Just Checking In

I am more convinced that I need to get out of here more often.

Yesterday afternoon, I was tired after class but I did not nap. Neither did I go grocery shopping. Instead, I stopped at Pit Master BlueBird & Sons BBQ. Finally satisfied the pulled pork urge I have been having this past week. I ate it at home before starting on Chapter Three of “A Rock and Roll Fanstasy”. It was a great sandwich, pork smoked to perfection.

I spent the rest of the evening doing that with an interruption for Vespers. I passed on the prostrations for the grocery shopping.

I talked to CC. Maybe a road trip next week. 

The work on the novel was started on Wednesday and continued on Thursday. I am cutting so much from what I wrote in 2010. It is better for it, but it is also shortening the work.

I got a shock yesterday at the class. The instructor who keeps repeating that he has played guitar for 20 years, so I assume he is a musician, did not recognize the name Doctor John. Oh well.

Liturgy in 43 minutes. I need to get ready for that and for going to Indianapolis. 

 

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An Eugene O'Neill Fest

 

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8 Romans, Machiavelli, Heidegger & Sartre, Nietzsche & The Dropkick Murphys

 

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Edgar Allan Poe, Harlan Ellison, Hamlet, and Marcel Proust All Walk Into A Bar.....

 

 

 

and in the bar they discuss American Transcendentalism.

 

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Fun Stuff

 Goofing off!

'Pretenders' Doc Is Anything but Precious

How ‘V for Vendetta’ Perfectly Explains Our Age

The Rolling Stones Have Had the Same Bassist for 30 Years, and He Has Never Been in the Band ( Ultimate Guitar)

Speckbohnen (German Green Beans)

Pollution in the Midwest:  Booth Tarkington’s “The Midlander” (Thornfield Hall)

Cardinal Field Guide (Cardinal Media)

De Gaulle: Résistance at Ciné Lumière (Institut Français · Royaume-Uni)

Bass in the Forest (Videos & Movies on Vimeo)

THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

What Is “a Character,” Anyway? (George Saunders)

The Underground Cooks of Singapore's Prisons (Gastro Obscura) - read it and do not think it is not that much different from what I saw in Fort Dix FCI.

 The EI Podcast / Reinventing Disraeli

 

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Road Trip To Anderson

 Yesterday, I made a trip to Anderson. I had lunch with J and spent a little time with her. Then I went back to the courthouse. There I ran into a fellow I knew and spent a long time talking. When I got back home, I was just too tired for Vespers.

 Now for some photos.

 I stopped off first at the eye doctor's to pay a bill and this was the view of their parking lot. From here I went west on McGalliard, stopping at the Let's Go at I-69.

 I went west, deciding I had not come into town on Madison Avenue. Ashby's farmers market seems definitely to have done away, but further west was the old round barn.

The corn is ready for harvest.

 My mother worked at Community Hospital. It was smaller then; this is what it looks like now.

 J told me about a local scandal with the Madison County morgue. This is what the morgue looks like.

 The Guide Lamp UAW building is still around and functioning.

What I thought was an interesting house north of down Anderson, and which I do not recall seeing before.

 

 This morning I did make Matins. We had full contact prayer at the end and my legs only managed one. The spirit is willing but the flesh is not.

I had breaks at By Hand and Fork and did my laundry. Then I moped away most of the weekend. The knees were still killing me after Ben-Gay and five ibuprofens. But I decided I needed to get out. First, I brought in the laundry, then I went out to Minnestrista for apples. Then I got some RC Cola. 

I managed to miss Vespers. The knees ache, if no longer screaming.

What I did accomplish was start turning “A Rock and Roll Fantasy” from manuscript into a computer file.

Almost out of smokes, so maybe a run down to the convenience store.

 

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AI Going Rogue! Which Way Gasoline? Saving Democracy!! Educating Hoosier?

 Exclusive-OpenAI works to understand full scope of agent activity as user data leak emerges

Two months after OpenAI disclosed the accidental hacking of Hugging Face, the ChatGPT maker is still working to understand the full scope of its rogue agent activity, two people briefed on the matter told Reuters.

The latest example came on Friday when OpenAI said its agents had leaked 53 images from ChatGPT users. OpenAI declined to say if the images were AI-generated or identified real people. It also declined to say when the ‌images were posted.

The intelligence war is turning against the Houthis (Al Jazeera), but this does what to oil prices?

The Saudi-led JFC’s broader transformation in C6ISR – the systems connecting command, communications, intelligence and combat capabilities – target development and faster sensor-to-shooter integration has changed the military equation since 2015. At the same time, sustained Houthi escalation has exhausted the restraint that governed Saudi policy for years. The major Saudi-led campaign now taking shape will therefore begin against an adversary whose external command support is already under sustained attack.

That is the decisive difference. The Russian-Iranian system sustaining and amplifying Houthi military power is being degraded before major Saudi-led air, land and naval operations are fully under way, while the tactical failures exposed at Mokha are being corrected within the Saudi-led JFC. The Houthis exploited a compromised command system once; they are now being forced to fight while the external system that magnified their own effectiveness is systematically dismantled.

The wrong prescription for liberal democracy's ills (Engelsberg ideas)

That’s a comment worth pondering as the political class around the world tries to figure out what happened to moderation. Leaders who do not hide their disrespect for democratic institutions are in power from Turkey to India to Argentina, while parties towards the middle of the ideological spectrum seem mired in trouble almost everywhere. Two thirds of German voters support none of the three parties that have framed political debate in Germany for nearly 80 years, even as Israel is torn by a debate about whether its government is becoming authoritarian. An overwhelming majority of Americans believe that elected officials don’t care what they think. As Daron Acemoglu asserts: ‘What we are witnessing isn’t a failure just of democracy but of liberal democracy.’

Acemoglu, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is well known for his work on political economy. His 2012 book Why Nations Fail, written with economist James A. Robinson, then at Harvard University, became a best-seller, and he shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics with Robinson and Simon Johnson, also of MIT, for their research on how social institutions affect prosperity. Acemoglu’s new book, What Happened to Liberal Democracy?, goes further, laying out the shortcomings of modern liberalism and offering ideas about how to avoid a slide into authoritarian rule. ‘Liberalism is worth saving and remaking,’ he insists.

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Against that background, Acemoglu calls for a ‘working-class liberalism’ that pays less attention to ‘thought policing’ and more to building community, using narratives that bring people together rather than polarising them. ‘Shared moral principles are more likely to emerge when people see themselves as having agency in choosing such principles and when they feel that they are part of both local communities and a broader shared identity,’ he asserts.

Acemoglu is far from alone in his critique. Many trees have fallen victim to ruminations about the shortcomings of liberal democracy. As befits a book by an economist, What Happened to Liberal Democracy? draws more heavily on the economics literature than most books of this genre, but its conclusions are far from unique.

Here’s What California Is Learning From Solar Panels Built Over Irrigation Canals (KQED ) and what I got out of it was they are using marginal space for solar panels. Why not here?

The future of Indiana depends on educating its future, so what have we got? Education is being underfunded. 

Indiana superintendents say they're cutting jobs because of property tax reforms (Indiana Capital Chronicle )

The survey went out to 290 superintendents throughout the state in August; 144 responded.

Other solutions raised in the report are creative: one superintendent said they planted prairie grass instead of mowing to save money on fuel, removed televisions to save on electricity and launched a student-run business to generate new income.

Nearly all of the respondents said they anticipate negative financial impacts from SEA 1, while a clear majority expressed similar concerns about universal school choice and the level of funding the General Assembly will allocate to public schools next year.

Schools would need anywhere from 1% to 25% in one-time funding increases to maintain the level of services expected by the community, plus an average of 6% in ongoing increases thereafter, the report found.

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Others are considering delayed maintenance, reduced staff raises, cuts to transportation services, electives and field trips or consolidation. One raised the possibility their district won’t be able to sustain student internships, career pathways or dual-credit offerings.

In rural districts, superintendents say they worry lawmakers are pressuring them to consolidate or close schools.

“I feel like funding is bleeding the small schools dry,” one superintendent wrote. “I am skeptical that this is simply a push to consolidate.”

The people running Indiana: About - CEOs of Indiana Corporate Partnership.

Snow Globe Palimpsest (Los Angeles Review of Books) shows the history of Zionism is not simple and that anti-Zionism has its Jewish roots.

 

Even the Irish think Putin pulls Trump's chain: Donald Trump acts as Putin’s puppet for reasons shrouded in secrecy (The Irish Times ).

Something for me, us, to think about: How Weimar Germany’s Proportional Democracy Put Hitler in Power. I favor proportional representation. Frankly, I assume the proportions being divided between our same-old main parties. One silver lining from the essay:

As the divided Weimar government continued to prove itself incapable of dealing with the myriad economic problems facing the country, more Germans began to search for radical solutions. By 1923 the Nazi Party had attracted more than fifty thousand members, among them the widely admired World War I general Erich Ludendorff. Hitler and Ludendorff believed the party was powerful enough to stage a revolution. 

“Divided.” Nationally, here, a multitude of parties seems unlikely. Maybe in the states, but even then not so many. Still, a reminder not to trust in one solution to a complicated problem. 

So, allow me to point you to STAR voting (Wikipedia).  We cannot change the type of representation without changing how we vote. This seems a better choice than instant run-offs, which interested me for over a decade.

Get moving:

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