The war, of course, furnished many examples of this pattern: the casual fact, the creative imagination, the will to believe, and out of these three elements, a counterfeit of reality to which there was a violent instinctive response. For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities, and that in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond. (Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion)

… sounds vaguely familiar…

In America more than anywhere else, the spectacle of mechanical progress has made so deep an impression, that it has suffused the whole moral code. (Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion)

Experience is an inherently uncertain business that carries risk – a risk without which one can learn nothing. (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things)

Curiosity will never be content… Perhaps there are things, like many others, destined never to be learnt before the world comes to its end. Or perhaps—but here I speculate, here my own curiosity leads me by the nose—the world is so arranged that when all things are learnt, when curiosity is exhausted (so, long live curiosity), that is when the world shall have come to its end. But even if we learn how, and what, and where, and when, will we ever know why? Why, why?” (Patrik Svensson, The Book of Eels)

The worship of death is a central component of patriarchal thinking, whether expressed by women or men. (bell hooks, All About Love)

… what is Deadpool - Wolverine if not a grand opera of death?

True love is unconditional, but to truly flourish it requires an ongoing commitment to constructive struggle and change.¹

I have always thought that if I found the right way of thinking, clouds would dissolve, skies would turn blue, oceans might even part for me to walk through.² If I believe that love is the answer, then I should bring that attitude of love to the cosmos. If I do that, the cosmos will love me back, right? But how does the cosmos love except through living beings? Then an attitude of love will bring love in return from all living beings, right? But that is not how it is. I eat this animal and harvest that plant in order to survive. Sometimes the animals and plants want to eat or harvest me. They need to survive too.

This business of survival is where the strife comes from. The goal is to wrap the strife with love. Good things can happen, though probably not of the clouds dissolving and ocean parting kind.

From this morning’s walk…

Of course my wife had to have this sign…

A nice thing happened today. In the farmer’s market I stopped by the stall of a young woman who makes jewelry. She said hello and immediately told me how much she liked my style which she had, apparently, been observing for a while now. She made my day.

From this morning’s walk…

Finding and displaying my feminine has been a stepwise process of normalizing this way of being. Normalizing for myself, my family, my friends, my community. As we get used to this way of my presenting, I normalized and become comfortable in my new “two spirit” way of being. Here is today’s look:

Our “We’re NOT Going Back!” flag arrived yesterday…

I like this way of thinking about myself…

The term “two spirit,” which is a modern term adapted by First Nations peoples in North America, reflects this idea. Serving as a catch-all phrase for the many different ways of recognizing these variations in individual tribal cultures, two-spirit people are recognized as being physically sexed one way while also having aspects of the other sex. In many tribes, such people are seen as having essential spiritual roles in the community precisely because they have feet in both worlds.

(Rhyd Wildermuth, Here Be Monsters)

If you boil the strange soup of contemporary right-wing ideology down to a sort of bouillon cube, you find the idea that things are not connected to other things, that people are not connected to other people, and that they are all better off unconnected. The core values are individual freedom and individual responsibility: yourself for yourself, on your own. Out of this Glorious Disconnect comes all sorts of illogical thinking. (Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names)

I have been experimenting with diagraming concepts in an attempt to open portals to deeper understanding of them… here i am trying to diagram capitalism… i am particularly amused by packman eating the cosmos and pooping it out at the bottom… i am trying to do one a day…

August 21, 2024 - by Heather Cox Richardson

The message of joy as we protect democracy, backed as that message is with four years of extraordinary accomplishments that have bolstered the middle class and spread opportunity among poorer Americans, has taken off. The convention has heard from three Democratic presidents and a range of other speakers, including a number of Republicans who have turned against Trump and are backing Harris and Walz. In July, Harris raised four times the money Trump did: $204 million to $48 million, much of it from small donors.

Deadpool-Wolverine was abysmal. Wish I could unsee it. Horrible gratuitous violence. Some humorous moments which didn’t come close to redeeming it.

True enough… the trick is to get sufficient numbers to adopt this approach…

The way to stop the war is to stop hating the enemy. It starts with seeing our opinions of ourselves and of others as simply our take on reality and not making them a reason to increase the negativity on the planet. (Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart)

I have finally moved on to third volume of this book… i think i have been reading it for two years now…

And then there is the third point, that quantity in and of itself changes quality. (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things)

Sitting in movie theater waiting to watch Deadpool-Wolverine… i wasn’t sure i wanted to see a movie advertised as bloody and violent… but then our yoga teacher said she saw it and loved it… i gave in at that point…

Loving justice for themselves and others enables men to break the chokehold of patriarchal masculinity. (bell hooks, All About Love)

When we begin to experience the sacred in our everyday lives we bring to mundane tasks a quality of concentration and engagement that lifts the spirit. We recognize divine spirit everywhere. (bell hooks, All About Love)

August 16, 2024 - by Heather Cox Richardson

I believe in free speech, but telling flat out lies that harm people’s ability to choose knowledgeably ought to have serious consequences…

You could see that demonization of immigrants today in Vance’s straight-up lie that Vice President Kamala Harris “wants to give $25,000 to illegal aliens to buy American homes.” In fact, Harris today called for Congress to expand plans already in place in the Biden administration, and none of those plans call for giving money to undocumented migrants.

August 14, 2024 - by Heather Cox Richardson

On Tuesday the United Auto Workers union filed charges against Trump and Musk with the National Labor Relations Board for threatening and intimidating workers. “When we say Trump stands against everything our union stands for, this is what we mean,” said UAW president Shawn Fain.

August 14, 2024 - by Heather Cox Richardson

Trump continues to insist that Biden’s replacement at the top of the Democratic ticket was a “coup,” partly because he wants to face off against Biden, rather than Harris. But he also is priming his supporters to believe that those Americans who want the government to work for them rather than the very wealthy are illegitimate.