Excellent Post from Juan Cole on UK's Coverage of NSA, Snowden

I keep visiting Juan Cole's Informed Comment these days for the USA's coverage of the NSA vs. Snowden.   Coles says the UK's Channel 4's reporting is unmatched by any USA "news."

They report, in full, and critically. I think aside from Chris Hayes on NBC.com and Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! it would be impossible to get this quality of reporting on this issue on any US outlet. The fusion of Corporate News and the US Government (with its Deep State) is so complete that questioning the Beltway Bandits is out of the question any more.

 While the USA does its best to throw Snowden and Manning into prison and deny them asylum off our shores, people are waking up. Thanks, Dr. Coles!

Making a painting

A friend commissioned a painting--by me--a while back.  My first commission!  And the idea of that has pretty much stopped me in my tracks.  I mean, what if it's no good at all?

And here's how it's going:  Every time I show it to someone, they have all these wonderful SUGGESTIONS for making it better.  If I don't continue to work on it, though, that accomplishes two things:  1) it shuts them up good, and 2) it stops me from actually doing this. 

I've started, then erased/wiped off the paint three times.  That's ok....I've done that before on other paintings. But it certainly slows down the process.  I've pondered using encaustic (hot wax and color),
but that's scary--comes with the potential for burning down my condo.

And it's not advice, per se.   My most recent painting instructor used to love to walk up to a painting while I was working on it, pick up a brush, and daub away, always to good effect.  (I've thought of calling her to see if she wants to give me a coaching session or two, but she, one of the best deaf painters ever, is fed up with painting.  She wants to write, and she's also avoiding exposure to all the toxic chemicals involved lest she contract another case of cancer.  (She cured herself of the cancer by eliminating everything from her diet that could bollix her health:  no cooking, no carbs, no sugar.  She could be my role model, if I were a person who could profit from good example.)

Anyway, here's the picture (a photograph taken by my benefactor in Ecuador).  I love it, but I've discovered there's no natural light save for what's reflected in a few tiles in the corner and in the planters.  And it intrigues me that this darkness is her favorite aspect of the photo, especially 

  
under the arches.  Fascinating.  I especially love the two red chairs, and I'm wondering if this relates to the fact that she married her best friend, another woman.  And so on.....

Wish me luck.

My Patron Saints.....

An article by Gretchen Rubin on Positively Positive today talks about our patron saints.  Rubin lists six of her patron saints, including Julia Child, Winston Churchill, and Virginia Woolf.  I'll have to think about this before I can make any list.  But one of the questions Rubin asks to help us get started is "What did I do for fun when I was ten years old?"

My parents bought our lake cottage when I was ten, and the place transformed my inner life.  I loved wading in the water, netting baby bullheads with an old lace curtain, feeding the chipmunks out of my hand,  building a raft, rowing our old boat all over the lake and up & down the river, popping corn in the fireplace, playing with the neighbor kids who were my age and whose house had a huge wraparound porch with sofas and huge stacks of comic books for rainy days.  And the trees.  Oh, my god, the trees!  Oak and paper birch and maple and basswood and cottonwood!  When the wind blew, the leaves of the tall, tall cottonwoods made a glorious rustling sound.  The Sioux called the cottonwood the "singing tree."  They did sing!  And the song went right into my heart.

So there's my clue:  My patron saints are trees, and I've already named them:  Oak, Paper Birch, Maple, Basswood, and Cottonwood.  I need one more for six.  There are several here in this area that I adore:  Atlas Cedar and River Birch and that funny little Dogwood by my porch.  And I can't forget the pine trees:  White, Scotch, Norway.....I'm going to go out and find each of these trees and take a photo of it.

 Ha.  This is a Sycamore, another of my favorite trees.  No Atlas Cedars or River Birch yesterday.  Having a bad tooth, so that cut down on my plans.

being funny

Almost everyone who meets me says I am funny--even very funny.  I think it was my way of getting positive attention from my family, who otherwise thinks of me less positively.  I am not always funny, though.  My usual mode is grouchy and serious.  What I wanted/want to be is beloved, but that's a rare event.  oh, well.

Wendy Davis!! And Why I Support Planned Parenthood

Who'd a thunk one blonde Texas woman could lead the charge and take down the Texas Legislature?

Populist Feminist Revolt and Heroic Filibuster Defeat Extremist Anti-Abortion Bill in Texas

Please note the last paragraphs of this article by Mark Karlin, editor of Buzz Flash at Truthout:

Personally, I want to dedicate the Texas triumph to the late Molly Ivins, a personal idol of mine.  Over 12 years, I have interviewed just about every prominent progressive figure, nearly one a week, but nothing thrilled me like talking over the phone with Ivins.
In our long 2003 interview (read here), Ivins said of social conservatives in legislatures and Congress, "I think that there comes a point where they're ramming something down your throat that's just flat wrong and unfair; you just can't take it anymore."
Molly, because of the courage of Wendy Davis and the civic activism of thousands of pro-choice Texans and Americans, this victory over the forces of darkness is in your memory.
(Molly Ivins succumbed to cancer in 2007 at the age of 62.)

Here's Joan Walsh in Salon on Wendy Davis, Feminist Superhero 

"...Ann Richards Is Smiling."

Not to forget Katha Pollitt at The Nation, either!  

Welcome to....

First, please welcome back Kalyn's Kitchen!  Don't know how that lovely blog slipped away from my list of BLOGS I LOVE, but she's back...with "Happy Cooking and Eating--Real Food, Real Cooking, Real Results!"  Good stuff!!

And welcome to Gaming Your Finances!  I saw this on Twitter this morning in a comment on a Mother Jones article about Trader Joe's.  The comment said something about a monthly challenge: setting your food budget at $25 a week!  and the kind twitterperson added a link to this site.  I must say the idea is a little better than the blog post, but there also were LINKS in that, one of which had a recipe for PB & J oatmeal, which inspired a comment by Kalyn (yes, it WAS her!).  She was saying "I love peanut butter and oatmeal" etc.  Well, there could be worse things than peanut butter & jelly oatmeal, but I'm verra curious!!  Maybe I can eat this for supper instead of hot dogs.  (Please don't mind me.  I am a true believer in eating healthy, but I make exception for hot dogs--the worst of the worst (wurst??).  Where else can you, when you are STARVING, get an approximation of a meal for $2 in this town except from a hot dog cart?  And if I walk another half block, it'll be $1.75!!

And so on....

Obama Betraying US on Syria?

I read Andrew Sullivan's rant against Obama, especially Bill Clinton's scolding Mr. Obama, last night and today to a friend, and she said, "Well, what do we know for sure?"  So I checked one of my best-liked sources, Juan Cole, and he had this (and much more--please click his name) to say:

Former president Bill Clinton criticized President Obama on Thursday for his inaction in regard to Syria. This step seems extraordinary and surely has something to do with positioning Hillary Clinton to run as a more hawkish New Democrat against anyone in the Obama circle in 2016. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton appears to have pushed for arming the Syrian rebels, but could not get Obama’s backing for the move. Bill Clinton’s criticism is extremely unfair, since there are many bad situations in the world in which the US cannot fruitfully intervene, and Clinton knows this sad truth all too well.

Get a Load of This!!

Thanks to Cop Car, who lists her sources, including Time Goes By.



This woman, Johanna Quass, is 10 years OLDER than I am.  Could I catch up?  Hardly.  What she has is not only skill but also many years of gymnastic practice.  I'm just enjoying her apparent ease and beauty!  Way to go, Ms. Quass!

The voice of Virginia Woolf

Open Culture has the only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf speaking. Her talk, "Craftsmanship," was part of a 1937 BBC broadcast.  Her speech is gorgeous.  The captions, should you choose to--or can--activate them, are absolutely accurate.  She pronounces every letter beautifully! 

These are good....

Ole Phat Stu posts Marketing-Speak!...
Thanks, Stu...(and Brian).  I especially like "maintenance free"  :)

What the Marketing people write - versus what they truly mean . . .
 
NEW - Finally sold all of the old model & lost the old blueprints :-(
ALL NEW - Parts are not interchangeable with previous design.
EXCLUSIVE - Imported product. Instruction manual in Chinese.
UNMATCHED - Almost as good as the competition.
FOOLPROOF OPERATION - No provision for adjustments.
ADVANCED DESIGN - The advertising agency doesn’t understand it.
IT’S HERE AT LAST - Rush job. Nobody knew it was coming.
FIELD TESTED - Manufacturer lacks test equipment.
HIGH ACCURACY - All parts fit.
FUTURISTIC - No conceivable reason for it to look the way it does.
REDESIGNED - Previous flaws fixed - we hope.
DIRECT SALES ONLY - Manufacturer had a big argument with distributor.
YEARS OF DEVELOPMENT - We finally got one to work.
BREAKTHROUGH - We finally figured out a use for it.
MAINTENANCE FREE - Impossible to fix.
MEETS ALL STANDARDS - Ours, not yours.
SOLID-STATE - Heavy as hell.
HIGH RELIABILITY - We made it work long enough to ship it.
NON-REFUNDABLE - We couldn’t make it work long enough to ship it.
INTUITIVE USER INTERFACE - Does not come with a manual.
CHEAP - Shoddy.

Thanks to Brian for the heads-up on this :-)

Juan Cole Does It Again....

In this morning's post on Informed Comment, Juan Cole really parses 2nd Amendment fundamentalists.  They're ok with "hunting our school children like animals," but heaven help anyone who leaks a government "secret."  We the people can't have any secrets from the government, though.
We've turned another corner on the path to perdition!

Iowa Made Network!!

My former coworker Craig Hlas (actually, I hired him 25 years ago for his great sense of humor) has come up with a network for promoting goods produced in his home state of Iowa.  To quote:

We're dedicated to promoting products made or grown in Iowa by producers, entrepreneurs, and artisans. We want to connect small and midsize Iowa businesses with customers -- and offer a directory for companies devoted to quality and integrity.

The Iowa Made Network's website lists 20 categories of items from Art to Furniture to Jewelry to Wine.  This being Iowa, the largest category is Food (n.f.s.) with 543 purveyors, but the next largest is Art with 129 artists.  Candy/Snacks (46 purveyors) merits its own category. There is even a category for Horses: "Uncle Slim's Pony Farm," whose owners have been raising Shetland ponies for 25 years.

This is an idea whose time has come, I think.  Every region of the U.S. has lost manufacturing (even the writing of local news) to China and other countries.  We don't all live in Iowa, but what's to prevent other states or even cities from rounding up their entrepreneurs and promoting them?  

Great TED talk on connection and vulnerability.....

Juan Cole Tells It Like It Is!!

Here's the headline for Juan Cole's blogpost today:  

Dear Oklahoma: We Feel for you, we love you, but do us some favors

The salient points: 

The immense, mindless violence of a tornado hitting a small Oklahoma town, turning houses into splinters and crushing people under rubble, including children, has rightfully dominated the American airwaves for the past few days. Oklahoma is a great state, a state with profound history, a place of big plans where Native Americans play an outsized role in politics and the economy and hardworking descendants of cowboys and homesteaders build admirable lives in its cities and small towns.

Oklahoma voters need to get past the pathos, however, to reconsider the politicians they keep electing to office, who adopt policies that harm Oklahomans and directly contribute to such tragedies. [Emphasis XE's]  Oklahoma has among the more corrupt and more despicable politics in the country, obsessed with hating gays and local Muslims (all three of them), with stingy and mean-spirited government, with controlling women, and with dirty oil and gas that is destroying our environment.

The sequestration, which your GOP politicians support, will cut funding for the National Weather Service, which performs little duties like… warning about tornadoes. Is that really what you want? If not, tell them so, and at the next polls, throw the bums out.

The hatred of government regulation (i.e. of good government) by Oklahoma’s political class impedes regulations like ensuring that there are shelters in all public schools. All they’d have to do is not give Big Oil $200 million in tax breaks a year, and they’d have the money to implement it.

Oklahoma’s senators, James Inhofe and Tom Coburn, voted against relief for victims of Hurricane Sandy in New York. You put them in office. They don’t care about people like you, living through the aftermath of a natural disaster. You should remember their position when they run for reelection.

Inhofe’s special pleading that Oklahoma’s disaster is ‘not like Sandy’ strikes the rest of the country as disgusting. This man is your public face, Oklahoma. Do you really want him there? You do understand that the rest of us have to support Federal relief aid for you in order for you to get it. We won’t hold you hostage to Inhofe’s small-mindedness, but we don’t appreciate your voting for him when you want our help.

And here’s the biggy. The tornado that so harmed you may not have been related to global warming. But it is indisputable that climate change will produce massive storms that will hit the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. By pumping out gas and oil you are dooming other small towns and big cities along the coasts to future destruction and loss of life, including childrens’ lives, of the sort you just suffered, except on a much bigger scale. You are not in any doubt that the climate can be dangerous.

Please, please rethink your energy policies and turn in a big way to wind and solar (you have a lot of both) as quickly as possible. You’ve recently made a start with wind energy, but it is frankly a drop in the bucket compared with what you could do — indeed, you’re the state with perhaps the biggest wind power potential in the whole country. You need to build out your grid to supply the rest of us, and you need to put in turbines everywhere they make sense.

Your Senator Inhofe, in the back pocket of Big Oil, denies all this, and makes your state look buffoonish to the rest of the world.  [Emphasis XE's]

Disasters require policy responses, to forestall them and to deal with the aftermath of the ones that can’t be prevented. Wise policy responses are crafted by caring, educated, wise politicians. You don’t seem to have many of those, and you need to pay more attention when you go to the ballot box. Otherwise, you are harming yourselves and the rest of us.

 [Here's the link to the whole thing if you haven't gone there yet:  http://www.juancole.com/2013/05/oklahoma-love-favors.html]

XE thanks Juan Cole for his trenchant prose on this topic.  She is disgusted with the seeming efforts to equate the destruction of the Oklahoma suburb of Moore by tornado with 9/11. (She remembers hearing about the ghost town of St. Mary's, Iowa, 1849-1859, which never made it onto the maps due to the same Bermuda Triangle of geography, wind, and destruction.  The intersection of Highway 1 and a county road 2 miles south of Mt. Vernon, Iowa, had been endowed with a post office, even.  But frequent tornadoes blew it all away. In XE's day, there was a farm with a famous herd of Aberdeen Angus cattle on that spot, and their prize bull, "Major Revolution," used to scare the crap out of her whenever she had to walk the two miles into town to work. He would paw and snort (cartoonists have captured the hot breath steaming out of a bull's two big nostrils). And, when the winds came, the cattle pens collapsed and the black cattle wandered out onto the highway, where their black bulk posed a hazard to trucks and cars driving in the dark.

So, weather is weather, Oklahomans....it's not a terrorist attack.  And please reconsider your votes the next time Inhofe and Coburn want to run for office again.

The Secret Garden.....

OK...yesterday was planting time on my porch.  So I stuck in some flat-leafed parsley, rosemary, basil, and mint.  And just by coincidence, my dogwood tree blossomed!  Maybe it's because it was so hot, but the flowers popped out.  They were greenish before and didn't look too much different from the leaves, but after one day of high heat, they've turned lovely creamy yellow.  Welcome back!!

Boating on the River

This peaceful scene shows part of the campus of the National Defense University (Home of the National War College) in southwest DC.  It's on the shore of the Potomac River's Washington Channel that separates Haines Point from the mainland.  It's a lovely area, and one you can't see well unless you're looking from  the water.  You certainly can't see the fronts of all the lovely old buildings facing the river.  Like Mt. Vernon, almost all of these places were built so that people could sit out on the front porch and catch the breezes off the river.  

Yesterday a bunch of us celebrated our friend Shirley's birthday by taking a boat tour around the island.  It was peaceful and refreshing.  And after lunch, the murky sky promising afternoon thunderstorms had dissolved into these glorious clouds & blue sky.  Happy birthday, Shirley! 

2013 Embassy Tour

• Today began the annual Embassy Tour in DC, when most of the foreign countries' embassies open their doors to visitors.

  
  

  Today was the Saudi Arabian, Thai, and Ukrainian. I got choked up in the Saudi embassy by the great food (especially the chicken & rice Al Khabsa), amazing photos of camels, Mecca), the tented seating areas with their glorious Oriental carpets, and the flowing robes for both men, women, & children.
  
  The Thai embassy had fabulous fruit & vegetable sculptures, exquisite musical performances on the Khim (hammered dulcimer) and ranket ekh (like a xylophone), massages, and fabulous food & drink. I had six sips of Thai iced coffee, and I'm STILL wide awake!

  
  

  I got choked up because I grew up on the flat, virtually treeless tundra in ND surrounded by rather chilly, blonde Lutherans, and all the while there were places like Saudi Arabia with dark-haired, dark-eyed, gracious people, palm trees, camels, amazing hills/mountains, and food like delectable dates growing on trees!. And the carpets! And the designs they painted on their hands! Unimaginable

  
  

  Lastly, we found the Ukrainian embassy on M Street, between Dean & DeLuca & the Key Bridge. I admired this one man's shirt, and he told me his mother had hand-embroidered it. Then I told him I used to live 1/2 a block from the Ukrainian Orthodox church in NE Minneapolis, and he LIT UP! "My grandfather used to be the pastor there!" he said. Then I told him how our kids' schoolmates were often first-generation kids from the Ukraine--Luba Smolka, Kalina Kramarchek--and he just beamed. "I KNOW the Smolka family," he said, and his grandfather raved about them as pillars of the church. Turns out he was born in Baltimore, as was my friend Cathy, (partner in crime mentioned earlier). Talk about a small world! And we watched a demonstration of a woman making pysanky (Ukrainian Easter Eggs). 

  
  

  The Ukrainian guy in the embroidered shirt from Baltimore used to visit his grandparents in Minneapolis--doubtless while we were living half a block away from the big, beautiful new church! I made a mistake and called it "St. Casimir's," but he reminded me that it was St. Constantine's. St. Casimir's was a Polish uniate church two blocks eat of St. Connie's. There were more than half a dozen Catholic churches of all kinds within three blocks of our house in any direction in NE Mpls, and the racket on Sunday a.m., when they all started ringing their bells made sleeping in on Sundays impossible.
• Can't remember when we've had more fun at exhibitions in DC! Next week: the European embassies: France, Germany, Italy, et al.....!!  Can't wait!

  
  

  NB:  Pictures to follow when I can figure out how to get them off my Blackberry.
  ....
  NB2:  Groan....How can Blackberry be so effing STUBBORN??? Still haven't got the photos pried out of its grip!  

QQ for the D.N.: A MISTAKE in the 2011 Rand-McNally Atlas???

Dear Dear Niece:

Since you are a big librarian and all, I'm wondering if it's just my rheumy eyes, or whether there actually is NO Hodgkins, IL showing in the 2011 Rand-McNally Atlas.  It's supposed to be in section J-7, according to the index in the back, but no way does it show up on the map on p. 32, which shows the whole state of IL.  

Ah!  Once blind but now I see!  It's on p. 34 that it's in section J-7.  Well, Hodgkins was only 2014 residents back in 2011, so R-McN had to economize somehow.  I get it!

Don't mind me....I'm just trying to track my replacement cell phone, the shipment of which has begun.

Gotta go meditate and then head out for the tour of the embassies today!  Have seen it advertised often (yearly) but have never gone before.  Hope I can find Dupont Circle! (Heh....)  Hope it's nice in your town today!  xoxo

Coffee Monster

About a month ago, I was walking from Union Station to Eastern Market to meet some friends for coffee, and I passed a freebie sitting on the sidewalk with a note: "FREE!  IT WORKS!"  Well, this was an espresso machine--Cafe Roma by Breville.  I thought one of my friends might like this, as she doesn't have an espresso machine or a coffee maker, either.  So I picked it up and lugged it along.  After about 3 blocks (with 10 more to go), it was feeling very heavy, so I began asking people I met if they wanted a free espresso machine.  Ha.  No, they didn't.  And my friends didn't want it, either.  Then followed the usual circus in which one friend offered to put it in her car so I wouldn't have to carry it home, then two items got lost in her car, then found, then delivered.

So.....fast forward to this morning when I decided to see if it would make a better cup of espresso than my little stovetop pot.  I had to look up the manual online to see how to proceed, but I managed to get all the pieces together, loaded the little 2-cup filter with my favorite (cheap, tasty) Cafe Bustelo, added cold filtered water to the tank, plugged it in, and turned it on. It makes a buzzing noise--BZZZZZZT!--which is weird, but soon I had a nice big cup of espresso!

Results:

The machine espresso has CREMA--unlike the stovetop.
The machine version tastes a little better--not so rough.
BUT the stovetop version is HOTTER--and the heat stays longer.

Well.  Do I need another machine in my kitchen?  No room, but I did like the taste.  There's also the possibility of making designs in the crema, though I haven't figured that out yet.

Bon voyage, mes amis!!

Doesn't this look like a wonderful rig? (The one in front, not the semi in back....) My friends are off to cross the country and stop at various places of interest along the way. May they have a fabulous time and return refreshed and happy!