Thanks for all the time and energy spent, JtC. When you find time to put up the button I'd be vey happy to contribute. I haven't had much time for blogging in many months, but I do like to keep informed and this crew of people do that so well.

Here's a pic of a happy discovery in my garden. This tree grew out of an old compost pile and never flowered till this year. It is an Apricot! Spring is earlier than usual here and with it, major allergic reactions.

Welcome all recent arrivals. The people who inhabit this blog are the finest around. I think you'll all be very comfortable here.

Votes still not sticking. Well just so long as nobody takes it personally, I've decided not to worry about it anymore. We can worry about it after things calm down. I am delighted to see everybody!

this is my first comment. testing...testing...
great looking site, btw. looking forward to interacting with so many refugee friends

Are we having fun yet?

Was just listening to Brook Gladstone's excellent "On The Media" program on WNYC this morning.

She had on the maker of this film "Bellwether 2016," in which he's been going around Vigo County, IN which is home to Terre Haute and the great Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs. The county has "voted for the winning candidate in every presidential election except two—30 out of 32 elections. They haven’t missed in 60 years. No other place in America comes close."

Well, the producer was asked what he's been hearing from people this year. He said, I can tell you one thing. We've only been hearing about two candidates. And neither of them is named Clinton. It's all Trump and Sanders.

He prefaced that by saying that the mainstream media in NY and DC do not at all have their finger on the pulse of what people are feeling, outside of their hermetically sealed towers of lapdog access privileges and horse race graphics.

To me, the elephant in the room is that shirking of duty from the Fourth Estate of the press, which has probably more to do with complicity in keeping the status quo in place and their pockets full. I thought since Occupy it would be a matter of time until it just boiled over, the fact that when average people look to the "news" to understand their worlds better and to make informed decisions they see nothing that resembles their own lives, predicaments and real life worries. They're instead manipulated into thinking they should be most afraid of ISIS and immigrants taking their jobs, than having journalists explain how American imperialistic foreign policy has made us infinitely less safer and how Wall St and corporate American believe that deregulated unbridled capitalism is not only not a deity, along with that greatest of all propaganda lies about their being a "free market," it is the source of our greatest troubles, effecting negatively everything from our healthcare in the hands of insurance companies to austerity in our communities (most glaringly in Flint) to the staggering $1 TRILLION of student debt to the outsourcing of jobs/lower wages/longer hours, etc.

This is the year, or an era we've entered, in which we are turning a corner in terms of how we get our news, who we trust to tell it to us, how the polls are unreliable. People now seem to more than ever feel like they've been duped by chronic dysfunction in Congress and the Revolving Door of DC, and no longer want to play around.

To that extent, it is one of the great crimes that Sanders can not get even a fraction of the media coverage Drumpf does, on top of which is battling a desperate and vicious Dem establishment propping a horribly disconnected, outmoded and unfit candidate and forcing her on the populace, with barely the appearance of a democratic process.

I'm resolved more than ever to fight for Sanders (though it's killing me as a first time Dad with an infant son preoccupying me most of the day).

Think I'll get offline for a little bit now and phonebank for Bernie to Michigan.

So happy to see all the good souls, rebels and dissenters coming over here. Will still fight the Neoliberal fascist pestilence back there. But man does it feel like a whole better place among you all. Lots of respect and love to everyone who's here.

for what purpose?

The United States has nearly finished setting up an air base in Kurdish-controlled northern Syria and was proceeding with the construction of a second base for dual military and civilian use, a Kurdish website said on Sunday.

The Erbil-based news website BasNews, quoting a military source in the Kurdish-backed Syria Democratic Forces (SDF), said most of the work on a runway in the oil town of Rmeilan in Hasaka was complete while a new air base southeast of Kobani, straddling the Turkish border, was being constructed.

Lots of new folks!

I go out of town for a couple of days to visit my Mom and I am off line those days. This afternoon, I came back to find this place bursting at the seams. Great work by our intrepid admins, JtC and Joe and a huge welcome to all the new folks here.