Other Venezuelans are much more cautious. “You kill Maduro,” one businessman there confided, “you turn Venezuela into Haiti.” After all, the weak opposition would have a hard time holding the country together amid a scramble for power and oil. Longtime international affairs expert Leon Hadar points out that such carnage would not just be a problem for Venezuela. “Venezuela has already produced over seven million refugees and migrants,” he writes. “A state collapse scenario could easily double that number. Colombia, Brazil and other neighbors are already overwhelmed. Where do Trump and his advisors think these people will go?”
Data centers consumed 4.4% of U.S. electricity in 2023, and are expected to triple the demand by 2028.
From 2017 to 2024, the number of data centers in the U.S. increased from 318 to 5,208.
Creating an AI video requires more than 10,000x the computing power of a Google search.
Even so, 37 states have now granted tax exemptions for data centers, including ones owned by Google, Meta and Amazon. CNBC found that “one Microsoft data center in Illinois received more than $38 million in data center sales tax exemptions but created just 20 permanent jobs.” counterpunch.org/2025/10/10/ro… #AIWaste #AISubdidy #AIは無理
It was only at the beginning of the early modern era, at about the time of the conquest of the Banda Islands, that a tiny group of elite European men, many of whom were deeply implicated in colonialism, invented a philosophy in which sentience, thought, reason, and historical agency were ascribed solely to human beings, with the result that vitalist beliefs of all kinds came to be contested, denied and violently suppressed. Over the following centuries, with the Western conquest of most of the world, this kind of human-centeredness became a core component of elite ideologies everywhere in the world, even in formerly colonized countries like India and Indonesia.
Today, as the planet hurtles towards environmental and societal breakdown, brought about by the interlinked vectors of global warming, biodiversity loss, species extinctions and the spread of new pathogens, it is becoming ever more evident that modernity was founded on a profoundly mistaken understanding of the world, and that the elevation of humans above all other species, and indeed the Earth itself, has had disastrous consequences for humanity as well as all other living Beings.
🧵 > Today, as the planet hurtles towards environmental and societal breakdown, brought about by the interlinked vectors of global warming, biodiversity loss, species extinctions and the spread of new pathogens, it is becoming ever more evident that modernity was founded on a profoundly mistaken understanding of the world, and that the elevation of humans above all other species, and indeed the Earth itself, has had disastrous consequences for humanity as well as all other living Beings. #LivingBeings #BiodiversityLoss #SocietalBreakdown @bsmall2@nerdica.net
> The discrediting of modernity’s anthropocentrism is itself a part of the ongoing collapse that we are now witnessing. Now, as it begins to dawn on us that there is much to be learnt from premodern ideas and understandings, the Earth suddenly seems to teem with sentience as we come to understand that we have always been surrounded by many kinds of Beings who also have spirits and souls and are richly alive. High modernity taught us that the Earth was inert and existed primarily to be exploited by human beings: in this time of monstrous anomalies, we are slowly beginning to understand that in order to ensure a future for humanity we must learn to recognize that we have never been alone on this planet, that the Earth itself is watching, and judging, us. > To come to this realization has taken me a very long time...
Yes, the turkey seems to be growing, maturing very quickly. I'm trying to get a photo that makes it easy to compare their feathers at their wingtips. Everyday the turkey's seem noticeably longer.
> ... one of Dewey's central themes, that the ultimate aim of production is not production of goods but the production of free human beings associated with one another on terms of equality. That includes, of course, education, which was a prime concern of his. The goal of education, to shift over to Bertrand Russell, is "to give a sense of the value of things other than domination, to help create wise citizens of a free community, to encourage a combination of citizenship with liberty, individual creativeness, which means that we regard a child as a gardener regards a young tree, as something with an intrinsic nature which will develop into an admirable form given proper soil and air and light."
Courage due to the will produces nervous disorders, of which "shell-shock" afforded numerous instances. The fears which had been repressed forced their way to the surface in ways not recognizable to introspection. I do not mean to suggest that self-control can be dispensed with entirely ; on the contrary, no man can live a consistent life without it. What I do mean is, that self-control ought only to be needed in unforeseen situations, for which education has not provided in advance. It would have been foolish, even if it had been possible, to train the whole population to have, without effort, the sort of courage that was needed in the war. This was an exceptional and temporary need, of so extraordinary a kind that all other education would have had to be stunted if the habits required in the trenches had been instilled in youth. （掲載日：2015.03.3／更新日： ） russell-j.com/beginner/OE04-10… #RusselOnCourage
Hitherto, men have thought it attractive in women to be full of irrational terrors, because it gave men a chance to seem protective without incurring any real danger. But the sons of these men have acquired the terrors from their mothers, and have had to be afterwards trained to regain a courage which they need never have lost if their fathers had not desired to despise their mothers. The harm that has been done by the subjection of women is incalculable; this matter of fear affords only one incidental illustration. russell-j.com/beginner/OE02-12… #RusselFeminism ??
Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption. [The measure of social status, of social acceptance, of prestige, is now to be found in our consumptive patterns. The very meaning and significance of our lives today expressed in consumptive terms. The greater the pressures upon the individual to conform to safe and accepted social standards, the more does he tend to express his aspirations and his individuality in terms of what he wears, drives, eats- his home, his car, his pattern of food serving, his hobbies. These commodities and services must be offered to the consumer with a special urgency. We require not only “forced draft” consumption, but “expensive” consumption as well.] We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing pace. We need to have people eat, drink, dress, ride, live, with ever more complicated and, therefore, constantly more expensive consumption. The home power tools and the whole “do-it-yourself” movement are excellent examples of “expensive” consumption.
🧵 > Car buyers held their vehicles for an average of two and a quarter years, and "The Ford Motor Company in one of its advertisements said this showed how smart and shrewd the average motorcar owner was becoming. At taht age, it pointed out, the car starts showing minor ailments and dents. Further, it stated, "The car is two ears old in style. Its fine edge is gone." Substitute Apple for Ford and Ipod[FoolPhone] for motorcar, and it's a sentence tat could be written this afternoon---indeed.. written on a [micro]blog[toot]... #BillMcKibben @bsmall2@nerdica.net
_Towards Liberal Education_ or another Humanities essay collection had something about Cadillac and the style changes and marketing niches. It had me looking for ways to search and replace Cadilllac with CellFoolPhone.. But it looks like Bill McKibben has already done it in his introduction to #VancePackard's #TheWasteMakers..
Maybe AI (Salami LLM stuff) is like the tacky fins and different bells and whistles that used to ornately decorate big cruising cars... I hope we can avoid wasting ourselves along the ecology of our lives... @bsmall2@nerdica.net
Ressa, who won the 2021 Nobel peace prize for her fight for freedom of expression in the Philippines, told Stewart people the world over were electing “illiberal leaders democratically because of insidious manipulation … [which] starts with the manipulation and corruption of our public information ecosystem”. She said “there is a ‘dictator’s playbook’”, comparing the Trump administration’s attacks on alleged Venezuelan drug boats to former president Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal crackdown on drug-dealing in the Philippines.
They ordered Colonel Jacob Smith, who had participated in the Wounded Knee massacre in the Dakota Territory a decade before, to proceed to Samar and do whatever was necessary to subdue the rebels. Smith arrived, took charge of the remaining garrisons, and ordered his men to kill everyone over the age of ten and turn the island’s interior into “a howling wilderness.”
“I want no prisoners,” he told them. “I wish you to kill and burn. The more you kill and the more you burn, the better you will please me.”
Another Wednesday night Free Software time slot! This 7(?) year old girl has been intent on learning chess moves with G-compris durig her last 3 or 4 visits. She comes every other week with he Mom who is the Hip Hop Dance instructor. I was distracted while signing with the two nice Deaf woman and the Mom had to request the PC setup for her daughter. The GNU/Linux Debian Gnome setup that boots to G-Compris was all set up, I just had to get a guy to move to another table so the girl could sit down and focus on chess. She was quick.. I've been going through the HipHop stretching warm up routine with the Mom but got called over to the PC. The girl somehow ended up with 8 applications opened over 5 workspaces. When a new blank workspace opened up the logo key was either forgotten or wasn't helpful enough. I had to close Inkscape and Gimp so she could focus on Fellswoop, "Five in a row"?, and Nibbles. Nibbles with the arrow controls is hard on this laptops keyboard. Maybe it's hard in general of little young people? But the girl is intent. Maybe she'll take it on as a challenge over the next month or so... Maybe I should ask around for an old game controller or find some way to make it more intuitive for a 7yo?
While Kirk’s murder was bad news for democracy—as no one ever deserves to be killed for their speech—the media reaction glossed over the role that President Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again movement, and Kirk himself, as a prominent supporter of that movement, have helped to legitimize the kind of political violence that Kirk apparently fell victim to.
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You have a government that hates you, you have a traitor as the president. Buy weapons, I keep on saying that. Buy weapons. Buy ammo. if you go into a public place, bring a gun with you…. Thank goodness in Arizona we can carry, and we carry.
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The Times quoted Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, saying “I think that you have a cultural civil war underway.” (Gingrich has been waging cultural civil war for a long time now; in 1990, he put out a memo urging Republican candidates to tar their opponents with words like “sick…pathetic…traitors”—Extra! Update, 2/95).
In the wake of Kirk’s murder, it was taboo to point out that his politics, and those of the MAGA movement he embraced, contributed to a culture of hatred and demonization. MSNBC pundit Matthew Dowd was promptly fired by the cable network after he observed:
Hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions…. You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and then not expect awful actions to take place.
When Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, in condemning violence, remarked that “I think the president’s rhetoric often foments it,” the Washington Post (9/10/25) editorialized that this was “a disgracefully ill-timed comment.”
In fact, there is no better time to point out that the right-wing movement Kirk was a crucial part of has played the leading role in dehumanizing others and normalizing violence. Failure to honestly examine the politics that are driving extremism will steer us away from the kind of analysis and action that are needed to prevent more tragedies.
Wink's interpretation of the New Testament is that Jesus was not a pacifist milksop but (among other things) was encouraging people to resist the dominant power system of the era, that being the Roman Empire. Mind you, Wink is no fan of violence either, and he devotes a lot of ink to attacking what he calls the Myth of Redemptive Violence, which he sees as a meme by which domination systems are perpetuated. But he is clearly all in favor of people standing up against oppressive power systems of all stripes.
Wink takes a general interest in people in various places who are getting the shaft. He develops an empirical science of shaftology, if you will. (Of course he doesn't call it shaftology; that's just my name for it.) He goes all over the world and looks at different kinds of people who are obviously getting the shaft
The dispossession of the working class, 30 million who have been laid off because of deindustrialization, has engendered rage, despair, dislocation, alienation and fostered magical thinking. It has fed conspiracy theories, a lust for vengeance and a celebration of violence as a purgative for social and cultural decay.
Christian fascists — like Kirk and Trump — have astutely preyed on this despair. They stoked the embers. Kirk’s killing will set it alight.
Martyrs are memorialized in ceremonies and acts of remembrance to remind followers of the righteousness of the cause and the perfidy of those who are blamed for the martyr’s death. This is what Trump did when he called Kirk “a martyr for truth and freedom” in a video message on September 10, awarded Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom and ordered flags to be flown at half-staff until Sunday. It is why Kirk’s casket will be flown back to Phoenix, Arizona on Air Force Two.
Dissidents, artists, gays, intellectuals, the poor, the vulnerable, people of color, those who are undocumented or who do not mindlessly repeat the cant of a perverted Christian nationalism, will be condemned as human contaminants to be excised from the body politic. They will become, as in all diseased societies, sacrificial victims in the vain attempt to achieve moral renewal and recapture a lost glory and prosperity.
Kirk’s killing is a harbinger of full-scale social disintegration.
His murder has given the movement he represented — grounded in Christian nationalism — a martyr. Martyrs are the lifeblood of violent movements. Any flinching over the use of violence, any talk of compassion or understanding, any effort to mediate or discuss, is a betrayal of the martyr and the cause the martyr died defending.
The cannibalization of society, a futile attempt to recreate a mythical America, will accelerate the disintegration. The intoxication of violence — many of those reacting to Kirk’s killing seemed giddy about a looming bloodbath — will feed on itself like a firestorm.
The martyr is vital to the crusade, in this case ridding America of those Trump calls the “radical left.”
> Kirk and his killer are this past week’s.. Brian Thompson and Luigi Mangione. > ... notoriety will persist for more than the usual short news cycle, with bumps during associated court cases, etc., but none of them were so wildly noteworthy before their tragic interactions that they’ll be universally remembered a decade... hence. > That thought might comfort you. > It shouldn’t. > Last year, about 17,000 Americans were murdered. > How many of their names do you remember? counterpunch.org/2025/09/15/ch…
+ According to a tally by Drop Site News, there have been at least 70 teachers, professors, administrators and journalists fired over remarks they made about Kirk since his murder.
+ Arizona sports outlet PHNX Sports fired its lead reporter on the Phoenix Suns, Gerald Bourguet, after Bourguet questioned why outrage over right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s killing was louder than outrage over school shootings, mass deportations, or the “hundreds of videos of horrific murders in Gaza (which Kirk cheered on)
+ On the night John Lennon was gunned down, Howard Cosell was ridiculed for briefly interrupting a Monday Night Football game of little consequence to break the news of his murder outside the Dakota. Yesterday, all but four NFL games held a moment of silence for rightwing podcaster Charlie Kirk and the four teams that didn’t are now under fire for not doing so…
+ RFK, Jr. at the Charlie Kirk memorial service at the Kennedy Center: “I met Charlie in 2001 and we became soul mates.” Kirk was 8 years old in 2001.
+ Intriguingly, Kirk was killed as his views on Israel, which he once boasted he would “kill and die” for, had begun to moderate, ever so slightly–evidence of just how deeply Israel’s genocide in Gaza has begun to blowback against its supporters in the US. He spoke out against GOP plans to expand laws banning anti-Israel boycotts, claiming attempts to suppress the BDS movement would backfire on the party and “play into growing narratives that Israel is running the U.S. government.” Kirk opposed the crackdowns on campus protests when they targeted US citizens:
+ Neighbor of Tyler Robinson: “The way he carries himself and speaks to others. I thought he’d be a C.E.O. or a businessman. He had good leadership qualities.”
+ Back in 2003, during peak post-9/11/Iraq War patriotic fever, when, as Dylan said of the McCarthy Era, "as long as you don't say nothing, you can say
Chomsky commented somewhere that debates ate not helpful for thought or discovery.. it's a competition to win not a conversation where you might change your mind. I think Chomsky said it was stupid.
Debate is a sport, and some people are very good at it, as he was, and it is not a reliable route to truth or clarity or anything else except who is more ruthless, relentless, has more rhetorical chops, etc. I mean it's dueling by verbiage and vehemence, and just like dueling with pistols or jousting with lances, all it settlesis better at the sport. (I know there is debate with rules in high schools and colleges, and then there's the free-for-all versions....)
He let college students pose questions and then (often, not always; see first comment) trounced them and somehow that was very appealing to a lot of people, which says a lot, but not that he was right or had his facts in line. Someone better than him at the sport--a top-notch courtroom lawyer, a lot of grownups--could have probably destroyed him in a debate not corrupted by interruptions and crowd roars, because he repeated a lot of MAGA nonsense. The clip I heard was him demanding his interlocutor say only yes or no to "can a man have a baby," and of course one thing I've learned in a lifetime of trying to avoid bullies is when you let them frame the argument you've already lost. Biological sex as all up-to-date people is a complex formulation, and also a number of trans men have given birth to children.
... as a movement strategist, he relied upon and advanced lies and bigotry—including falsehoods that fueled violence and an assault on our national foundation. That was not a side gig for Kirk. It was a core component of his organizing. He did not practice politics the right way. He used deceit to develop his movement and to weaken the United States. His assassination is heinous and frightening and warrants widespread condemnation. It should prompt reflection on what is happening within the nation and what needs to be done to prevent further political violence. It should not protect him or others who engage in such politics of extremism from critical review.
Education is, of course, in part a matter of schools and colleges and the formal information systems. That's true whether the goal of education is education for freedom and democracy, as Dewey advocated, or education for obedience and subordination and marginalization, as the dominant institutions require. The University of Chicago sociologist James Coleman, one of the main students of education and effects of experience on children's lives, concludes from many studies that "the total effect of home background is considerably greater than the total effect of school variables in determining student achievement." Actually, about twice as powerful in effect, he concludes from a lot of studies. So it's therefore important to have a look at how social policy and the dominant culture are shaping these factors, home influences and so on.
Leading the vengeful posse is Donald Trump, blaming 'radical left political violence,' before we even know who shot Kirk, ignoring Trump’s own long history of inflamed political rhetoric. True to this history, Trump is now promising to “find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity, and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it” (who knows how wide he will cast that net). Yet, five minutes research would make clear that the vast bulk of recent political violence in America comes from the right and much of it is in Trump’s name.
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Trump supporter Vance Luther Boelter murdered Democratic state Rep Melissa Hortman and her husband in June (incidentally, after that murder, Trump said he wouldn’t ‘waste time’ making a condolence call to “whacked out” Minnesota Governor Tim Waltz). Trump supporter Cody Balmer tried to murder Democrat governor Josh Shapiro, and his family in April. Cesar Sayoc, who sent pipe bombs to the homes of Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton and Joe Biden was a Trump supporter. Solomon Peña, who was found guilty in March of orchestrating attacks against state Democrats, was a Trump supporter. David DePape, who tried to kidnap Nancy Pelosi and assaulted her husband with a hammer was a rightwing conspiracy theorist and Trump supporter. I can ignore the pathetically poor state of political discourse in the US because I don’t live there but I can’t ignore partisan garbage on my FB wall.
The murder of Charlie Kirk, graphically shown across X and other platforms, has triggered a tsunami of rightwing bile, blaming the 'left' (whatever that means) and threatening payback (I just saw Fox...
Working on a meme-sort of image with Erika E.'s photo and quotes from Albert Camus's _Myth of Sisyphus_ > A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock... There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn. --- Albert Camus in Myth of Sisyphus > Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth.
Not only do we need to oppose them; we need to be the opposite of them... "Kindness, compassion, generosity are often talked about as though they’re purely emotional virtues, but they are also and maybe first of all imaginative ones," and that imagination can be fed and encouraged--or starved... #DianeDiPrima , once said, "the only war that matters is the war against the imagination." #FarawayNearby #RebeccaSolnit #WarOnImagination
I and we are wildlife whose natural habitat is libraries, when it comes to physical space, because they contain books in which minds roam free through time and space, encounter Dogen and Dante and Sappho and Black Elk and others long since gone, meet…
Prune (I think) an outgoing hen...The first to run over to see if food is forthcoming.. She goes off on her own a lot.. Almost got eaten by a neighbors dog once while out in the garden by herself. Now the garden is so overgrown a dog on the street probably wouldn't notice her, and if the dog did chickens are probably much harder to catch in overgrown thickets..
Some birds might be fighers but these Silkies aren't. Even the big solid rooster just squawks with surprise and takes off as quick as any other bird when startled. Prune just happend to be out alone where she was visible. It probably makes her more vulnerable to big cats, and any big birds.. A falcon used to stop by so I did a search but I got the impression falcons don't go for things much bigger than pigeons. So it's just the chicks that are causes for worry. The same with crows. That's part of the reason my green curtain attempts stretch out over the rest of the yard too. Some of those strings were tied up over the yard to discourage crows and get my neighbor to relax. She worries about the birds more than I do. They work so hard and have so little time but were ready to tie their fishing line up around my yard. That got me moving quick with hemp string and some other fiber-based line... I'm hoping big turkeys will discourage cats.. I don't expect much to deter a decent-sized dog with hunting instincts. But there aren't many of them nearby.. I hear the little Japanese Chabo birds are fierce. I was reading that they are really Shamo birds with a recessive gene that makes their legs really short, but should verify that one day... It's hard to strike a balance though. It would be nice to have birds that can defend themselves, but it's nice that kids can hang out in the yard with the birds and not be frightened or threatened...
With friends like these who needs war criminals ? "You got gangsters in power and lawbreakers making the rules" --- Bob Dylan Wake Up
In 2019, Trump impulsively ordered Navy SEAL Team Six on a covert raid into North Korea to a listening device. Before landing, the SEAL team believed that a nearby boat had spotted them, so, naturally, they killed everyone onboard. Then they sank the boat and used knives to puncture the lungs of the Koreans' bodies so they would sink as well. Then the SEALS aborted the mission. The crew of the boat were civilians who'd been diving for shellfish. There were no weapons on board the fishing boat. Leading members of Congress were told about this entire botched affair and said nothing for four years...
Members of Congress who've known about this since 2021 but never told the public: - Chuck Schumer - Nancy Pelosi - Adam Schiff - Mark Warner - Kevin McCarthy - Mitch McConnell - Devin Nunes – Marco Rubio
Fruitcaketocracy: the New American Experiment Supporters must see him as a grandmother 👵 off her rocker mumbling nonsense. I mean, you don't let anyone mess with her, that I understand, but you hand her the nuclear football either. Ya know?
Just absolute madness from beginning to end. Trump: “Newsom didn't allow the water to come from the Pacific Northwest. You know they have tremendous amounts of water in California, which most people don’t know. They send the water out into the Pacific Ocean. So I demanded that to be open. If that were open during the fire, you wouldn't have had the fire because all the sprinklers would've worked in the houses. They had no water. They had no water in the fire hydrants. They wouldn’t have had the fires. They would have been put out after one house, two houses. But he stopped the water from coming in. And I had to send in the military to have that water opened, after the fires. And now that water, but he should have more, because they still restrict it. There’s something wrong with these people. There’s something really wrong.” There’s something really wrong with Trump’s brain…
> 1. Ours is, above all, a *tragic* reality. Neither the most optimistic statistics nor the most ideologically contaminated explanations can disguise the situation of inhumanity and injustice in which our societies struggle. As long as we do not recognize the catastrophic state of certain societies in which the great majority of their people living if perpetual life-threatening situations, everything else, as a consequence, will be out of focus, and totally lack any semblance to reality.
--- Ignacio Martín-Baró (1974!!) in _Towards a Society that Serves its People: The Intellectual Contributions of El Salvador's Murdered Jesuits_ (1991)
Ashphalt Flowers!! Maron came over to help me enjoy and photo the SouthStyle NanBuShiki Moment, the sense of wonder I get fro seeing flowers blooming on asphalt and the inner soundtrack is comes to mind with DonDokoSho memories...
I put the little (big balled but in a good way) tanuki racoon dog figure down by the morning glory. It just seemed appropriate while having an 南部式 song running through my head, the group's Hyoto mask image is earthy-sexy(?) in the same sort of way as the Tanuki figures. It's hard to describe, maybe humor eros, keeping it real?? It took me decades over here to notice the characteristic Tanuki crotch: I had to read about it in an article or book or something. Too funny... > Like flowers blooming in asphalt/ we'll speak of love in abandoned fields/ Crusted guilt becomes nourishment/...
Flowers can be tough.. I used to wonder how "pansy" became an insult like weakling when I see them blooming in cold weather, they seem to be much more hardy than other flowers...
... The pretense that we will find out whether or not Donald Trump is a sexual predator if the Epstein files are released is itself a kind of cover-up, since we already know he is – though I’m all for finding out exactly what it is he’s so frantic to hide. He was found liable for sexually assaulting E Jean Carroll in a 2023 civil trial and has been credibly accused of groping, grabbing, and assault by numerous women. His worse-than-creepy behavior around the teenage girls in beauty pageants he managed is well-documented, as is his closeness to Epstein....
But in another sense the whole society is hiding something: that this violence is everywhere and it deeply shapes – or misshapes – our society. The statistics I cited above address the victims of specific crimes. But all girls and women are impacted by the reality that so many men want to harm us and these crimes could happen to any one of us. This violence affects the choices we make about where to go and when, what jobs to take, when to speak up, what to wear....
Systemic problems require systemic responses, and while I’m all for releasing the Epstein files, I want a broader conversation and deeper change.
> The wise parent, at the present day, is likely to choose, if he can, some method of education for his children which is not in fact universal, and for the sake of experiment it is desirable that parents should have the opportunity of trying new methods. But they ought to be such as could be made universal, if found to produce good results, not such as must from their very nature be confined to a privileged few. Fortunately, some of the best elements in modern educational theory and practice have had an extremely democratic origin; for example, Madame Montessori's work began with nursery schools in slums. In higher education exceptional opportunity for exceptional ability is indispensable, but otherwise there is no reason why any child should suffer from the adoption of systems which might be adopted by all.
Green Curtain? Multi-layered Canopy... It would be interesting if there was some way to measure how much cooler the yard and house are with mounds of green working their way up strings onto the house and over to bushes. Sure, they limit the view out to the chickens but in this climate cooling things down comes first! And the chickens eat the fallen flower petals. When kids come over we can pull off the fading pinkish flowers and feed some birds by hand... Multi-Purpose Morning Glories..
People comment about how big the leaves are on these vines. The vines come from seeds that have just fallen or been cast around for the past couple years. Maybe store-bought seeds are some sort of F1- hybrids ad these plants are working their way back to the original strains? Maybe they are adapting to their situation here? It''s just nice that, once they get going, the grow fast and provide a lot of shade with their big leaves. I hope they stay green shady and cool until October, it will probably be really hot until then..
These mid-sized birds should move on to a new home soon, 6 of them. There are 3 roosters and 3 hens. Too many roosters so wherever they go hopefully the people will be able to choose one rooster and then find someone to eat the other two I guess. Maybe the rooster should be chosen for a pleasant consent-seeking personality, or for Silky-features like a black flattened comb.. But you can see the smallest rooster with a more Silky-like coloring ignoring consent and riding Mangle in this series of photos.. I was so focused on trying to get this little boss rooster and as many other birds in the photo that it took me a while to notice and shoo over-eager rooster away... Poor Mangle...
I wonder though: Does the reveal of these tragedies actually excite the authoritarian MAGA?
Aren’t they so chock-full of misinformation that these are criminals beyond repair, they would cheer this as success? 🤔
80% of russians now support Putin, much more than when the war against Ukraine started. The brutality has only solidified his support. What if this is the same?
On a public “grooming standards” webpage aimed at prospective Customs and Border Protection agents, the agency advises that any tattoos and brandings must be concealed if they are “obscene or gang-related.” In other words, agents are allowed to have the very markings for which Caraballo and others were disappeared into a Salvadoran gulag — as long as they keep them out of sight. “It’s like saying ‘our gangsters are okay,’” Rosenow said. “But a young man fleeing persecution from his home country, a father of two little girls who likes to have ink on his body to commemorate his daughters, he is going to be subjected to this kind of horrifying shit?” theintercept.com/2025/07/16/cb…
Neither Victims nor Torturers/Executioners --- Albert Camus
Hateful Monger Miller should be put in a nice little sandbox not put into policy positions..
... I don’t think it’s necessary to kill them entirely We’re not a barbaric people. We respect life. Therefore torture is the way to go. Because tortured people can live. Torture is the celebration of life and human dignity. Ha, ha...
It's from a video that was posted on social media yesterday by Breakthrough News https://x.com/BTnewsroom/status/1945531629037850656
Ordinary rendition involves sending someone to another country after a formal request for extradition. Extraordinary rendition bypasses all the legal niceties and sends a prisoner to another country without any due process whatsoever. It’s important to call things by their proper names. Extraordinary rendition is what happened to Abrego García. During the “war on terror,” and once again today, such an act carries the risk of torture with it. ... Note that extraordinary rendition is illegal, both under the United Nations Convention Against Torture, where it is identified by the term “refoulement,” and under the U.S. Foreign Affairs Act of 1998, which states: “It shall be the policy of the United States not to expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture, regardless of whether the person is physically present in the United States.” That last clause relates to a practice known as “chain refoulement,” in which someone is first sent to a third country where the risk of torture is less, only to be sent on to the original prohibited destination.
I didn't want to write this article. In fact, I had something relatively uplifting planned: an Independence Day piece about the rich implications for the present moment to be found in the Declaration of Independence.
You could call these jokes, if you think killing people is funny. Or you could call them thought experiments. Liddle suggested as much in his column: “I am merely hypothesising, in a slightly wistful kinda way.” This “humour” permits obscene ideas to seep into the range of the possible. Academic researchers see the use of jokes to break taboos and reduce the thresholds of hate speech as a form of “strategic mainstreaming”. Far-right influencers use humour, irony and memes to inject ideas into public life that would otherwise be unacceptable. In doing so, they desensitise their audience and normalise extremism. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
Since the 90s Chomsky was mentioning how the USA turn toward the sort of economy it urged onto "our backyard" (Latin American) "client states" was making a situation where the only jobs were security guards.... ' “The frustration isn’t yet producing mass resignations or major internal protests, but the officers and agents described a workforce on edge, vilified by broad swaths of the public and bullied by Trump officials demanding more and more.” "
... the American "we" is different. In both racial demographics and political norms, this is not the country it was fifty or sixty years ago. But under authoritarianism, it's often not that people normalize atrocities, but that they're afraid to speak up, which is why strong early action matters.
Arendt argued as early as 1951 that the concentration camps in German South-West Africa (now Namibia) served as a model for the Third Reich’s bureaucratic organisation of forced labour and systematic murder: to suppress an anticolonial rebellion, the Germans had killed a hundred thousand Ovaherero and ten thousand Nama. Both Arendt and Aimé Césaire, whose Discourse on Colonialism was published a year before The Origins of Totalitarianism, used the metaphor of the boomerang to describe the way violence that was once reserved for colonial subjects was turned on Europeans. For Mbembe, too, this history shows the West’s need for some racialised other – ‘a Negro, a Jew, an Arab, a foreigner’ – to make sense
> The more things a man is interested in, the more opportunities of happiness he has, and the less he is at the mercy of fate, since if he loses one thing he can fall back upon another.
bsmall2
in reply to Brian Small • • •> Today, as the planet hurtles towards environmental and societal breakdown, brought about by the interlinked vectors of global warming, biodiversity loss, species extinctions and the spread of new pathogens, it is becoming ever more evident that modernity was founded on a profoundly mistaken understanding of the world, and that the elevation of humans above all other species, and indeed the Earth itself, has had disastrous consequences for humanity as well as all other living Beings.
#LivingBeings #BiodiversityLoss #SocietalBreakdown
@bsmall2@nerdica.net
Brian Small
in reply to Brian Small • •🧵
#ErasmusPrize #GhoshErasmusPrize