Faye Dunaway: Kathy
You have good eyes. Not kind, but they don't lie, and they don't look away much, and they don't miss anything. I could use eyes like that.
Three Days of the Condor (1975)
Friday, July 31, 2020
Three Days of the Condor (1975)
Potato Blood
When you cut into the potato, you damage the cell walls that keep everything nice and tidy. The phenols and the enzymes meet the oxygen coming in from the outside world, causing a chemical reaction to take place. This chemical reaction results in – you guessed it – pink potatoes.Jan 20, 2009
Word: Balloon Juice
If you’re hoping to go back to normal, it’s not going to happen. The normal of November 2019, before SARS-CoV-2 got a foothold in the human population, will not return. There will be a time when COVID-19 is no longer one of the top causes of death in the United States and a primary topic of concern around the world. But we can’t know when that will be. I’m guessing it’s at least two years away.
Because of negligence by leaders, particularly President Donald Trump, the virus is everywhere. It will take serious effort to bring it under control. The United States has handled the pandemic almost uniquely badly, but even countries that have minimized cases continue to be affected as well. Vigilance must be constant to keep the virus from returning with travelers. Where there are outbreaks, they will have to be tamped down with isolation, testing, and tracing.
https://www.balloon-juice.com/2020/07/31/where-we-are-with-covid-19/
Alan Watts
"The poets have seen the truth that life, change, movement, and insecurity are so many names for the same thing. Here, if anywhere, truth is beauty, for movement and rhythm are of the essence of all things lovable."
— Alan Watts
12 Breads a Baking
While the dozen mini mixed grain sourdough loaves were baking I ran outside and started trimming my front hedges. Using my gigantic manual hedge scissors gets me riled up. Decapitating saplings and weeds in an instant. The effort, the sound and the gesture makes me want to kick and scream. I feel like King Kong and I'm wild for a fight! I love it. I came back inside and shook the loaves out of their pans. They're done and so am I.
T. Susan Chang
Buttermilk somehow seems perpetually cool and unruffled — in custardy icebox desserts... It's tart but not biting, rich yet understated. Never mind wanting to eat and drink buttermilk all day long — I want to be buttermilk.
-T. Susan Chang
Splashy Joe
By night Splashy Joe works in the CVS warehouse driving a fork lift. By day he swims and later has a nap before work. He arrives at the Y every morning at 7AM for his daily swim. He must be outrageously strong because as a middleweight man swimming the crawl inefficiently (hence the splash) he plows his left arm into the water in a way that could make him go backwards and the right arm propels him forward and he keeps at it doing laps for a solid hour.
Waffling Potatoes
My husband is squeezing about 5 pounds of grated potatoes. The liquid that came out is about 8 ounces of potato blood and it's red. I'm saving it for bread dough. Next we'll add 1/3 cup olive oil for 12 grated and squeezed potatoes (or 2T for 4 potatoes) and lots of freshly ground black pepper. Then we bake in preheated (medium) waffle iron for ten minutes and salt 'em and enjoy.
Nutrition and epigenomics; prof. Maria Koziołkiewicz
Nutrition and epigenomics – new findings, new mechanisms
Components of your diet (grains and cereals, vegetables, fruit, milk, and others) have a much larger effect on your body than previously thought. Not only are they a source of vitamins, minerals, polyphenols, carotenoids but also (which we did not know until recently) they modify the meaning of the genetic information in the DNA.
Author
prof. Maria Koziołkiewicz
Dziekan Wydziału Biotechnologii i Nauk o Żywności PŁ.
Dinner like a Pauper
Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper
Eat your breakfast, share your lunch with a friend, and give your dinner to your enemy.
source
Primo Levi
He died in 1987 in what many think was a suicide, but which others believe to have been an accident.
He said: "Monsters exist, but they are too few in numbers to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are [those] ready to believe and act without asking questions."
Writer's Almanac
Kim Addonizio
It's the birthday of poet and novelist Kim Addonizio (books by this author), born in Washington, D.C. (1954). Her dad was a sportswriter for The Washington Post, and her mom was the tennis champion Pauline Betz. She's the author of Tell Me (2000) and What Is This Thing Called Love (2004), and her fifth book of poetry, Lucifer at the Starlite, came out in 2009. Her most recent collection is My Black Angel (2014).
She said, "Poetry is not a means to an end, but a continuing engagement with being alive."
Writer's Almanac
Summer Breakfast
In a blender combine ripe banana, ice cubes, orange juice, plain yogurt. buzz and enjoy. Creamsicle!
Rainbow ice pops
Ingredients
1 1/2 cups diced strawberries, cantaloupe and watermelon
1/2 cup blueberries
2 cups 100 percent apple juice (or another favorite juice)
6 paper cups (6-8 ounces each)
6 craft sticks
Instructions
Mix the fruit and berries together and divide evenly into the paper cups.
Pour 1/3 cup of juice into each paper cup. Place the cups on a level surface in the freezer.
Freeze until partially frozen; approximately 1 hour. Insert craft stick into center of each pop.
Freeze until firm.
Serves 6.
Skin in the Game
The biggest enemy to any town or city are the absentee landlords.T he owner occupants that have moved onto our street of tenements, cottages and duplexes have made all the difference in the world. Gotta keep some skin in the game.
To Give
“We leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint. Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen - there’s no other way to be here. Nothing to do with disobedience. Nothing to do with grace or salvation or redemption. It’s in everyone. Indwelling. Inherent. Defining. The stain that is there before its mark.”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain
“Nothing lasts and yet nothing passes either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts.”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain
“It's best to give while your hand is still warm.”
― Philip Roth, Everyman
Dream
I dreamed I went to a little corner market with my red back back. My former butcher was running the store. I had 6 vidalia onions in my pack when I went in. When the woman behind the counter packed my red pack with groceries she took out my onions and forgot to give them back.
Washed Out
“You be greater than your feelings. I don't demand this of you - life does. Otherwise you'll be washed away by feelings. You'll be washed out to sea and never seen again.”
― Philip Roth, Indignation
Ideaology Observes
“You cannot observe people through an ideology. Your ideology observes for you.”
― Philip Roth
shameless vanity of utter fools
“--nor had I understood til then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others”
― Philip Roth, The Plot Against America
I'll tell him this
“You go to someone and you think, 'I'll tell him this.' But why? The impulse is that the telling is going to relieve you. And that's why you feel awful later--you've relieved yourself, and if it truly is tragic and awful, it's not better, it's worse---the exhibitionism inherent to a confession has only made the misery worse.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral
The Dying Animal
“These girls with old gents don't do it despite the age—they're drawn to the age, they do it for the age. Why? In Consuela's case, because the vast difference in age gives her permission to submit, I think. My age and my status give her, rationally, the license to surrender, and surrendering in bed is a not unpleasant sensation. But simultaneously, to give yourself over intimately to a much, much older man provides this sort of younger woman with authority of a kind she cannot get in a sexual arrangement with a younger man. She gets both the pleasures of submission and the pleasures of mastery.”
― Philip Roth, The Dying Animal
I don’t ask writers about their work habits
“I don’t ask writers about their work habits. I really don’t care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they’re actually trying to find out, "Is he as crazy as I am?" I don’t need that question answered.”
― Philip Roth
Being Game
“Because that is when you love somebody - when you see them being game in the face of the worst. Not courageous. Not heroic. Just game.”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain
Think About
“Stop worrying about growing old. And think about growing up.”
― Philip Roth, The Dying Animal
In the Room
“The pleasure isn't in owning the person. The pleasure is this. Having another contender in the room with you.”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain
Human Nature
“You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral
a habit of mind
“Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing.”
― Philip Roth
Welcome August
Something about this time of year, time goes deep and zoomy, poignant and beautiful. Welcome August.
Philip Roth
“You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion. ... The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that -- well, lucky you.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral
Obsession
“The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open. ”
― Philip Roth, The Dying Animal
be free of all that noise
The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.
Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.
Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.
And he couldn't do it. He could not fucking die. How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here.
Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when.
When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.
Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?
People are unjust to anger - it can be enlivening and a lot of fun.
A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die!
-Philip Roth
Thursday, July 30, 2020
Walking Around by Pablo Neruda
(English Translation of Walking Around by Robert Bly)
It so happens I am sick of being a man.
And it happens that I walk into tailorshops and movie
houses
dried up, waterproof, like a swan made of felt
steering my way in a water of wombs and ashes.
The smell of barbershops makes me break into hoarse
sobs.
The only thing I want is to lie still like stones or wool.
The only thing I want is to see no more stores, no gardens,
no more goods, no spectacles, no elevators.
It so happens that I am sick of my feet and my nails
and my hair and my shadow.
It so happens I am sick of being a man.
Still it would be marvelous
to terrify a law clerk with a cut lily,
or kill a nun with a blow on the ear.
It would be great
to go through the streets with a green knife
letting out yells until I died of the cold.
I don't want to go on being a root in the dark,
insecure, stretched out, shivering with sleep,
going on down, into the moist guts of the earth,
taking in and thinking, eating every day.
I don't want so much misery.
I don't want to go on as a root and a tomb,
alone under the ground, a warehouse with corpses,
half frozen, dying of grief.
That's why Monday, when it sees me coming
with my convict face, blazes up like gasoline,
and it howls on its way like a wounded wheel,
and leaves tracks full of warm blood leading toward the
night.
And it pushes me into certain corners, into some moist
houses,
into hospitals where the bones fly out the window,
into shoeshops that smell like vinegar,
and certain streets hideous as cracks in the skin.
There are sulphur-colored birds, and hideous intestines
hanging over the doors of houses that I hate,
and there are false teeth forgotten in a coffeepot,
there are mirrors
that ought to have wept from shame and terror,
there are umbrellas everywhere, and venoms, and umbilical
cords.
I stroll along serenely, with my eyes, my shoes,
my rage, forgetting everything,
I walk by, going through office buildings and orthopedic
shops,
and courtyards with washing hanging from the line:
underwear, towels and shirts from which slow
dirty tears are falling.
Fred Rogers
"Discovering the truth about ourselves is a lifetime's work, but it's worth the effort."
— Mr. Fred Rogers
Lifeguard Texting Spells Trouble
If lifeguards have their eyes on their cell phones, how can they be watching the water?
Jollof rice
Jollof rice, or jollof, also known as benachin in Wolof, is a one-pot rice dish popular in many West African countries such as Ghana, Nigeria, The Gambia, Senegal, Cameroon, Sierra Leone, Côte d'Ivoire, Liberia, Togo and Mali. It is also called 'reddish one-pot dish' and varies in these countries. Wikipedia
Main ingredients: Rice, tomatoes and tomato paste, onions, cooking oil, goat meat or beef
Region or state: West Africa
Alternative names: Benachin, riz au gras, ceebu jën, zaamè
This is the healthiest type of cooked rice because it is cooked in an extremely healthy sauce and has the lowest calorie count of all rice meals. 300g of Jollof rice = 296 calories.
Love and RAGE
A Love Song to My Anger
Lama Rod Owens discusses his new book, Love and Rage, and finding the wisdom of anger in charged times.
Interview with Lama Rod Owens by Nina HerzogJul 20, 2020
https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/love-and-rage/
Ego
"Trying to build happiness on a foundation of ego is like trying to build a tower on quicksand."
— Pamela Gayle White
Deeper
"Trust yourself. At the root, at the core, there is pure sanity, pure openness. Don't trust what you have been taught, what you think, what you believe, what you hope. Deeper than that, trust the silence of your being."
― Gangaji
Stuart MacLean's memoir
This book was so good I could take sentences out and just hold them in my hands and admire them!
"I became nostalgic for the moment happening right in front of me."
Stuart MacLean's memoir, The Answer to the Riddle Is Me
ABSENTEE LANDLORDS DESTROY a CITY
Sad to report the feces farm is back. It's not as bad as it was in February but nonetheless it's still happening. I am truly amazed that with all of the complaints there is still no compliance. I can't wrap my mind around it. There's a sandbox for the kids and a picnic table and of course nobody sets foot in the yard due to the land mines and the stench. The mowers get enraged that they have to mow through crap. What does it take for them to pick up after the dogs? It's tragic but the truth is the ABSENTEE LANDLORDS have hurt themselves the most. It's a quality of life issue.
Enslaved
“In history up to the present it is certainly an empirical fact that separate individuals have become more and more enslaved under a power alien to them, a power which has become more and more enormous and, in the last instance, turns out to be the world market.”
- Marx - The German Ideology 1845
The Housing Question 1872
“Capitalist rule cannot allow itself the pleasure of creating epidemic diseases among the working class with impunity; the consequences fall back on it and the angel of death rages in its ranks as ruthlessly as in the ranks of the workers.”
- Engels - The Housing Question 1872
(Source: marxists.org)
Engels: Transition from Ape to Man
“Let us not flatter ourselves on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first.”
- Engels - The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, 1876
(Source: marxists.org)
Wednesday, July 29, 2020
Only in Poetry...
'Only in poetry can I be at home, only in doubt can I be safe. Literature began with poetry: 'the song of a nomad predates the scribblings of a settler', writes Brodsky.'
Nikola Madzirov, writing about home:
https://iwp.uiowa.edu/91st/vol10-num3/nikola-madzirov-the-situation-ii
Letter to a Friend
I know you've been running from your shadow. And I know this because I recognize it as I did the same thing for a long time.
I believe you're having your terrible 20's and terrible 30's NOW because you didn't get to have them when you were that age.
I wish you could have a home base because it's really hard to feed your soul and learn to take care of yourself when you are homeless or rootless and running.
Even if you can afford to keep running I am not sure it's good or wise to continue.
When I bought my house I was terrified because I no longer could run from apartment to studio because my whole life was here. That's when I faced a lot of things and nearly went crazy. I still get to escape by swimming and walking and reading reading reading each day to break up the intensity of home and work and recreation/athletics. My walking and swimming provide relief, mood stabilization, and structure to my life. Now I wouldn't trade my discoveries for anything but it was a haul.
I wish I could be of more help, but all I can tell you is what I have experienced. I hope this helps.
4 Pema Chödrön Quotes
“The only reason we don't open our hearts and minds to other people is that they trigger confusion in us that we don't feel brave enough or sane enough to deal with. To the degree that we look clearly and compassionately at ourselves, we feel confident and fearless about looking into someone else's eyes.”
― Pema Chödrön
“The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.”
― Pema Chödrön
“You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.”
― Pema Chödrön
“If we learn to open our hearts, anyone, including the people who drive us crazy, can be our teacher.”
― Pema Chödrön
Mother of Bread
When I mix up dough I become the mother
of fermented yeast and fresh wheat
rising in my kitchen overnight.
I bring forth loaves from my hands,
breasts and loins.
The next day loaves bake on hot stone
the aroma fills the house.
I am the midwife bringing forth the golden babies
tapping the bottom of each
listening for the hollow sound of being done.
I arrive at a dinner party with my newborn
still warm, wrapped in a blanket.
The hostess becomes shaken, frightened of her own infertility.
She snatches the bread from my arms
and burns my child in the oven.
She produces a pale impostor
made by robots on some distant planet,
something her children will prefer, she assures me.
But her children delight in the slicing and eating of a warm
homemade loaf smeared with fresh butter.
Even a naked slice is good.
There has never been a child who didn't love my bread.
-Emily Lisker 12/2/09
of fermented yeast and fresh wheat
rising in my kitchen overnight.
I bring forth loaves from my hands,
breasts and loins.
The next day loaves bake on hot stone
the aroma fills the house.
I am the midwife bringing forth the golden babies
tapping the bottom of each
listening for the hollow sound of being done.
I arrive at a dinner party with my newborn
still warm, wrapped in a blanket.
The hostess becomes shaken, frightened of her own infertility.
She snatches the bread from my arms
and burns my child in the oven.
She produces a pale impostor
made by robots on some distant planet,
something her children will prefer, she assures me.
But her children delight in the slicing and eating of a warm
homemade loaf smeared with fresh butter.
Even a naked slice is good.
There has never been a child who didn't love my bread.
-Emily Lisker 12/2/09
Haruki Murakami
“From the moment of my birth, I lived with pain at the center of my life. My only purpose in life was to find a way to coexist with intense pain.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
My Name is Lucy
“You will have only one story,” she had said. “You’ll write your one story many ways. Don’t ever worry about story. You have only one.”
― Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton
Ways to Feel Superior
“It interests me how we find ways to feel superior to another person, another group of people. It happens everywhere, and all the time. Whatever we call it, I think it’s the lowest part of who we are, this need to find someone else to put down.”
― Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton
Elizabeth Strout
“I suspect the most we can hope for, and it's no small hope, is that we never give up, that we never stop giving ourselves permission to try to love and receive love.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me
Caleb Daniloff
But then again, how many times had I found the thinnest excuse to party? Some meager accomplishment, a visit from an old friend, even getting fired. It's really a selfish act, driven by the central desire to get fucked up, to escape who you are rather than enjoy who you're with.
-Caleb Daniloff, Running Ransom Road: confronting the past one marathon at a time (pp80)
Key Lime Pie with regular limes
I'm making this today!! (with a few changes)
https://www.onceuponachef.com/recipes/key-lime-pie.html
Alan Watts
“To go out of your mind once a day is tremendously important, because by going out of your mind you come to your senses. And if you stay in your mind all of the time, you are over rational, in other words you are like a very rigid bridge which because it has no give; no craziness in it, is going to be blown down by the first hurricane.”
Alan Watts
Embrace hope and grieve well
Embrace hope and grieve well. I'd be so excited that I couldn't sleep the night before I was getting a new pair of shoes for school (age 7). Yet my mother always picked out and insisted we buy the orthopedic looking ones. CRY HARD.
Fistful of Ashes
"It’s hard to let go anything we love. We live in a world which teaches us to clutch. But when we clutch we’re left with a fistful of ashes."
— Madeleine L'Engle
Lurking
You can usually find a story lurking in the shadows of what you have to tell yourself in order to survive.
Steve Edwards
@The_Big_Quiet
Words Jump Out
It's amazing when a sentence jumps out at me. I look up get the page number and vow to copy it down. Just like getting a license plate.
Aquarium
“This is what I’ve always loved about a city, all the worlds hidden away inside, largest of aquariums.”
― David Vann, Aquarium
That's Right
"My mother and I each had our routines. She taught high school, took long hikes in the state parks near our house, read mystery novels, and sometimes disappeared with explanations as thin as, "I just need a few days," or "I'm going to visit a friend."
"Which friend?" I would ask.
"That's right," she would say.”
― David Vann, Legend of a Suicide
We no longer see the same world
“Because you can choose who you’ll be with, but you can’t choose who they’ll become.”
― David Vann, Caribou Island
“Having something to look forward to changes everything. I've always needed a future. I can't live without one.”
― David Vann, Aquarium
“We live through evolution ourselves, each of us, progressing through different apprehensions of the world, at each age forgetting the last age, every previous mind erased. We no longer see the same world at all.”
― David Vann, Aquarium
Vann
“Anything is possible with a parent. Parents are gods. They make us and they destroy us. They warp the world and remake it in their own shape, and that's the world we know forever after. It's the only world. We can't see what it might have looked like otherwise.”
― David Vann, Aquarium
“Each thing that happens to us, each and every thing, it leaves some dent, and that dent will always be there. Each of us is a walking wreck.”
― David Vann, Aquarium
“Even now, I still believe metamorphosis is the greatest beauty.”
― David Vann, Aquarium
“The dead reaching for us, needing us, but this isn't true. There's only us reaching for them, trying to find ourselves.”
― David Vann, Aquarium
“The worst part of childhood is not knowing that bad things pass, that time passes. A terrible moment in childhood hovers with s kind of eternity, unbearable.”
― David Vann, Aquarium
On Hell
“I thought that was a wonderful idea, that one could be on hell without being in it, like “Just Visiting” on the Monopoly board.”
― David Vann, Legend of a Suicide
David Vann 2
I write every morning, seven days a week, and the momentum of writing every day is tremendously important to me, because I have no outline or plan and view writing as a transformation by the unconscious. I don’t know what will happen on the page each day, but there’s a shocking amount of pattern and structure that emerges, and I think this can happen only through a daily practice. It’s also a replacement for religion for me, so I need the daily practice for emotional and psychological reasons, to not feel that my life is about nothing.
Where I write doesn’t matter, as long as I have a room to myself. It can be a hotel room anywhere in the world, or on my boat in Turkey, or at home in New Zealand in bed, as long as it’s for two hours by myself every morning, without distraction (no human movement or voices, and I wear earplugs). I travel for about half of each year, with book launches and interviews and festivals in about twenty countries, so I’m happy that I can write anywhere.
https://advicetowriters.com/interviews/2013/9/10/david-vann.html
David Vann
Before I could write, I told stories about squirrels which my mother wrote down. She always encouraged reading and writing. And my father told lies constantly, about the size of fish and his fidelity in marriage and everything in between. The first stories I wrote were collections of our hunting and fishing tales, illustrated and with titles such as North To Alaska, given to my family each year at Christmas. I come from a family with five suicides and a murder, many divorces, mental illness on both sides, and beautiful landscapes, so it was wonderful material.
https://advicetowriters.com/interviews/2013/9/10/david-vann.html
Tuesday, July 28, 2020
“hygiene theater”
Squirting the coat-hooks with sanitizer does nothing for safety especially when the lifeguard is texting.
Morris+Calhoun
Qestion:
What does an acknowledgment of privilege do?
Seriously asking because I am stuck atop that intellectual fence on this one..
Matthew R. Morris
response:
Acknowledging your privilege allows you to escape the torture of always seeing how much more privileged than you other people are. Accepting your own privilege gives you the freedom to witness others' lack of privilege.
William H Calhoun
question:
What do you think it means to have the freedom to witness others’ lack of privilege?
Matthew R. Morris
response:
To not have blinders in place preventing you from seeing & acknowledging that others have less privilege than you. More bluntly, to not "disappear" the less privileged out of your own fear of them.
William H Calhoun
Werner Herzog
"Eat, or don't. It's your choice, the world will not notice your demise as it moves relentlessly onward."
- Werner Herzog
Monday, July 27, 2020
Balloon Juice
Millions on the line and COVID spreads
How exactly are schools and universities supposed to open in a few weeks with far fewer resources available to prevent community spread?
A Woman In Portland
Protection is necessary for anticipated violence. But anticipating violence often prepares the way for it. The woman’s nakedness said that she anticipated no violence, and those anticipating violence directed little of it her way.
https://www.balloon-juice.com/2020/07/27/a-woman-in-portland/
Story
“The best arguments in the world won't change a person's mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory
“What you make from a tree should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory
“Librarian is a service occupation. Gas station attendant of the mind.”
― Richard Powers
“Evil is the refusal to see one's self in others.”
― Richard Powers
Richard Powers
What strikes me when you talk to writers about the writing process is the incredibly anxious and ongoing battle between the inside and the outside—the struggle to solve being in the world sufficiently to feel what’s really going on, and being out of the world sufficiently to be able to protect yourself from what’s going on. Then to be able to assemble it in a removed and protected and safe environment. You constantly hear these stories about people like Turgenev sitting by a window, which had to be closed, with his feet in hot water. It’s a very elaborate balancing act to find a necessary womb that isn’t so far removed from the world of stimuli that it gets choked off at the root, and yet isn’t in the maelstrom. You want to see and feel the maelstrom but not be buffeted by it.
RICHARD POWERS
Blue Kiddie Pool
Today at 98 degrees I took out the big blue plastic kiddie pool and filled it using the hose. Then I stood in it with my dog and we splashed around in the water. I stepped out and threw his toys in and he fetched them. I had to hose him to get him to let go of one of the squeaky toys before he destroyed it. We played in the water for an hour or so. As my husband reminds me every spring, the neighborhood is QUIET by the time late July rolls around and it's true. Everyone is hiding indoors with their air conditioners blasting and I am outside in the shade drinking iced coffee stomping in mud puddles with my dog. Heaven.
Sunday, July 26, 2020
I LOVE this GUY
José Andrés
Founder, World Central Kitchen
“The future of the nations will depend on how they feed themselves.”
— Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, 1826
John Lewis
“Trying to get out front & worry about who’s getting the credit, that’s just never been my concern. Let’s get the job done - that’s how I feel...Don’t worry about the limelight. Get the job done, & there will be plenty of credit to go around.”
- John Lewis (Walking With The Wind)
Saturday, July 25, 2020
Dana Milbank
Democracy Dies in Darkness
Stop fretting about Trump and do something about it. Right now.
Dana Milbank
Columnist
July 24, 2020 at 6:29 PM EDT
Do this now.
Take a pause from President Trump’s latest outrage (sending federal police to foment violence in U.S. cities in hopes that it will help his flagging campaign) or inanity (“Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.”) — and do the only thing guaranteed to end the nightmare.
Go to Vote.org, or, if you are reading this in the dead-tree edition, type vote.org/am-i-registered-to-vote into your browser, spend 30 seconds entering your name, address and date of birth, and you’ll find out instantly if your voter registration is current. If not, follow the instructions to register.
Next, click this link or type vote.org/absentee-ballot into your browser, and sign yourself up to receive an absentee ballot for the November election. That takes about two minutes.
Finally, make sure your friends and family do the same. If they’re technology-challenged, help them through it or give them the phone numbers for their states’ elections offices, available here at the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, eac.gov/voters/election-day-contact-information.
Sign up for The Odds newsletter for election updates from data columnist David Byler
Heck, do it even if you support Trump. Fine by me. If turnout is higher than in 2016 — if Americans truly have their say in November — then Trump doesn’t stand a chance. As he said himself this year, if you have higher “levels of voting … you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
AD
One hundred days from Sunday, the election will decide whether the madness subsides or accelerates. Lawmakers so far haven’t provided states with the funds needed to prepare for the expected onslaught of mail-in ballots because of the pandemic; New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice estimates $2 billion to $4 billion would be needed to avoid a massive electoral crisis. And Trump, who is counting on chaos so that he can dispute unfavorable results, has publicly cast doubt on the security of mail-in ballots at least 50 times this year, The Post calculates. (He draws an essentially meaningless distinction between “mail-in” and “absentee” ballots.).
There’s no evidence of the potential for widespread fraud he alleges. But the best remedy is to reject Trump so thoroughly in the balloting that his refusal to commit to honor the outcome will simply look silly. “I have to see,” he said last week when asked about accepting the results, as if honoring the will of the people in a democracy is strictly optional.
Underfunded state election offices mean we can expect serious backlogs with the distributing and tallying of mail-in ballots. This is why now is the time to request ballots, before the systems are overwhelmed. The Post’s Kate Rabinowitz and Brittany Renee Mayes this past week calculated that 76 percent of American voters can cast ballots by mail in the fall.
Only nine states, an electoral Hall of Shame, make you choose between your health and your right to vote, because they don’t count the pandemic as a valid reason to request an absentee ballot. The nine: Connecticut, New York, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and West Virginia.
Conversely, if you’re lucky enough to live in Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Hawaii, Utah, California, Vermont or the District of Columbia, all you have to do is make sure you’re registered and your address is correct and you’ll automatically receive a ballot in the mail.
If you live in one of the other 34 states, request your ballot at Vote.org. Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa and Ohio say they will automatically send absentee-ballot applications to all registered voters. But in the rest — including battlegrounds Arizona, Florida, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire — it’s all up to you to take action and request your ballot. (Some states let you bring the completed absentee ballot to a polling place or collection spot instead of mailing.)
Vote.org’s chief executive, Andrea Hailey, tells me that for those in the 13 states requiring a “wet” (non-digital) signature to get an absentee ballot (Ohio and Georgia among them), the nonpartisan, nonprofit group will send stamped envelopes. Those who prefer not to use Vote.org can of course go directly to their states’ election offices; other groups doing good work in this area include Rock the Vote, HeadCount, TurboVote and the Voter Participation Center.
Several Republican-controlled states have imposed voter-suppression measures — purges of voting rolls, voter identification laws, closing polling places, restricting voting hours and limiting early voting — and those assaults on voting rights will disenfranchise many. Trump’s attacks on mail-in ballots, without which people would be forced to risk their health in long voting lines, could discourage many more.
But sufficiently massive turnout will overwhelm all voter suppression schemes — and the results will leave no doubt for Trump to exploit. The first registration and absentee-ballot deadlines are in about 60 days. Check your registration and get your absentee ballot — now.
Friday, July 24, 2020
Adam Schiff
We are all greatly comforted that the President can remember and comprehend the words — Person, Woman, Man, Camera, TV.
But it’s these five words we wish he could understand:
Honesty, Duty, Country, Compassion,
Decency.
-Adam Schiff
@RepAdamSchiff
Come Back from the Silence with Something to Say
One of the functions of art is to give people the words to know their own experience. There are always areas of vast silence in any culture, and part of an artist’s job is to go into those areas and come back from the silence with something to say. It’s one reason why we read poetry, because poets can give us the words we need. When we read good poetry, we often say, “Yeah, that’s it. That’s how I feel.”
URSULA K. LE GUIN
Summer Spent
Summer Spent Trailer https://youtu.be/XBKJIhGOKj4
The film is a 2012, 40 minute documentary depicting DiRado's obsessive, work discipline and artist life connected to numerous people on the island of Martha's Vineyard for over 25 years. Most of the filming takes place in the town of Aquinnah, MA
NOAM CHOMSKY
NOAM CHOMSKY: President Trump is desperate. His entire attention is there's one issue on his mind; that's the election. He has to cover up for the fact that he is personally responsible for killing tens of thousands of Americans. It is impossible to conceal that much longer. Just compare the United States with Europe or even Canada; it's becoming a pariah state to the point where Americans aren't even permitted to travel to Europe. Europe won't accept them.
His chances of victory depend on his doing something dramatic. He was trying very hard to set up military confrontations that you mentioned, martial law. It's moving toward martial law. He might even be able to try to cancel the elections. There is no telling what he would do. He is completely desperate. This is like the actions of some tin-pot dictator in a neo-colony somewhere, small country that has a military coup every couple of years. There is no historical precedent for anything like this in a functioning democratic society. If he could send Blackshirts out in the streets, he would be happy to do that.
Exactly how this will eventuate is very hard to say. The courts are unlikely to do anything. We may even get to a point where the military command has to decide which side they are on. The man is desperate. He is psychotic. He is in extreme danger of losing his position in the White House and will do anything he can to prevent it.
https://www.democracynow.org/2020/7/24/noam_chomsky_on_trump_s_troop
https://www.nationofchange.org/2020/07/24/noam-chomsky-on-trumps-troop-surge-to-democratic-cities-whether-hell-leave-office-if-he-lose/
Maynard Silva, We miss YOU
Maynard Silva
Peter Simon
Out of the Blues: Maynard Silva Makes a New Start With Old Truths
Thursday, February 28, 2008 - 7:00pm
Who is Maynard Silva, anyway?
Certainly, he is a classic blues man.
Island born and raised, Mr. Silva has appeared on stages on and off the Vineyard for nearly 40 years, his voice a familiar throaty growl.
His public persona is the sheen on a core of enormous strength and wisdom, shaped by time and pressure.
Maynard Silva is the sum of the elements of his life code: tradition, humility, the value of relationships and of mentors. And he has a wriggling delight in our inexhaustible opportunities to experience joy in life.
“I live my day-to-day life based on a tradition of people I know and learned from. People who have survived similar things to me. So tradition is very important in my life. Without tradition, I lose a very important part of my life. I’ve been very lucky to have encountered strong people who taught me their strong traditions,” he said, adding:
Maynard Silva
— Jaxon White
“My first influence and the man who influenced all my music to this day was a man named Petronio (Pete) Ortiz. He lived on this Island and he taught me the sign painting business. He understood the tradition of sign painting and how to be creative within it. He taught me that relationship. I see people struggle with the relationship between creativity and tradition every day.”
Today, recovering from several bouts with cancer and in recovery from alcohol addiction, Mr. Silva has become the mentor, just as legendary blues men like Booker T. Washington (Bukka) White were to him as a young musician. The Memphis-based White shepherded the career of his cousin B.B. King and welcomed a skinny kid from Martha’s Vineyard into his world to learn his art form.
“It was an attitude more than following a set of rules, a process more than anything, just like the sign painter,” Mr. Silva recalled. “When I met Bukka, he lived in this little apartment in Memphis. I got close to him and saw he used the same framework as the sign painter. Opening his guitar case and pulling out that old National [guitar] was the same thing as Pete opening that box and pulling out those brushes,” he said.
“I am a traditional person and artist. I work in the context of tradition that people have taught me. Tradition is the great liberator. It provides me a different individuality and expressiveness than functioning without a tradition. That was a golden gift.
“Humility is a huge part of it. If you have no humility, you just got your own damn self, the most boring thing in the world. When those guys opened their boxes, they were praying for inspiration. Artists are humbled by the opportunity to do that magic, that’s the difference. Somebody with a strong tradition can conjure up these things from their hearts and from the world around them. It’s amazing.
“Everybody was expecting them to be something — ‘My God, you’re Bukka White’ or ‘You’re Pete Ortiz,’ and at the moment they opened their cases to get out their magical tools, they were the most humble men in the world, mentally getting down on their knees, saying, ‘Give me something I can share.’
“You got humility, you got B.B. King. You don’t have humility, well, that’s where a you get a lot of the stuff we hear.”
Mr. Silva credits his cancer experience with teaching him more. “It’s my third year dealing with this and it’s changed everything. My way of relating to the human race changed because I learned how to ask people for help.
“When people help you it’s actually a joyous thing for both of you. I always thought asking for help was shameful, a weakness. I learned that to be connected to people that way was a joy, and that they liked it as much as I liked it. That made the way I relate to everybody different, including other musicians I play with and the people I play for.
“I am more inclusive of them. Really, I provide a context for people to play music in. I try to give people a safe place to take chances, to dig inside, to show their stuff. It’s okay to make a mistake playing with me.
Maynard Silva
Playing harmonica in 2001: since recent shoulder injury, he’s gone back to harp. — Mark Alan Lovewell
“The December [brain] cancer became a violent thing. Cancer usually isn’t a violent thing, but it became so in a very few minutes. Caused me to break my own shoulder. Made it seem like my time in this body was a matter of hours at most. The first thing I thought was, ‘No more music?’ What I got out of that is that my life is not measured in a half hour anymore. That knowledge informs everything now, and I just play for the joy. Before I didn’t know how deep it ran in my bones. I kind of took it for granted.” He continued:
“The final way my sickness has affected me is that I’ve gone back to my first instrument, the harmonica.” Mr. Silva is recovering mobility in his broken left shoulder but right now, he said, “I can’t get up and down a guitar neck to play.
“So I went back to the harmonica. Guitar players are like dogs, sniffing around, peeing on trees. They’re tough. The guitarist’s ego is a piece of work. I’m the worst. I have to be the cock of the walk when I play. But when I’m playing the harmonica, I’m closer to the guitar players than I ever was. My blessing is to go back to old Petronio’s head. He taught me to be intuitive.”
Maynard Silva
Maynard Silva with new wife Basia at this past weekend’s musical potluck. — Peter Simon
On relationships: “My marriage is a big part of my life. Basia [Jaworska Silva] married me a year ago when I was on chemo. She refers to it as a medical adventure. She is a great spirit and a great artist.”
Mr. Silva has made huge changes in the midst of his medical adventure. Getting married, selling his house, changing his instrument.
But he doesn’t see it that way. “If you find a person that’s sincerely willing to be a partner to you in times that would scare people off, then you’re a damn fool if you don’t enter that partnership,” he said. “And if you find some material possession is taking more energy away from you than it should, then convert it to capital and enable yourself to function in the lives of the people you love. Selling the house made my involvement with Basia more healthy and allows [his son] Milo a little bankroll for his explorations or an opportunity. That’s better than hanging on to an old house,” he said.
Milo, an accomplished musician, is exploring the blues musical roots in the Republic of Tuva, a kingdom in Siberia, 2,000 miles east of Moscow.
“Anything you got, if it’s a guitar, a car or a toilet, it’s gotta work for you. If it doesn’t, get rid of it, that’s the way I feel,” he said.
Mr. Silva is planning recording work with bassist Tom Howland and guitarist Al Schackman and he’s is excited about singing in the Jim Thomas Spirituals Choir, reviving slave spiritual music. “You can hear every element that is in black music. Everything I’ve been playing my whole life you can hear in those spirituals,” Mr. Silva said.
He was a philosophy major in college. “I never called on what I learned in philosophy because my self-centered lifestyle went away from any contemplation of spirit or consciousness. Later on, when my life changed, when I got out of that way of looking at things and living, the philosophy background made me more open. Not religious, not corny, but feeling your own spirit and that you’re part of the world. It’s a dance, two steps forward, one step back.”
He concluded: “I’m down to one prayer, from the Lakota Sioux: Today is a good day to die. If it’s a good day to die, Then it’s a good day to live. So take your day.
“If you accept in your heart that it’s a good day to die, you can really live, baby.”
We LOVE YOU Dr. Fauci!!!!!!!!!!
16 hours ago
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/fauci-says-he-and-his-family-have-been-assigned-security-detail-due-to-serious-threats
Senate Approves Proposal To Strip Confederate Names From Army Bases By Veto-Proof Majority
17 hours ago
Inspectors General Announce Probes Into Feds’ Use Of Force In Portland, DC Protests
18 hours ago
Pelosi’s Not Tolerating Yoho’s Lip: ‘Women Will Be Treated With Respect’
Fauci Says He And His Family Have Been Assigned Security Detail Due To ‘Serious Threats’
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, listens during a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing on June 30, 2020. (Photo by Al Drago - Pool/Getty Images)
By Cristina Cabrera
|
July 24, 2020 7:59 a.m.
46
Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the White House’s most prominent health responders to COVID-19 and a target in President Donald Trump’s attempts to downplay the pandemic, said on Thursday that he and his family have been receiving threats.
“I’ve seen a side of society that I guess is understandable, but it’s a little bit disturbing,” Fauci said in a podcast interview with CNN commentator David Axelrod.
The doctor recalled how he had received hate mail decades ago for leading efforts at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to find treatment for HIV/AIDs.
“It’s really a magnitude different now, because the amount of anger,” he told Axelrod. “As much as people inappropriately, I think, make me somewhat of a hero–which, I’m not a hero, I’m just doing my job–there are people who get really angry at thinking I’m interfering with their life because I’m pushing a public health agenda.”
The backlash goes beyond just hate mail, Fauci said. It’s also led to “actual serious threats against him and his family.
“Serious threats against me, against my family, my daughters, my wife,” the doctor said. “I mean, really? Is this the United States of America?”
Fauci asserted that the attacks reflect “the divisiveness of our society at a political level.”
“This is a public health issue, the fundamental principles of public health, and I don’t see how people can have animosity to that,” he said.
The doctor revealed that he and his family have been assigned security detail in response to the threats.
In recent days, Trump and his administration have worked to undermine Fauci’s credibility as the doctor’s sobering analysis COVID-19 clash with Trump’s politically motivated efforts to put a falsely positive spin on the outbreak ahead of the November elections. Trump’s allies in right-wing media circles have also been attacking Fauci.
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46
Author Headshot
Cristina Cabrera (@crismcabrera) is a newswriter at TPM based in New York. She previously worked for Vocativ, USA Today and NY1 News.
Dōgen Zenji
"To what shall I liken the world? Moonlight, reflected in dewdrops, shaken from a crane's bill?"
- Dōgen Zenji
Waffled Root Vegetables!!!
Yes you heard me right. Step one get a waffle iron. Step two grate the veggies fine squeeze the blood out and save it for bread making. Add a few teaspoons of olive oil for each cup of vegetable matter and some fresh ground pepper. Spread a thin layer on preheated waffle iron. Bake for ten minutes add salt enjoy. They taste like potato stix. Remember those?
idaho potatoes, sweet potatoes, rutebega, carrot, turnip, green plantain, cassava?
idaho potatoes, sweet potatoes, rutebega, carrot, turnip, green plantain, cassava?
Thursday, July 23, 2020
Film
The true story of Montgomery Clift, as told by his youngest nephew
https://lwlies.com/festivals/making-montgomery-clift-hollywood-star-queer-icon-myth/
https://www.sarasotamagazine.com/arts-and-entertainment/2019/04/sarasota-film-festival-em-making-montgomery-clift-em
Stephen DiRado
“I document people’s lives for better or worse,” Mr. DiRado said. “Art can be a whisper and it can be a billboard. It can touch one person and it can scream to a whole society. But the point is, the artist is saying something pertinent, something in the present tense about the world we live in. The art that I gravitate to is the art that is about me, in some way — and it’s not necessarily a positive thing.”
Mr. DiRado’s work can be seen on his Web site, https://stephendirado.com/.
info@stephendirado.com
https://vineyardgazette.com/news/2007/09/14/famous-unknown-makes-unforgettable-images
It pays off slowly
"The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off."
Raymond Chandler
Michael Greenberg
A person in the throes of mania can be very persuasive, with a lot of certainty, that life changes must be made and you must help. Resist those grand life plans because often they’re not realistic. Stay centered next to the whirlwind because that’s what the person needs from you. And, yes, it is hard to do when you love someone.
Michael Greenberg author of Hurry Down Sunshine: A Father’s Story of Love and Madness
Wednesday, July 22, 2020
Not Alone
“I may be scrambling to figure out how to balance kids, schools and work in the coming months, & that’s no small problem. But at least I’m not alone. At least I have someone to do it all with...We should keep in mind those who don’t.”
-@SonnyBunch
Alice Walker
“Hard times require furious dancing. Each of us is proof.”
― Alice Walker, Hard Times Require Furious Dancing: New Poems
Maeve Brennan
Most of the fact writing has become selfish writing. The writers don't think about the reader but about themselves. They're all trying to show their wonderful minds and their unique unhappinesses and their fascinating adjustments and so on. Writing is for the reader. [The reader] always comes first.
MAEVE BRENNAN
Peach Pinochet
Augusto Pinochet is known for being the leader of a military junta that overthrew the socialist government of Pres. Salvador Allende of Chile on September 11, 1973 and for heading the ensuing military government (1974–90) that harshly suppressed dissent and tortured opponents but also promoted economic growth.
Enjoy
My friend C who is quite petite told me "I love ice cream, I eat it every day. Nobody believes me because I am thin but I only have one bowl."
Pudding
Craving vanilla pudding
Ingredients
3 cups milk (divided)
1/4 cup cornstarch
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
chocolate pudding
C.S. Lewis
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
― C.S. Lewis
Happy Birthday Edward Hopper
It's the birthday of the painter Edward Hopper, born in Nyack, New York (1882). By the time he was 12, he was already six feet tall. He was skinny, gangly, made fun of by his classmates, painfully shy, and spent much of his time alone drawing.
After he finished art school, he took a trip to Paris and spent almost all of his time there alone, reading or painting. In Paris, he realized that he had fallen in love with light. He said the light in Paris was unlike anything he'd ever seen before. He tried to re-create it in his paintings.
He came back to New York and was employed as an illustrator at an ad agency, which he loathed. In his spare time, he drove around and painted train stations and gas stations and corner saloons.
Hopper had only sold one painting by the time he was 40 years old, but his first major exhibition -- in 1933 at the Museum of Modern Art -- made him famous. His pieces in that show had titles like Houses by the Railroad, Manhattan Bridge Loop, Room in Brooklyn, Roofs of Washington Square, Cold Storage Plant, Lonely House, and Girl on Bridge. Though his work was more realistic and less experimental than most other painters at the time, he painted his scenes in a way that made them seem especially lonely and eerie.
Edward Hopper said: "Maybe I am slightly inhuman ... All I ever wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house."
Writer's Almanac
Focus
Just focus on the one or two really important things, and everything else, just surrender to it.
Naval Ravikant
Tuesday, July 21, 2020
Joyce Carol Oates
Obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.
Joyce Carol Oates
Ice Skating
Whenever I go ice skating I am 7 years old again and and it's my birthday. Only this time I am my own parent and Donald Trump is not my mother.
Kevin Kelly
Separate the processes of creation from improving. You can’t write and edit, or sculpt and polish, or make and analyze at the same time. If you do, the editor stops the creator. While you invent, don’t select. While you sketch, don’t inspect. While you write the first draft, don’t reflect. At the start, the creator mind must be unleashed from judgement.
KEVIN KELLY
Laurence Tribe
Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, has called for peaceful civil disobedience. “Stormtrooper tactics have no place in a free society,” he said. “The apparent deployment of the military for domestic law enforcement violates the posse comitatus act in the absence of a genuine insurrection, and the claim that such deployment is genuinely necessary to preserve order does not meet the laugh test.
“The administration is violating the first amendment on a regular basis now, thereby endangering all our liberties.”
“Even for a president who rarely sticks to the script and wanders from thought to thought, it was one of the most rambling performances of his presidency.” Trump is in total meltdown. #HeMustGo.
Confucian Classics
@UnwobblingPivot
·
3m
The Master said, "The man of wisdom delights in water, the man of humanity delights in mountains. The man of wisdom is active, the man of humanity is tranquil. The man of wisdom enjoys happiness, the man of humanity enjoys long life." (An. 6.21)
Paul Krugman
Opinion
What You Don’t Know Can’t Hurt Trump
“Slow the testing down,” he said, and it’s happening.
Paul Krugman
By Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist
July 20, 2020
Workers at a testing site in Sun City Center, Fla., last week.
We’re now at the stage of the Covid-19 pandemic where Donald Trump and his allies are trying to suppress information about the coronavirus’s spread — because, of course, they are. True to form, however, they’re far behind the curve. From a political point of view (which is all they care about), their disinformation efforts are too little, too late.
Where we are: In just a few days millions of Americans are going to see a drastic fall in their incomes, as enhanced unemployment benefits expire. This calls for urgent action; but avoiding economic calamity was always going to be hard, because Republicans in general have balked at providing the aid workers idled by the pandemic need.
But now it turns out that there’s another obstacle to action: An intra-G.O.P. dispute over funding for testing and tracing of infected individuals. Even Senate Republicans support increased testing, which is desperately needed given our current situation: Surging cases have created a testing backlog, and test results are taking so long to come back that they’re effectively useless.
But Trump officials are opposed to any new money for testing. They’re barely even trying to offer excuses for their opposition, since Trump himself explained the strategy a month ago at his Tulsa rally: When you expand testing, he declared, “you’re going to find more cases, so I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please.’”
In other words, what you don’t know can’t hurt Trump.
Nobody should be surprised that the Trump team is trying to suppress bad news about the pandemic. This was completely predictable given the Law of Obama Projection: Every right-wing conspiracy theory about President Barack Obama was an indication of what Republicans wanted to do themselves, and would do once they had the power.
Remember, for example, wild claims about an imminent military takeover of Texas, lent credence by senior Republicans? Now we have unidentified Department of Homeland Security agents in unmarked vehicles seizing people off the streets of Portland, Ore. Remember claims that the government was secretly constructing concentration camps? Thousands of migrants are now immured in detention centers, often under horrifying conditions.
And the current war on Covid-19 testing was prefigured by constant claims that the Obama administration was suppressing bad economic news. “Inflation truthers” insisted that the feds were hiding the runaway inflation that right-wingers predicted, but that never arrived. Unemployment truthers — including, notably, one Donald Trump — declared that official job numbers showing a steadily improving economy were fake, and that unemployment was actually much higher than reported.
It was inevitable, then, that the Trumpists would do what they falsely accused Obama of doing, and try to hide bad pandemic numbers. Efforts to hold down testing are only part of the story.
The Trump administration recently ordered hospitals to stop reporting Covid-19 data to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, sending it to a private contractor instead. As a result, hospitalization data, a key pandemic indicator, disappeared from the C.D.C. website before being reinstated after a widespread outcry.
And some Republican-controlled states, notably Georgia, have for months been massaging coronavirus data, presenting it in misleading ways that understate the problem.
The puzzle is why the latest attack on testing came so late. Pro tip: If you’re trying to conceal bad epidemiological news, you should start the cover-up before everyone realizes that the pandemic is spiraling out of control.
A fascinating Times post-mortem on Trump’s failed coronavirus response helps us understand what happened. And I do mean mortem: Americans are dying of Covid-19 at a rate eight times that in Canada, 10 times that in Europe.
The Times account makes it clear that the Trump team never seriously considered trying to deal with the pandemic’s reality. It also makes it clear, however, that officials convinced themselves back in April that they were getting away with this abdication of responsibility, that the coronavirus was going away.
And by the time they realized that the virus wasn’t playing along with their political games, it was too late to hide the truth.
At this point it’s not even clear what purpose obstructing testing is supposed to serve. The attempt to engineer an economic boom before the election has already failed, as reopened states are reversing course. And Trump has already squandered all credibility on the coronavirus; even if the numbers on reported cases suddenly started to look much better, who besides his hard-core supporters would believe them?
So this doesn’t look like a political strategy as much as an attempt to soothe the boss’s fragile ego. Trump keeps insisting, falsely, that the only reason we’re seeing so many cases is too much testing, so his aides are trying to mollify him by holding testing down.
And if this cripples America’s pandemic response, making a test-trace-isolate strategy impossible, well, actually dealing with the virus was never part of the plan.
Michelle Goldberg
Opinion
Trump’s Occupation of American Cities Has Begun
Protesters are being snatched from the streets without warrants. Can we call it fascism yet?
Michelle Goldberg
By Michelle Goldberg
Opinion Columnist
July 20, 2020
Federal agents confronting Black Lives Matter protesters in Portland, Ore., on Monday.
The month after Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Yale historian Timothy Snyder published the best-selling book “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century.” It was part of a small flood of titles meant to help Americans find their bearings as the new president laid siege to liberal democracy.
One of Snyder’s lessons was, “Be wary of paramilitaries.” He wrote, “When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.” In 2017, the idea of unidentified agents in camouflage snatching leftists off the streets without warrants might have seemed like a febrile Resistance fantasy. Now it’s happening.
According to a lawsuit filed by Oregon’s attorney general, Ellen Rosenblum, on Friday, federal agents “have been using unmarked vehicles to drive around downtown Portland, detain protesters, and place them into the officers’ unmarked vehicles” since at least last Tuesday. The protesters are neither arrested nor told why they’re being held.
There’s no way to know the affiliation of all the agents — they’ve been wearing military fatigues with patches that just say “Police” — but The Times reported that some of them are part of a specialized Border Patrol group “that normally is tasked with investigating drug smuggling organizations.”
The Trump administration has announced that it intends to send a similar force to other cities; on Monday, The Chicago Tribune reported on plans to deploy about 150 federal agents to Chicago. “I don’t need invitations by the state,” Chad Wolf, acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said on Fox News Monday, adding, “We’re going to do that whether they like us there or not.”
In Portland, we see what such an occupation looks like. Oregon Public Broadcasting reported on 29-year-old Mark Pettibone, who early last Wednesday was grabbed off the street by unidentified men, hustled into an unmarked minivan and taken to a holding cell in the federal courthouse. He was eventually released without learning who had abducted him.
A federal agent shot 26-year-old Donavan La Bella in the head with an impact munition; he was hospitalized and needed reconstructive surgery. In a widely circulated video, a 53-year-old Navy veteran was pepper sprayed and beaten after approaching federal agents to ask them about their oaths to the Constitution, leaving him with two broken bones.
There’s something particularly terrifying in the use of Border Patrol agents against American dissidents. After the attack on protesters near the White House last month, the military pushed back on Trump’s attempts to turn it against the citizenry. Police officers in many cities are willing to brutalize demonstrators, but they’re under local control. U.S. Customs and Border Protection, however, is under federal authority, has leadership that’s fanatically devoted to Trump and is saturated with far-right politics.
“It doesn’t surprise me that Donald Trump picked C.B.P. to be the ones to go over to Portland and do this,” Representative Joaquin Castro, Democrat of Texas, told me. “It has been a very problematic agency in terms of respecting human rights and in terms of respecting the law.”
It is true that C.B.P. is not an extragovernmental militia, and so might not fit precisely into Snyder’s “On Tyranny” schema. But when I spoke to Snyder on Monday, he suggested the distinction isn’t that significant. “The state is allowed to use force, but the state is allowed to use force according to rules,” he said. These agents, operating outside their normal roles, are by all appearances behaving lawlessly.
Snyder pointed out that the history of autocracy offers several examples of border agents being used against regime enemies.
“This is a classic way that violence happens in authoritarian regimes, whether it’s Franco’s Spain or whether it’s the Russian Empire,” said Snyder. “The people who are getting used to committing violence on the border are then brought in to commit violence against people in the interior.”
Castro worries that since the agents are unidentified, far-right groups could easily masquerade as them to go after their enemies on the left. “It becomes more likely the more that this tactic is used,” he said. “I think it’s unconstitutional and dangerous and heading towards fascism.”
On Friday, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, tweeted about what’s happening in Portland: “Trump and his storm troopers must be stopped.” She didn’t mention what Congress plans to do to stop them, but the House will soon vote on a homeland security appropriations bill. People outraged about the administration’s police-state tactics should demand, at a minimum, that Congress hold up the department’s funding until those tactics are halted.
Through the Trump years, there’s been a debate about whether the president’s authoritarianism is tempered by his incompetence. Those who think concern about fascism is overblown can cite several instances when the administration has been beaten back after overreaching. But all too often the White House has persevered, deforming American life until what once seemed like worst-case scenarios become the status quo.
Trump has already established that his allies, like Michael Flynn and Roger Stone, are above the law. What happens now will tell us how many of us are below it.
he continues to fiddle while Rome burns
“What he continues to do is downplay not only the challenge to Georgians, but the deaths of Georgians,” Stacey Abrams, Kemp’s Democratic challenger in the 2018 gubernatorial race, said Wednesday on MSNBC. “More than 3,000 Georgians have perished, disproportionately black and brown Georgians. And he continues to fiddle while Rome burns.”
Russell Edwards, the Democratic mayor pro tempore in Kemp’s hometown of Athens, Ga., called on the governor to resign on Wednesday night, saying that even as hospitalizations rise, Kemp “continues to thwart and undermine the efforts of others.”
“@BrianKempGA fails to do right. And that’s putting it lightly,” Edwards wrote on Twitter. “His order today sabotages protections, banning local governments from requiring mask-wearing. Words fail to describe this monstrous behavior.”
Article
Elizabeth Warren
Opinion
To Fight the Pandemic, Here’s My Must-Do List
The Senate needs to act now. There is no time to waste.
By Elizabeth Warren
Ms. Warren is a Democratic senator from Massachusetts.
July 21, 2020
The New York Times
Americans stayed at home and sacrificed for months to flatten the curve and prevent the spread of the coronavirus. That gave us time to take the steps needed to address the pandemic — but Donald Trump squandered it, refusing to issue national stay-at-home guidelines, failing to set up a national testing operation and fumbling production of personal protective equipment. Now, Congress must again act as this continues to spiral out of control.
Those who frame the debate as one of health versus economics are missing the point. It is not possible to fix the economy without first containing the virus. We need a bold, ambitious legislative response that does four things: brings the virus under control; gets our schools, child care centers, businesses, and state and local governments the resources they need; addresses the burdens on communities of color; and supports struggling families who don’t know when the next paycheck will come.
Here’s what the next federal response must include:
Start with funding the robust public health measures we know will work to address this crisis: ramped-up testing, a national contact-tracing program and supply-chain investments to resolve medical supply shortages. Without these measures, we will not be able to adequately reopen safely, more people will die and there will be no economic recovery.
Our schools face enormous challenges, like figuring out whether and how to safely reopen, how to help students who fell further behind because of distance learning — disproportionately students of color. The next legislative package should include at least $500 billion to stabilize state and local governments and at least $175 billion for our public schools to help them reopen safely, avoid teacher layoffs and provide the mental health and other services our children require.
No one can reopen schools by just snapping fingers. No matter what Betsy DeVos says.
ImageChildren in an elementary school class wear masks and sit as desks spaced apart as per coronavirus guidelines during summer school sessions at Happy Day School in Monterey Park, California on July 9, 2020.
Children in an elementary school class wear masks and sit as desks spaced apart as per coronavirus guidelines during summer school sessions at Happy Day School in Monterey Park, California on July 9, 2020.Credit...Frederic J. Brown/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Parents are drowning. Child care centers and schools are closed, yet essential workers are expected to still go to work each day, or night. Even parents who can work from home are expected to feed the baby and help their children learn while participating in Zoom calls. We cannot begin to have a recovery without affordable child care. The next relief package must include $50 billion in emergency support to keep child care providers in business now and make long-term investments so more families can find affordable, high-quality and safe care in the future.
Rather than bullying businesses into reopening, then shielding them from liability when people inevitably get sick and die, let’s instead make sure they have the resources necessary to put the health and security of their workers first, and enforceable safety standards set by OSHA. The Essential Workers Bill of Rights, which I proposed with Representative Ro Khanna, would include federal money for hazard pay, sick leave, family and medical leave, and enforceable health and safety protections for all essential workers.
While the virus continues to rage, extended unemployment coverage is critical. Rather than set arbitrary expiration dates for unemployment insurance, let’s tie those benefits to real-time economic data. Families would be better off and we’d be investing in a stronger economic recovery.
The structural racism that has long existed in this country has caused the pandemic to hit Black and Latino neighborhoods and Indian Country especially hard. The next relief package must include Senate Democrats’ proposal for at least $350 billion immediately invested in these communities.
To avoid a tsunami that could put millions of people out on the street, Congress should extend and expand the national eviction moratorium, provide emergency rental assistance and increase funding for families experiencing homelessness. We should broadly cancel student loan debt so families don’t have a student debt bomb waiting for them on the other side of this pandemic — a burden that again falls disproportionately on students of color.
Americans are generous, but if they’re going to put up taxpayer money during this pandemic, we need strong anti-corruption protections like my CORE Act to make sure a bunch of Trump-connected businesses that can hire armies of lobbyists can’t swoop up big chunks of relief funding.
Our constituents are counting on us to deliver the relief they desperately need. The House passed a relief bill over two months ago. Now the Senate must act to contain the virus and to provide the funding so that our economy, our schools and our families can begin to recover. This is about saving lives and livelihoods — and we don’t have time to waste.
Elizabeth Warren is a Democratic senator from Massachusetts and a former presidential candidate.
an unexpected and better way
If you say that someone has reverted to type, you mean that they are now behaving as you would expect them to, after having behaved in an unexpected and better way.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man must consider what a rich realm he abdicates when he becomes a conformist.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Monday, July 20, 2020
Dehydration and hot weather
Article
The human body contains a high proportion of water, so when the temperature rises and the body tries to cool itself by sweating, dehydration can occur, particularly in children.
What is dehydration?
Dehydration is the loss of water and salts from the body. We need water to maintain our blood volume and blood pressure and to ensure our body functions properly. Along with water, the body also needs electrolytes, which are salts normally found in blood, other fluids, and cells.
Why do we need water?
The human body consists of nearly 60 per cent water; brain tissue is said to consist of about 85 per cent water.
Although fluid loss occurs during hard physical work, even simple tasks like gardening, walking or riding a bike can result in a significant loss of fluid within a very short period. We can also lose a lot of fluid in hot or humid conditions.
Babies and small children feel the effects of heat sooner and more seriously than adults. Children in cars need special protection from heat as cars can heat up very quickly. A parked, locked car can reach dangerously high temperatures very quickly, even if the windows are open slightly. You should never leave a child in a parked car — your child can quickly become overheated and dehydrated, with potentially fatal consequences.
Stages of dehydration
The early stages of dehydration usually have no signs or symptoms, but can include dryness of the mouth and thirst. Other symptoms of early or mild dehydration may include:
headache;
dry skin;
passing less urine than normal;
tiredness;
dizziness; and
cramping in the arms and legs.
As dehydration increases, signs may include:
extreme thirst and parched mouth and tongue;
rapid pulse;
dark, yellow urine;
little or no urination;
sunken eyes;
in infants, a sunken fontanelle (the soft spot on the top of the head);
skin that has lost its elasticity and doesn’t quickly return to its normal position after being pinched;
absence of tears when crying;
irritability or drowsiness; and
irrational behaviour.
If you are with someone, particularly a child or young person, who suddenly becomes dizzy, nauseated or weak during hot weather, get them indoors or in the shade. Replace lost fluids with water or an electrolyte solution and cool the person down with a tepid shower or sponge bath and by fanning air over their moist skin. Seek medical attention if the symptoms get worse or last for more than an hour.
If someone has dry, red skin, a fast pulse, looks confused or delirious, or feels very hot, that person is in extreme danger and you should seek medical attention immediately, as well as taking the steps outlined above.
During hot and humid weather, you are at higher risk of dehydration and heat-related illnesses, including cramps, heat exhaustion and heat stroke. In severe cases, dehydration and heat stroke can result in shock and even death.
How do I combat dehydration during hot weather?
Water should be given to counteract dehydration in hot or humid weather, regardless of your activity level. Drinking water helps lower your body temperature and replace the fluid you lose through sweating. It should be drunk before you get to the stage of feeling thirsty.
It’s best to remember that other drinks, such as soft drinks, coffee, or alcohol-containing beverages, are no substitute for water. Although they contain water, they also contain ingredients which are dehydrating.
Sports drinks contain carbohydrates and electrolytes and are useful if exercising in hot weather. Oral rehydration solutions such as Gastrolyte and Hydralyte are also suitable. They should be made up and given according to the manufacturer’s instructions. Children should be encouraged to drink water before, during and after exercising, especially if the weather is hot.
So-called ‘energy drinks’ contain caffeine or other stimulants, and are not an appropriate rehydration fluid. If in doubt, water is the preferred option in most cases.
Preventing dehydration during hot weather
It is recommended that during hot weather we should be drinking water even when not thirsty. You can tell if you are well hydrated if you do not feel thirsty and your urine is a dilute (clear) colour.
Other things you can do to avoid dehydration during hot weather include:
avoiding the sun in the middle of the day — exercise or do outdoor activities early in the morning or evening instead;
wearing sunscreen and a hat that shades your head, neck, ears and face — sunburn stops your body from cooling itself down properly;
wearing thin, loose clothing — this allows good airflow, which helps sweat evaporate; and
avoiding dark clothing, as this absorbs more heat than light clothing.
Hemingway
Don’t get discouraged because there’s a lot of mechanical work to writing. There is, and you can’t get out of it. I rewrote A Farewell to Arms at least fifty times. You’ve got to work it over. The first draft of anything is shit. When you first start to write you get all the kick and the reader gets none, but after you learn to work it’s your object to convey everything to the reader so that he remembers it not as a story he had read but something that happened to himself. That’s the true test of writing. When you can do that, the reader gets the kick and you don’t get any. You just get hard work and the better you write the harder it is because every story has to be better than the last one. It’s the hardest work there is. I like to do and can do many things better than I can write, but when I don’t write I feel like shit. I’ve got the talent and I feel that I’m wasting it.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Caleb Daniloff
No longer do I run from my demons, but run with them. We pace each other, the past and me. And some days, I go faster.
-Caleb Daniloff Running Ransom Road, xvii prologue
Harry Anderson
While the world is ablaze with fear and distrust, hate and disease, I intend to protect my own tender core by concentrating on hope, prosperity and love.
Harry Anderson
Article
A Navy vet asked federal officers in Portland to remember their oaths. Then they broke his hand.
"We’re all just normal people who think what’s happening is wrong.”
Memoir
Legler has started swimming again and, along with her advocacy work, including with the UN (she is moderating a panel about women’s equality and empowerment next week), modelling and work as an artist, she has spent the past decade mentoring formerly incarcerated children. “One of them asked me: ‘Is it hard being soft?’ And I was able to tell her it was the best thing that had happened to me.”
Godspeed by Casey Legler is published by Scribe (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
Mood Mantra
All of life is peaks and valleys. Don't let the peaks get too high and the valleys too low.
John Wooden
Lao Tzu
Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them - that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.
Lao Tzu
Viktor E. Frankl
For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment.
Viktor E. Frankl
Monday Musing
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
Viktor E. Frankl
We may have all come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Theodore Roosevelt
Showing off is the fool's idea of glory.
Bruce Lee
Sunday, July 19, 2020
A Sweltering Sunday
We took advantage of the heat wave and went ice skating. It was fabulous and only cost 5 bucks. I warmed up so I skated with thin khakis and a sleeveless tank top. After we skated for 2 hours the Zamboni came out. As we were leaving we saw 2 hockey kids show up. We drove home and drank iced coffee and snacked on pretzels and peanut butter. I made my favorite dinner; Chinese spicy garlic broccoli with almonds and brown rice. I also cooked 2 pounds of chick peas in the instant pot. It only took and hour from dry.
Ice Skating!!
PUBLIC SKATING SESSIONS
PUBLIC SKATING
TUESDAYS, FRIDAYS & SUNDAYS
12pm – 2pm
$5.00 Admission/$5.00 Rental
PUBLIC HOCKEY
MONDAYS & THURSDAYS
11am – 1pm
$5.00 Admission/Goalies Free
Full Equipment Required
All Public Skating Sessions are subject to change please contact the Ice Rink
at (401) 233-1051 extension #3 for updates.
Fruit Smoothies
It's a heat wave. We just made yogurt banana orange juice blueberries + ice smoothies.
Sun Mania
“It is not only night time in which one is able to dream, for with the sun also comes the most magnificent of ideas.”
— Nicole Addison
Three Writers
How I Came Out About My Disability
Three writers share how they revealed their disability, to a family member, to a love interest on a dating app and to oneself.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/13/us/disability-reveal.html
Rage
I don’t know if the virus will kill me or if it’s going to be my rage. Sometimes I want to cut America into different pieces, and all these anti-maskers can live together, and we’ll see how it works.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07/18/covid-pandemic-store-clerk-north-carolina/?arc404=true
Thrift And Fearlessness
Woo has always been thrifty. During the company’s early days, she’d hunt for cashmere fabric at the Rose Bowl flea market, Badt recalls. Leftover fabric from cutting and sewing that other brands would toss, Woo catalogued and stored, not really knowing what they might be good for. That meant her initial run of hundreds of masks didn’t cost a penny in materials since she had 22 years’ worth of high-quality scrap material saved up.
Article
Saturday, July 18, 2020
Broken Foods
Broken foods, such as cookies, pretzels or chips have no calories. Calories leak out when the item breaks
Loran McEvoy
James Baldwin
You go into a book and you're in the dark, really. You go in with a certain fear and trembling. You know one thing. You know you will not be the same person when this voyage is over. But you don't know what's going to happen to you between getting on the boat and stepping off.
JAMES BALDWIN
ultimate odd couple, the doctor and the president
One is a champion of truth and facts. The other is a master of deceit and denial. One is highly disciplined, working 18-hour days. The other can’t be bothered to do his homework and golfs instead. One is driven by science and the public good. The other is a public menace, driven by greed and ego. One is a Washington institution. The other was sent here to destroy Washington institutions. One is incorruptible. The other corrupts. One is apolitical. The other politicizes everything he touches — toilets, windows, beans and, most fatally, masks.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/18/opinion/fauci-trump-coronavirus.html