Optimism

The good weather arrived 24 hours early, throwing me into a sudden and unusual good mood.

I took a walk this afternoon, stopped in my neighborhood tavern and had a couple on the patio, soaked it all in.

I wasn't the only one in a better mood than usual.  Or perhaps I was, making me more accepting of others for a change.

Nah, we like the rare sunshine here in Oregon, where the summers are truly glorious.  Everyone capable of doing so gets jacked up for it, especially an early taste like this one.

I need sunshine these days. I understand now why older people head south in retirement, something I sort of laughed at when younger. I never got it together enough to do that, never purchased the rec vehicle that could save my ass during our rainy season, which come to think of it wasn't as bad this year what with climate change and all.

I've never wanted one of the gas guzzlers to drive all over hell, but to occasionally move and park and absorb new scenery every few months.

Anyway, it feels like an arrival, a rebirth for now, with ten days or more ahead scheduled for outrageously beautiful conditions.  That'll take us right to the edge of the solstice.

I know the drought in Cali is messing with people, but I don't mind the rain shortage myself.  Can't control nature--or what mankind is doing to it--like much else.


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More Good Questions

FIFA is a Swiss-based organization.  Yet the arrests of FIFA officials is based on a Washington-initiated “investigation” by the FBI. By asserting the universality of US law, Washington is asserting the authority of its police and prosecutors over sovereign countries.

Why did Switzerland, and why do other countries lay down in obedience to Washington’s assertion of the universality of its laws? Are the political leaders paid off or are they threatened with assassination or false indictments?  What explains that of all countries on earth only Washington’s law is universal, acknowledged and bowed down before in other countries? Is if fear of retribution?

By whose authority? asks Paul Craig Roberts.  Why, the good ol' USA, of course.


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Update

The weatherman says the skies will be blue this weekend.

Am I pleased with that?





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Doc of the Day

From Al Jazeera, Jan., 2015.


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Buddy's In!

Things just got weird.

An American nobody named Buddy Dooley announced today in front of a throng of idolaters at Portland's Pioneer Courthouse Square that he is officially a candidate for the office of President of the United States of America.

"I'm serious," Dooley said when one "journalist" scoffed. "I need the money."


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Joseph Mitchell

A new bio.

From 1964 until his death in 1996, Mitchell would go to work at his office on a daily basis, but he never published anything significant again. In a remembrance of Mitchell printed in the June 10, 1996, issue of The New Yorker, his colleague Roger Angell wrote: "Each morning, he stepped out of the elevator with a preoccupied air, nodded wordlessly if you were just coming down the hall, and closed himself in his office. He emerged at lunchtime, always wearing his natty brown fedora (in summer, a straw one) and a tan raincoat; an hour and a half later, he reversed the process, again closing the door. Not much typing was heard from within, and people who called on Joe reported that his desktop was empty of everything but paper and pencils. When the end of the day came, he went home. Sometimes, in the evening elevator, I heard him emit a small sigh, but he never complained, never explained."

Perhaps an explanation does emerge, however, in a remark that Mitchell made to Washington Post writer David Streitfeld (quoted here from Newsday, August 27, 1992): "You pick someone so close that, in fact, you are writing about yourself. Joe Gould had to leave home because he didn't fit in, the same way I had to leave home because I didn't fit in. Talking to Joe Gould all those years he became me in a way, if you see what I mean."--Wikipedia.


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Two

Two of my favorite Talent poems:


The Wag Ted

The wag, the same one you've heard about,
the best and worst customer in Tex’s Tavern,
once said: “The best thing about Talent is that
it takes none to live here.  The land is enough,
the Rogue is rough and the freeway, need  you
to go somewhere, is right over there.”

The wag was tight and nodded in the wrong direction.
But he went on anyway:  “The fields are green, though
often brown, and the sheep are easy and fearless; the
beer is warm and cheap at Tex’s Tavern, and Lizzie
DeLay is reckless—but at bottom, wink, wink, a doll.”
The wag’s droll friend Rex Dern said, “Ted, it may be

Time to go.”  Lizzie, better at directions than the wag,
lifted her head and then a brow; toward the door
her red eyes did roll. “Poor Ted, he’ll soon be dead,”
Tex announced one day as he counted his money.
“He’s bleeding me dry, and though he may look spry,
the booze will soon kill him—and if it doesn't, I will.”


Morning Coffee

The morning coffee drinkers at Talent’s Noble Coffee
are friends and experts in many fields.  Or they claim to
be.  Political thinkers on occasion, they’re reluctant to
yield the floor when a debate is in session.  A door
salesman named Harry Reems—he changed his name
after the porn star—is also an astrologer, a horn player
and a former friend of the “disgraced chef,” Paula Deen.

A retired biologist, Clay Hicks calls himself a philologist
and plays with words night and day.  He has joined
Dianetics, has written two self-published polemics that
no one has read and keeps one great friend in Noble
Coffee—himself. Coffee, a known diuretic that settles
wrong in the intestines of the naively political, makes
Noble Coffee a fine enclave every morning, a haven for
coffee fiends who, despite everything, sometimes get along.


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Fooled Again?

‘Tis the season once again. You should know it well by now: a “progressive” Democrat running in the primaries for president of the United States. We’ve seen it all before, from Jesse Jackson to Dennis Kucinich, left-leaning voters have time-and-again been asked to support candidates that are working to transform the corrupt and war-hungry Democratic Party from within. And each and every time this strategy has failed — not only to elect a progressive Democrat into the White House — but to alter the party that offer themselves up as a lighter shade of neo-con.

This time around that “progressive” Democrat is self-proclaimed “socialist” Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Even though it’s early in the primary push, Bernie is hitting the trail, spreading a message of hope for working class people that he’s there to fight for their cause. He wants to create new jobs, challenge Wall Street crooks and take on the corporate control of our political quagmire. These are fine positions to take, but what Bernie isn’t about to tell you is that in order to radically alter the system in favor of workers, the Democrats must be abandoned altogether — for it’s their neoliberal policies, from Bill Clinton on down, that exacerbated the sell-out of the American workforce.

Sure, Bernie will talk tough when it comes to these failed policies. He’ll criticize fast tracked free-trade agreements and corporate plutocracy, but his hardy embrace of the Democrats continues to undermine his own criticisms. It’s as if Bernie got a job at a coal mining outfit in hopes of stopping the melting of ice caps in the Arctic. His bid for the White House is simply a dead end and a waste of valuable resources. Progressives would be better off working to reinvigorate the antiwar movement and Occupy than spending time and money on Bernie’s hollow campaign.

Joshua Frank dishes out some tough love.


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Bad Start

It's June 1 and the sunshine of the past week is gone, the temp has dipped into the low-60s.

Next sunny day?  Friday.

I've got nothing.

Blah...

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First Read:

This

&

This


Then you may go outside and play.


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Bloodthirsty

Nebraska Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts says that last week's repeal of the Nebraska death penalty by the state's Legislature won't stop him from executing the 10 people still on Nebraska's death row.

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Baseball

Watching the Giants tonight on the MLB.com free game.

The first MLB game I ever saw as a kid was in San Francisco, 1962.

Some things you just don't forget and can't get out of your system.

I suppose I'm a Giant forever if I'm a baseball fan at all.


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Borowitz

Just saw this, though it's a couple of days old.

New Yorker blogger Andy Borowitz lampoons John McCain.

Okay, so I like this brand of onionesque humor.




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Beyond the Dubious

In diplomacy, as in war (“diplomacy by other means,” according to Clausewitz), it can be useful to distinguish goals from strategies.

America’s goals in the Middle East are clear: it wants Middle Eastern countries to serve the needs of American capitalists and to advance their interests; and it wants to impose a pax Americana, a stable regional order maintained under American domination.

It has been this way since even before the end of World War II.

Years ago, the United States also wanted to replace Britain and France as the dominant Western power in the region. This was never a major concern, however; in part because, before World War II, making common cause with Britain and France against Germany was a higher priority.

Oh, my!  The truthiness of Andrew Levine.


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Who is Bernie?

People are silly and uninformed, something Juan Cole understands.

Bernie is a full-on modern moderate in today's political landscape.  It is the right that has moved into radical terrain with the Huckabee/Santorum theological mandate (similar to jihad), which is supported by all of the GOP presidential candidates--with the possible exception of Rand Paul, who has his own set of radical philosophies that scare Americans, particularly women.

While being earnest, Bernie's two areas of weakness--thus his undifferentiated radicalism--remain in plain view: his support of both military spending and Israel. On those matters he is no more advanced than Ted Cruz, et al, who are conservative twits writ large and infinitely more "radical" in substance than Sanders.


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