Time Changes

 Well, it has been a long day, some closing notes.

I have spent the day updating this blog, with some reading on the side. I took a break to walk down to McClure's then down to Dollar General. The sun was bright, the air was warm.

The cat came to visit; it is still out on the porch.

I ate dinner, waiting for my niece to call. She did not.

I downloaded more music. I crashed my browser a few more times.

Something I learned Friday: that I may be exceedingly stubborn on goals, I am quite flexible on means. I will stop and ask for directions. This I had never thought of until then. The question I ahe for all means: will it work?

Some rejections received recently and of which I have not posted:

Thank you for taking the time to submit to The Write Launch.  We appreciated the opportunity to read "True Love Ways Gone Astray." While "True Love Ways Gone Astray" was one of the many excellent pieces received in Short Story this past submission period, it was not selected for upcoming issues.

There may be only one or two reasons a piece is declined as we strive to find a balance for each issue of The Write Launch.  Thus, we encourage you to always keep writing.

Thank you again!

Editors

and:

Thank you for your submission of "Their Bright Future" to Halfway Down the Stairs. We appreciate your interest in our e-zine. Unfortunately, however, the other fiction editors and I have decided not to accept your piece for our upcoming issue. We wish you all the best and hope you will continue to visit Halfway Down the Stairs.

Kind regards,
Carrie Bachler
Fiction Editor

Some items looked at and which I have not had time to comment upon:

• The American Dream
• Trump family on trial: five takeaways from a week in the New York fraud case 
• United Auto Workers union hails strike-ending deals with automakers that would raise top assembly-plant hourly pay to more than $40 as ‘record contracts’  
• CAPITALISM ALONE IS NOT THE PROBLEM 
• Deplorable Storytelling: Richard Russo’s latest novel poignantly chronicles the lives of down-on-their-luck upstate New Yorkers.
• Bob Knight's fingerprints are all over Indiana high school basketball: '100% intertwined' 

 Some things with excerpts for you to follow up on:

‘On the brink of extinction’: a food historian’s hunt for ingredients vanishing from US plates 

The American buff goose. Amish deer tongue lettuce. The Nancy Hall sweet potato. The mulefoot hog. When food historian Sarah Lohman stumbled on these fantastical-sounding ingredients in a database of vanishing foods called the Ark of Taste, she set off on a journey across the United States to discover more ingredients and traditions that had been abandoned in the annals of history.

I downloaded a bunch from Pearl Harbour's rockabilly album, and then I did some looking. She should have been bigger, in my opinion, but check out Pearl Harbour: She's a Blast! and Pearl Harbour's website. 

A review for a Prince reissue, Diamonds and Pearls (Super Deluxe Edition)

Once upon a time, there was a Prince who was so powerful that he could write a hit song on command. It happened when he was making his watershed 1999 album. In Alan Light’s Let's Go Crazy: Prince and the Making of Purple Rain, the artist’s former manager, Bob Cavallo, recalled telling Prince he was missing a first single for the set. Two weeks later, the guy came back with “1999,” which would become one of his signature songs. Same goes for Purple Rain. The movie’s director, Albert Magnoli, told Prince that he needed a track to play over a mid-picture montage, tying its themes together. The next day, Prince handed him “When Doves Cry,” another signature and his longest running No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.

It happened again with Diamonds and Pearls. Ahead of the 1991 release of a major comeback for one of the titans of ‘80s pop and the unveiling of his new band the New Power Generation, suits in the Black-music department of his record label, Warner Bros, weren’t hearing a lead single for R&B radio. Prince disagreed but he took the weekend and came back with “Gett Off,” a pummeling interpretation of new jack swing that contained a string of slick pick-up lines—some rapped—from Prince and the promise of “21 positions in a one night stand” from N.P.G.’s in-house rapper Tony M. It became a No. 6 R&B song, and its orgiastic video portraying an HR nightmare of a dance audition lived in heavy rotation with the persistence of a vibrator that summer on MTV.

 Time to Throw the Intersectional Left Under the Bus!

 Bad ideas and arguments are bad ideas and arguments. It shouldn’t matter who makes them. Just like it shouldn’t matter who in the intersectional hierarchy massacres Jews. It’s still an atrocity.

It’s high time for Democrats to decisively reject this kind of thinking across the board. Embrace instead the universalistic principles the overwhelming majority of Americans believe in. They believe, unlike Kendi, that racial preferences in rewards and decision-making are not fair and fairness is a fundamental part of their world outlook. They actually believe, with Martin Luther King Jr., that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” In a recent University of Southern California Dornsife survey, this classic statement of colorblind equality was posed to respondents: “Our goal as a society should be to treat all people the same without regard to the color of their skin.” This MLK-style statement elicited sky-high (92 percent) agreement from the public, despite the assaults on this idea from Critical Race Theory (CRT), Kendi, and large sectors of the Democratic left. In a fascinating related finding, the researchers found that most people who claim to have heard about CRT believe CRT includes this colorblind perspective, rather than directly contradicting it. Perhaps they just can’t believe any theory that has anything to do with race would reject this fundamental principle.

Five types of gun laws the Founding Fathers loved

One of the most common claims one hears in the modern Second Amendment debate is the assertion that the Founders included this provision in the Constitution to make possible a right of revolution. But this claim, too, rests on a serious misunderstanding of the role the right to bear arms played in American constitutional theory.

In fact, the Founders engaged in large-scale disarmament of the civilian population during the American Revolution. The right to bear arms was conditional on swearing a loyalty oath to the government. Individuals who refused to swear such an oath were disarmed.

The notion that the Second Amendment was understood to protect a right to take up arms against the government is absurd. Indeed, the Constitution itself defines such an act as treason.

Gun regulation and gun ownership have always existed side by side in American history. The Second Amendment poses no obstacle to enacting sensible gun laws. The failure to do so is not the Constitution’s fault; it is ours.

 Now, a shower and bed.

sch