No one liked this in 2015, so I thought I’d give you another chance. It occurred in the waiting room between lives:…Then I spy Elvis himself–fat, paunchy and wearing sunglasses. The only trace of fame that adheres to him is the white-spangled costume which was his trademark. I wish he was singing a hymn from one of his albums, but then I realize that there is not much interaction between those who wait. He is not in an aisle seat , but I lean over and address him. “Mr. Presley?” He looks up nervously, as though he expects an autograph hound, then nods. You’re headed for a different life and different lessons. Before you’re all gone would you be kind enough to give us the gift of your ‘Amazing Grace’?” Elvis blinks, obviously surprised, and then looks all around him as though to assess his potential audience. Apparently satisfied, he stands and faces the main portion of the crowd. His voice is richly beautiful as he sings all seven verses of “Amazing Grace,” as only he can. He sits down when finished and instead of wild applause there was a total, respectful and moved silence, punctuated by quiet sobs.
MORE EMPATHY OR SYMPATHY? Oh I feel for the members of Congress who are quitting. I can both empathize and sympathize for them and their families. We’re all entitled to give up when both the task and the experience is too unravelling. It’s especially difficult to make that decision when one is a linchpin to the possibility of a better tomorrow. So, move over, baby, we’re in for a winter in the heart and a climate that’s brewing inevitable. Quick; find a god you can believe in. Or have they all quit too…
QUOTE OF THE DAY: The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world.” –Hannah Arendt, quoted in The Week from FEE.org
By now you have probably heard that Trump cannot be listed on Colorado’s Republican primary list for the 2024 General Election, due to a ruling by the state’s Supreme Court earlier this week, based on the Fourteenth Amendment, which forbids anyone who has caused an insurrection from becoming President. Next to the Supreme Court of the land? Do you think the Fourteenth Amendment is unreasonable?
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Miscellaneous Question: When you say something is on the right side or the left side, are you inside looking out outside looking in?
SOMETIMES IT SEEMS LIKE THE LOAD is too huge to bear. Sometimes I get washed off my feet by the weight of it all. At such times a list of concrete goals strikes me as handy. A random list of worthy causes I try to remember, in no special order, includes: OOPS–Sorry. I didn’t get beyond the first cause today: Women:
1870 — African-Americans may vote now, but women may not.
1918 — Doctors in New York are permitted to advise their married patients about birth control for health purposes. My mother was six years old.
August 18, 1920 – Women allowed to vote – Passed by Congress June 4, 1919, and ratified on August 18, 1920, the 19th amendment granted women the right to vote. Only a smidge over a hundred years ago. Victory took decades of agitation and protest. I’ve experienced that fact like a fairy tale, not fully realizing that it occurred only fifteen years before I was born. My mother was eight years old when women were “given” the right to vote. (African Americans were granted that right in 1870.)
1936 — Judicial approval of medicinal use of birth control is established. I am one year old.
1964 — The Civil Rights Act passes, prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex.
1965 — In Griswold v Connecticut, the Supreme Court overturns one of the last state laws prohibiting the prescription or use of contraceptives by married couples.
1971 — In Phillips v. Martin Marietta Corporation, the U.S. Supreme Court outlaws the practice of private employers refusing to hire women with pre-school children.
1972 — Title IX of the Education Amendments prohibits sex discrimination in all aspects of education programs that receive federal support.
1972 — In Eisenstadt v. Baird, the Supreme Court rules that the right to privacy encompasses an unmarried person’s right to use contraceptives.
1973 — With its Roe v. Wade decision, the U.S. Supreme Court declares that the Constitution protects women’s right to terminate an early pregnancy, thus making abortion legal in the U.S.
1994 — Congress adopts the Gender Equity in Education Act to train teachers in gender equity, promote math and science learning by girls, counsel pregnant teens, and prevent sexual harassment.
1994 — The Violence Against Women Act funds services for victims of rape and domestic violence, allows women to seek civil rights remedies for gender-related crimes, provides training to increase police and court officials’ sensitivity and a national 24-hour hotline for battered women.
2013 — Reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. The new bill extends coverage to women of Native American tribal lands who are attacked by non-tribal residents, as well as lesbians and immigrants.
2017 — A worldwide protest called The Women’s March happens the day following Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration. It was the largest single-day protest in U.S. history with an estimated 4 million participating in local marches across the nation. The organizers’ goal for the march was “send a bold message to our new administration on their first day in office, and to the world that women’s rights are human rights.”
2022 — The Supreme Court rules that the constitution does not confer any right to abortion, thus overruling both Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) and setting off waves of protests across the U.S.
Dates selected partially from History of Women’s Rights in America (
PROUD OF MY CITY — On January 6th of 2024 the city of Athens, Ohio will outlaw single-use plastic carryout bags. The ban applies to all stores and vendors in the city of Athens, including restaurants, and covers single-use plastic carryout bags provided to customers at checkout. The law does not apply to plastic bags (usually without handles) that a store or restaurant provides within the business to hold potentially messy items such as produce, meat, fish, baked goods or bulk items. Stores or restaurants that violate the new law will be cited with an administrative offense and fined $150. If they fail to pay the fine within 30 days, they’ll be cited with a misdemeanor offense. Customers will not be subject to citations or fines. Many stores and restaurants will be posting “Remember your bags” or “BYOB” (Bring Your Own Bag.)
The ordinance can be reviewed on the city’s web site, https://library.com,oh/athens/ordinances/code_of_ordinances?no-deld=1225501. “Plastics , including bags, contain thousands of chemicals that leach out and can’t be separated from the plastics at recycling. Most of these chemicals are not identified and many are known to be toxic. Plastics last for hundreds or years. They don’t biodegrade. They break into smaller microplastics and nanoplastics that leach out toxic chemicals.
Plastic waste threatens our ecosystem and us. It is found in soil and water and our bodies and is killing wildlife, both on land and in waterways. Eliminating single-use plastic plastic bags is a start in reducing oil and gas pollution. Promoting and increasing our use of plastic is Plan B for the fossil fuel industry as they see their profits decreased by our reliance on more renewable energy sources. More plastics means more fracking and more petrochemical facilities. For more information, email Athens ReThink Plastics at AthensReThinkPlastics@gmail.com. And BYOB!
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DID YOU KNOW? A group of buzzards is called a wake, though this refers to the vultures instead of true buzzards. This name comes from a reference to a funeral practice called a wake in which family and friends of the deceased would sit by the casket and watch for signs of waking. (The vultures or true buzzards wait to make sure their deceased is truly dead before eating.) Barf.
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GREAT IDEA
This may be evermore at the level of its inception idea, but realizing that it’s too late to orchestrate one of my homemade Christmas cards, I decided it would be Happy New Year cards, and then my eyes got big and I thought about making a card of a Christmas tree with ornament balls of friends in my life, past and present. Even a page of those I’ve forgiven. Now that I’ve told my reader, at least you will know I had the idea, if I never get around to accomplishing [finishing?] it.
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WELCOME IS THE NEWS THAT today Pope Francis is allowing priests to bless same sex relationships (but not marriages).
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Regretful is the old news that I still can’t can’t navigate to return to D’Verse Poets…Oh well, can’t be young and sharp forever….
WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THIS: Apparently when we have a win in the battle with energy corporations over their continuing damage to the environment, “we” may make it up to them with million dollar judgments from the public coffers. Did you know that? How and who allowed this to happen?
The U.N. recently released a ground-breaking report titled “Paying Polluters; The Catastrophic Consequences of Investor-State Dispute Settlement for Climate and Environment Action and Human Rights” (ISDS). The article is by Melanie Foley in the Nov./Dec 2023 Public Citizen News, and includes the words of Special Rapporteur Professor David R. Boyd to the U.N. General Assembly:
“Please consider how crazy this system is. States that are trying to tackle the climate and environmental crisis and safeguard human rights of their people are being forced to pay billions of dollars in compensation to the very corporations that have caused this crisis. Instead of making polluters pay, states are paying polluters.”
The report concludes that ISDS has become ” a major obstacle to the urgent actions needed to address the planetary environmental and human rights crises.”
I suppose this could be one of my jaded “HO HUM” sharings. I went, and found via Google:
The report concludes that ISDS has become ” a major obstacle to the urgent actions needed to address the planetary environmental and human rights crises.” Some of he cases are international but I chose not to wrap my brain around those, for now at least. P.S. ISDS is not related to the Inflammatory Skin Diseases Summit nor the International Spinal Deformity Symposium. (Shame on me for being cocky on such a serious topic!)
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Thank you, PRESBYTERIAN OUTLOOK – This week serendipitous workings connected me with the June 2023 issue at the free bin at the Library. The entire issue is on “GUN VIOLENCE,” heralded on the cover as “A Christian case for repealing the 2nd Amendment. Enough already! From Despair to hope.” [I’ll drink to that!]
An observation worth quoting: “While you may choose to be silent when it comes to gun violence out of concern for who you may anger, your silence is also sending a message to those who are most impacted by gun violence (women, children, youth, LGBTQ+, and people of color) that their trauma and suffering don’t matter.”
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OOPS! Just misunderstood Time’s”Person of the Year.” I thought for sure it was an A.I. construction but my daughter, more familiar with the music culture, identified her as Taylor Swift, as does the cover. But I doubted the labeling, you see. Upon further thought, I wonder if that is really Taylor, or a costly look-alike? It’s true Time’s CEO of the year is the AI leader Sam Altman. ….Now that I think about it, Altman doesn’t look real alive, either.
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REMARKABLE: There are more mobile phones in the world than people. (Per Time, Dec. 25, 2023, p. 27–Oops, it’s an advertisement. Does that matter?)
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This August 14th, in a decision that the Republican state attorney general of Montana Austin Knudsen has appealed, a judge ruled that the state of Montana must consider the effects of climate change when deciding whether to begin or renew fossil-fuel projects. Held v. State of Montana is a first-of-its-kind case, but–“given a rising generation of young activists who know the power of speaking their minds”–is unlikely to be the last. (The 16 plaintiffs, ages 5 to 22, had taken the state of Montana to court for violating their right to a clean environment, which is enshrined in the state’s constitution.) –Ninis Twumasi
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QUOTE OF THE DAY – It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not: Oscar Wilde
When I looked at the new charge card I’d had to drive to another city to get, I recognized it as the one I’d thrown away two month’s earlier and thought the real one never arrived. It had been sent without notice, without anything on the outside of the envelope, and nothing explaining it on the inside accompanying the unfamiliar card. Since every day I’ve been throwing away several unopened “wanna” envelopes, I just tossed this, opened-out-of-curiosity anyway. Ergo, I’m having to contact beaucoup automatic billing accounts. However, when I call needing to talk to a real person, it’s unbelievable how many “clicks” I have to make before giving up. Even my own town’s water department is impossible.
I know it’s my own fault for disbelieving, but perhaps I should disbelieve the 9-11 panel and the real story about Roswell and the UFO’s? And how about A.I. and the reassurances by Musk about Earth humans colonizing Mars by 2050? And Santos and…?
Sound like a failing and flailing old biddy, don’t I?
What possibly fertilized the idea of avoiding the truth appears to have been sidetracked and weaponized by its political opponents. I’m referring to MAGA’s focus on protecting youth and even those at the college level from historical (and current?) truths. Beyond the well-publicized school mufflers is, for example the recent movement by Ohio Republicans to cut State funding of centers of higher learning such as colleges and universities for continuing actions of allowing protests by students and faculty. NEWS FLASH: On Nov. 29, 2023, The Ohio House has seemingly killed the controversial legislation to overhaul the Ohio education system, resulting in a win for public education advocates. We’ll follow this report…(Ohio bills limiting college protests – Google Search).
Google can lead you to varieties of political correctness, also:
adjective as in not causing offense: Strongest match
If, for instance, we say “wheelchair rider” instead of “wheelchair bound,” are we not being guided by an assumption that there’s something wrong with being wheelchair bound? How about calling a woman a person rather than a (gasp) “woman”? Using the “PC” approach to language also embodies lost information. Lost information allows or leads to some loss of the truth, does it not?
Name-calling with prejudicial intent is an entirely different matter. Calling someone a moron, a retard or a dunce is usually meant to hurt, and is not included in the Truth that I’m supporting. And I realize that logic is not high on the list of those who eschew science. And companies and scammers have become whizzes at similar misspeak. If you start looking you may find examples of misleading and incomplete information in mild statements. Most any offering of a gift for friends means someday they’ll be billed for an automatic costed renewal without warning. Look hard at those magazine offerings. Rather than comparing your cost break to a full year’s subscription, they now compare it with 20 issues or some such. An AARP article by Sari Harrar in December’s bulletin gives advice on not getting scammed:
Don’t respond to phone calls or text messages from unknown numbers.
If you get a call or text out of the blue trying to sell you something, ignore it and delete it.
Don’t respond to unsolicited e-mail offers, (even second-guessing that’s been initiated by the cookie apparatus). Better safe than sorry.
Don’t give your credit card, bank account or Social Security numbers out over the phone–legitimate businesses or government offices never ask for such info by phone.
Say no to anyone who wants to do any transaction via a gift card, cryptocurrency or by sending money through a financial transfer app to someone you don’t know.
In addition, I’ve been advised that if you try and get on a site and are told by voice and computer that your computer has been invaded by a trojan virus and to call a proffered phone number, don’t. Instead unplug your computer, wait 10 sconds and plug it back in. Also, if you find your computer locked by a site you’re trying to reach, (as happened to me when I tried to read an aticle on the 15 worst things Donald has called people), you can unlock it by pressing the Shift key and holding it down for 10 seconds and when it goes beep beep it’s unlocked.
Rebound scams that specifically target people who have been recently cheated–often older, lower income people –not always aware that they’ve been cheated the first time–are a common danger, fraud analysts warn. Crime syndicates use customer-relationship managemen systems just like legitimate businesses do.
I’m ending this post here because I see that since I’ve been writing on my WP Dashboard I’ve collected 11 new ad squares so it appears I’ve been infiltrated….But I won’t even proofread. Only, I’ve fleetingly wondered if returning to old fashioned Christianity might make Americans behave better, since nothing else seems to help. If only they could avoid the Christian nationalists. And I realize this post is a mish-mosh, but then so are a lot of other things.
HO HUM–The U.S. is producing more crude oil than at any time in in its history. At 13.2 million barrels a day, the U.S. is now the world’s largest producer of crude oil, followed by Russia and Saudi Arabia. Newsweek 2023:
Today we’re going to visit Molly at GDC. That’s usually a Sunday occurrence, but …well, nothing is ever written in stone. We wanted to bring her home for Christmas, but the last time she had refused to leave, and also two grandchildren will be visiting me and their mother in my small Ohio condo. And her Downs Syndrome turned into dementia a coupla years ago. By the end of weekly visits from us she recognizes her sister and me, but we don’t want to risk dive bombing the grandchildren’s Christmas… Molly’s birthday is a bigger day for her anyway, three days later, at now it will be 52. The connection between Downs and dementia is a recent truth now that their lifespan has increased. The photo is one of our earlier photos. (Molly is a near-miss for her name). I just vsited Dear Downs, one of my “pages,” and had no ideda so many folks had visited it. (It is not reproduced on ths site). Sorry I never responded to any of you.
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WE TOOK MOLLY TO SEE THE CHRISTMAS LIGHTS
The city of Gallipolis has a central park ready-made for a Christmas light extravaganza. If you happen to be anywhere near this old French-settled town on the Ohio River, take a look during December. Stupendous! Molly liked it too, and I suspect Uri our chihuahua puppy did also. Here’s one shot of many:
HO HUM — On the way to see Molly we had to go through the town of Cheshire, owned by the energy company. Here’s what we saw there:
NANMYKEL.COM 