Micro Posts

2024-10-27

# Joe Biden has apologized to the indigenous people 'for what happened during the "Indian Boarding School era".

Now let's apologize and reckon with the rest. America has turned away from its foundational truth: It is a country built on white supremacy which is, even now, based in genocide, land theft, slavery and violence. In the years since its founding we've repeatedly and arrogantly pretended to be the champions of freedom and democracy.

The truth is we have become a violent empire with a thin veneer of democracy. The core is white supremacy, systemic violence and capitalism.

2024-10-25

# I'm happy to have been included in Manuel Moreale's ongoing People and Blogs series. You can read the interview here. There are 60 other interviews in his ongoing series. There are lots of interesting folks out there publishing blogs.

2024-10-22

# Watching season 2 of Pachinko and it's excellent. Also, I cannot resist watching the opening credits for this show. The smiles, the dancing, it's delightful.

2024-10-17

# Today's afternoon food experiments. Dinner was my usual sweet rice which is simple, just a bit of sugar, cinnamon, salt and soy milk. I'm out of soy milk so I subbed in peanut butter and also added 1/4 cup of canned pumpkin pie mix. Oh my that was good! Then some hot chocolate and because I'm out of soy I subbed in peanut butter again. Might sound odd but I just blend up a bit of water and peanut butter to make a frothy, nutty milk that works great for hot chocolate.

# Morning breakfast that was so good it deserves a mention: Baked pumpkin oatmeal with walnuts. And coffee of course.

2024-10-13

# Morning coffee and oatmeal while listening to Tech Won't Save Us podcast. An excellent podcast and this particular episode is especially worth a listen. They just dig right in. Accessible but really dense in history, the facts and narrative of the current moment. No doubt I'll give it a second listen.

2024-10-08

# I've made a good bit of progress the past couple weeks getting my Images page setup. It's far from complete but I've got a good start. Each image linked to the matching blog post.

# Sitting on the porch listening to a flock of birds in a nearby tree. I've not identified them visually but Merlin suggests Common Grackel or European Starling. They're having quite the conversation and it is somehow very soothing.

# Should we act? The latest reporting from the Guardian suggesting that "humanity’s future is in balance".

Look. There will be no averting profound human suffering. Let's have some fucking straight talk. We have waited too long. Should we act? YES. But look around you. Look at yourself. What are you willing to give? If you're a typical middle class American the answer thus far is not a fucking thing. The middle class of the US is a significant driving force behind the climate emergency. And from my observation these folks could not care less than they do...

2024-10-07

# A brief note of appeciation for Wikipedia. Such a gem. During a Facetime call with my folks this morning and I ended up down a rabbit hole about the history of race, relations, religion and language in the Middle East. In a very brief, lay-person sort of way of course. My poor parents. But Wikipedia got a donation out of the deal because I realized afterward that I needed to do a bit of follow-up reading and fact checking to confirm a few of the things I'd shared. After all these years I'm still amazed that a site like that came into existence and that it persists.

# Had an interesting five hour visit and conversation with a friend and fellow radical yesterday. One of the things discussed is our frustration with the lack of emphasis on, a commitment to, or even a notion of, daily citizenship. Trump succeeded in motivating half the country to anger and overt racism. But the other half of the country is still confined to the limited scope of electoral politics. That is a veneer of democracy, not the full depth and responsibility of meaningful democracy.

# One year later and Gaza is now reduced to rubble. 41,000 dead (likely 100,000 when those buried under the rubble are included). 100,000+ wounded. Settler violence has increased in the West Bank as land theft has accelerated. Israel has expanded the war to Lebanon.War Crimes and genocide continue.

Autumn 2024

Now (and sorta now)

Sticky Note: As I'm self-rolling this site in html I don't have comments or fancy web mentions. If you mention or link to a post please let me know: I love email!

2024-10-06

Site updates: Boy howdy, I've been making good progress on various site updates. I added a bunch of older posts, some of which I'd sort of "misplaced" several years ago when I switched from Blogspot to WordPress. For whatever reason they just didn't make the transfer. I happened to go look at what was on the Way Back Machine and discovered them. And I've got more images added in to the Images page and I've got them all linked up to their matching blog posts.

Fall Chores! The shorter days and cooler weather are coming so I'll be busy soon with the massive amount of leaves that will fall. I enjoy working outside and especially love playing in the leaves. Mostly, it's just raking them and running over them with the mower to mulch them up a bit and then making various piles in areas that I'd like mulch to suppress the growth of certain plants or where I want to hold moisture. Then in the spring I've got compost. Yay!

It's ridiculous that so many treat fallen leaves as waste to be bagged up for "disposal" rather than as the free, on-site, nature made organic matter it is. Then they'll pay to have shredded wood mulch brought in to landscape with. Waste upon waste.