I’m not really making an effort at being a news blogger. I have little to add of any unique value. I do not want to sound self-important. If there’s anything to when I do comment on the larger world I do not control or have particular expertise in, it is to assert as much agency as I think we all might have due to any way we might relate to the world, to care about things and to ask for justice.
The Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts can suck it. The vertical playground at Swampoodle is one of The Childe’s favorite places to play.
It is near several places we make regular errand runs to and, in addition to climbing fun, it provides him a vantage point to observe the train traffic coming in and out of Union Station (The Childe is a trainspotter, although he does not yet know this term).
Like many park areas with something interesting for different groups, it is a small oasis in the city. We need more such things for all of us. (We also need the city to keep the drinking fountains in clean, working order in all the parks. I did just put in a 3-1-1 request with regards to Swampoodle’s drinking fountain.)
This says nothing about me (except to significantly explain my stint of SAHD duty in the latter case), but I am proud to know people directly involved in each of these efforts:
I don’t have to let go of my broader and deeper political critiques to appreciate some of this progress.
Caught up with the most recent episode of Maron’s podcast & enjoyed the bit in his usual rambling opening where he called out Trump on not citing his sources, being a coward for not giving credit to Hitler.
This feels like design for sacrifice zones… I’m not sure I believe that, but I hate the ideas that both people may need things like this and that whatever capital went into this has been dwarfed just by the fight to keep burning fossil fuels, never mind the wealth extracted and costs externalized on our lives by the continued burning.
We (the United States) have a war culture. We’ve been at war, one way or another, at substantial expense, my entire life, and longer, and most of the time, really. That, and my being politically aware and anti-war on most fronts (with a couple of exceptions that have their own equivocation) for 25 years (ugh), means this resonates with me: “War Culture Hates the Ethical Passion of the Young." Also, I used to work for IPA.
This still feels like equivocation. In other words: too little. Certainly far too late for tens of thousands of dead innocent civilians, and what infrastructure there was to support the social and physical fabric of a society. (Israel is attacking clean water!) Not sure this stops, or rights, a genocide. Those are the table stakes now. Not enough, Joe.
I do want more aggressive antitrust action from the Department of Justice, including in the industry’s Apple is in, and possibly against Apple itself with well-crafted, technical and market literate arguments, if applicable… but calling Apple a monopoly still seems like a stretch. This DoJ action seems like a technically illiterate attack on on the reasons I choose to use an iPhone.
[Before we put these questions to a sperm whale unit, we’d have to think hard about whether we’d act on the answers. Kristin Andrews told me a heartbreaking story about a chimpanzee named Bruno who was taught sign language at the University of Oklahoma. Bruno was encouraged to build his whole life around the practice of asking humans for things. But after a few years, the scientists’ grant ran out and he was transferred to a different facility. When one of the lab’s scientists visited him there, he was distressed to see that Bruno seemed upset. He kept signing Key and Out. The scientist had taught the chimpanzee to communicate, but even in the face of a clear request, the scientist couldn’t help him. “If these whales start saying Go away; make the ships leave, what will we do?” Andrews said. And how will it reflect on us as a society if we ignore them?](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/02/talking-whales-project-ceti/677549/?gift=S4EwRLGNogt2Kqjs1lNdf1C5Zvy59Sc8vQ93xrMMh-I))
I assume the writers of Extrapolations were up on this whale research a couple of years back.
I was short with my father on the phone today. I couldn’t take his fatalist “it will get worse,” (and he’s a Trump voter) point of view. It may seem ironic to some who know me, because I also can say “It will get worse” — before it gets better. I think I am still not fatalistic, but my hoarder, prepper, some-kind-of-Republican father, who doesn’t even think Trump will fix things, is.