Trump took with him to Mar-a-Lago…

… contained highly sensitive material about Iran and China, including information about Iran’s missile program.

… HCR’s post ends on an ominous note…

Finally, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin today called his Russian counterpart Sergei Shoigu for the first time since May 13. The Pentagon says it wants to keep the lines of communication open.

Decision to Leave is a Stirring Hitchcockian Neo-Noir… another glowing review of the movie…

Technically speaking, _Decision to Leave_ might be the best-made film of the year. It is nothing short of breathtaking, with glowing cinematography from Ji-yong Kim and pitch-perfect editing from Park’s frequent collaborator Sang-beom Kim.

Imani Perry: To Understand America, We Have to Understand the South… a look at Perry’s latest book, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation… this book sounds really interesting… the premise… uncomfortably… has the ring of truth to me… another one to add to my long list… i wish i could find more time to read… more time to understand…

How to Outsmart Election Disinformation… every U. S. citizen should read this… full of resources for making sure you get to vote and that you are not being snookered by misinformation…

A Disturbing Number of Americans Endorse Violence to “Top Voter Fraud” and Return Trump to Power…

In the final weeks before the 2022 midterms, faced with multiple government investigations, Donald Trump has tripled down on a disturbing pattern of incitement. He continues to stoke grievance and fear and use inflammatory rhetoric that is likely to instigate random followers to violence, a technique experts call stochastic terrorism.

… and…

Now, a new study published by the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California-Davis reveals a growing acceptance in the United States of political violence, particularly among Americans who identify as partisan Republicans.

Christian Nationalists Are Closer Than You Think to Running America… Mother Jones can be given to hyperbole in its article titles… click bait… they are a pretty liberal take on the news and politics… still, i think we need to pay attention to Christian Nationalists… i think Roe v. Wade is more than the canary in the coal mine…

They, Borowicz says, _hate the Bible_: Democrats, COVID-conscious governors, librarians letting “pornography”—read: queer-friendly literature—into schools, trans people, pastors who didn’t fight lockdown orders, and Barack Obama, “the opposite of light.” (COVID, by the way, is “punishment for our sins.”)

… no, i don’t hate the bible, i simply can’t tolerate any idiot who wishes to push it on me as the only meaningful source of information in the world…

… on a lighter note…

Weirdly, Taylor Swift Is Extremely Close to Creating a True Metaverse… according to this article the only thing missing from Swift’s launch of her new album, Midnights, is a “3-D space to hang out in.”

To call what Swift is doing with this album release “online savvy” or “audience engagement” or “marketing” is to undersell it. She has, in a way, created a virtual universe in which fans can experience the launch. As _The__Washington Post_’s Emily Yahr recounts, Swift has left puzzles and secret messages for fans for more than 15 years, embedding them in her album liner notes, music videos, and social-media posts, and even (if the theories are right) in the clothing she wears. The result is a near-year-round ecosystem that’s pretty much constantly bubbling away online.

… i wonder if “weirdly” isn’t a bit of disrespect to a woman creator… weirdly, as in unexpectedly, as in surprising from a woman… hmmm…

… wow, so much attention to a movie most people are disturbed by… America’s Favorite Marilyn Monroe Cliché…

Let’s be clear: She was not Norma Jeane. She Chose to be Marilyn.

… as i do most mornings, i start with reading the latest from Heather Cox Richardson…

as of yesterday, drug prices got cheaper, especially for seniors, and hearing aids are now an over the counter item, saving consumers as much as $3000/pair… and a historic peace agreement between Israel and Lebanon has been brought to a conclusion with the assistance of the Biden administration…

But all that news got drowned out by the continuing drama coming from the Republican Party. As Republican political strategist Sarah Longwell wrote in _The Bulwark_ today, the Republican Party is facing an “extinction event,” having been taken over by former president Trump to become the right-wing MAGA Party. As Longwell wrote, “In the Republican party as it is currently constituted, political power emanates completely and totally from Donald Trump.”

… i linked the Bulwark article yesterday…

… a really fascinating article on the bōsōzoku, motorcycle gangs of Japan and their portrayal in film and animation…

Wearing boots, boiler suits and bandanas – dubbed _tokkō-fuku,_ meaning “special attack uniform” – they roamed the streets wielding baseball bats and Molotov cocktails on weekends, causing public nuisances and engaging in violent turf wars. Their association with Japan’s notorious crime syndicate, the _yakuza_, reportedly became so pronounced at one point that up to one-third of yakuza recruits were coming from bōsōzoku gangs. In a 2015 documentary by Vice, meanwhile, one former gang member recalled that being a _bōsōzoku_ member was “like being in the military. It was like being drafted into war.”

… the gangs were a post WWII phenomenon now in substantial decline (though juveniles behaving badly is not)… two films, Crazy Thunder Road and the more sympathetic to bōsōzoku His Motorbike, Her Island, have been released for the first time ever outside of Japan by Third Window Films…

… another great article on director Sean Baker and his breakout masterpiece, Take Out. It is worth reading about the process of making the low budget film…

Almost two decades later, amid zero-hour contracts, feverish debates around immigration, and a pandemic that has only served to inflame rhetoric (and highlight our ever-increasing reliance on delivery riders), the questions _Take Out_ raises feel as urgent as they ever did.

… i have seen his film The Florida Project, some years ago now… i remember it, which means i liked it… sad slice of life movie… i haven’t seen Take Out… It’s been restored and re-released by Criterion Collection Blu-ray…

… from Maria Popova this morning… How to Stop Waiting and Start Living: A Jolt from Henry James

When the possibilities themselves had accordingly turned stale, when the secret of the gods had grown faint, had perhaps even quite evaporated, that, and that only, was failure. It wouldn’t have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.

… about the Henry James novella, The Beast in the Jungle… a man spends his life waiting for the thing the universe, he believes, has prepared him for… waiting, never acting… the results are predictable… it hits home too, because sometimes i find myself waiting for the beast to appear, which it never does as i imagine it… still i have tried, as most of us have, to be something, as most of us have…

… this article on Gowanus artsts' neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY caught my attention because i had a studio for my architecture practice there… it was short lived, lasting a year or two… we moved upstate soon after i got it and it became untenable to get to and from it without consuming large amounts of travel time… i loved it though… i loved the industrial messiness of it, the scrap metal yards with their claw bucket beasts moving the metal from truck to yard and from yard to barge…

This year’s Gowanus Open Studios, the 26th and perhaps largest yet, finds the neighborhood at a crossroads. While new attention to the area brings welcome exposure, imminent rezoningalong the waterfront is leadingresidents and local organizations to fear their little corner of the city may soon go the way of Dumbo, Williamsburg, and Hudson Yards. Amid a citywide housing crisis, Brooklyn artists are also realizing the connections between art-world buzz and luxury real estate.

… also…

Six Artists I discovered at Gowanus Open Studios

Inside the studio of artist Ella Hepner in Gowanus, New York (all photos Elaine Velie/Hyperallergic)

… apparently, the new artist “it” neighborhood is Sunset Park… Affordable for Now, Sunset Park Rises as a Buzzing NYC Arts Hub… where the artists go, the creative wannabe’s with money follow… and the artists are, most of them, forced to move on… as are the not wealthy they live amongst… gentrification, over and over and over again… #art #sunset-park #gentrification

… from a post on Singer Distance by Ethan Chatagnier:

Longing is the ferment of loneliness, the wine that comes from letting it age properly. It’s the bitters in the cocktail, the acid in the marinade, a reason to look up at the stars and make a wish, and it can be the source of wonders. “All planetary exploration to me is a story about longing. It’s a longing to know ourselves. It’s a longing to understand the significance of our own existence. It’s a longing to communicate, to say to the universe ‘We’re here. Know us. Where are you?’”

Letters from an American, October 16, 2022

… Republicans doubling down on Voter Fraud and willingness to accept the results of any election they don’t win…

In an interview this morning with _CNN’s_ Dana Bash, Arizona Republican nominee for governor Kari Lake refused to say that she would accept the results of the upcoming election– unless she wins. Former president Trump said the same in 2020, and now more than half of the Republican nominees in the midterm elections have refused to say that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election because, they allege, there was voter fraud. This position is an astonishing rejection of the whole premise on which this nation was founded: that voters have the right to choose their leaders.

Maria Popova takes a look at Nick Cave’s new book with collaborator Sean O’Hagan, Faith, Hope and Courage.

… i have a copy of this book on my Kindle… i haven’t read it yet, but i may cue it up next… i could do with a little uplifting… i love Nick Cave, though a recent entry on The Read Hand Files, claiming Blonde as his all time favorite movie shook me a little… still… there is so much that seems good in him…

Anyone who says they don’t have any regrets is simply living an unconsidered life. Not only that, but by doing so they are denying themselves the obvious benefits of self-forgiveness. Though, of course, the hardest thing of all is to forgive oneself… One sure path to self-forgiveness is to arrive at a place where you can see that your day-to-day actions are making the world a measurably better place, rather than a worse place — that is pretty simple stuff, available to all — and to arrive at this place with a certain amount of humility.

Nick Cave, Via Maria Popova

!Ay! by Lucrecia Dalt gets an 8.6 as best new music… i will have to listen to this one when i get home as the internet is so abysmal out here…

The Colombian musician sketches a sci-fi vision of bolero, son, and other classic genres she grew up with. It’s philosophically daring, technically ambitious, and a joy to experience.

The Unheeded Warning… Walter Rosenberg/Rudolf Vrba escapes Auschwitz and tries to tell the world what is going on… several hundred thousand jews are saved, but many more could have been if the world had believed what he and his fellow escapee were saying… we humans have a tendency to doubt reports of the horrific and then turning away when the truth of it becomes hard to escape… i know this feeling… it’s the “I do’t want to get involved feeling,” a kind of security that whatever evil it may be is not going to reach into my life… but if i do something, it might…

Information, Vrba learned, is not knowledge. Before humans will act, they not only have to have the facts; they must also believe them. “I knew, but I didn’t believe it,” said the French Jewish philosopher Raymond Aron, when asked about the Holocaust. “And because I didn’t believe it, I didn’t know.”

… and, in shades of “Facts don’t matter, what people belive matters”…

Rudolf Vrba fought that impulse, with only partial success. Today, his story has something profound to tell us: The first line of defense against evil and catastrophe is truth, but the truth alone is not enough. It needs believers who will not look away.

A tribute to Robbie Coltrane… we named our cat after Rubeus Hagrid… our cat is a gentle giant channeling Hagrid in so many ways… Ruby, as we call him is constantly mistaken to be a girl cat when people hear his name, until we explain… i had suspected that would be a problem when my wife hit upon the name… but the name fit, once you understood it, so it stuck…

The End of the Good Republicans

Just look at the Good Republican governors (several of whom I’ve been championing for years): Chris Sununu, Doug Ducey, Brian Kemp, and Glenn Youngkin. None of them were overtly opposed to Donald Trump. But they didn’t jump on the election denial bandwagon and, for the most part, still sounded like the decent conservatives of yore—just with an extra side of red meat.

But now every single one of them is campaigning either for or with an election-denying lunatic. Ducey, along with the Republican Governors Association, has thrown in with Kari Lake. Sununu has embraced election conspiracist Don Bolduc in New Hampshire. Kemp is campaigning with the pro-coup GOP nominee for lieutenant governor and supporting the supremely unqualified and scandal-ridden Herschel Walker.

… this has strange echos with the Auschwitz escapee link above… i feel the gloom descending and not enough alarm bells going off…

Over time, the whole mutually reinforcing, mutually radicalizing process creates the conditions necessary for 70 percent of the Republican party to sincerely believe that Joe Biden is an illegitimate president due to a rigged election. It’s hard to blame voters for believing a lie when every politician they see and media personality they trust is repeating it.

But The Republican Triangle of Doom™ runs in the other direction. And the reality is that these supposedly Good Republicans aren’t going to drag the party toward them. They’re the ones who are going to move. After all, the hard-right MAGA types aren’t the ones compromising.

… the article at the end laments, “The Good Republicans are gone. Probably for good.”… and, so, what is the answer… current Republicans who can’t stomach it have to move to the independent lane and campaign to get Democrats elected and possibly to build a new party free of the rancid ideas and behaviors of the far right…