Just Between Strangersmusings tossed into the void . . . |
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So who’s really being un-American here? Not the protesters, who are simply trying to get their voices heard. No, the real extremists here are America’s oligarchs, who want to suppress any criticism of the sources of their wealth.Indeed. Keep up the good work, frustrated average citizens! The public understands where you're coming from!!
There are a lot of people who are getting an unusually raw deal right now. There is a small group of people who are getting an unusually good deal right now. That doesn’t sound to me like a stable equilibrium.Only time will tell whether this set of demonstrations becomes symbolic of such woes to the more general American public, but if that connection persists, we might have the start of a real revolution, which is something I think that this country is in dire need of.
For me, the experience was less of recall from my own childhood -- honestly, who remembers anything specific from age 4? -- than of an overwhelming wave of appreciation for this man and his approach to children, his understanding of their questions about the world, and his ability to talk to them right out of the television in a way that made them want to answer back and care about their friendship with him. It was all I could do to not openly weep right there on the couch, and this little exchange of letters allowed me to do it just now at the office instead. What a delicate appreciation he had of the people he was addressing, and a gentle way of giving them a gift from a distance.
(via whiskey river)
The only thing that is real is that we have six roots within us. Three roots of good and three roots of evil. The latter are greed, hate and delusion, but we also have their opposites: generosity, love and wisdom. Take an interest in this matter.If one investigates this and doesn't get anxious about it, then one can easily accept these six roots in everybody. No difficulty at all, when one has seen them in oneself. They are the underlying roots of everyone's behavior. Then we can look at ourselves a little more realistically, namely not blaming ourselves for the unwholesome roots, not patting ourselves on the back for the wholesome ones, but rather accepting their existence within us. We can also accept others more clear-sightedly and have a much easier time relating to them. We will not suffer from disappointments and we won't blame, because we won't live in a world where only black or white exists. Such a world doesn't exist.
- - Ayya Khema
I no longer fear bad men doing bad things. I now fear ignorant people doing ignorant things out of their own misguided fear that the world is a horrible place.Ridiculous that we are afraid to exercise our own parental judgement, to live our lives as if those around us were doing the same...
How have we changed in the last ten years? Only insofar as we've learned nothing, continue to give up our freedoms, get used to continuous intrusions on our rights and persons in the name of "security." Just ask this everyday Ohio mom who was detained and treated like dirt for having the nerve to, um, fly in a plane while brown? There appears to be no penalty for cruelty and injustice anymore, as long as somebody is sufficiently nervous along the way, and nobody has any concrete rights that they can rely on once DHS is involved. It's more than scary -- it's alienating, infuriating, heart-rending. This isn't who we wanted to be; why have we let bin Laden push us there?The Google+ common name policy is insane. It creates an antisocial space in what is supposed to be a social network. It is at odds with basic human social behavior; its implementation is NECESSARILY arbitrary and infuriating, and it is actively damaging the Google+ brand and indeed the broader Google brand.Indeed, people are fleeing the network, the Blogger host, and even finding alternative search engines. The wondrous allure of "starting over" with all the lessons of Facebook in hand has been wiped away by this demonstration of complete obliviousness to how people operate in the world (of which the Internet is just one slice)...
(directly from Eschaton)
A Modest Proposal
Since conservatives claim to believe that the stimulus destroyed the economy, how about we have Stimulus II which only goes to states with Democratic governors. Everybody's happy!
- - Atrios
My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.You tell 'em, Warren!
(via whiskey river)
Questions Before Dark
Day ends, and before sleep
when the sky dies down, consider
your altered state: has this day
changed you? Are the corners
sharper or rounded off? Did you
live with death? Make decisions
that quieted? Find one clear word
that fit? At the sun's midpoint
did you notice a pitch of absence,
bewilderment that invites
the possible? What did you learn
from things you dropped and picked up
and dropped again? Did you set a straw
parallel to the river, let the flow
carry you downstream?
- - Jeanne Lohmann
The Light of Invisible Bodies
beyond the fields we know
(via Medley)
A good jobs program would be paying people to whiteout 2011 on calendars and replace with 1937.
- - ntoddpax
(NTodd Pritsky)
Wow. Boehner on whether his bill will prevent downgrade of U.S. creditworthiness: "That is beyond my control."
- Josh Marshall, at TPM
(via whiskey river)
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.
- - David Whyte
Sweet Darkness
The House of Belonging
A number of commentators seem shocked at how unreasonable Republicans are being. “Has the G.O.P. gone insane?” they ask.
Why, yes, it has. But this isn’t something that just happened, it’s the culmination of a process that has been going on for decades. Anyone surprised by the extremism and irresponsibility now on display either hasn’t been paying attention, or has been deliberately turning a blind eye.
I also agree with Krugman that this craziness has spread in large part because there has been no cost associated with it -- no outcry, no push-back, not even really much negotiation against it. Perhaps the uncrazy just dismissed such things, forgetting that repetition leads to establishment as truth. Anyway, am happy to see any amount of debunking and disgrace that can be mustered, but a little pessimistic that we can manage such before the ship of state hits one iceberg or another...
Holy crap! Apt, and not at all funny...
"I'll take [Boehner/Cantor/Lannisters/Littlefinger] at his word!" I just realized: Obama negotiates like Ned Stark. Now, winter is coming.
- - Kevin Murphy (kcm74 on Twitter)
(via whiskey river)Whether success or failure: the truth of a life really has little to do with its quality. The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.
- - May Sarton
Twi Chi
Worth a listen. I have yet to find any lamp-like LED product that didn't make me feel this way; there are some tragically appealing but useless stone garden lights in my furnace closet as prime examples...To call these candles at all is an insult to every pig that died to yield the tallow fat that lit the literary and creative endeavors of mankind up until the electric era.
(via Medley)
It doesn't TAKE all kinds. We just HAVE all kinds.
- alittlepregnant
It is more profitable for them and their large fast food and supermarket customers to handle and sell tomatoes that are harvested in two or three passes when they are green, indestructibly hard, and impeccably smooth skinned and have a couple of weeks of shelf life ahead of them. Taste does not enter the equation. "No consumer tastes a tomato in the grocery store before buying it. I have not lost one sale due to taste," one grower said. "People just want something red to put in their salad."Ack! Gotta get a garden plot up and running!
On these terms, today's GOP could not be less conservative. I'd insist it's less conservative than Obama. It does not present reality-based reform for emergent problems. It simply reiterates dogma and ruthlessly polices dissent or debate.
I don't know what it will take to undermine the ascendancy of the Tea Partiers and other frothy right-wingers, but I hope that some sanity can return before they drive our country to financial ruin and the loss of any moral authority that our national ideals once gave us.But for most of us, achieving the state expected of us wouldn’t just be a matter of trying, it would be the equivalent of earning a Ph.D. in astrophysics while simultaneously working swing shift as a police officer and raising triplets as a single parent — and we’d never get to stop. Maybe someone can actually do this, but expecting it to be a routine occurrence is, frankly, an expectation not supported by existing evidence.
(via whiskey river)
You, as you are, you're just right.
Your parents, your children, your daughter-in-law, your grandchildren,
they are, all for you, just right.
Happiness, unhappiness, joy and even sorrow,
for you, they are just right.
The life that you tread is neither good nor bad.
For you, it is just right.
Whether you go to hell or to the Pure Land,
wherever you go is just right.
Nothing to boast about, nothing to feel bad about,
nothing above, nothing below.
Even the day and month that you die,
even they are just right.
- - fragment of a Shin Buddhist poem in Taitetsu Unno's book,
River of Fire, River of Water
Have been listening to Lady Gaga recently, and I like her stuff very much, but it's impossible to have been a teen in the 1980s and not hear classic/early Madonna in many of her songs (as well as influences from other stars of a similar era). I picked up that the bridge in Born This Way was a hat-tip to Vogue, but I had no idea that the parallels ran this close; give anything 30 years and it's new again, in the right hands at least. More power to her for having learned the right lessons from that previous incarnation -- boppin' pop + continually repackaged outrageousness can make for serious longevity!The overall May 2011 unemployment rate still hovered around 9% and the rates for African Americans (16.2%) and Latinos (11.9%) were even higher, not to mention the youth unemployment rate (24.2%). But guess what the most relevant rate for those Washington insiders themselves might be?Deficits, schmeficits. We need to do something to create jobs -- short-term, long-term, make-work, whatever -- before the bottom really falls out of things. When 60% of the unemployed have been out for more than 6 months, you're looking at a huge swath of people just giving up...
Now that was a relatively puny 4.5% in May. Which explains why the Village can concentrate on worrying about the deficits.
That is, cell phones may well increase cancer risk -- not enough data to confirm, but enough to flag as a concern. Now who's paranoid?(via whiskey river)
Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.
- - Louise Erdrich
I have learned to be happy where I am. I have learned that locked within the moments of each day are all the joys, the peace, the fibers of the cloth we call life. The meaning is in the moment. There is no other way to find it. You feel what you allow yourself to feel, each and every moment of the day.
- - Russ Berrie
You have used up the years and they have used up you, and still, and still, you have not written the poem.
- - Borges
(via riskywiver)
An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
- - G. K. Chesterton
Have been driven to action by this study, which indicates that it's not really safe to store any of your food or drinks in any kind of plastic.The researchers were able to measure some type of estrogenic chemical leaching from roughly 95 percent of all the plastics tested, including 100 percent of the food wraps and 98 percent of the plastic bags. Even when the plastics were unstressed and just exposed to various solutions, they still leached estrogenic chemicals.Am trying to find glass or stainless steel alternatives to our mishmash of plastic containers, while also factoring in the need for unbreakable toddler options and leakproof lunch solutions. Looks like a pretty big project, but I expect to have many decades yet in which my body can thank me...
(via nowthis)
Since the media is so stuck on the passive-aggressive phrase "openly gay", can we also get them to use "current wife" for politicians?
- - urbanbohemian (Brian Gray)
(via whiskey river)
Advice to Myself
Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don't patch the cup.
Don't patch anything. Don't mend. Buy safety pins.
Don't even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don't keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll's tiny shoes in pairs, don't worrywho uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic - decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don't even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don't sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we're all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don't answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in though the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don't read it, don't read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.
- - Louise Erdrich
Original Fire: Selected and New Poems
Wow, hard to believe that 6 months have sneaked by, but I seem to have the list of new developments to support it. Most obvious to the casual observer is that you've become a creator of games -- crawling or slithering across the floor, jumping down the stairs ("don't touch!"), making up rules for kicking and chasing a ball outdoors (even if not always followable by mortal parents), and inventing other silliness on the fly. You love to pop any bubblewrap that crosses your path (initially it took great zen-like concentration, but recently you discovered the destructive power of dancing across a sheet of the stuff on your heels!). And you craftily substitute a triumphant raspberry for the occasional good-night kiss, much to your own amusement.
-- most notable is that as you began to give some common words their full three syllables, they didn't always end up in the right place ("beanna," "amitals," and "elphantant" are the most notable). But you've picked up on the family game of substituting topical lyrics into familiar songs (especially anything that can be sung to the theme of "Maisy"), and you like to make up your own words for things (like "cun") and ask for them to be worked into books that are read to you (a challenge to tired parents!). Further, there are *many* signs that you are hungry to be able to read: you want to take your turn at "reading" favorite books aloud, sometimes riffing on the images and other times working in turns of phrase from the original text; you recognize all the names in Winnie the Pooh, and can integrate them smoothly into your concoctions when you read those tales to us; and you are picking out more and more individual words (apparently deciding for yourself the controversy between word-recognition and phonetics modes of learning).
There are things we have enjoyed less: a period when you wanted us to read you one book while you flipped through another; the congealing of the frog nap game into a sort of running discipline proxy battle; a rise in violent rhetoric, including threats to "chop you up to bits" (or "make a mama-loaf") or "throw you out of the house"; elaborate rituals of reverse psychology, as when every peanut-butter sandwich had to be accompanied by great shows of longing from Mom, combined with "you missed your chance" taunts; and a return of biting, most dismaying at times when it arose in a context of snuggling and affection. I guess we're getting resigned to the idea that such things are never a phase that is truly past, just a cycle that comes and goes, and to trying to find the connection even amidst the exhaustion and conflict.
If you arranged members of Congress from left to right based on how they voted on welfare-state issues—Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance—it turned out that this left-to-right axis could predict every other vote: On Iraq expenditures, on abortion, whatever. “When you realize the fundamental divide in U.S. politics is just this one-dimensional thing, and that is how you feel about the welfare state,” Krugman says, “that changes things.”We have so little basis anymore for discussion of class issues or the value of the welfare state that we seem to be pulled hither and thither by the proposals of conservatives, unable to rally the public to a wider defense on the basis of values arguments. Perhaps we can find our way back, and along the way help Krugman feel less alone...
(via whiskey river)
To This May
They know so much more now aboutthe heart we are told but the world
still seems to come one at a time
one day one year one season and here
it is spring once more with its birds
nesting in the holes in the walls
its morning finding the first time
its light pretending not to move
always beginning as it goes
- - W. S. Merwin
Thank goodness our current Supreme Court is there to protect them from any disturbance or unhappiness! Wouldn't want them to have to watch where they're putting their feet down all the time... [head-desk]
Arranged loosely by age of child...It's a measure of how crazed we have become on this topic that just saying, "It's not such a big deal!" is a big deal. Our culture is hung up on mama's milk, and the undercurrent is: Why should anyone consider what is best for the mom when the baby's whole future is at stake?If only sanity had a chance!
Police in the US now rival criminals, and exceed terrorists as the greatest threat to the American public.When civil liberties extend only up to the point where you get arrested (rightly or wrongly), you're not living in a civilized nation. These guys in New Orleans make the 1980s LAPD look sort of mannered!
This tot has a seriously delirious giggle. Apparently he loves bubbles and his dog does too. Hard to beat a good time for all!Because they can, if you just let them. Because sometimes a job well done is a reward unto itself. Because it feels good to be a family member, instead of just a dependent. Because everyone wants to walk strong and smart and confident in this world.Kids need to play, but they need to feel that they're doing things that matter too. We need to remember that they can manage a lot more than we sometimes think...
Now winter, the winter I am writing about, begins to ease. And what, if anything, has been determined, selected, nailed down? This is the lesson of age – events pass, things change, trauma fades, good fortune rises, fades, rises again but different. Whereas what happens when one is twenty, as I remember it, happens forever. I have not been twenty for a long time! The sun rolls toward the north and I feel, gratefully, its brightness flaming up once more. Somewhere in the world the misery we can do nothing about yet goes on.(via whiskey river)
- - Mary Oliver
(via whiskey river)
The truths we have come to understand need to find their visible expression in our lives. It is not enough to be a possessor of wisdom. To believe ourselves to be custodians of truth is to become its opposite, is a direct path to becoming stale, self-righteous, or rigid. Ideas and memories do not hold liberating or healing power. There is no such state as enlightened retirement, where we can live on the bounty of past attainments. Wisdom is alive only as long as it is lived, understanding is liberating only as long as it is applied. A bulging portfolio of spiritual experiences matters little if it does not have the power to sustain us through the inevitable moments of grief, loss, and change. Knowledge and achievements matter little if we do not yet know how to touch the heart of another and be touched.
- - Jack Kornfield
(retweeted by Medley)
Impressive that our expectations of government have shrunk to "don't shut down" and may still be unmet.
- pourmecoffee
Obama administration curtails rights for terror suspects -- same as the old boss?? See also US military's "gratuitously harsh treatment" of Manning condemned by NYT, WaPo, LAT, ACLU and Clinton To Congress: Obama Would Ignore Your War Resolutions -- it all makes me want to cry.What's key to understand about this model is that what ends up in the various spheres has very little to do with empirical or logical merit. These are not truth categories, they are categories of practice, shaped by social forces. In other words, they are deeply, intrinsically political, though "objective" reporters seem almost incapable of recognizing that they are engaging in political choices.
A lot has happened over the past 30 years, but if you're looking for a single political sea change that's had the biggest impact on middle class wages—more important than union decline, more important than NAFTA, more important than the end of Glass-Steagall—it's the political consensus that underlies the Fed's reluctance to allow labor markets to stay tight enough to generate wage increases in the real economy. And it's something we're seeing all over again right now, as the DC chattering classes have almost unanimously decided that inflation is our real enemy right now, even though core inflation is running around 1% and unemployment is still near 9%.
In a rational world, there should be no discussion of the deficit as policy. Team D and Team R would present their competing visions for what the government should spend money on, and where that money should come from. ... Ideally, we'd have one party that thinks we should spend a bit more on things like social safety nets, and do so with more progressive taxation, and one party which thinks we should spend a bit less, and with more regressive taxation, and the voters would have a reasonably clear choice.Sounds like crazy socialist Euro-think!
The federal government is full of smart, competent, persuasive people working in a system that prevents them from rapidly addressing even the problems with obvious solutions. Let’s see some realistic thought experiments that address that.
Interested in local politics of Philadelphia and/or PA? Check out A Smoke-Filled Room
The regional heavyweights are summarized at
Those who would trade an essential freedom for temporary security deserve neither freedom nor security.
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