@Raggedy Ann @Raggedy Ann
Smiling in reading your prose over again. A few weeks ago i featured a little Lewis Mumford and a repeat of his seems in order:

"But we may avert that fate: perhaps only in facing such a desperate challenge can the necessary creative forces be effectually welded together. Instead of clinging to the sardonic funeral towers of metropolitan finance, [ours is] to march out to newly plowed fields, to create fresh patterns of political action, to alter for human purposes the perverse mechanisms or our economic regime, to conceive and to germinate fresh forms of human culture.
Instead of accepting the stale cult of death that the Fascists have erected, as the proper crown for the servility and brutality that are the pillars of their states, we must erect a cult of life: life in action, as the farmer or mechanic knows it: life in expression, as the artist knows it: life as the lover feels it and the parent practices it: life as it is known to men of good will who meditate in the cloister, experiment in the laboratory, or plan intelligently in the factory or the government office."

Hey, how's the rehab of your injuries coming along? Good, i hope!

Many thanks for today's addition to the porch conversation; always a pleasure to see you.

Edited to add of your injuries as el pointed out so as not to infer rehab in another connotation. No intent to mean it that way. Oh the pen and the mind don't always fit together.

An attempt at prose this fine Saturday morning.

Revolution, is it the Answer?

Sitting on my porch and contemplating
your words or, rather, those of
Pirsig, which brings a short circuit to my brain.
Of course, revolution is nothing without
compete dismantling of the system in place.

I see, now, that my gaze has been incomplete.
Revolution is necessary to overturn
and upset this organized scheme
in order to revamp the existing structure.
Complete change is the only way forward.

Have a beautiful Saturday, folks!

@enhydra lutris
circuits of grey matter waiting before Saturday and do the final edit late Friday or very early Saturday morning; happened to wake in a humerous mood this morning juxtaposed between life's fragility, nature's overwhelming beauty and the idiocy of the politic.

A few tough days preceded this morning; health, finances and other shit pulling down, depressing me. The cool air lifted the spirits.

Congrats on the upgrade sorry it brings inconveniences that will take fixing. It's a grogeous day here and i do need to get out later and wallow in the crystal clear skies.

Another funny thing popped up in reading this morning: "On Thursday, President Donald Trump posed for an Oval Office photo with one of the leading promoters of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which claims that top Democrats are part of a global pedophile cult. https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-in-oval-office-meets-promoter-of-qan...

YouTube conspiracy theorist Lionel Lebron was in the White House for an event on Thursday, according to a video Lebron posted online. During the visit, Lebron and his wife posed for a smiling picture with Trump in the Oval Office."

Sorry for the size of this photo, tried to downsize it, anyways; could that be Inspector Clouseau in disguise as QAnon with Trump?

Hoping you a great day at the market and about!

Ubuntu 18.04.01 LTS from 16.04.something and now I get to relearn, to test all my applications and data, and to rebuild the one I use most. My editor of choice is Notetab Pro, which can do just about anything and everything. One of its features is the outline file, something of a free-form database. Each heading in the outline panel list is a hotlink to a file, which can have any content and be as simple or complicated as you wish. This is where I live, all my stuff is in Notetab Pro. It is not a Linus ap, but a windows ap run through an emulator named wine. Part of the upgrade was a wine upgrade.

zo, initially it couldn't even find where the outline files were stored. After I tracked most of them down, I discovered that the list of titles in the outline panel is gibberish. Each item is just a row of little boxes. Thus "drafts", containing most of my work in process, now has 25 or so lines of unreadable crap which links to the files containing drafts of stuff I'm working on. Yee Haw!

Needless to say, this will slow me down a tad and set me back a bit. That said, it is Farmers' Market today, so we have to run out and get veggies, fruit and nice fresh caught salmon and such trucked in from Pillar Point Harbor at Half Moon Bay over on the coast.

Also, it is day 2 of the REI Labor Day sale and we seriously need a new ice chest/cooler and they have a good deal on good ones, so we have to get out there too, meaning that I can't even really start on this chaos until much later today. Luckily, I have my Sun and Mon columns already in the queue.

Meanwhile, I really liked your column, Smiley, and it got me ready to face and deal with all of this shit.

Have a great weekend.

@magiamma
thanks for bringing some good music ... a little more from this splendid day on the mtn.

Have a good one in return!

have a good one...

[video:https://youtu.be/KaIORi2ovNc]

@mimi
piece quoted in Haarretz above. Is that a smokescreen, a poor taste in jokes or Benjamin's ghost writer; don't know, wouldn't think it would stir up too much on the face of what's written there; but maybe that's a motive for publishing it, to stir shit up.

In these times who knows which way the wind may blow an ember of newsprint; people wear "make America great again" hats with pride in their hearts and guns in their hands.

Maybe, someone else can provide more insight ...

How you feeling, recall reading you had a setback, health-wise, recently. Hope you are on the mend and feeling better?

Thanks for being here, mimi, always a pleasure to see you!

If Trump Falls, the Testimonies of Cohen, Pecker and Weisselberg Could Spark an anti-Semitic Backlash

The trio’s public profile is a Jewish stereotype: the lawyer-fixer, the smut-dealing publisher and the numbers whiz who knows it all ...
The name of the lawyer who implicated Donald Trump in the commission of federal crimes is Cohen. The name of the publisher who has agreed to tell investigators how he turned his newspaper into a clearinghouse for Cohen’s payments to women is Pecker. And the name of the accountant who has been granted immunity in order to testify about the role played by the Trump Organization in Cohen’s endeavors is Weisselberg. The common denominators of Cohen, Pecker and Weisselberg, beside their willingness to do whatever it takes for Trump in the past and their apparent willingness to inform on him now, is that all three are indisputably and recognizably Jewish.

I guess that's a 'no no' to talk about ... but my first reaction to the headline was "not at all". A Trump fall brought through these three Jewish men would be one most non-Jewish folks would be grateful for. NO backlash, imo, just a "Thank You."

@gjohnsit
the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus was in opposition; reading that gave me pause, why would the CBC oppose a better rule?

Anyways, i asked the party to get rid of superdelegates altogether and clean house; including party kick-back state and candidate scams and to stop sending me solicitations before the 2016 election.

Miles to go before a party gets my moral or pen's support, again.

Thank you gjohnsit for your contributions to today's OT. Have a good one!

a first step

Under the new plan, which was agreed to on Saturday afternoon in Chicago at the Democratic National Committee’s annual summer meetings, superdelegates retain their power to back any candidate regardless of how the public votes. They will now be largely barred, however, from participating in the first ballot of the presidential nominating process at the party’s convention — drastically diluting their power.

Superdelegates will be able to cast substantive votes only in extraordinary cases like contested conventions, in which the nomination process is extended through multiple ballots until one candidate prevails.

@GreyWolf
Damn, hurts to view our reality; thank you for reminding me, GreyWolf, about something i read last week and meant to write about somewhere:

Rep. Don Young, an Alaska Republican, has long argued that its rules against overfishing hurt coastal economies. On July 11, the House passed H.R. 200, the Strengthening Fishing Communities and Increasing Flexibility in Fisheries Management Act, mostly along party lines. The reauthorization, claimed Young, who sponsored the bill, would strike “a proper balance between the biological needs of fish stocks and the economic needs of fishermen.”

Environmentalists see it differently. By weakening the very stipulations that have made Magnuson-Stevens so effective, cautioned Ted Morton, oceans director at the Pew Charitable Trusts, the bill could “undercut the important role science plays in management decisions” and increase overfishing. Rep. Jared Huffman, a California Democrat, dubbed Young’s legislation the Empty Oceans Act.

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2018/08/why-a-new-fisheries-bill...

Good to see you, GreyWolf and thanks for your contribution to today's OT.

Hoping you've a great evening!

A commercial fisherman took this photo off Manasota Key. He said from 12 miles out, all the way in to shore, there’s nothing but death. "Three days fishing, and only caught 260 pounds of fish. We’re in big trouble here folks!" Susan Hardin #TheSixthExtinction pic.twitter.com/jIMOu5FZIQ

— Tim Canova (@Tim_Canova) August 25, 2018

@Unabashed Liberal

Love the cuteness and the deer.

Today's painting comes from a free download site for screen wallpaper, surprisingly. Normally i save or bookmark a painting or image i see when reading on the web or sometimes i search for a particular painting, spending a considerable amount of time on occasions trying to find an image that sized close to the needs of this platform; sure wish i knew how to change the size of images imported from the web, that would help; glad you enjoy Saturday's art, thank you.

Leary of public wifi, too; but, i've had to use it when traveling; try not to access financial sites; however when on the road with Mom, i had no choice. So far so good as much as i know, the bank account surprises me on occasion causing me to reflect "where did the money go, thought i had more than that."

Hey, if we miss each other the next few days, enjoy your anniversary trip celebration, congrats! Please give my regards to Mr M.

If i can get this to upload, here's an old photo of granddog, Jackson Pollock, fishing with me when he was a year-old.

BTW, when i returned to Mom's, to do lawn maintenance at the end of May--the house had been sitting empty with no people for six months--a large doe walked out of the woods as i sat on the back patio, stood still looking at me a few minutes; i talked to her in soft voice. She moved to the other side of the yard hugging the tree-line to her baby fawn in high grass, a moment to remember.

Best wishes.

I'm running very low on available wi-fi GBs--we don't trust using public wi-fi, which may be stupid, but we think it's too risky--so, I'll have to wait until my data package 'turns over' to play the various videos. They look like a lot of fun. And, I always love your selection of music. BTW, the painting is absolutely eye-popping. Someday, clue us in on where you find such lovely artistic renderings, okay?

Oh, here's a funny Tweet that I hope gives everyone a chuckle or two.

Deer comes so often he gets his own bed pic.twitter.com/mx3YuybqUs

— Land of cuteness (@landpsychology) August 24, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

After more medical treatments this week, we'll be enroute to an Anniversary celebration that falls in the first week of September. So, here's wishing you and yours a Happy Labor Day in advance; be safe, if you travel.

Blue Onyx

"Everyone thinks they have the best dog, and none of them are wrong."
~~W. R. Purche

@Deja
Good to see you, hope you are well. Speaking of hurricanes, been on the phone to my best old friend from college in Hawaii. Last evening he said that he was okay on Honolulu, but the other islands, the big island, especially, took a big hit.

Been a while since we've talked; have you relocated?

Appreciate your son's statement in this thread below, very wise, indeed; making communication that works even more special.

Many thanks for your contribution. Sending virtual vibes and hopes that all find the assistance they need to rebuild their lives.

All the best to you.

Here is Rockport, before/after but excuse the grammar on the text.

[video:https://youtu.be/oCU2iqgMRNw]

In a day or two, it will be the anniversary of when the rain started, and did not stop for day upon day, upon day in the Greater Houston Area (literally hundreds of square miles). Even when I thought it had stopped raining, I'd go outside and realize, days into the deluge, it was still raining, just not pounding into my windows and sides of my house.

Even after four days of non-stop rain, I couldn't go anywhere after it stopped -- roads were impassable due to either high water, washed out roads and especially bridges, or downed trees.

My mostly outdoor cat wouldn't leave the house, not even to the porch until I brought her with me, and even then she clambered to get back inside where it was so hot because I turned off the ac when I noticed water rising around my ac unit. That ac unit was my gauge of the water level.

There are still people rebuilding. There are still people living in shells of their previous homes. There are still people living in RVs, or even tents.

30-60 inches of rain in The Greater Houston Area in a timeframe that felt like an eternity.
[video:https://youtu.be/YzQGgyrxXiI]