Signal Wave

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Just finished re-reading an Agatha Christie novel, Appointment with Death. I had forgotten who committed the murder, so it was just as fun the second time.

agatha_0.jpg

This novel seems to exist just so that Christie can make the point that, no matter how terrible a person or how damaging their actions, murder is still unacceptable. Not sure I'm convinced, given that the victim is abusing her child to the point that the girl is on the verge of a schizophrenic break and shows no signs of slowing, but I get why Hercule Poirot can't condone it.

It's well worth a read, if only for Christie's characters and portrayal of dysfunctional relationships.

This song has been all over the local classic rock station for the past two weeks, so this is my current earworm. Much better than last week's!

God, I miss him. I cried all afternoon the day he died. It's possible I wouldn't be here without his music to get me through my adolescence. Although, at the time, his 80's album Let's Dance struck me as a poppy sell-out. It has grown on me as I've aged, and I now think it's quite good.

Never going to fall for
(Modern Love)
Walks beside me
(Modern Love)
Walks on by
(Modern Love)
Gets me to the Church on Time
(Church on Time)
Terrifies me
(Church on Time)
Makes me party
(Church on Time)
Puts my trust in God and Man
(God and Man)
No confessions!
(God and Man)
No religion
(God and Man)
Don't believe
In Modern Love

I haven't watched any new shows this week, but this is a fascinating entry on Kirsten Dirksen's channel. I highly recommend her channel for anyone needing inspiration or cheering up:

This is pretty cool, though it seems it's kind of dodging the crappy effects of capitalism and pretending they don't exist. Pretty much the only thing I don't like about the sustainability movement is that, well, sooner or later you're going to run smack into economic and financial difficulties that are pretty much inescapable under capitalism unless you've got one or more massively rich people involved. Pretending that problem doesn't exist doesn't seem like the best choice. On the other hand, I'm in full support of people doing whatever they can, under capitalism or not.

How are you all today?

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That people rush to support (or condemn) a politician without so much as reading the wikipedia article about that politician both bewilders and chagrins me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Northam

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Fairfax

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@HenryAWallace

Northam had privately reacted in confusion to the photo and told several people that he did not believe that he was either of the men depicted in the photo.[85] Early that evening, he had also told Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax that although he had no recollection of the photo, he considered it a possibility that he was one of the two men depicted.[86][87] According to The Washington Post, "two people familiar with the events of that evening" said that Northam "decided to take the blame" for the photo due to the pressure on him to issue a statement, even though at the time, Northam was still confused about the photo's origins.[85]

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@HenryAWallace

all agree on something, it's fairly likely that I will disagree with it once I ascertain the facts. That doesn't excuse me from ascertaining the facts, but I have to admit that it influences my opinion of what the likely outcome will be.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

on your mind" post. I did not mean, even a little, to aim it at you individually. (((CStMS)))

Yes, I meant the part that you quoted, and other parts. And let's look at the pic in question.

And this was medical school, not grade school, not junior high, not high school, and not even college. And it was not only black face, but depiction of a Klan member with someone in black face as amusing. And, beyond that was the dishonest mealy mouth about his not remembering the photo, but taking the "blame" for it, whatever that means. Also:

CBS News also unearthed Northam's Virginia Military Institute yearbook, which listed "Coonman", a racial slur, as one of Northam's nicknames; Northam told reporters only two people referred to him by that name, and said that he regretted the presence of the nickname in his yearbook.[115] Northam says that he does not understand why that nickname was bestowed on him.

And then, there was his voting twice for George Bush and explaining that as being "under informed." Well, if you know that little about politics, how the hell do you get the nerve to run for Governor? (I had the same reaction to Senator Brooke admitting that he had been a Republican on the assumption that the Republican Party was still the party of Lincoln. Damn! You first ran for the US Senate in 1966, while the ink on the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act was still drying. )

So many politicians have tried to hang tough when caught with their pants down (literally or figuratively) that we welcome someone saying "Yeah, I did engage in that POS behavior. I was wrong and I'm sorry." Of course, as to black face and the "cute" Klan member impersonation, Northam did not do even that much. However, I fear we may be giving disproportionate emphasis to the apology: I, for one, would be much more comfortable with someone who never voted Republican, as did Northam, Hillary, Warren and others, and who never thought it humorous to portray a black person couple with a Klan member.

ETA: I note Northam was a member of the military, to which the Democratic Party seems to be addicted as a source of prospective candidates.

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@HenryAWallace

is that, coincidentally, scandals have been unearthed (or concocted) about the governor, lieutenant governor, and DA, all simultaneously. That looks to me like someone trying to clear people aside. It certainly seems unlikely that people just happened upon scandals involving all three of them at the same time. The fact that it's almost certainly being done from crappy motives does not excuse the behaviors, if they are true. But I feel manipulated, and I don't like it. Even more so, I hate the political culture we're living in, where making an accusation on the Internet or in the press is the equivalent of proof of guilt. The idea of "innocent until proven guilty" seems to be gone, and the press seems to be the arbiter of whether or not someone is deemed a predator; the same press is also the arbiter of which predators get exposed and which do not.

I don't want to support a politics based on smears and character assassination.

The problem, of course, is that it's quite possible all the charges are true, and I don't want to support rapists or racists either.

You have to admit this is a brilliant strategy on the part of the people who want to destroy the left. All they have to do is sacrifice a few of their racist, sexist brethren and expose their wrongdoing, and the left will destroy the rule of law and institute a new McCarthyism for them. They left will do so for a variety of reasons, but mostly because they're stuck between a rock and a hard place. They don't want to get on board with oppressors and bigots, but they (usually) also prefer rule of law and a non-authoritarian political system based on evidence. However, when those two things come into conflict, most liberals will sacrifice the rule of law, which is an abstract thing, rather than risk being on the side of racists and rapists.

The only reason I'm giving Northam any benefit of the doubt is that the Democratic leadership pretty much instantly tells people to resign if scandal arises (we know that from the examples of Van Jones and Shirley Chisolm). Now of course, these guys are no Van Jones (not that I think he's all that great, but at least he gets some policies right), but did you notice that the entire array of prominent Democrats started calling for Fairfax to resign when no hard evidence has emerged? Actually, they started calling for him to resign *before* the lawyer for his accuser said there were emails from the time corroborating her story.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

travelerxxx's picture

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

Harper's has published an article by Lionel Shriver in the February issue which discusses this issue of public shaming due to various past sins. It is focused primarily on artists, but applies to all who have been dragged into the public spotlight by our new morality police. The author is mostly concerned with the morality police of the politically left. Shriver is looking at the destruction of livelihoods - even lives? - by the assorted Social Justice Warriors. It's a good read and germane to this thread.

No time to go into it further now as I'm heading to work...

Unless you are a subscriber, you'll get only one shot at this link (as Harper's allows just one free online article per month for non-subscribers), but here is the link: Cruel and Unusual Punishment If that link blocks you, simply go to Harper's and find your way to the February 2019 issue, then go to the monthly Easy Chair column.

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@HenryAWallace

was not intended to sound defensive! When I said I was required to ascertain the facts, I was responding to my own internal critic, which is extremely ingrained after twenty years of academic training.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

magiamma's picture

And everyone. Rain and wind all night. Again sustained 30-40mph. Don’t know how the birds are surviving. Must be hard.

What you said about capitalism is true at the grander scale of planet survivability. It’s going to take massive capital and technology to turn the titanic climate monster around.

dodging the crappy effects of capitalism and pretending they don't exist. Pretty much the only thing I don't like about the sustainability movement is that, well, sooner or later you're going to run smack into economic and financial difficulties that are pretty much inescapable under capitalism unless you've got one or more massively rich people involved. Pretending that problem doesn't exist doesn't seem like the best choice.

Back later w some info about Faith Ringold, one of our Bay Areas’ better known black artists.

Thanks for the ot. Have a good one.

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@magiamma

I was thinking about books like the excellent Creating a Life Together, a wonderful book by Diana Leaf Christian that I wish I'd read before trying to start an ecovillage. She knew that something like 90% of sustainable communities fail, so she wanted to know what the successful 10% did. After amassing a lot of data, her conclusion is basically that you shouldn't run out and buy land; you should sit together and talk and hammer out a mission statement and rules for your community and make sure you all are on the same page, because most of the time, you aren't. Once you have a statement and a plan, and the people who weren't in line with those assumptions leave, THEN you can buy land. All this is great.

The only place she stumbles, IMO, is where she's talking about what to do when some people in the community have way more money than others. In particular, it's often true that one or two people have comparatively a lot of money, and the others all have much less. This creates situations where one or two rich people buy the land, and then basically become Mommy and Daddy, or King and Queen, to the nascent community. Christian doesn't like that dynamic (who would), but if you don't do that, if everybody ponies up an equal amount, it not only shuts out the people who can't pay anything, or at least much, it also holds the amount each person contributes down and might prevent people from being able to buy land at all. This was all easier when land was cheaper and was not quite the casino playground for the 1% that it's been over the past twenty years or so.

I don't blame Christian for not having the answers to these conundrums, but I do blame her a bit for smoothing over the real difficulty and pretending it can be got over, or got around. I'm not sure it can. You can say that people put in "sweat capital" and that their work counts the same as money, but if people don't really buy that in their hearts, it won't matter.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

enhydra lutris's picture

@magiamma
Rain, off and on, sometimes heavy to violent, plus wind, ditto, since thurdsay nite/friday morning. We have a hummer feeder, suet feeder and peanut feeder in each yard (front & back) plus an elevated platform feeder about 6 feet off the ground full of safflower in the back, and a special ad hoc where the resident scrub jay gets in-shell peanuts every morning. I try to keep them all loaded, so they'll have a steady energy source to keep their metabolic rates up. That's about all one can do because they aren't very good at sharing shelter.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

magiamma's picture

@enhydra lutris
was wondering and wanting an in person report - though guessing that the systems are so big now that there is not that much difference

five bird feeders here in two location. there are wood rats so I have had to reconfigure / rethink everything. no more food for the squirrels and I feed the crows down the road a piece. I used hot pepper and oil on the seed the first three months then the rats moved to a different part of the yard and have not been back. they are a good food source for the owls and red shoulders - though I dislike the latter bc they eat 'my' birds e.g. the birds in my yard.

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In personal news, I'm able to sit at the computer for more than a half an hour now! It's still a bit painful to get my elbow all the way down to the chair arm. Still have another round of quite painful therapeutic massage to try and pummel my arm and shoulder back into position.

You'd never know I'm actually not doing the repetitive motion that caused this in the first place. This one is stubborn!

But I'm dead chuffed (as they say on the Great British Baking Show) to see this improvement. Not being able to write or game for more than 20-30 minutes at a time has been really irritating. Now I know what my partner was going through. She had serious frozen shoulder problems preventing her from doing her work with fiber (spinning, weaving) and it was driving her nuts (both the pain and the inability to do the things that keep her sane).

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

enhydra lutris's picture

some small level of rehabilitation starting. I often find some limb or joint acting up and wind up exploring new things as a result, or trying new approaches to old things.

The problem with the "sustainability" movement/lifestyle is in the intersections with the outside world. If you have the resources and skills to live a comfortable life while remaining completely isolated, then well and good, but you never do as an individual. You either have to intersect with the outside economy, polity and/or society, or you need multiple people with complementary skill sets and dedication to the whole program without somehow making it a cult of some sort.

My approach has been to retreat from the whole arena and then look at it as an organism and ecosystem. What necessary and what additional desirable inputs can my wife and I provide for ourselves. Re-filter in terms of what ones are we willing to put in the time and effort to so on a continuing basis. Work on improving efficiency and skills in those limited things and accept it that we have to get the rest from "the system" and figure out how to deal with that too. Then we have a "neighborhood" level of interaction where we can and do work somewhat cooperatively among ourselves to provide certain other things for and to each other and work on enabling and/or enhancing that aspect of things. That can even be taken a step further, to "community", being a subset of the persons, entities and processes at a reasonable distance from home with whom/which we interact on a somewhat regular basis.

So far, that has all been more of an organic process than something planned and analyzed, though the more rigorous and cerebral aspects go on all the time as background processes, whether intentionally or not. The whole approach brings things down to a manageable realm. One can then also look at the interactions with all the rest of reality in terms of being more "sustainable" from a different perspective, that of minimizing harm or stress on the environment and socio-political-economic fabrib of society. You will buy some clothing, so take the time and effort to figure out who are your preferred vendors and stick with them. Ditto veggies you do not grow, eggs, cheese, meats, etc. This latter process winds up being limiting but also beneficial in a complicated way.

Then all one needs to do is make it reflexive/automatic.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@enhydra lutris

What necessary and what additional desirable inputs can my wife and I provide for ourselves. Re-filter in terms of what ones are we willing to put in the time and effort to so on a continuing basis. Work on improving efficiency and skills in those limited things and accept it that we have to get the rest from "the system" and figure out how to deal with that too. Then we have a "neighborhood" level of interaction where we can and do work somewhat cooperatively among ourselves to provide certain other things for and to each other and work on enabling and/or enhancing that aspect of things. That can even be taken a step further, to "community", being a subset of the persons, entities and processes at a reasonable distance from home with whom/which we interact on a somewhat regular basis.

Not sure I'm in a very good place for doing it. There are far worse places, but most people in Gainesville are liberals, with a smattering of Trump folks (it gets to be more than a smattering when you go outside town). Ironically, the liberals are more difficult to work with, because most of them are in denial about how bad things are--or if they see it, they center it all on Trump, as if getting rid of him and his circle will restore the status quo and that will make things, somehow, safe and good.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

Fleetwood Mac - Never Going Back Again

Here is an updated Zuma :

Launch
In September 2017, SpaceX sent applications to the Federal Communications Commission for special temporary authority to transmit signals at 2.2 GHz during launch of "Mission 1390", for the time period between November 2017 and April 2018

Where Elon Musk leads... keep flushing.

In the media
The US government has not publicly stated if there was a failure of Zuma, and this secrecy has generated speculations on its purpose and its fate. A number of articles published by the amateur satellite tracking community stated that if the satellite was still in orbit or operating covertly, then it would likely be located visually. In the process of searching for Zuma, amateur astronomers instead found radio transmissions from IMAGE, a NASA satellite that was lost in 2005

IMAGE was lost but now it's found, good job amateurs. Lots of Northrop-Grumman's stuff doesn't fly right, neither do Boeing's upgrade failures. Pull up to go down why not. tax dollars at work

Will The Circle Be Unbroken

Having a freezing cold Sunday morning here, grateful for being indoors with heat. double bonus

Sunday PEACE

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@eyo

I love that album. Love, love, love it. And you picked a song that wasn't a hit, kudos to you! I love giving a little air time to songs that aren't well known.

As for Elon Musk, he looks crazy to me.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

magiamma's picture

Day 9 Black History Month

Faith Ringold GG bridge quilt.jpg

Faith Ringgold was born in New York City in 1930. While working as an art teacher in public schools, she began a series of paintings called American People, which portrayed the civil rights movement from a female perspective. In the 1970s, she created African-style masks, painted political posters and actively sought the racial integration of the New York art world. During the 1980s, she began a series of quilts that are among her best-known works, and she later embarked on a successful career as a children's book author and illustrator.
https://www.biography.com/people/faith-ringgold-9459066

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Comf9SetjRA]

Ringgold’s public art works include, Flying Home: Harlem Heroes and Heroines, 1996 in MTA’s 125th street, For the Women’s House, 1971 Rose M Singer Center on Rikers Island. The Crown Heights Children’s History Quilt, 1994 a Percent for Art project is at P.S. 22 in Brooklyn.  Eugenio María de Hostos: The Man, His Life and His Dream 1994 located at Hostos Community College, Tar Beach mosaic, 2003 Princeton Library, and fifty-two mosaic panels in the Civic center subway station in Los Angeles, Ca. 
https://faithringgold.blogspot.com/

Faith Ringold Quilt dance.jpg

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Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@magiamma

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

lotlizard's picture

That’s a sweeping, unjustifiably broad generalization, but sweeping, unjustifiably broad generalizations seem to be in vogue in academia these days as part of Grievance Studies.

https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2019/02/07/davis-marks-evil-is-banal/

Also, at Dickinson College:

https://thedickinsonian.com/opinion/2019/02/07/should-white-boys-still-b...

And in other news, Sunnis still hate Shiites (six-year old Shiite boy decapitated in Saudi Arabia).
http://shiarightswatch.org/a-six-years-old-child-was-beheaded-in-saudi-a...

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