A Ringing Endorsement For Living In Indiana

Even better it points out the benefits of living in Indiana.

Public Health Professor Left Indiana; Found Fulfillment in New Mexico (Business Insider)

I packed my bags and moved to Kentucky for a master's degree in public health, then to Ohio for my doctorate in health education. I was hired as a faculty member at BSU in Indiana. In total, I lived in the Midwest for 15 years, with the last 10 in Indiana.

The small college town of Muncie averages more than a foot of snow each winter. Some winters in Muncie were really harsh, windy, and freezing for weeks at a time.

The last couple of weeks I am almost hoping for winter. The humidity and the heat have been giving my lungs trouble. Sneezing and coughing, I have been feeling like a mucus factory. No church today. I made the decision last night during another coughing jag. It wore me out. I almost thought I had decided wrong until another episode hit during the night. I had another when I finally woke this morning and during my walk to the convenience store. 

The good point about living in Muncie:

Between Muncie, Indiana, and Las Cruces, New Mexico, the biggest cost difference is in housing and healthcare. I bought a house in 2023, but I used to rent a two-bedroom, two-bathroom for $800 a month in Indiana in 2020, and that jumped to $1,050 in New Mexico. 

 Let us face facts, if you can live in Indiana then you can live anywhere. The weather can change from sunshine to rain in a day. At some points during the year, you can have rain, sleet, snow, and sunshine within an hour.

The humidity can be 100% and not rain.

Much of the central part of the state was swamp. If the wide swathes of cornfields disappeared they would return.

America is a country of conservatives and reactionaries, a history lesson:

Cohn lives through Trump. McCarthy was a bum.

 I passed a point very early this morning with my project. A section was finished to my satisfaction, the argument put together. Not that all points were finished. Of course, when I got into bed there were some details that could be added, but not ones that changed the argument. 

I intend no more writing this week besides for this blog. Books need read. 

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Beeves - Those With Four Legs, Those In Black Robes

 Some odds and ends I thought worth considering together.

Trump’s beef import deal: Small Hoosier farm sales boom; Indiana commercial sellers take hit (Fox 59)

However, the anticipated impact across all suppliers, big and small, is more complicated than a quick boost in sales.

Indiana is home to roughly 20,000 individual beef producers. That includes both commercial and local sellers, like RK Cattle Company in Danville – watching its freshly-fed, farm-to-fork flanks, steaks and more – fly off freezer shelves.

“There is a demand and a need and a want for quality, American-raised beef,” said Karissa Wyeth, owner of RK Cattle Company. “I think that’s just very important to people right now. You might not want to go out to a restaurant and eat because it’s expensive, but you’re willing to put good meat on your table for your family.”

Wyeth tracked a 44% spike in sales last week after Trump’s temporary tariff pause announcement. Since then, she suspects consumers are losing trust in grocery store meats.

'Starship Troopers' director confirms Donald Trump's space uniforms are Nazi-inspired (Euronews). Of course they are; Trump does like a man in a good-looking uniform.

John Roberts’ role model shows everything wrong with the Supreme Court.

Reconstruction’s opponents drew a different lesson. They insisted that the president needed a court powerful enough to protect him from “the meshes” of Congress. As the nation abandoned Reconstruction, a generation of politicians and historians recast Johnson as a martyr to congressional tyranny. Their remedy was to articulate and entrench a new doctrine: that the Constitution makes the court supreme over Congress. They encouraged the court to void any statute that hems in presidential power.

It took 50 years for that doctrine to triumph. It arrived carrying a grudge. In 1926, Chief Justice William Howard Taft wrote that studying “the injustice that the radical Republicans did to Andrew Johnson” left him “humiliated as a Republican.” He then used a case before him, Myers v. United States, to condemn the Tenure of Office Act and strike down a Reconstruction-era regulation of the presidency. Admirers cheered that the court had at last vindicated Andrew Johnson.

Today’s court has resurrected that project. Just this term in Trump v. Slaughter, the court invoked Myers to shred century-old statutory protections that kept public servants from being replaced with loyalists. Afterward, on Substack, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote admiringly that Taft’s leadership not only protected the president from Congress, but also helped to fend off congressional efforts to rein in the court.

 When I was younger, so much younger, the conservatives were complaining about the liberality of the Warren Couurt. That the unelected court had too much power. Over the years, I have been convinced by the sonceratives that what they really wanted was not a more democratic court but a court that was under their power. This article is just more proof that a strong court is just fine if it is run by conservatives. Where are you now, Alexander Bickel?

Today my mother's mother would have 128 years old.

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Indiana - Keeping Democracy Alive! Vote!

One surprise I had this year was learning that my oldest sister did not know who laws are made. I learned that in high school. That made me want to share these two pieces from the Indiana Capital Chronicle.

Democracy Day: A guide to how Indiana makes its laws

All the information you need to participate in Indiana's democracy

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Normalization (Sheila Kennedy )

As we prepare to go to the polls, I would suggest that we focus on several that he omits–and especially on the growing normalization of multiple bigotries by this administration and by MAGA and Trumpism generally. We need to understand what that particular area of normalization is doing to America’s civic fabric and to our common understanding of what I’ve called “The American Idea.”

What happens to our understanding of America when certain groups of people are so constantly targeted and marginalized that media simply reports the latest attack on “wokeism” along with other news of the day?

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Writer Related Items

Things put off as I worked through my research project. 

A Scottish hospital. A dying man. A fascist doctor. Will we listen? (The Herald)

We know how the story starts: on a bright cold day in April as the clocks are striking 13. We know how the story ends: in the basement of the ministry of love with a cage full of starving rats. And we probably feel like we know what the story means, what it’s saying, what it’s warning us about. Yet here we are, the story is happening again, and in a different way: in a hospital in Scotland, with a dying man, and a fascist doctor. It is unexpected.

I wonder, as it gets going, this brand new version, if it can have anything left to say, or at least anything surprising. Everyone has read the book, and everyone’s familiar with its dark and disturbing iconography: Big Brother, Room 101, the Thought Police. These are the phrases we use to talk about the state we’re in. They form the questions we ask. Has fiction become fact? In what ways is 2026 like 1984? How Orwellian are we really?

***

The solutions to all of this are harder to come up with – at one point, the Scottish doctor wonders what the way forward might be and Orwell shrugs and says “I don’t know” before coughing up more blood into his handkerchief. In a way, it’s the bleakest, most dystopian way to end a bleak and dystopian story, but the comfort for us, in the audience, is that, even though the parallels are there and they’re strong, Winston’s world is much, much worse than ours, which means there’s much more hope in our world too. It’s hard to watch at times, but perhaps this version of Orwell can remind us of the basics, the sums that make us. Such as two plus two equals four. And Winston’s final desperate statement of an un-disputable, un-editable fact: it takes two to be human.    

  10 Reasons Why We Didn't Accept Your Submission (Thin Skin) - read this and it might help you revise.

From Literary Hub: What Weimar Berlin’s Most Famous Plays Revealed About Artistic Freedom and What Latin American Literature Can Teach the Current Leaders of Latin America. The latter has more humor than the former, but both should widen your horizons.

A good refresher covering everything:  All about perspectives in novels  (Nathan Bransford)

Q: Can stories with unsavory characters find a home in today’s lit mag landscape?

Processing: How Nicholas Russell Wrote Observer

Asking Confidently and Advocating for Your Work

That can feel pushy at first. Self-centered. Why should someone want to read my writing? Answering this question is key to seeking your audience’s attention. No matter who you’re speaking to, let whomever is considering your work know quickly that your writing is worth their time. And tell them why, succinctly. In my experience, when I can confidently advocate for myself and my work, the reader—agent or editor—will be more willing to entertain the possibility that it IS worth their time.  

We Were the Mulvaneys  JCO writes about her novel.

Finally, I have to say of We Were the Mulvaneys that it’s the novel closest to my heart. Passages were transcribed in white heat, as in a fevered dream. I was scarcely inventing or imagining, only just “remembering.” My writing is so much about homesickness. The rural landscapes and waterways of upstate New York, where I was born and grew up on a small, not-very-prosperous farm north of Lockport. The sights, smells and texture of life in a small town. The intense emotions of high school life, ephemeral anxieties and joys. The wounds that can cut deep, and scar for years, or a lifetime. 

 Novelist Annie Dillard has died (NPR).

I read Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek while in prison. I thought it was wonderful and recommend it as being along the lines of a modern Walden.

Margaret Atwood: ‘God made the middle finger for a reason’ (London Times) - always witty, always worth listening to. 

“They don’t want Democrats being elected.” Wry insouciance vanishes, and raw exasperation with Americans enters her tone. “Yeah, so how about voting this time, instead of doing what you did with Hillary Clinton, because she wasn’t perfect enough? And how far did that get you, nincompoops?”

Atwood has no time for ideological purity or extremism on either left or right. “Defund the police was a really stupid idea,” she says. “An awful slogan. What did they think was going to replace it?” To many fans’ disappointment she won’t even call herself a feminist “because there’s too many different kinds, so what are we talking about?” I suspect she is bored with being asked about gender politics, and when I say so she looks relieved.

“I’m the human rights generation. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was made up for a very good reason, so that’s my point of reference. And if you want rights for women, you also have to have human rights for men.” She fixes a stare. “Radical idea, right? But it doesn’t make any sense otherwise. So what kind of gender politics am I interested in? I’m interested in the legal kind. I’m interested in whether or not you can have a credit card. Or whether or not you can have an abortion, or whether or not you can wear trousers to the office.”

***

Research suggests that people are having a lot less sex, I tell her. Last year, for example, a study by the Institute for Family Studies found that weekly sex between Americans aged 18-64 fell from 55 per cent in 1990 to 37 per cent in 2024. The number of 18 to 24-year-olds who’d had no sex at all in the previous year had doubled since 2010.

“That’s interesting. Well, silly old them. Enjoy it while you can, kids.”

She pauses, then volunteers languidly: “I still get letters from pervy people. Which I’m considering rather flattering, actually, at my age. And no, I am not going to put on black leather and high heels and walk all over your face. Dream on, wanker.”

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September Is Now August Part Two

Nothing is going on here. I have spent the last few days on my project, when I was supposed to be doing other things. I have left the apartment onlly to make it to the convenience store. Plenty of groceries in the apartment. The heat has been leading me back into the bad habit of napping. I did get through last week's mail.

I have talked to CC and KH. I need to call E and Paul S. DM did not return my call. 

News from Indiana I like to share. 

 The Indiana-Based Bourbon Brand That Outshines E.H. Taylor And Blanton's 

What is that mushroom cloud? 

 Navy installing advanced nuclear microreactor at Indiana command

The Pentagon announced Wednesday that the Navy is planning to install Indiana’s first advanced nuclear micro modular reactor at Naval Weapons Station Crane by September 2028.

The reactor’s deployment helps carry out President Donald Trump’s 2025 executive order calling for the swift integration of nuclear power within the military, with a goal of having at least one working reactor on a military base by Sept. 30, 2028.

 Your 2026 Indianapolis fall theater preview

 A rejection arrived this week:

9/14 

Thank you for sending us "Agnes." We appreciate the opportunity to read your work, but unfortunately this submission was not right for us.

If you decide to submit to us again, please wait at least six months from now before you do so.

Thank you for thinking of us, and—

Best wishes,

The Editors of Copper Nickel

Belated news from Anderson: Workers go on strike at Coca-Cola Consolidated in Anderson - WRTV 

 

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Trump Mania

 It is not Iran who is jacking up gas prices, it is Ukraine!

 Trump calls on Ukraine to halt strikes on Russian diesel fuel, citing a global shortage 

Remember this: America's economy is booming & great! 

Trump urges rapid interest rate drop after Fed announces quarter point hike 

What alternate reality? 

How MAGA Bewildered Voters Into Its Alternate Reality 

Plenty of right-wing listeners use these shows as their primary news source. They’re not listening to Ben Shapiro for his “take” on news they already consumed elsewhere. They’re listening to Ben Shapiro to find out what’s happening in the world in the first place. It’s a replacement for mainstream media, not a supplement to it.

And now the landscape is shifting again, in ways that should alarm everyone who cares about a free press and its role in American democracy. The tech oligarchs who built our dominant social media platforms—the distribution mechanisms where people go to discuss politics—are consolidating power in ways that are explicitly hostile to old-media ethics like rigorous fact-checking, fidelity to the truth, and avoidance of partisanship.

Americans can’t rely on mainstream media to hold the lines of democracy anymore. Not because mainstream media is bad, but because it’s actively being captured, or hollowed out, or reconfigured by people who do not share its traditional mission.

sch 9/18 

 

Washington Irving; A Movie Review; Chuck Todd About 9/11

What I was doing on 9/11, other than reading and researching and working on my research project. 

Starting off with a film review: ‘Hope’ Review  by Sonny Bunch (The Bulwark). 

Washington Irving is making a slight comeback. Preparing to be Forgotten: On Philip Lopate’s “A Washington Irving Sketch Book”  (Cleveland Review of Books) is the second review I have seen of this book. I first knew of Washington Irving from the Authors game. Looking back, it was an antique game when I was a kid. My mother's mother gave it to us. It seems it was a game she had played when young. Anyway, I did read The Knickerbocker Stories while in prison. All I can say is that I prefer Irving to James Fenimore Cooper - Irving has more humor. As to this review:

Lopate’s A Washington Irving Sketch Book is the tribute of one minor writer to another. It’s a collection of essays examining individual facets of Irving’s life and work in roughly chronological order. Each of Irving’s major works is given a chapter, but so are disparate topics like his bachelorhood, his affinity for painters, his melancholy temperament, his forays into paraliterature, and the house he built in the Hudson Valley. I don’t call Phillip Lopate a “minor writer” in order to demean him. It’s a phrase he applies to Irving in this book: “I am not trying to promote Irving to the top levels of the American pantheon. I agree, Irving is a minor writer.” And it’s a phrase Lopate has applied to himself, for instance in an interview in Tablet Magazine in 2023: “I didn’t imagine [as a young person] being a successful ‘minor writer.’ I have my place in the culture, not a huge place, but it’s respectable.” He is known as a personal essayist and anthologist of personal essays. He considers Irving a model. So what makes them both minor writers? 

 The Man Behind the Myth: Should We Question the Hero’s Journey? (Los Angeles Review of Books). I tried reading Campbell while in prison. He was one of the few books I did not finish. There was something about his thesis or his writing that I found tedious. It is good to find my dissatisfaction is shared by others.

Like many tales of compulsion, Campbell’s Hero brings dangers to those who put their faith in it. The first is a serious misunderstanding of how myth works. Myths and traditional stories function in specific environments for reasons bounded by time and place. Common traits are interesting, but the differences — what we might call variations or multiforms — cannot be ignored.

The second is the existence of an ideal form in myth. How we talk about and choose to accept differences is important. Calling one version of a story a “variant” implies, wrongly, that there is an authoritative and original form. This is a top-down version of storytelling that often misses the significance of the differences themselves. Famous things we think we know about ancient myths are mere possibilities contingent on their time and place. In many stories, Medea did not kill her children. In a majority of tales, Oedipus had children with someone other than his mother.

The Monomyth is the ultimate example of this simplifying of narrative patterns. It reminds us in a way of the Greek myth of Procrustes, the criminal hotelier who cut guests up or stretched them out to fit the bed of his choosing. Campbell started with a thesis and a fictive metric and then cut global myths to fit his Odyssean bed.

Another challenge comes from what audiences know and expect. As defenders of Campbell will argue, much of what he suggests is meant to be allegorical. The hero’s journey is not supposed to be a simple narrative pattern; it is instead a psychological, even mystical, exploration of the self. But his language, which is derived from myth, is slippery — and due to its outsize influence it affects how people understand ancient traditions. Modern notions of the word “hero,” for example, assume essential goodness or imply selfless deeds on behalf of others. Ancient heroes and figures from myth are anything but essentially good. Within ancient myths, heroes are young people in their full strength; they are part of a generation before the “iron” age of modern humans, marking the transition from a time when gods and people shared the earth. They can also be exceptional figures who follow a pattern of withdrawal and return to their communities, suffering pain and inflicting suffering in turn.

 Twenty years after 9/11, Chuck Todd asks if we have harmed ourselves.

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