Two Cheers for America’s COVID-19 Response, Brent Orrell, The Bulwark

Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live… just added this to my to-read list… it’s way down but it looks really interesting… so is the Bulwark article which says we got a lot of things right, even while getting a lot of things wrong…

20220209-05

The Supreme Court’s Alabama Redistricting Ruling Looks Like a Holding Pattern, Not a Power Grab, Eric Boehm, Reason.com

But the case against Alabama’s new districts is hardly clear-cut. On the map approved by state lawmakers, there would be six likely Republican districts and one majority-black, likely Democratic district. What you think about that split probably depends on your own political leanings, but the operative question in the federal lawsuit is whether state lawmakers in Alabama (a state where about 27 percent of the population is black) should be required by federal courts to draw a second majority-minority district.

… i am pretty liberal… i’ve been a registered Dem for all my voting life, though i am seriously considering changing to a registered Independent… despite my strong liberal leanings i am, and have always been, interested in legitimate and well formulated discussions and arguments from the other side of the spectrum…

… Reason.com, which presents the Libertarian perspective is one of my best go to conservative sources… it presents an argument for the conservative side of things that makes the case without much liberal bashing…

… MSNBC has done all the handwringing about this decision suggested in the article… i suspected that the issues at stake and the reasons for deciding one way or the other were not clear cut… and they aren’t…

Regardless, it was not, as some coverage of the case has suggested, Republican state lawmakers who took radical action here. It was the federal district court, which on the eve of an election overturned a map that is not materially different from the maps that have been used in every congressional election for the past few cycles. Were those maps racially discriminatory too? If so, why weren’t they challenged?

20220209-04

What Did the IRS Want With Your Selfies?, Lil Kalish, Mother Jones

Facing mounting bipartisan pressure, the Internal Revenue Service announced yesterday that it’s walking back plans to deploy facial recognition software to identify taxpayers.

… well, i have allowed Apple to use facial recognition to unlock my phone… it felt secure and easy on one level… but, this feels much more Orwellian to me… perhaps i should rethink it with Apple too?… especially since, at this moment, i can’t say whether we are heading for authoritarianism or not… something rather threatening to humankind lurking out there…

20220209-03

231.02 lbs

… downward trend of weight is a good was to start the day…

… slept in a little this AM… then the dogs suddenly had an urgent need to get out of bedroom… it was time to get up anyway… disrupted the normal order of the morning though… that has a discombobulating effect on one… when you have an out of the bed routine, it means you are on auto pilot until some of that delicious coffee starts flowing through your system… you struggle to think what’s next… oh yah, gotta feed the cat… not that the cat would ever let you forget for long… but after a few minutes, the flow of things is gently pushed back on track and auto pilot engages again…

… photography salon… a lot of abstract work last night… a lot of good abstract work… my image poem received reasonably well… i am well into it as a weekly production habit… more auto pilot… or is it a discipline that projects one more deeply into their life?… shaking things up once in a while is good, but disciplined routine certainly has its rewards…

… H asked me to call them last night… they announced their pending departure from CPW… big changes… H is a confusion to me… is it my leadership of the Salon that puts me on the list of people that should be notified before the general public learns?… our interactions have always been a bit stilted, distant, like we both want to connect but struggle to do so… they said they are working on a personal project of interviews with photo artists and i was one they wanted to connect with… i will miss them, but not completely clear in what way… she and C haven’t figured out exactly what they will be doing, or rather, the particulars of what they are doing… as we walked i wondered if they were pushed out or they are leaving under their own steam… i am distant from the politics of the center, so i don’t know… it could be either… H would never make it clear which… they will leave the area, they said… not clear where to… C is pursuing a PhD but it doesn’t sound as though the institution that will grant it is lined up yet… i think i will make a point of reaching out to them now and again in coming weeks and months, see if i can establish more of a relationship…

… S was not at Salon last night… they have been a bit silent lately… hope everything is good with them…

20220209-02

February 8, 2022, Heather Cox Richardson

… it’s odd when a bit of news can seem like a ray of sunshine in anotherwise gloomy landscape…

The fallout over the Republican National Committee’s statement censuring Representatives Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) for “participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse” continues to rain down on the Republican Party.

… i still can’t say whether this country will go authoritarian or not, an awful lot of my fellow citizens seem to want that, but it does look like justice could have its way… haven’t felt that way in a while…

20220209-01

NATO Unity Is Put to the Test, Natalie Dowzicky, Reason.com

… my expectation is that as soon as the Winter Olympics conclude Russia will pull the trigger… Putin has too much already invested in the effort… but i am no expert…

President Joe Biden met with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz for the first time today to dissuade American fears that Germany is an “unreliable partner” in the possible Russia-Ukraine conflict. It’s still unclear what role the largest economy in the European Union will play if Russian forces invade Ukraine.

Previously, Germany has received harsh criticism for its “soft treatment” of Russia as its troops gather at the Ukrainian border. Until recently, Chancellor Sholz has been reluctant to clarify what exactly Germany will do if Russia invades Ukraine. Biden attempted to put that doubt to rest in a press conference on Monday by declaring, “Germany is an incredibly reliable ally.”

20220208-05

This Racial Justice Activist Gets Right to the Heart of the Critical Race Theory Mania, Abigail Weinberg, Mother Jones

It can feel hard to understand what the hell is going on. But for activist and author Kimberly Latrice Jones, it’s not all that complicated. She cut through the bullshit when she appeared on The Breakfast Club podcast on Monday, offering what she thinks is the real reason why the anti-CRT craze has taken hold: White parents want to avoid having difficult conversations with their children about race.

… not sure i don’t think there is a little more to it than that, but it probably figures into the equation…

“The truth is, Ruby Bridges, who integrated school, is only in her sixties,” Jones, who co-authored the 2019 book I’m Not Dying With You Tonight, said. “So what it is is that you don’t want your kids, your grandkids, to know that you spit at her. You don’t want your grandkids to know that you witnessed lynching. You don’t want your grandkids to know that some of those family heirlooms that’s in the will are things from atrocities that happened to Black people.”

“We want to be convinced that it was so long ago,” she concluded. “It was last night. It’s today.”1

20220208-04


  1. Kimberly Latrice Jones ↩︎

Charred Sweetheart Cabbage with Prawns and a Pickle Brine Dressing, Helen Graves

… just bookmarked the recipe… doesn’t it look yummy?

2,700 Artists in New York State Will Benefit from New $125M Program… gonna keep an eye on this one… not sure i will be able to make the case for need, but we’ll see…

20220208-02

books: To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf 📚 … the next book i am taking up is Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse… i have had this book on Kindle for some time… a Paris Review article discussing the Bouef Dabube featured in the narrative pushed it to the top of the list… when i am done with it, on to Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, which would be a re-read for me…

books: The Greeks by H.D.F. Kitto 📚 … just finished reading… the last chapter was rather rambling and seemed an apology against various critiques of ancient Greek character… however, the rest of the book was so interesting and infomrative and, really well written…

233.0 lbs

… hard time with weight… hard to exercise enough… hard not to eat and drink too much…

… H moody…

… we will head out to BI in a few days… looking forward to the change of scenery… trying to figure out what my reading, work routine will be… contemplating a new tablet, basic one for writing and what not, but don’t really have the money… will simplify my working out there…

… a comparatively rich couple of photo days… hope it keeps up…

… E liked Shifting the Silence… a lot…

… i have a feeling that what i am producing is meaningful even if very few people notice it… E said they have given up posting on FB because it is so unrewarding to the very beautiful content they share… i have found the same thing… whereas whinny wearing your heart on your sleeve and pictures of cats and dogs gets all the attention… i am trying to let go of the need for attention but it is hard… we make, at its best, because we can’t not make, but we want to be seen too…

… signed up for a micro.blog member’s newsletter because they signed up for mine… am i starting to generate an audience?… i am thinking that i will write on Friday and edit pictures on Saturday so that my two titled posts are ready to go as we leave for BI…

… i still need to think what our meal is going to be for Valentines Day… maybe lamb?… roast leg of?… then we could share with M and P… hmmm…

… i received my copy of Woman in the Dunes… it’s reputed to be a masterpiece… it features a picture of a man and woman making love on the cover, so of course my libido being in charge of things wanted a copy… artsy eroticism… what could be better?…

… H has their surgery date… end of March… shouldn’t be a big deal… day surgery… there is tension about it none the less… don’t blame them…

… the political crisis in the country gets worse every day… i don’t think anyone can say for sure whether democracy will survive… on my bad days i despair that it won’t… all kinds of nasty thinking people declaring their desire to see democracy end… Peter Thiel, a libertarian billionaire has stepped down from the board of Meta to work on electing Trumpian candidates in 2022… he apparently believes that Democracy is not compatible with freedom anymore, deplores welfare and that women should never have been allowed to vote… seriously?… WTF

20220208-01

A photo pairing from today’s images…

20220207-04

I’ve added a map of flattened cans locations to my project page

Discovery locations of flattened cans in series.

20220207-03

BFF’s

Lies Are the Building Blocks of Trumpian Authoritarianism, William Saletan, The Bulwark

… an extensive article on the lies people, including a large number of independnts, believe about the current state of affairs… facts really do matter, but only if we can get the people to believe them

… excerpts from the article…

These numbers, combined with the corresponding patterns in Trump’s, McCarthy’s, and the RNC’s propaganda, teach an important lesson. We’re in a battle to save democracy, but the battleground isn’t values. It’s facts. We’re up against a party that spreads, condones, excuses, tolerates, and exploits lies—lies about our political process, and lies about an attempt to overthrow our government—in order to make Americans think that the party of authoritarianism is the party of democracy. And we’re in serious danger of losing.

In a country immune to authoritarianism, this campaign of lies would fail. But the campaign isn’t failing. It’s working. Rank-and-file Republicans, joined by many independent voters, believe the lies. They’re ready to put Republicans back in charge of Congress. They’re ready to support McCarthy when he shuts down the Jan. 6th investigation. And many are ready to re-elect Trump.

20220207-02

232.0 lbs

… my weight dropping slowly as i manage what i eat and get out for walks again… looking forward to better walking conditions so i can walk further…

… dinner with D and E last night… so nice to spend time with friends… brought them copies of Etel Ednan’s book Shifting the Silence and Kitto’s book, The Greeks, as well as a nice bottle of wine…

… E and i in similar places about making art, though my advantage is that photography fits mostly on a hard drive… E says their first art focus was photography and they think sometimes about returning to it…

… a lazy day yesterday… spent most of the day laying around watching tv… The Summer of Soul documentary… some Olympics…

… a disappointing response to my posts yesterday… only a couple of likes, no comments… haven’t checked the analytics yet to see if there was action beyond my own… i need to do something about making the analytics such that it doesn’t count my visits to the site…

… just purchased a copy of Bertran Russell’s History of Western Philosophy… before i tackle it i will tackle Virginia Wolf’s To The Lighthouse

20220207-01

Watching The Summer of Soul documentary. 1969 was some kind of year… m.imdb.com/title/tt1…

This looks interesting…

Museum of the Moving Image Launches Screening Series Focused on Extinction & Life as It Might Be

The World, The Flesh and the Devil and The Woman in the Dunes are the first two offerings… both available to stream through Amazon Prime…

20220206-03

Image Poem, Week 05

About the Repeating of History

Winston Churchill (and others it appears) famously said,

Those that fail to learn from history, are doomed to repeat it.

I have been studying H. Kitto’s The Greeks, a very good book about ancient Greek civilization. This civilization reached a glorious pinnacle, had a brief 100 years of production worthy of the gods which profoundly impacted the direction of Western civilization, and then quickly came unravelled.

In my ‘Cliff Notes’ version, it boils down to a tale of two city-states, Athens and Sparta. In very broad outline, ancient Greece was a contest between oligarchs and democracies to become the dominant form of government. Sparta was an oligarchic city-state, Athens was a democracy much of the time, at least for men, especially so at the height of its achievements, though it had fits of oligarchy here and there.

Sparta and the oligarchic way won in time, but not before the democratic polis of Athens scaled dizzying civilizational heights, the result of good fortune and its liberal democratic environment. It was, apparently, incessant war that unravelled them, or perhaps, a civilization blazing so bright can last at their pinnacle only so long.

This history is interesting to me because it echos the moment we are at, in the United States and around the Globe. There is an intense struggle between oligarchic/authoritarian actors and democratic actors and the o/a side of the struggle seems to be positioned to seize control of the world order. I can easily imagine them running the table with the United States turning oligarchic or authoritarian in the near future. In the liberal community of the United States there is a five alarm fire going on. The threat to democratic institutions is so clear and present to us.

I am beginning to wonder if there ever could be a learning-from-history sufficient for a civilization to avoid repeating it. It seems to me that there has long been a struggle between oligarchs/authoritarians and the democratic/egalitarian instincts of the people. There is something about the human civilizational psyche that makes this a continuous back and forth struggle. Is it the masculine/feminine thing? Is it the yin/yang thing? Is it the pendulum thing?

We can read about it in histories of past civilizations and recognize the signs of the pendulum swing in our own, but there seems little that humans consciously manage that predictively determines an outcome. Circumstances are favorable or not. Leadership is great or not. A citizenry has a strong and cohesive ethos or not. Luck is on your side or not.

A friend of mine recently told me they were reading about Sparta and that they admired their conservative ideology which also made room for homosexuality, abortion, and education for women (not at all common at the time). An oligarchic society that worked in its own way. I, of course, prefer the Athenian democracy. It will come as no surprise that this friend is a life long conservative and that i am a life long liberal.

From my point of view, the present oligarchic/authoritarian side of things in this country is populated by fanatics who are barely shy of mentally disturbed if shy at all, but, I am coming to realize that this is their revolutionary moment and they are pursuing it with all the determination that one expects revolutionaries to posses. Because they are seeking to undo the world order I believe in, they look crazy and evil to me. The liberal news media keeps trying to assess them as shockingly aberrant in the context of ‘this great democracy,’ but they don’t believe in democracy and will only be aberrant until they are the dominating ideology, which is when those of us who believe in government by, for and of the people will become shockingly aberrant.

I don’t know which way this struggle is going to go. I intend to pull for the democratic side, but history has taught me that the pendulum swings and that I should prepare myself for the possibility of a new civic order.

20220205-01

All ready to make our Pambazos tonight!

Cooking with Virginia Woolf, Valerie Stivers, The Paris Review

One of my favorite features of the Paris Review, Cooking With… Each one is a look at an important literary work with a culinary event of importance to the narrative. In this case, a boeuf en daube in To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Wolf.

The boeuf en daube in To the Lighthouse, a 1927 novel by Virginia Woolf about an English family on vacation in the Hebrides, is one of the best-known dishes in literature. Obsessed over for many chapters by the protagonist, Mrs. Ramsay, and requiring many days of preparation, it is unveiled in a scene of crucial significance. This “savory confusion of brown and yellow meats,” in its huge pot, gives off an “exquisite scent of olives and oil and juice.” It serves as a monument to the joys of family life and a celebration of fleeting moments. Thus, it is with fear and trembling that I suggest that Woolf’s boeuf en daube, from a cook’s perspective, is a travesty, and that its failures may prove instructive.

The recipe at the end looks well written as is the article on To the Lighthouse. I will pursue both.

20220204-05

Glenn Youngkin Set Up a Tip Line to Snitch on Teachers. It’s Only Gotten Weirder Since., Arianna Coghill, Mother Jones

It’s only been a week since Gov. Glenn Youngkin launched a tip line that allows parents to report any teachers or school administrators teaching “divisive” subjects, like critical race theory, in Virginia schools. Within days, the tip line was spoofed on Saturday Night Live and flooded with fake tips. And now the governor’s office is refusing to make the complaints public.

20220204-04

NASA Unveils Awe-inspiring Image of Galaxy Threesome Gone Wrong, Hrag Vartanian, Hyperallergic

_ A group of three galaxies, collectively known as NGC 7764A, imaged by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope using both its Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Camera 3. (image courtesy NASA)_

20220204-03