I took a vacation day to take of some legal business. What happened was that I disappointed a woman in Kokomo within 16 minutes. I think that is a new record for me.
Before that, I did some reading.
Bloomington overpriced for rents! Rent too high. Wages too low: 140 mid-income beds in Indiana apartment complex are empty. Not good for me, who wants to move to Bloomington when I finish my business in Kokomo.
For example, rent for a 371-square-foot studio in The Standard is $1,715. For a single person who makes 120% of the area median income, $75,960, the city’s incentives would cap the monthly rate at $1,188.
The inner ear of Neanderthals reveals clues about their enigmatic origin
In pushing for Ukraine elections, Trump is falling into Putin-laid trap to delegitimize Zelenskyy
Zelenskyy is not opposed to elections in principle and has agreed that elections should be held when the time is right. “Once martial law is over, then the ball is in parliament’s court – the parliament then picks a date for elections,” Zelenskyy stated in a Jan. 2 interview.
And he appears to have the backing of the majority of Ukrainians. In May 2024, 69% of Ukrainians polled said Zelenskyy should remain president until the end of marshal law, after which elections should be held.
The issue, as Zelenskyy has said, is the timing and circumstances. “During the war, there can be no elections. It’s necessary to change legislation, the constitution, and so on. These are significant challenges. But there are also nonlegal, very human challenges,” he said on Jan. 4.
Even opposition politicians in Ukraine agree that now is not the time. Petro Poroshenko, Zelenskyy’s main political rival, has dismissed the idea of wartime elections, as has Inna Sovsun, the leader of the opposition Golos Party.
So only a problem for Putin.
You may know Clockwork Orange, its author was Anthony Burgess who more and better books: Jan Dalley meets Anthony Burgess (1987, Literary Review).
There is a strong sense that Burgess is at odds with the mores of British letters, as this incident shows. Interested in ideas, unabashed by serious cultural discussion, spurning the art of raising modesty to a high form, he is a Continental-style intellectual – a creature traditionally regarded with suspicion by the British. He writes about himself in a way that is just Not Done: on reading Joyce as a schoolboy, for example, he says, ‘The modernism did not deter me … I, who had read the score of Le Sacre du Printemps, was not likely to be put off by literary experiment.’ His prolificity, too, causes friction: ‘People say I write ‘too much’. The current ideal is Anita Brookner – small, finely wrought books, a life’s work no thicker than this.’ He holds a finger and thumb an inch apart. He defends his rate of output – a novel a year for some time, and often a work of non-fiction too – by comparison with Hardy, Conrad, and H G Wells.
From earlier in the week, something I forgot to post:Republicans find new ways to make voting harder in Indiana:
Indiana remains basically democratic. But make no mistake about it: if the GOP continues to get its way and make mincemeat of voting rights, we will be living in a very different — and by no means democratic — state.
As voting rights are manipulated to preserve one party’s advantages, we risk moving towards a de facto one-party state. That prospect should worry all real patriots, and not just the extreme partisans now running the show at the state Capitol.
(This came in today's email: Questionable elections bills going the wrong way - commentary from Indiana Capital Chronicle. 2/22/25)
I went off to group therapy early, was still the last person in the door. I guess upsetting Kokomo women had been too much a blow for me, I forgot my notebook, so I needed to buy one from Payless. The lecture only lasted 15 minutes. Here are the notes:
Trauma
manifesting trauma response - some sort of emotional response
- Straight into shock
- Absolute numbness - separation from one's self
- Derealization - not aware - brain fog
- Learn to build container in mind.
- Building a safe space.
An hour nap turned into three. Not that I feel rested or even comfortable with myself. I ate dinner, did some catching up on my online reading, these past two hours.
Sam Peckinpah would be 100 years old this year, and The Guardian has Nihilistic, anarchic, repugnant: Sam Peckinpah’s 10 best films – ranked! although I have not seen Straw Dogs in decades, there are only two I have not seen, and often more than one time.
Granta has Piranhas and Us by Can Xue (Translated by Annelise Finegan). Interesting in how the story is told, and I am rather mystified by it all.
My back is stiff, and I want to call it a day. I will finish this up tomorrow.
2/21
I slept away Friday afternoon and then I most of the evening, only to wake around midnight, and then I could not get back to sleep until almost 2 AM. The neighbors had the heat on too high, even with my windows open. Which leaves this morning's plan in disarray.
The Quakers food pantry opens at 10. That is a must.
Laundry, too, is a must.
The big plan was to spend the day cleaning.
The Quaker food bank was last week, so I came back and started cleaning the kitchen and putting dinner into the slow cooker.
I am really liking the Zeno browser. Built on Firefox, it does not have the problems I had with Firefox since I came back from prison - like not crashing in a blink of an eye. It moves faster than Edge or Chrome. Unlike those two, it has also not crashed after an hour or two. I am able to keep far more tabs open than with Firefox, Chrome or Edge without inducing a lockup and crash. I am seeing how long I can run Backwoods, a show from WMBR, without a crash. It is about 40 minutes now. That is 10 minutes longer than I can with Internet radio with Chrome or Edge. I am disappointed with its split screen function - Edge is a bit more of what I like - since I cannot figure out how to close the split without closing the originating tab. Time may solve that. I may need to change its dark format, but it is as customizable as Firefox.
The front room and bathroom are swept out. I need to collect my clothes for the laundry. So far, so good.
Damn caught up with Elizabeth Brogden's The Valkyrie (The Common). It was a harrowing read - the prose tangling me up in its gracefulness only to give a punch to the head made more powerful by it being indirect. Do give it a read.
I got confused. All morning I knew it was Saturday and was aware of the bus schedule. Only when I decided to leave for lunch and the laundry, my mind had slipped back to the weekday bus schedule. I decided to read Can Xue's Piranhas and Us (Granta; Translated by Annelise Finegan). Which reads both as a mystery, a coming of age story, and a fable. Leastways, that is my description.
The old man was old, although hale and hearty. He lived beside a pond, where a large scholar tree bloomed with white flowers at the door to the house, and behind the building, purple perilla and sunchokes grew in a large vegetable plot that didn’t need tending. We often went to steal his sunchokes to pickle and eat. We, Little Camel and I, thought that, anyhow, the old man couldn’t eat so many, and in truth the old man never interfered even when he discovered us stealing his vegetables.
I decided to go ahead and walk downtown instead of waiting for the bus. The Downtown Farmstand stops serving lunch at 2 pm.
12:29
Around 1 pm, I walked down to The Downtown Farm Stand for lunch, carrying my laundry bag with me. One bowl, not huge nor small, and I was stuffed. Delicious stuff. I caught a bus at 1:45 for the laundry. I was there for about 90 minutes, then it was a bus ride and a walk back here after 3 pm. A short nap, tasting the pork in the low cooker, and here to read another short story. The story was another of Granta's Chinese short stories, In Her Room by Wang Anyi (Translated by Michael Berry). Another brilliant piece that takes in a lifetime and ends with a devastating sentence. No dialog, just prose like this:
Time seems to slip by without leaving even the slightest trace on her body. There is no way of guessing her age, but her thin, supple body, glowing white skin, and clearly defined features all make her look like a young woman still in the prime of her youth. The most telling details lie in her expression – that mildly amused look so common among young girls. The edges of her mouth tilt slightly upwards, as do her eyes, that’s one of the reasons her expression is so distinctive. Her face is nearly devoid of wrinkles; even when she smiles the skin on her face remains smooth and even, with the exception of a hint of crow’s feet. But even those tiny lines seem to accentuate the natural curvature of her eyes, increasing her allure. There is nothing aged about her appearance – she doesn’t even seem to have fully matured – she looks more like a girl in the spring of youth. It is hard to believe. Could she really be that young? There is something about her that gradually reveals the passage of time. Once those tiny details emerge, they quickly multiply. Beneath her supple body, glowing skin, and perfectly manicured appearance there is something frozen and fixed. It is difficult to express. Nothing changes, but it is as if more and more is added to her, layer upon layer. Who knows? Perhaps at some point her appearance will actually begin to transform. That’s why, while everyone repeatedly remarks ‘how young she looks’, between the lines, what they are saying is that her youth has passed.
6:00 PM
Trump Issued Perhaps His Most Terrifying Executive Order on Tuesday
On Tuesday, Trump issued an executive order which purports to do several things.
First, it purports to abolish the independence of congressionally created independent agencies and subject the heads of all such agencies to performance (and by implication, dismissal) standards set not by Congress but by the White House Office of Management and Budget. This portion of the order is a bald power grab that plainly violates Supreme Court precedent.
Second, the order asserts as to independent agencies the claim Trump has already made about the rest of the executive branch—that he can ignore Congress’ statutory commands about how appropriated money shall be spent. The nonchalance of this declaration reflects Trump’s growing confidence that the Republican Congress will not protest his usurpation of the legislature’s constitutional power of the purse, and thus that the legislative branch already bows before the Führerprinzip.
In addition, the Feb. 18 executive order makes a breathtaking assertion that reaches far beyond independent agencies, declaring that the president (and the attorney general subject to the president’s control) “shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch” ***
In short, Trump is declaring that in all questions of either making law in the form of regulation or interpreting any law whatever—regulatory, statutory, or constitutional—the only executive branch opinion that matters is his.
Trump declared himself king with this; even more, he is saying he is an absolute monarch. The article gives a long history of how England got away from an absolute monarchy where the king declared the law and where the king commanded his subjects. Did Trump voters really want to make an absolute monarch, giving up their rights to be citizens rather than Trump's subjects?
I rode this week with a bus driver with whom I am on friendly terms. He exulted in how Trump-Musk were cutting the government. It amazes me how he was taken with how little was actually being accomplished, or how Trump was doing this while violating the law. Here Are The Biggest DOGE Hoaxes And Inaccuracies—As $8 Million Canceled ICE Contract Listed At $8 Billion (Forbes). I guess we now have such small lives that such things seem large and important. Economists Reveal the Truth Behind Musk and Trump’s ‘DOGE Dividends’ has what will be the most likely dividend from the Musk/Trump attack on government employees:
Galbraith was skeptical that the approach taken by DOGE in Trump’s first month would ever yield positive results.
“Wholesale dismissals, reductions-in-force, and probationary firings are a slash-and-burn approach,” he said. “They will make the federal government less efficient: queues will get longer, maintenance will be deferred, more mistakes will be made, it will be harder to hire new people if they don’t think the jobs are secure.”
In which I hear echoes of what Musk did to Twitter.
Last night, early this morning, I looked up Elon Musk on Wikipedia. He has a bachelor's degree - he is not an engineer. He coded a webpage. Musk is not a tech whiz kid; he is a businessman who knows how to take advantage of a situation to make good investments. Without government money, SpaceX would be a dead business. His ability to run a business on his own is shown by his running of what was Twitter. As for Tesla - Tesla’s 2024 financial results are out—and they’re terrible:
But gross profits fell by 1 percent, with net profits falling by a huge 53 percent to $7.1 billion for the year, making this Tesla's worst year since 2021, when it made just $5.5 billion in profit. Free cash flow dropped 18 percent during the year to $3.6 billion. Delving into the profit and loss statement, $2.8 billion of that profit came from selling regulatory credits to other automakers, not from selling cars or even supercharger access.
Tesla plays the government subsidy game. Odd thing I noticed in the Wikipedia article as Musk's affection for William Golding's Lord of the Flies. If that is an intellectual/spiritual touchstone for Musk, then much is explained - everything is a bloody struggle of survival where the brightest, strongest, most ruthless live at the expense of everyone else. There is vanity in such things. We tend to think of ourselves as Jack or Ralph, the leaders in Golding's novels, rather than Piggy.
For every action, there is a reaction: Some Republicans hammered at home by constituents about DOGE, Ukraine (ABC News) and California crowd savagely boos Trump transportation secretary (SF Gate).
Now, about the sign that end times are upon us:
- Amazon MGM Studios gains creative control of James Bond franchise
- Daniel Craig Reacts to Amazon’s James Bond Takeover: ‘My Respect’ for Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson Remains ‘Undiminished’
- James Bond Shocker: Amazon MGM Gains Creative Control of 007 Franchise as Producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson Step Back
Kiss James Bond goodbye.
sch
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please feel free to comment