The Books of Bokonon

Wait...who am I kidding? But maybe there were some moments that were pretty okay, as well as a few developments that were actually positive . A vaccine for Malaria strikes me as very beneficial.  I tend to take good news where I can find it.

  Jimmy Carter passed away today. He was the 39th US President, which places his term in office right around my preteens and early teens. I remember back in 1976, my 5th grade class did mock presidential elections and I think I was one of the few kids in my class who "voted" for Jimmy Carter that year. That should have been a warning to me decades later when I would try to find some of my old school friends on Facebook. But I digress. I often view President Carter as one of the more underrated Presidents we've had. He was in office in the shadow of Nixon's near-impeachment and ultimate resignation, the rather ugly end to our involvement in the Vietnam War, and at least one energy crisis mixed with what at least felt like stagflation. He did not preside over those events, but those were the events that would shape the public zeitgeist for the remainder of the 1970s and into the 1980s. Carter dealt with multiple crises as President, including a Russian (then Soviet Unio...

What a long title for what will probably be a short post. I think it is no secret that what we think of as MAGA in the US is a movement composed of demographic groups who ordinarily would never be allies. One of the huge challenges among the oligarchs who have their own fortunes to grow - while fleecing the rest of us of course - is how to package themselves as working class nationalist populists when what they really want is to keep the neoliberal gravy train flowing. It is quite the balancing act, and one likely doomed to failure. Elon Musk is our poster boy of an oligarch elite who truly believes he is better than the rabble he amplifies on his social media app. And now that he has his candidate about to occupy the White House, he's let the mask slip. Remember, the white nationalists in the US don't want immigrants at all. They're pretty clear about that. Musk's and Ramaswamy's argument that Americans are poorly educated and not capable of handling the jobs that ...

Hi everyone! I am catching up on a few things after Christmas and a brief trip out of town. Always a good thing to visit with family whenever possible, and we all realize that the opportunities for the sort of large reunions we would regularly do are going to become increasingly scarce. It's best to appreciate the people we have in our lives now. None of us lasts forever, but while we do have time and ability, we can choose to make the most of those opportunities. They provide memories to last a lifetime. I certainly have tons of good memories. When the blogger Jon Swift passed away a number of years ago, the lefty side of blogtopia lost a prominent and witty voice. Jon Swift would also do a roundup of best blog posts each year. That was a tradition that could have been lost, but thankfully Vagabond Scholar has picked up the tradition and has run with it. This year's roundup is very well worth your time .  Blogs have certainly lost their luster since their heyday in the mid to ...

🎄Take a moment to watch this heartwarming Christmas video from President Biden. A beautiful reminder of the normalcy, kindness, and decency his administration has brought. We’re truly going to miss him. [image or embed] — Chris D. Jackson ( @chrisdjackson.bsky.social ) December 24, 2024 at 6:03 PM

I normally do a midweek cafe and lounge at Progress Pond, but the site is undergoing some much needed maintenance while maintaining its presence on the internet tubes. So, I'll just post here what I would have posted there. This time around, I am going to pay tribute to my favorite TV series, Community . These videos appear from the closing credits from two of the Christmas episodes that were released during its six-season run. If you know the series, these will bring back good memories. If you haven't seen Community, what are you waiting for? That last one is a mirror image of what you would normally see on the screen, but otherwise, it's fun. Cheers, and happy holidays!

  Happy Festivus , everyone! It may not be an official holiday, but I celebrate anyway. So, let's get that meatloaf cooked up and air some grievances. The fact that I remembered to post this Festivus message that I had planned to do months in advance is truly a Festivus Miracle. Cheers, everyone! And the lack of traffic on this blog lately has me deeply disappointed with you all. I have a lot of issues with you all right now...Okay, you get the idea.  On a more serious note, the holiday, which was originally portrayed on an episode of Seinfeld, was practiced by a family starting in the late 1960s, if I recall the lore correctly. The basic premise of Festivus was to challenge all the social pressure and commercialization that characterize our current Christmas holiday season. So instead of a tree, just use a plain metal pole. A meal that most don't consider all that fancy or attractive challenges some of the extravagance that goes with the usual festivities during Christmas. Re...

I am not surprised that the social media app Bluesky is going through some growing pains . A number of smaller alternative platforms to what was once known as Twitter had been in development for a bit, but never had much traction. Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter changed that. A lot of migration from Twitter happened, as you recall, in the aftermath of Musk's purchase of the platform. Bluesky was invitation only at that juncture. Mastodon saw an increase in users practically overnight in late 2022 and into 2023. That platform definitely faced its own growing pains. Scaling up turns out to be really difficult. You need more server space, more moderators, and so on in order to keep the platform from going off the rails.  One good thing about both Mastodon and Bluesky is that by the time I joined each platform, they had their own built-in culture and norms. That set expectations immediately and I think that has made my experience on each platform much better. Both have their plu...

A great cover of a great David Bowie song:

I remember this one from my early teens. Ian Hunter was known as a member of Mott the Hoople (who were a big deal a bit before my time, but I like their music all the same, thank you). And of course Mick Ronson was one of the greats on the guitar, as well as a very talented producer in his own right. Cheers!

Here's another classic: This band was in class all by itself.

This video is from archived footage from a film student's project. Wire is playing this song, it appears, but the audio comes from a different gig around the same time. It still works for my purposes. I will always have a soft spot for 1970s punk, as that sub-genre has been influencing rock and pop music ever since. Wire has broken up and reformed a few times since they started in 1976, but each time they always have something new to say. Respect.

This is not a sports blog. I am not going to turn it into one. I do want to make note of Rickey Henderson's passing . He was just days away from his 66th birthday. I remember him from his first season with the Oakland A's in 1979. His unique batting stance, which was more of a crouch, definitely caught my attention - especially since it worked well for him. I would later learn his stance had helped him see the pitcher better, which was definitely to his advantage. I tried that batting stance for a brief while myself and alas it was of no help for me. He was an all-around great lead-off batter who could get his plate appearances, steal tons of bases (I thought Lou Brock's base stealing records were untouchable until Rickey Henderson came along), and he could hit for power. He was a gold-glove left fielder. He had it all and certainly was a bright spot in an otherwise dismal 1979 season for the A's. He would be a great asset to the A's and any other team he played on ...

Whenever I see a relatively optimistic take on what a second Trump presidency will bring our way, I like to bookmark it for further consideration at a later date. This blogger could be right on the money, or I may well be coming back to this one and saying "that aged well." We shall see. For the record, as dark as I may view this extension of the Trump era, I will root for the optimists to be right if only for the well-being of myself and those I am closest to.

One of my friends covered the bankruptcy filing of Big Lots! a couple months back and I would advise you look at his post and accompanying videos for more context. The news today is that the deal that would have saved at least some Big Lots! outlets had fallen through , and the company is days away from simply liquidating remaining inventory and closing all currently opened locations. I am well aware of my city's Big Lots! store. It is located in the same shopping center as the pharmacy I go to. There are some other discount outlets located at the same shopping center, including a Ross. I had expected that our city's Big Lots! would have been closed regardless, as that seems to be what often happens when a major change goes through bankruptcy. That said, the store always looked busy - at least based on parking lot traffic - so perhaps it would have survived reorganization. Barring a miracle, I guess we will never know. The retail apocalypse isn't quit my usual beat, but si...

According to the scripture found in the Books of Bokonon , a Pool-pah is defined as a "shit storm" or "the wrath of God." Either will do as far as I am concerned as we witness the latest round of House GOP incompetence (with a significant assist from Trump and shadow president Musk). As of now, we are staring down yet another government shutdown, and I will have to double check the calendar for the last day that the debt ceiling needs to be raised, but also the debt ceiling being breached, thus tanking the global economy. We have some real stable geniuses running this circus.  Here's the sitch: The US House of Representatives has a GOP majority this session that is wafer thin (currently 221 GOP - 214 Dem). It will be an even thinner majority come January when the new Congressional Session starts (220 GOP - 215 Dem, with some seats already vacated thus further narrowing the majority). Any House Speaker, regardless of who he or she is, will have to accept that mos...

It's been a minute since I put up another video in this series. If you have not ready On Tyranny , I would ask why not? It's a book that can be read in a single sitting and it's written by a professor who actually knows how to write like a regular person. You'll learn a lot along the way. Now on to our next video: This is a useful lesson. Find a cause or some causes that you value and contribute. Depending on your time and skill set, maybe you'll donate money. Maybe you can give some of your time. None of us can be everywhere at once. So we donate time when and where we can, and otherwise spare some change when we can.  I love the concept of civil society . I probably saw or heard the term civil society used around the late 1990s. I had no idea of its eastern European origins. Dr. Snyder can tell the story better than I can, so I hope you check out the video. Basically civil society includes various organizations (some political) made up of people who share some c...

Learned helplessness is not helpful, and the rationale for learned helplessness is not even based on reality . I would honestly be breathing a lot easier if Harris had won the White House and ideally the Democratic Party held the Senate and regained the House. That did not happen. Trump squeaked out a win in terms of popular vote and really had a so-so showing in terms of the electoral vote. To put things in perspective, Biden's performance in 2020 was also relatively speaking so-so, and aside from Obama in 2008, so-so victories are about all that we've seen this century when it comes to Presidential races. The US Senate ended up about how I was expecting it to go, and about the way that actual professional analysts had expected. A GOP mandate would have meant sweeping Senate seats in the same swing states Trump won. Aside from Pennsylvania, where Casey lost just barely, Trump proved to have no coattails. And if you paid attention to the polls, one thing that was consistent was...

Michael Moore has been right on the matter of health care for ages, and we should listen now . I think we can have a very candid conversation about the state of healthcare in the US without glorifying the dude who assassinated that United Healthcare insurance CEO last week (both of whom are villains in this story and both shall be unnamed here on this blog). We can acknowledge that assassinations are rarely "good" or "heroic" actions. It's murder. But then again, if we think about the role that insurance corporations play in denying care to average working folks like myself, we can ask how much blood on their hands these insurance companies as well as any of the other corporations that run our healthcare system, including hospital corporations and pharmaceutical corporations. There is such a thing as organizational violence, and that is violence where some bureaucratic action is systematically responsible for the harm to people who would not have been harmed oth...

I'll lead by posting a link to a blog post I think might be worth your while. The blogger I've known primarily as The Analyst on Telegram has been moving over to Bluesky and has hosted longer posts on his own blog.  The Analyst's title is certainly intended to provoke a reaction. The reality is that all governments fall eventually. It's never a matter of if but when. Towards the end, The Analyst makes clear that predicting the exact moment that this iteration of Russia led by Putin is impossible. But if one reads through the post carefully, one will appreciate the various economic and geopolitical headwinds the Putin regime faces.  The economic picture is grim. The ruble has been losing value for much of this year, and plunged recently to its lowest level since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Although the ruble recovered a bit, it is still north of 100 rubles to one US dollar, and there is little hope that aside from maybe another dead cat bou...

I always preferred this cover to the original.

  The above photo is one I took of some wildflowers in my back yard (or as my British friends would say, garden) this past summer. I was just looking at an illustrated article on Vox about rewilding as a strategy for mitigating climate change . Although I am skeptical about individual actions amounting to all that much when it comes reducing our carbon footprint (much of what really needs to be done has to happen at a much more systemic level rather than an individual level), I do see some benefit to doing what we can realistically do. In my case, I've had the same home for a bit over a decade now. I inherited a lawn that looked like the lawns of several of my wealthier and now deceased neighbors. The grass was immaculate when it came to weeds, and no doubt some money was sunk into whatever chemicals were needed to keep the lawn looking like something out of a magazine. As a practical matter, I really did not have the money, so aside from keeping the grass mowed, there was not much...

Back in 1994, I saw my very first web browser (probably Mosaic, but I would end up using Netscape Navigator pretty quickly). I had developed a web page in 1995 - at the time connected to my student account at University of Missouri. Then I migrated my web presence to Geocities, where my web page would remain until that became untenable. I regularly relied on Usenet for information and communication with people who had shared interests. Then I tried my hand at blogging. My original blog was mothballed a long time ago. It was a mess. It just needed to disappear. I enjoyed MySpace at first. Then I ended up on Facebook - my account was set up back in the day when one required an invite to create an account. I would find my old school and college friends and become immediately disappointed. Twitter became arguably my favorite spot - initially for self-promotion for my academic output but also as a space to be informed and to connect with people who shared similar academic and political inte...

I remember learning those immortal words from a speech by Franklin Delano Roosevelt when I was a kid and have not forgotten. There are very few veterans left who survived the Pearl Harbor attack. This was the moment in history that put an end to American isolationism that was the hallmark of US foreign policy after the conclusion of WWI. An attack on our soil (Hawaii was not a state then, but it was US territory) was not going to go unanswered, no matter what the America First crowd might have wanted. And since the Japanese empire was an ally of Nazi Germany, answering that attack meant accepting being drawn into another world war. The bombing of Pearl Harbor shattered the illusion that the US was invulnerable to threats from distant neighbors. After all, the US has two major oceans that act as buffers as well as two friendly neighbors to the north and to the south. Once a Japanese attack on the west coast started to look at least conceivable it probably didn't take a lot of imagin...

 We live in interesting times, to say the least. Let's start with Syria. When I started crafting my post, this was a map showing the position of a faction of Syrian rebels in relation to the remaining territory under Assad's control. That map has become very outdated since then. When I was reading that intelligence had predicted that Assad's regime would collapse in 5 to 10 days , I knew it looked grim for that particular barbaric dictatorship. If reports that a faction of rebels has now not only succeeded in taking several major cities but also now is in control of the Damascus International Airport, the regime is officially over. This is a dictatorship that the Russian Federation and Iran have propped up in earnest since the initial heady days of the Arab Spring. We know how opposition to Assad's regime got decimated, and how Russia bombed the city of Aleppo into the Stone Age. Syria has been in a civil war since 2011. Granted the territory held by various rebel facti...

I think this video is pretty self-explanatory and offers what strikes me as good common sense. Make sure to pay attention.

I've been meaning to get back to this video series. The lesson here is one that was definitely practiced by numerous people in South Korea during what was my morning and then lunchtime and was essentially their overnight hours, when ordinarily most folks would have been asleep. This coup woke people up - literally - and got them outside, taking a stand, and making a difference. We see the same thing happening in the republic of Georgia as its ruling party is becoming ever more subordinate to Russia and ever more authoritarian.  Dr. Snyder is right that there is something to be said for unplugging - turning off the computer, putting away the cellphone, and being physically present, whether at a protest or civic organization meeting or whatever. The people you meet are not ones selected by an algorithm which turns out to be a good thing. He may well be right that the time many of us spent in social isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic paved the way for the crisis we faced toward th...

Like many of you in the US, I pretty much woke up to a developing news story that the South Korean President (Yoon) had declared martial law and was apparently in the midst of perpetrating his own autogolpe (a fancy name for a self-coup). I honestly don't know the intricacies of South Korean politics, so I'll leave all that for those who have legitimate expertise, but I get the impression that Yoon, who narrowly defeated an incumbent back in 2022 had become deeply unpopular and had led a scandal-plagued presidency. He also had to deal with a Parliament whose majorities were with the opposition, meaning he really was a lame duck. Thankfully for South Korea, Yoon apparently made a half-assed coup attempt that failed within a matter of hours. The members of the South Korean parliament got together, held a vote, and rejected Yoon's martial law declaration, which did force him to back down. What his future holds is hard to say. At minimum, I expect he will be impeached. I get th...

The title comes from an opening line from Gil Scott-Heron's song B-Movie . Over the course of his spoken word performance, accompanied by a wonderful late-1970s/early 1980s funk groove, Gil Scott-Heron broke it down that there was no way that a guy who got maybe around a quarter of all potential eligible voters, and that it boiled down to half of the eligible American voters didn't vote in the first place, whether due to apathy, dislike for any candidate on the ballot for President that year, or any of a number of structural barriers to voting (persons with disabilities, or who work and have no early voting options, etc). Reagan managed to win over 25% of the eligible voters and the rest who bothered to cast a vote did so for Carter or Anderson in 1980. So the case that Ronald Reagan did not have a mandate for his first term is very defensible.  So why go back into some funk and R&B history? Because we have a bigger problem now, and that bigger problem also does not have a ...

One of the patterns that began to emerge in 2023 was the fall of majority parties and coalitions in practically every advanced democracy on the planet. That trend has continued throughout this year. Even those cases where a majority party stays in power, it has tended to be a considerably weaker majority than before. India comes to mind (smaller majority limiting Presidential power), and Ireland's governing coalition appeared to survive this weekend's vote. I've been following other elections in Iceland and Romania this weekend. Iceland just voted out its governing party and voted in a social democratic party as its governing party. All I have right now with regard to Romania's parliamentary elections are exit polls as of this writing. It appears that the social democrats will have the largest plurality, but the far right has made some noticeable gains.  If you ask if there is any ideological shift globally, it seems to me difficult to see any coherent pattern. Arguably...