How I Spent the Afternoon

 CC came up and started typing, then I took her to Puerto Vallerta for lunch. I admit here their Burrito Fajita is good. She is getting the hand of the laptop.

Reading since she left:

Red Lady of Paviland: the story of a 33,000 year-old-skeleton – and the calls for it to return to Wales  -  a bit of history unknown to me, but it has a moral, too: fit theory to facts, not facts to a theory.

9 Events That Led to the Civil War - nothing new does not mean they should be forgotten.

Zone of Strangeness: On John Cheever’s Subjective Suburbs - on which I have written a post scheduled for 2/9/2023.

Adventures in Not-Writing - interesting, did more of a skim, I think it reinforces the idea of writing as madness.

Unredacted NIH E-mails Show Efforts to Rule Out a Lab Origin of Covid

As the search for that origin continues, both in Congress and in the scientific community, it is unclear whether dispositive evidence to support either the lab or natural origin theory will ever emerge. Georgetown’s Lawrence Gostin, for his part, is not optimistic, noting that the Chinese government has foreclosed the possibility of a rigorous, transparent, and independent investigation into the emergence of the virus in Wuhan.

“I think it is extraordinarily sad for humankind that we probably will never know for sure,” he said. “But I lay much of that in the hands of China.”

The Mystery of Suicide - I wrote a long post on this that will be published tomorrow at 9 am.

I forgot to mention reading 'It’s my whole life:' Delilah’s Pet Shop struggles after city ban. This is what happens when a good idea get overtaken by hysteria. 

Count me as one who think Leonard Peltier deserves no more prison time - too many questions about the investigation. Please give The Guardian's FBI’s opposition to releasing Leonard Peltier driven by vendetta, says ex-agent a look.

Peltier, an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribe and of Lakota and Dakota descent, was convicted of murdering two FBI agents during a shootout on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota in June 1975. Peltier was a leader of the American Indian Movement (AIM), an Indigenous civil rights movement founded in Minneapolis that was infiltrated and repressed by the FBI.

Rowley refers to the historical context in which the shooting took place as “… the long-standing horribly wrongful oppressive treatment of Indians in the U.S. [which] played a key role in putting both the agents and Peltier in the wrong place at the wrong time”.

The 1977 murder trial – and subsequent parole hearings – were rife with irregularities and due process violations including evidence that the FBI had coerced witnesses, withheld and falsified evidence.

Larry Sweazy - an Indiana writer - has a new collection of stories, for more information go here. 

Much too difficult to cut up in pieces is Robin Downie's The role of luck in our live. Quite an interesting read, lively prose, and worth reading for a philosophical study.

Oh dear! I find these arguments deeply unsettling. I am convinced that it is up to me as a moral agent to do A or refrain, and that I am responsible for my decision. But yet the 'luck arguments' suggest that my decision will be determined by the constitutive luck of my brain events, by the circumstances in which I make my decision, and the result of my decision will also be affected by luck.

I have a deeply-rooted belief in myself as an agent, as someone who can make responsible decisions to act or forbear. But the all-pervasive reach of luck seems to undermine that belief. There seems to be an irresolvable conflict in these positions. 

I submitted "True Love Ways Gone Astray" to The /tƐmz/ Review.

 And I have another rejection for "Colonel Tom":

Thank you for your submission to The Lindenwood Review and for your interest in our journal. While we are unable to publish your work in issue 13, we send you our best wishes for placing it elsewhere soon. We hope to see work from you again in the future.

The Lindenwood Review

www.lindenwood.edu/lindenwoodReview

Also, from The Scottish Review: That distant dream of democratic decency - a thoughtful piece, not with its applications here. Perhaps common decency is the glue holding together democracies, and that is certainly a quality lacking in this country.

It is 11:02 pm, I have cleared out all but one draft. I am calling it a night.

We still have not got that much snow!

sch