dianeravitch The Worst Day in American History Today, as most people celebrate the Independence of our country, we think of the men and women who not only established our government but enabled it, prodded it, and compelled it—to live up to its ideals. On July 4, 1776, many Americans were not free; many did not have the right to vote or to own property or to be educated. Many did not have the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” We have still not lived up to the democratic ideals that the Founding Fathers put on paper. Currently, nearly half the states have enacted or intend to enact laws making it more difficult to vote, which is an attack on the fundamental promise of democracy: one man or woman, one vote.
We have only recently learned how fragile our democracy is. On January 6, 2021, a large mob stormed the U.S. Capitol in an effort to prevent the certification of the Presidential election of 2020. According to the U.S. Constitution, this ritual of certifying the results of the election is ceremonial; it is not an occasion to overturn the election results. The electoral votes from the states had been counted and certified. In some states they were recounted. The Trump campaign filed scores of lawsuits to overturn the outcome based on claims of fraud, but every such lawsuit was dismissed for lack of evidence, including two appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court, even though it is dominated 6-3 by conservative Justices. Federal judges appointed by Trump, including three on the High Court, threw out his legal appeals
Despite the resounding defeat of Donald Trump in both the electoral college and the popular vote, Trump insisted that the election had been stolen from him. It came to be known as The Big Lie, repeated on a nearly daily basis.
As January 6 approached, Trump tweeted to his followers and asked them to come to Washington, D.C. on thay. He promised that “it will be wild.” As you know, he addressed thousands of his supporters that day to march to the Capitol and to “fight like hell.”
January 6 was the most shameful day in American history, the only day in which large numbers of Americans attacked the seat of their own government. They were seditionists, they perpetrated a violent insurrection, overrunning the U.S. Capitol, brutally beating law enforcement officers. It is almost equally shameful that members of Trump’s party, with only a few exceptions, have minimized what happened on that day. One member of Congress said it was akin to a normal tourist visit. Another described the violence as “peaceful protest.” Rep. Liz Cheney was ousted from her leadership role for acknowledging the seriousness of the insurrection. When asked to create an independent commission to analyze what happened that day, Senate Republicans refused to do so.
The forces of authoritarianism are rising, most notably in China, Russia, Brazil, Hungary, and Myanmar. We need to protect our democracy.
To understand what happened on January 6, please watch this video, created by the New York Times from the cameras of police, insurrectionists, and other sources. You may think you have seen it all. You have not. Watch. Then think hard about what you can do to restore our democratic ideals on this July 4.
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All posts by Nan Mykel
A Lovely, Reblogged
Published July 2, 2021 by Nan MykelCrashing into the Moment
July 1, 2021 by Rosemerry
for Marne
And though we have not spoken
in over thirty years, today I invite
the memory of my friend to walk
with me in the garden.
That girl would laugh
to learn I’ve become a woman
who weeds, who waters, who grows.
We were uncultivated together,
unrooted, unmanicured,
and blossoming anyway,
windblown and wandering and wild.
I bring that sweet madness now
into the tidy rows and marvel
at how things change.
For a moment, I am running with her
over a hill and spinning
and crashing and laughing.
For a moment, I am again that girl
who is more dream than flesh,
more wish than should, more
me than I ever could be.
How beautiful the song of that memory,
how it rhymes even now with whatever
is green in me.
Even now, I am running,
spinning, crashing, though anyone looking
at the garden might think
I am peacefully deadheading flowers,
talking to the spinach,
painstakingly pulling the weeds.
Relax and Die…
Published July 1, 2021 by Nan MykelI was kind of spooked when I read that a form of fungi sedates cutleaf ants with a marijuana equivalent and when they’re blissed out the fungi pierces them with an upright stalk in order to fertilize itself in the surrounding environment. It reminded me of doping victims prior to rape. Devious, worse than sneaky! But there, I’m anthropomorphizing again. This information was in the new book, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures, by Merlin Sheldrake.
This week I read in The Week that a Maine restaurateur gets her lobsters stoned before boiling them alive. Their meat was deemed “sweeter,” because they were more relaxed and less stressed. (Until…)
Why does this bother me so! Both manipulations. ..brainless and non-brainless. Getting one’s defenses down in order to kill it. I’m reminded of “nature red in tooth and claw”…Too sentimental, I guess, when millions of refugees are homeless and starving. Concrete examples, and humans, are more bothersome…And if children and babies are involved…!
Death On Our Doorstep — Thanks Exxon-Mobil
Published July 1, 2021 by Nan MykelOur lovely Earth and our babies born today…
The average temperature in much of British Columbia, Canada, in the month of July is a comfortable 73° (F) or 23° (C). Earlier this week, still in June, the temperature in parts of British Columbia reached 121.28° (F), or 49.6° (C). Nearly fifty degrees hotter than the average July temperature before it’s even July! I don’t know about you, but I cannot imagine being in temps over 100°, let alone 121°!!! In the U.S., Oregon and Washington experienced the same heat wave with crushing, debilitating temperatures. Why? C’mon folks, think about it … you know why and so do I … this is exactly what scientists have been warning us about for decades … this is the global warming that half the people in this country say is a hoax. Well, guess what, climate deniers? The state of Oregon reported 63 deaths attributed to the heat wave that finally broke…
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So My Anthropomorphism Wasn’t Totally Off Base!
Published June 30, 2021 by Nan MykelSpecial–had to share…
I’ve noted on occasion that I tend to go pretty far down the anthropomorphism path. An example: our house was long shaded by wonderful old trees.
I loved them for their natural beauty, their cooling us from the summer’s heat, their enveloping us with privacy. Sitting beneath them or watching from a window as their leaves swished in the breeze, I invariably felt calm and relaxed.
Over time, a number of these trees became ill. We always waited til we’d received solid confirmation that they were dying, when we had no choice but to take them down before they toppled onto our house in a storm.
That potential became frighteningly real during a severe windstorm last year, when three enormous nearby trees fell, their roots yanking up huge chunks of sidewalk and leaving deep holes. They severely damaged a house and two cars…
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WILL THE REAL GOD PLEASE STAND UP?
Published June 25, 2021 by Nan Mykel
Linguist Noam Chomsky has spent much of his life studying the underlying structure of language–not the meaning of words used but their underlying form and pattern. Evolution is the hypothesized generator underlying language, which subsequently developed world wide into the various languages, all based on the underlying pre-existing patterning. (See Grammatical Man by Jeremy Campbell, Simon and Schuster). A similar underlying evolutional provision is hypothesized to exist in other areas (with some suggestive evidence) in the area of mathematics and musical talent. Incidentally, the most spoken languages as of 2020 are English: 1,132 million; Mandarin Chinese: 1,117 million speakers; Hindi 615 million; and Spanish 534 million (blog.Lingoda.com).
Perhaps a more clearcut evolutionary prescription is suggested by what has been called the spiritual gene hypothesis, fine-tuned by Dean Hamer, a molecular biologist at the National Institutes of Health. The God gene hypothesis proposes that human spirituality is influenced by heredity and that a specific gene called vesicular monoamine Transporter 2 (VMAT2) acts by altering monoamine elements and provides an evolutionary advantage by providing individuals with an innate sense of optimism (Wikipedia).
Hamer draws a sharp distinction between spirituality and religion or belief in a particular god, the latter of which is transmitted culturally. Wikipedia reports that there are approximately 4,200 active religions in the world [!] As of 2020 the breakdown is:
| Religion | Adherents | Percentage |
|---|---|---|
| Christianity | 2.382 billion | 31.11% |
| Islam | 1.907 billion | 24.9% |
| Secular –Nonreligious/Agnostic/Atheist | 1.193 billion | 15.58% |
| Hinduism | 1.251 billion | 15.16% |
| Buddhism | 506 million | 5.06% |
| Chinese traditional religion | 394 million | 5% |
| Ethnic religions excluding some in separate categories | 300 million | 3% |
| African traditional religions | 100 million | 1.2% |
| Sikhism | 26 million | 0.30% |
| Judaism | 14.7 million | 0.18% |
| Spiritism | 14.5 million | 0.18% |
| Baháʼí | 5.0 million | 0.07% |
| Jainism | 4.2 million | 0.05% |
| Shinto | 4.0 million | 0.05% |
| Cao Dai | 4.0 million | 0.05% |
| Zoroastrianism | 2.6 million | 0.03% |
| Tenrikyo | 2.0 million | 0.02% |
| Animism | 1.9 million | 0.02% |
| Druze | 1.2 million | 0.015% |
| Neo-Paganism | 1.0 million | 0.01% |
| Unitarian Universalism | 0.8 million | 0.01% |
| Rastafari | 0.6 million | 0.007% |
| Total | 7.79 billion | 100% |
Summer Poem
Published June 24, 2021 by Nan MykelMagnificent…
This poem is a writing chair at 5 AM
with summer night pressed to the window,
luxe and lush and fresh-scented with rain.
Night is the river and the poem her crannog,
the song of the salmon coursing the worlds,
her eyes fey-lit with bioluminescence,
that glowing domain of water words
the verses weave in wombed refrain.
The poem shuts its eyes as the night bids
and widens undersense to dream, canoeing
down the river in a drum of crannog song,
chaired in ecstasy’s vatic virile thrum.
The music is water-born and bourned,
branching horns across the night forest
that canopies the poem’s pale cranium.
A crashing rhythm by matins wrought:
from river forges the poem tongs its fish
glowing with weirdlight harmonies,
silverine over ghostly sash, the ochre
of occasion rimmed with silt — soul ash.
Here is the poetry the darkling night rides
a transit, if you…
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Gosh…
Published June 24, 2021 by Nan MykelIn 2020, during the Trump administration, 881 active Secret Service employees were diagnosed with COVID-19. This, according to records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), included a majority, 477, of secret service “special agents,” and 249 from the “uniformed division.” From <https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/6/22/2036545/-Newly-released-records
A lightning strike can lead to strange super talents. [But don’t count on it}. In a blog post for Psychology Today, University of Miami neuroscientist Berit Brogaard writes about an incident where an orthopaedic surgeon who was struck by lightning developed an urge to learn to play the piano. He began to compose music he had mysteriously started hearing in his head since the strike. After a few months he abandoned his career as a surgeon and became a classical musician. This type of phenomenon baffles scientists. From <https://www.sciencealert.com/what-happens-after-being-hit-by-lightning>
YIKES! (via the May 17, 2019 The Week): A 72-year old French adventurer and former paratrooper has become the first person to cross the Atlantic in a barrel. Jean-Jacques Savin set off from the Canary Islands in December in his 10-foot reinforced plywood vessel, which has no motor, oars, or sail and was propelled only by ocean currents. After four months at sea and having traveled 2,930 miles–during which he survived on canned food, freshly caught fish, and a block of foie gras–Savin finally reached the Dutch Caribbean island of St. Eustatius last week. It is “the end of this adventure,” He wrote on Facebook. Image CNN Travel
JUST CURIOUS…
Published June 23, 2021 by Nan MykelIs anything positive happening anywhere in the government? If so, I’d sure like to hear about it.
I’ve seen lists of things that have failed. How about a list of successes to date, beside money for those suffering from the pandemic. Not that I’m discounting that but perhaps for every unfortunate occurrence we could acknowledge a positive one?
Help ask leadership a few questions that need answers
Published June 22, 2021 by Nan MykelFood for thought, Mr. President.
I do not have a crystal ball, but I do read and have read for more than a few years. I am not prescient, but I do recognize we have issues that are just not getting talked about enough or at all. Please help me ask a few simple questions of leadership – state and federal representatives, senators, governors, council member and county commissioners, etc.
- since there is a global and US water crisis that will only be made worse by climate change – what do you plan to do about it now, not as it becomes even worse a problem?
- since climate change is a huge problem by itself and shows up in utility, reinsurance, NGO, and governmental models with catastrophic impact, how do you plan to leverage further what others are already doing to combat it?
- since America has fallen woefully behind other countries in infrastructure and we…
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