Hecuba should have cried “Enough”!

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Another oldie but goodie, from 2002. Maybe even more relevant today.

Tonight I watched the film version of Euripedes’ Trojan Women that featured Katherine Hepburn as Hecuba, Queen of Troy, who was given no choice but to watch while her city, her countrymen and women, and her family were ravaged by men of great ego and little else. They took everything from her that they could — her birthright, her identity, her freedom. But what they couldn’t take from her was her voice.

I watched the film with a group of women called together by my therapist friend in ritualized support of one of those woman — an American nurse suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as result of her experiences in Viet Nam. We were there to help her give voice to her painful memories, to rage and cry out and vocalize whatever was staying stuck so painfully in the deep wounds of her soul. (Ritual, art, drama, healing: the legacy of Asclepius.)

ENOUGH! We wanted Hecuba to finally cry ENOUGH! We wanted the Trojan Women to all finally cry ENOUGH! But they didn’t, and so we all cried ENOUGH for all the times we didn’t — for all of the times that men and women of conscience do not cry ENOUGH loud ENOUGH for all of the times that men of great ego and nothing else continue to repeat and repeat, over and over again, the very same tragic scenario that Euripides so eloquently and dramatically and ritualistically unfolded all of those centuries ago. When will it be ENOUGH?

In the Middle East men of great ego and little else ravage and destroy what they cannot possess. In our very own America, men of great ego and little else take away everything from us that they can — expect us to watch and endure, like Hecuba. We are all Hecuba, watching, enduring, while men of great ego and little else ravage our liberties, our identities, the very planet that sustains us.

Where are our voices crying ENOUGH! ENOUGH! ENOUGH!

Happy Belated Blogversary to Me.

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As of this past November 29, have been blogging here for 23 years. I take breaks because I often these days I have nothing to say. I’ve been looking over some of my old posts, when I did have something to say. Here is one of my favorites, posted in 2006, before I moved to Massachusetts:

One For The Girls

I look out my rear window and all I can see is the monstrous cab of a bright and shiny red eighteen wheeler. He’s practically crawling up my spoiler. I’m in the left lane on a two-lane stretch of the Mass Pike. I’m driving back from a couple of nights helping out my daughter and the day is gloriously just spring.

I’m on cruise control, two car lengths behind the car in front of me — in front of which are a couple of big delivery trucks. To the right of us are an empty car-carrier and another truck. I can’t move into the right lane. I pump my brakes, but the monster cab is so close to my rear that he probably can’t see them. We all drive along that way for a while, the trucks setting the speed, the red monster cab threatening to gobble me up.

There’s finally an opening in the right lane, and we two cars take it. The trucks take off in front of us, passing each other in some kind of bizzare tag game as they disappear into the distance.

It’s so warm that I open my sun roof, loving the freedom of the road, radio station surfing to find some music that suits my mood. I settle on Country. It reminds me of my carefree adolescence hanging out with a bunch of guys who had a country western band. They taught me the only three guitar chords I know, the ones that suit just about every Everly Brothers tune — at least the ones that were popular during the 50s. As I continue my controlled cruising, I tap my foot to the simple rhythms of songs about old cars and lost loves and I sip at my bottle of cold Starbuck’s Mocha. Life is good.

And then it gets better. I zoom by (just a bit over the speed limit) the big bad bright red monster eighteen wheeler, along with three of the other trucks, pulled over to the side of the road by a blue light blinking police car. I’m tempted to beep or wave out my open sunroof; I opt for discretion. Then Martina McBride comes on with This One’s for the Girls, and by the time she gets around to singing the chorus for the second time, I’m singing it with her:

This one’s for the girls
Who’ve ever had a broken heart
Who’ve wished upon a shooting star
You’re beautiful the way you are
This one’s for the girls
Who love without holdin’ back
Who dream with everything they have
All around the world

Now both feet are tappin’. I’m dancin’ in my seat.
It’s a good day.

Abyss Walkers

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There is a fraternity of us, the abyss walkers….
from “Outer Banks” by Anne Rivers Siddons

There is a fraternity of us, the abyss walkers. In our eyes, the world is divided by it, made up of those who walk frail, careening rope bridges over the abysses and those who do not. We know each other. I do not think it is a concsious thing with us, this knowing, at least not most of the time, or we would flee from each other as from montsers. It is an animal thing. It is only on that wild old neck-prickling level that we meet. It is only in our eyes that we acknowledge that our twin exhalations have touched and mingled. Sometimes, though not often, one of the others, the non-abyss people, will know us too. You may even know the feeling yourself; you may have met someone about whom otherness clings like miasma; you can feel it on your skin though you can’t name it. When that happens, you have me one of us. You may even be one of us, down deep and in secret. The other half of the world, the solid, golden half, the non-abyssers…they feel nothing under their feet but solidity. They inherit the earth. We inherit the wind.

Have a chat with MIT’s debunking bot.

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A team of MIT researchers has made public a link to an AI bot designed to debunk conspiracy theories.

This study is investigating how humans and artificial intelligence algorithms interact. In the study, you will answer questions and have a back and forth discussion with an artificial intelligence algorithm. If you give us permission by saying yes below, we plan to discuss/publish the results in an academic forum. In any publication, information will be provided in such a way that you cannot be identified.

You don’t necessarily have to ask it about a conspiracy theory; it will answer every question with super-intelligent logic and a thorough explanation. For example, I asked it if aliens from space visited our planet eons ago and had an effect on our evolution. I also asked if there was an “afterlife.” It scientifically explained both issues in detail.

Go debunkbot.com to try it out.

And if you do, please leave a comment here about how it worked for you.

After We Crash and Burn

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After the next four years of the crashing and burning of our democratic government, hopefully, we will be able to rebuild into a better America. But the challenges we will be facing will be unprecedented, and I can’t begin to imagine how we will rise from those ashes.

One of the challenges was predicted in a book I read back in the late 90s, The End of Work. I am re-reading it now and will share some of the ideas put forth in the book.

In the meanwhile, this is from the back of the book:

Rifkin argues that we are entering a new phase in history — one characterized by the steadily and inevitable decline of jobs. Sophisticated computers, robotics telecommunications, and other Information Age technologies are fast replacing human beings in virtually every sector and industry. Near-workerless factories and virtual companies loom on the horizon.

While the emerging “knowledge sector” and new markets abroad will create some new jobs, they will be too few to absorb the vast numbers of workers displaced by the new technologies

Rethinking the nature of work is likely to be the single most pressing concern facing society in the decades to come.

Rifkin warns that the end of work could mean the demise of civilization as we have come to know it, or signal the beginning of a great social transformation and a rebirth of the human spirit.

The book does not even mention the threats of Artificial Intelligence, which makes his argument even more relevant.

His projections and suggestions offer hope to all of those future unemployable citizens and are especially important to those elderly, disabled and/or homeless individuals who, even today, suffer without a safety net.

from “Letters From an American”

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Historian Heather Cox Richardson publishes an online newsletter about the history behind today’s politics, “Letters from an American”. The current issue offers some details about Trump’s cabinet candidates that have not been widely publicized. I quote some of them below. She also includes the following disturbing observation:

There are a number of ways to think about Trump’s appointments. The people he has picked have so little experience in the fields their departments handle that Erin Burnett of CNN suggested that he is simply choosing them from “central casting”—a favorite phrase of his—to look as he imagines such officials should. Indeed, as Zachary B. Wolf of CNN pointed out, while President Joe Biden vowed to make his Cabinet look like America, Trump’s picks look “exactly like Fox News.” Trump has actually tapped a number of television hosts for different positions.

That so many of his appointees have histories of sexual misconduct is also striking, and underlines both that they share his determination to dominate others and that they do not think rules and laws apply to them.

But there is another pattern at work, as well. In a piece he published on November 15 in his “Thinking about…” newsletter, scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder explained that destroying a country requires undermining five key zones: “health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence.” The nominations of Kennedy, Gaetz, Hegseth, and Gabbard, as well as the tapping of billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to run the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to destroy the administration of the government, are, according to Snyder, a “decapitation strike.”

“Imagine that you are a foreign leader who wishes to destroy the United States,” Snyder writes. “How could you do so? The easiest way would be to get Americans to do the work themselves, to somehow induce Americans to undo their own health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence. From this perspective,” he explains, “Trump’s proposed appointments—Kennedy, Jr.; Gaetz; Musk; Ramaswamy; Hegseth; Gabbard—are perfect instruments. They combine narcissism, incompetence, corruption, sexual incontinence, personal vulnerability, dangerous convictions, and foreign influence as no group before them has done.”

Pete Hegseth: According to Heath Druzin of the Idaho Capital Sun, Hegseth has close ties to an Idaho Christian nationalist church that wants to turn the United States into a theocracy. Jonathan Chait of The Atlantic did a deep dive into Hegseth’s recent books and concluded that Hegseth “considers himself to be at war with basically everybody to Trump’s left, and it is by no means clear that he means war metaphorically.” Hegseth’s books suggest he thinks that everything that does not support the MAGA worldview is “Marxist,” including voters choosing Democrats at the voting booth. He calls for the “categorical defeat of the Left” and says that without its “utter annihilation,” “America cannot, and will not, survive.”

Linda McMahon: She once incorrectly claimed to have a bachelor’s degree in education when she was trying to get a seat on the Connecticut Board of Education and is known primarily for her work building World Wrestling Entertainment. And she, too, has been entangled in a sex abuse scandal. In October, five men filed a lawsuit claiming that she and her husband, Vince McMahon, were aware that former ringside announcer Melvin Phillips was assaulting “ring boys” who were as young as 13.

TulsI Gabbard: Nichols notes that her constant parroting of Russian talking points and her cozying up to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad make her “a walking Christmas tree of warning lights” for our national security. Former Republican governor of South Carolina Nikki Haley suggested that Gabbard is “a Russian, Iranian, Syrian, Chinese sympathizer” who has no place at the head of American intelligence. A Russian state media presenter refers to Gabbard as “our girlfriend” and as a Russian agent.

Pam Bondi: In March 2016, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) found that the Trump Foundation illegally donated $25,000 to support Bondi at a time when she was considering joining a lawsuit against Trump University. Her office ultimately decided not to join the lawsuit. Bondi defended Trump in his first impeachment trial, during which she was a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel. She supported Trump’s campaign to insist—falsely—that he won the 2020 presidential election. She is also a registered lobbyist for Qatar.

To read the complete issue of this newsletter go here. To subscribe to the newsletter, either free or paid, go here.

A Fabled Coat Tale

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The following is a double “haibun” that I wrote. Generally, a haibun consists of one or more paragraphs of prose written in a concise, imagistic style, and one or more haiku.

The coat was heavy with history – nights thrown over naked shoulders at smokey Montparnasse cafes, or tossed onto the back of a scarlet sofa at a late night Parisian salon. Its heavily textured fabric masked a delicate residue of absinthe, bathtub gin, and the mascaraed tears of its most passionate devotees. Nina Hamnett, self-proclaimed and notorious “Queen of Bohemia,” wore its gold satin lining next to her skin while she danced shimmering lights into its weave of rich silk brocade. On those nights, the coat created its own melody, a mesmerizing harmony of color, texture, and pattern, the timeless echoes of Sirens’ songs.

            from creative abandon
            and dazzling artistry
            mythos emerges

When war started and the creative effete fled to the safer shores of England and America, the infamous coat reappeared in the window of the Fifth Avenue Parisian boutique that Zelda Fitzgerald frequented during her spendthrift forays around New York City’s Palais Royale Hotel in search of the perfect evening dress. What she found, instead, was the legend and the fantasy of the still richly seductive coat, artfully displayed in a shimmer of late afternoon sunlight. And so the storied coat became her constant companion through bi-polar adventures played out over two continents and two decades, until both she and the coat began to unravel.

            relics of deadly excess
            burdened with fear
            set fragile souls afire

A Little Glimmer of Hope

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As reported on the Oregon Capital Chronicle:

Democratic attorneys general prep for role as last line of defense in Trump era.

As Trump prepares for a new term in office, 23 Democratic attorneys general will be a watchdog against any Trump-led initiatives that they believe are unconstitutional, illegal or both. The landscape has changed: Rosenblum is retiring from the role and former Oregon House Speaker Dan Rayfield will become the next attorney general. Ferguson was elected governor of Washington. The two are the last Democratic attorneys general who were in office when Trump started his first term.

In the second Trump term, attorneys general now have a four-year history of court actions that their predecessors took on wide-ranging issues like immigration, health care and the environment. And they often prevailed in court, an outcome that highlights the remarkable power that attorneys general have, through the court system, to unravel executive orders and directives from the most powerful elected leader in the world.

“We kind of have a track record and a set of expectations of how he has operated in the past,” Rayfield said in an interview with the Capital Chronicle. “The attorneys general are just a check and balance on that power. When he oversteps and pursues, whether it’s discriminatory or unlawful policies, you are that backstop for that.”

Read the whole article here.

Food Health Tips for Thanksgiving from NPR

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I’ve discovered podcasts. Well, I didn’t just discover them; I knew they were out there, but the only one I became addicted to is “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me”. Today on one of their podcasts, I discovered some interesting facts about storing and reheating leftovers.

  1. There is no “5 second rule”. If you drop something on the floor and there’s bacteria there, it’s going to get on your food. (Some people think that will help you to develop and immunity to the bacteria. Maybe, but it sure is a risk to risk it.)

  2. You don’t have to was your meat of poultry before you cook it. You’re going to kill the bacteria when you cook it. If you wash your meat you might be doing more harm that good. The bacteria on the outside of the meat can splash all over your kitchen and onto other food nearby.

  3. While food generally lasts 3 or 4 days in the fridge — except if you reheat it, and you can reheat it several times. Each time you do (as long as it’s above 165 degrees, you can reheat it multiple times. Each time you heat it, it will keep in the fridge for another 3 or 4 days. But reheating food will affect its quality and texture.

  4. Don’t leave any food out in room temperature for more than 2 hours.

  5. Expiration/sell-by dates and use-by dates are more of a guideline for nutrition and freshness. You still can use it unless there are signs of spoilage.

Welcome to the Kakistocracy

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As seen on bluesky.social:

Fun fact: “kakistocracy”, a government run by the worst people, is derived from the Greek “kakos”, or bad, evil and vile. Kakos shares its root with “kaka”, or as any child still pronounces it today, “caca”. Yes, Poop. So kakistocracy is literally the government of the shittiest people.

On the other hand, The Onion just bought out Alex Jones Infowars.