A Bad Moon On The Rise

I finished off the night with some blog posting, some reading online, and having Outlander running in the background.

Something good from out of Indiana: Hoosier Cabinets and the Dream of Efficiency (JStor)

“As far as we know no one person or company is given credit for the invention of what we now call the Hoosier cabinet,” he says. While it’s possible to find several early United States patents for a kitchen cabinet starting about 1885, many furniture companies jumped on the Hoosier cabinet-making band wagon.

Though most of these concerns hailed from Indiana, as the cabinet name suggests, some were based in Ohio and elsewhere in the Midwest.

“We have found approximately 130 different companies that produced a version of the new popular kitchen cabinet, either from newspaper advertisements, internet sales of cabinets, or seeing a cabinet personally at antique malls,” Warner says. The only one that still makes cabinets is Coppes Napanee, which began its life as a sawmill in 1876 before branching out into retail lumber and then, in 1903, Hoosier cabinets. Twenty-four odd years later it was making 23,000 of them annually. Indeed, some estimates suggest a tenth of all households contained a Hoosier cabinet by the 1920s.

With apologies to John Fogerty and CCR:

A bad moon is rising, whether we cower or stand upright is to be the question.

Trump’s Rage at Liz Cheney Takes a Dark Turn—and Wrecks a Big GOP Lie

But the real story here is the public conduct of Trump and Republicans, not that of Liz Cheney or what Trump supposedly “believes” about it. Trump is demonstrating that he’s eager for Cheney’s prosecution to proceed regardless of whether there’s any legitimate basis for it.

The story is that House Republicans are abusing their public roles to create a phony pretext for something that Trump already intended to do anyway: wield law enforcement as a weapon against his enemies with no serious legal predicate. And Senate Republicans appear willing to confirm Patel while knowing full well that Trump has expressly chosen him to carry out this extraordinary and degenerate abuse of power.

The Times Literary Supplement came in today.

Forgotten fatherlands: Coming to terms with Germany’s colonial past by Peter Frederick Matthews raises questions for me that run outside the review - was Hitler really so foreign to German culture?

Doomed to a life of freedom: A provocative drama of the Turkish Republic’s early years by William Armstrong

Those who burn books: Radwa Ashour’s epic of Castilian conquest and Moorish dispossession by Patricia Storace

One last piece from The Bulwark: Trump Could Cost the Country Its Most Important Weapon. For all Trump's BS about America being a joke, he is the one making us look silly. 

Nations, including the United States, have four ways of getting others to do as they please: force, threats, bribery, and persuasion. All four methods are important, but what has really set U.S. leadership of the free world apart was persuasion, both active and passive. Since its independence, through its can-do culture and its dominance of science, culture, and the arts, the United States has inspired other nations to follow America’s example, cooperate with Washington on projects of mutual interest, or simply to emulate American practices in domestic politics.

Only MAGA zealots think there is anything inspiring in Donald J. Trump.

Perhaps, there is a bathroom on the right?

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