The Books of Bokonon

"As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action...Words are used to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests." Gore Vidal, Imperial America, 2004

It's too soon to say with any certainty, but today is one that is cause for cautious optimism at the very least. I posted the live feed to Cory Booker's record-breaking 25 hour Senate floor speech last night when he had only been on a few hours. At the time I would have had no way of predicting how long he would hold the floor. His action beat the previous record of Strom Thurmond (an old-school segregationist) that went back to the 1950s, who needed to swept into the dustbin of history anyway. This speech was more than a form of performance art. Senator Booker tackled substantive issues throughout the 25 hours and four minutes he held the floor. He was joined by Democratic colleagues along the way - a number of whom asked questions to give Senator Booker's voice a rest. And those questions were substantive. For those who question whether or not the Democratic Party can meet the moment, hopefully this day will offer reason to hope. There were a number of special elections ...

Okay, since I am not well and can't really sleep, I will post a couple videos. I'll start off with Jon Stewart as he tries to cut through the crap old Trump and Vance pulled last Friday - an event that still has me muttering Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: The pro wrestling metaphor is fitting, actually. That's about as sophisticated as Trump and Vance can manage. And the Russian government and its state controlled media are jumping for joy. I'll finish with Jimmy Kimmel who had his own reaction to whatever old Trump's SOTU address was.

I will introduce a new series that I expect to be irregular. Or at least I hope will be irregular. I have used Pinterest to bookmark a lot of news articles and web pages of interest for quite a few years, and found it especially convenient to use for my own particular purposes. That has worked without incident for several years. I've maintained several boards which had been left publicly facing (in the hopes that something I pinned might be of use to others) until recently. This past summer, I started to get bombarded with alerts that several of my pins had been deactivated as inappropriate content or promoting violence. I do pin quite a few articles published in mainstream news sites dealing with dark topics such as fascism, genocide, torture, and the like. The articles I pin are ones opposed to each of those aforementioned topics.  My initial thought was that there was a MAGAt or two who had stumbled on to my boards and that I was suddenly in the middle of a harassment campaign. ...

This one will be a little more personal, but it seems like a good time to reflect a bit. I turned 59 today. I have spent the day, and a couple before it, sick. One of the joys of working in any level of the education sector (I'm in higher ed) is being exposed to pretty much any and every virus in circulation at any given time. It goes with the territory and I accept that. I had some hope briefly that after our shared experience with the COVID pandemic that a new work and classroom attendance culture would take hold - one a bit more forgiving for those who are really just too sick to be in class. From a health standpoint, it would be great. As long as the work gets done, I'm okay with that. There will always be a subset of colleagues who will disagree, and I accept that too. Most likely, I will be well in a day or two - knock on wood. The last several days have been rough for us as a nation. As my kids have wished me a happy birthday, I've lamented the world they are inherit...

I haven't put up a Jon Stewart video in a few weeks. Perhaps I was not much in the mood. But I am now. This Monday evening, he unpacked a new year with two terrorist attacks that fit nobody's preconceived narrative, and a January 6th that went much differently than the January 6th of 2021. Amazing what happens when the losing candidate handles it with panache, rather than throws a temper tantrum. Jon Stewart laughs, but as we all know, he does so with a certain amount of moral outrage. There was a line from V for Vendetta - I don't remember it exactly - where the character Gordon Dietrich is asked if everything is a joke to him. He answers "only the things that matter." I feel that. Let's watch the video:  

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.

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 ...

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...

I don't know if you have ever been to a city or town council meeting or a school board meeting. If you haven't, make a point of attending a meeting at some point in your life. You probably won't thank me, but you will find it educational. I was at my city's board of directors meeting this past Tuesday. Most of the agenda was pretty cut and dry. I get the impression at most board of directors meetings in my city that much of the heat comes from the on-going fallout from a consent decree after the US government had finally had enough of my city's leaders at the time consistently failing to update a failing sewer system until it met federal regulations. Much of the heat on that set of issues is understandable, as there is a lot of frustration over the cost of decades of mismanagement from our elected leaders is being passed on to us. I feel the same frustration. I also know that the city just needs to get on with it and get the job done.  This week, the heat was direc...

Since the middle of the last decade, I've heard repeatedly that we live in a "post-truth" era. That was best exemplified by Kellyanne Conway's usage of the term "alternative facts" back in 2017 in response to the kerfuffle over the crowd size for Trump's inauguration in late January of that year. So, this is the so-called post-truth era. Admittedly it has been a long while since I was taking philosophy classes as an undergraduate student, but terms like relativism (sometimes used interchangeably with perspectivism and perspectivalism) have some value. The basic gist is that each of us will have a somewhat different experience of the same phenomenon. Note what isn't in dispute: that there is some phenomenon that has occurred and that each of us had an experience of it. The facts on the ground are what they are, but what each of us might make of the facts may vary - sometimes in ways that can be constructive, and sometimes in ways that are not. As long...

 

Before I go to sleep, I wanted to spend a few moments reflecting on a Zoom call I was on this evening sponsored by the Fund for Authentic Journalism, which Al Giordano and crew founded a number of years back. Most of these folks on the call were personal friends and colleagues of his, his mother, and then a few of us who didn't know the man personally, but had made a point of subscribing to his newsletter and who first learned of his work via Narco News back during the early years of the Iraq War. He also did some blogging at Daily Kos for a while, so I would have encountered his work in that venue as well. What impressed me was how well Giordano could read through the crosstabs from polling data and see what most journalists would miss. In the process, he was a voice of calm and reason at times when folks would be panicked or when they were getting their hopes up just a bit too much. He was one of the few folks who would remind his audience that polls are not predictive, and I kne...

  We're only halfway through the week, and it's been, shall we say, a bit weird. Okay. Really weird. The authoritarians are doing their worst, as usual. This is just a very partial list: A Kremlin-run troll farm has been pushing a fake Harris video . Thankfully they've been caught. An Ohio county sheriff has found his inner Stasi Chekist and is demanding the addresses of any county resident who posts a Harris/Walz yard sign .  He also uses a lot of eliminationist rhetoric. There's something oddly un-American about that. Supreme Court Justice Alito is apparently besties with a right-wing German aristocrat who is also obsessed with ending reproductive freedom. Nothing weird about that...oh who am I kidding.  William Kristol (a columnist I would have almost never endorsed a couple decades ago) has reminded us once more that it really is okay to tell the truth and call Trump a threat to democracy . He and his co-author rightly refer to the threats against the Haitian immig...

I'll admit I had never heard of Dr. Allan Lichtman prior to 2016, when he correctly predicted that Donald Trump would become the next US President. My reaction was along the lines of "who is this guy" and "you've got to be kidding me". But I learned who he was and realized that he knows his stuff. Lichtman uses a set of thirteen keys (answered as true or false) developed by him and a colleague in 1981. This model ignores polling data, which is the stuff that most take for gospel. Instead, the model is guided by historical precedent. As someone who relied on polling aggregators at the time (e.g., 538), I can see how his approach to prediction seems unsophisticated to the data wonks.  Here's the thing: he's used those keys to make the right prediction for nearly all US Presidential elections since 1984. That kind of track record establishes his credibility. We ignore his predictions at our peril. A lot of hay has been made out of the Democratic Party l...

 It's now time for a closer look: As a bonus, here is Adam Kinzinger as a guest on Jimmy Kimmel's show that appears late at night (is that close enough to a JD Vance impersonation?): I always said Trump stinks. I just never knew that was true literally.

 Maybe:   The contrast is stark. As we saw during the Democratic Convention last week, quite a few of the speakers were Republican Party members who endorsed Harris. It's clearly not because they see eye with Harris on the issues. Quite the opposite. But they do share a love of our nation in common with their Democratic counterparts and are willing to be part of what in different contexts would be called a popular front. We've seen since then other former staffers (not only Trump's) from previous GOP presidential campaigns and Presidencies endorse Harris. They've turned their backs on Trump, and with good reason. He was unfit for office in 2016 and he is even more unfit today. For many, the events of January 6th that resulted in a coup attempt turned out to be the last straw. Others might be looking carefully at the policies promoted in Project 2025, which is very much tied to Trump, and realized that those policies were simply weird: un-American and more befitting more...

That's the question keeping Jimmy Kimmel up at night : “I don’t know if there will be any late-night television shows on network TV in ten years. Maybe there’ll be one but there won’t be a lot of them,” he said on the Politickin’ podcast. “There’s a lot to watch and now people can watch anything at anytime, they’ve got all these streaming services. It used to be Johnny Carson was the only thing on at 11:30pm and so everybody watched and then David Letterman was on after Johnny so people watched those two shows but now they’re so many options. Maybe more significantly, the fact that people are easily able to watch your monologue online the next day, it really cancels out the need to watch it when it’s on the air and once people stop watching it when it’s on the air, networks are going to stop paying for it to be made.”  I doubt Jimmy Kimmel will have much to worry about the Monday after his last late night broadcast, whenever that happens (hopefully not for a long time). But he is ...

 Liz Dye: It's fine to laugh at JD Vance and his couch . At this juncture, the GOP is weird memes practically write themselves. You look at the policies that Vance, Trump, the right-wing think tanks (including the one that hatched Project 2025), and it becomes obvious that these folks are pushing policies and ideas that are really out of touch and just plain odd - definitely radically out of touch with what most of us as Americans want or value. That's worth mocking. Hell, we could all use a few good laughs after the events of these last few weeks, and definitely the last decade. As long as we remember to go to the polls and vote this November, let's continue to laugh. Note, image comes from link, which is credited to Getty. Also, most importantly, no couches were harmed in the composition of this post.

This is a thought-provoking article in the Arkansas Times . The article's somewhat paywalled, but you should be able to read a limited number of articles for free. The basic thesis, with some data analyses to back it up, is that Democrats (progressive/moderate/etc) who want to have the most impact at winning voter over simply refuse to play by the GOP's rules. Instead of countering all the charges of "grooming" and GOP obsessiveness with bathrooms, focus on the sort of basic kitchen table issues that voters care about. So, let the culture warriors scream about their latest weird obsession. Tell voters how you plan to help them directly, whether at the local, state, or federal level. People want roads that work, affordable healthcare, electrical grids that function, etc.