I feel like taking a stroll through beauty this morning.  The word has gotten so  tarnished by sexual overtones that the topic has dropped out of serious consideration. Maybe I’m funny (yes, I know I am), but I can go back through–and enjoy, and relax, to memories of what I think of as beauty.  Maybe I’m just talking about memories that filled me up, like experiences of some beauty does.  I remember a dress in the ninth grade. It was of pin corduroy, and was something that might be called magenta and had wrap around buttons down to the waist with a little neck that poked up.  Whatever happened to soft pin corduroy, anyway?

Another memory is the figure of a Chinese lady with a parasol, one foot in the air as observed through a store window.  Perfect! If I hadn’t been poor I would have possessed it.

How can the sweet smell of the countryside after a rain be called beauty?  I don’t know, but it got inside me, too.

I’ve been reading The Ring Road, a poetic sequence, by Jonathan Aldrich, and it’s touching me inside.  Lovely with so many targets responding inside me.  You may think I’m talking about nothing, I don’t know.  It’s impossible really to know what others experience, but it’s a place inside that can be fed by its own sensitivity or some kind of thirst assuaged.  Because of how the word beauty has been abused, it seems to have been overlooked.

Oh–Aldrich just captured it:  our underwater life, p. 45.  And I’m on page 57 now:

Still there is only one

garden  for each of us

whose light falls perfectly.

Although this garden slips

away it is not forgotten.

In high schools across the country, students are being placed in military classes without electing them on their own. “The only word I can think of is ‘indoctrination,’” one parent said…..See today’s NY Times

Or, just preparing the fodder?  Seems MAGA lost but our innards are still infested.  When I get the time I hope to explore what some state officials are doing to punish climate changers (through our banking system).

No one who’s done more’: Eric Trump says his father saved ‘religious freedom’ from Barack Obama

(And here I thought the T’s were against religious freedom!)

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Whatever else contributed to the FTX meltdown, it is essential to recognize the role played by a society—backed by a legal regime of economic incentives—that valorizes wealth, spurns regulation, and worships technical “smarts” over democratic accountability. The trouble is distributed throughout a culture that is “inherently elitist, genius-obsessed, and dismissive of larger society,” as Cathy O’Neil puts it in a searing essay on tech futurism.

“Ultimately,” O’Neil concludes, “this is all about power and influence.” If we took Fried’s arguments seriously, we might actually do something about that—by reining in the power of the rich, say, and shoring up the welfare of the rest. The relentless libertarian demand to parse personal responsibility, Fried’s essay makes clear, keeps distracting us from changing the organization of society—except perhaps to build more prisons. In its zeal to identify bad apples so it can leave everything else the same, this outlook is the anti-reformist and anti-regulatory philosophy par excellence.

More at Ben at Boston Review members@bostonreview.net via gmail.mcsv.net

France is going to be one of the first countries in the world to ban fossil fuel advertising

In August, France announced that they will become the first European country to ban fossil fuels advertising! This includes ads for all energy products relating to fossil fuels and energy from the combustion of coal mining and hydrogen-containing carbons. Ads for natural gas are still allowed but may be phased out in the coming year. Companies caught advertising these environmentally disastrous products could face fines between €20,000 and €100,000.

Originally tweeted by Theodor Kittelsen (@ArtistKittelsen) on September 25, 2022. and reblogged an excerpt by Ned Hamson.

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The new king of England, Charles III may have a bad rap with liberals due to England’s takeover-the-world past , but he’s personally involved in fighting climate change.  And he’s the first royal with a college degree and is an artist in his spare time.  His own auto, an Aston Martin DB6 — which he has owned since 1970 — uses an untraditional fuel source, in keeping with his efforts to lower his own personal carbon footprint. Instead of gasoline, Charles’ favorite vehicle uses repurposed surplus English white wine and whey made from the cheesemaking process, which is converted into bioethanol fuel. The unique fuel is created by a company called Green Fuels in Gloucestershire, who worked with Aston Martin specialists to produce the unusual energy source.

9 Magestic Facts About King Charles III:  <hello@interestingfacts.com>

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SELF ANALYSIS – I know I’m impulsive, a poor keeper of promises (I think of them as intentions), and disintegrating with age (I experienced hallucinations as I woke up a little while ago), but this blog, which was not so cleverly named, eats up almost all my time, taking it from vacuuming, taking up the garbage, doing my dishes, cooking goulash, crock potting a chicken breast and making a salad that must last for a week– not to mention the much earlier attempted organization of my files, including old photos from my genealogical workdays.  As I pause in my blogging, I hope to replace it not with my domestic duties but putting together again my abandoned novel about a transgender’s experience coming out.

(By the bye, my files got so out of hand because I developed the habit of saving informational articles to use in my collegiate  school column at the University of Florida, “S’Matter of Fact.”  Oops, sorry; that was my high school column at Miami Jackson.  In college it was called “Artifacts,” as I did postgraduate study in anthropology.  John Goggin was my  anthropology teacher and mentor who took us on digs during the weekend, and Buddy Davis was my much admired professor in journalism, who frequently spoke of “the milk of human kindness.”

(You may have noticed I have a slight problem with bragging, too, but memories are what’s left of a loooong life with many chapters.)

My cousin Barbara, who was the copy editor for my nonfiction Fallout, has declined the invite to copyedit this new fiction enterprise, saying “What do you know  about being transgender?!”  I didn’t answer, but don’t feel any difficulty in relating; they’re human and I’m human and I am sensitive and empathic with a good imagination remaining, so why not?  Earlier I abandoned the novel after someone seemed to think the beginning, maybe called the Preface, was too raw.  In fact, she questioned whether I had written it.  [I have subsequently re-written the Preface.]  Anyway, I hope to continue reading your blog posts and we’ll see how long I can keep this promise.  Oh yes, the title may be Inside Jules’ Closet;  Shady Acres; or…?

I’d like to post it chapter by chapter as I write it on this blog, but first have to explore if that would interfere with its getting published.  Let me hear from anyone with the answer, please.

P.S. Sorry about the following misleading photo of me as much younger, but I think I prefer it.  Smile.

GOD?  At the end, when most of us either hope or want to have something to hope for…Except perhaps the hardened folks with shattered and bitter…No, I shouldn’t overstate. I suspect there are atheists and other agnostics who are able to let go entirely of consciousness and say goodbye to themselves as their lights go out.  As for others, well, as you may have noticed I’m kinda fond of myself and hate to see the old girl go.  In fact, I wrote the following poem back in 2015:

WISHFUL THINKING

Squabbling in

the planet’s sandbox,

howling from a fistful of the stuff

into streaming eyes,

bloodline against itself.

Domesticated life forms,

not cloned, rather

tainted with the freedom

to differ in

their cousin rivalry.

Why are the earth’s many

Gods only uncles?

Let us hear from Grandfather

who in His infinite wisdom

must surely re-unite us all.

[Or not…]

The [heart] beat goes on…

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What’s the point of the annual COP27 gathering? In short, nations still strive to reach the goals they set even if they don’t fully meet them. Rather than viewing these conferences as the final word, experts argue they are part of a process in which the world’s most powerful people recommit to fighting climate change.

From <https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?ogbl#inbox/WhctKKXgtTcBWZFrZDSkcFtWqGqsJXdLClKxrBpvMqKhZWvfQPlMTHCkqGjbVXRhSdZgJcl>

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CONFESSION:   I don’t like to feed depression, so I read the last few pages of novels to make sure they don’t end sadly.  What a waste of time to read an entire book only to make yourself feel bad!  I forgot to do that when I read Mary Gordon’s The Rest of Life, as I may have mentioned before.

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DISQUS?  I’m trying to understand a safe way to join Disqus without making myself totally vulnerable to the world, as in info files in all areas of my life. .  Has anyone done Disqus and how did it go?  Worth the trouble?  I read a stupendous article on the 3 Quarks Daily site or platform or what have you…that I’d like to refer you to.   It was  in an 11/14/22 posting, and appears to have been previously on Disqus.  Titled We Can’t Work (It) Out by Ada Bronowski:  “A comedian is a comedian the day he or she invents their own form of ideal ugliness… The slightly sickly, un-sculpted body is what enables a comedian to say the outrageous things they say and reap the laughs.”  She traces the ungainly comedian way back and forward, including Socrates.  Sorry, I don’t know how to recapture an earlier article on 3 Quarks, but you can probably figure it out yourself, if you’re under 80.  I still had it on my read e-mail.  But it’s amazing.  See if you don’t think so…P.S. 3 Quarks Daily features published articles from the fields of  Science, Arts, Philosophy, Politics and Literature.

...will be worn by murderers/ burglars/insurrectionists this year?  I don’t blame the Black Friday merchants but I do wonder  about how quickly laws against the wearing of masks got ignored (justifiably) with the pandemic, yet the wearing of masks just happened to coincide with looser–or no–gun controls?  I recommend them when breaking the law.  Will a number of them be found alongside discoveries of hidden caches of ammunition and aka’s?

I thought it nicer not to give credit for the photo, but these or many, many other varieties of ways to become anonymous,,,and protect against sun and cold and maybe even the winter’s anticipated viruses…can be found under black friday sales on the internet.