Filler on a Rainy Day

Published February 9, 2023 by Nan Mykel

Dandelion seeds in the sunlight blowing away across a fresh green morning background

The Awakening

I had no umbrella. Sounds. They battered. The rain in torrents, my racing, stumbling footsteps splashing, slipping. Slick tires pass. Falling, I crouch, and await the inevitable arrival of my attacker. He finds me on my knees, my hair plastered to my face. It is Paul. He stands me up and draws me into his arms. Our eyes meet, and hold. Two souls. Our heart beats reverberate against each other, chest to chest. For a moment I sense hesitation, then feel the cold metal of a knife thrust deep into my side, and I awaken.
My psychiatrist is quiet, then asks, “Who is Paul?”
“I don’t know! It’s like a memory from the past, but I cannot recapture it! I would have died—did die– from it.”
A longer silence follows, then “obviously you didn’t die.”
“I wonder.”

Nan

If Only the Capacity for Love…

Published February 9, 2023 by Nan Mykel

…Would overcome the inhumane political machine…The thought of earthquake survivors freezing to death prior to rescue now even as I write this is unspeakable (though not un-write-able?).

Researchers say folks in Turkey and Syria need to brace themselves for yet more quakes and aftershocks, as well as deteriorating weather. “The possibility for major aftershocks causing even more damage will continue for weeks and months,” says Ilan Kelman, who studies disasters and health at University College London. The current death toll is over 17,500.

“The weather forecast for the region for tonight is dropping below freezing. That means that people who are trapped in the rubble, who might be rescued, could well freeze to death. So these hazards continue,” he adds.

See doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-00364-y 

OH, So That’s What It’s All About!

Published February 8, 2023 by Nan Mykel

I kid you not–it’s in Time magazine this week, by Isabel Wilkerson, author of “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.”

In 2021 for the first time, the USA’s white population showed a decline–the only racial or ethnic group to do so, by 8.6%.

This had an effect on the caste system, defined as “an artificial, arbitrary graded ranking of human value, the underlying infrastructure of a society’s divisions.” What has the drift resulted in?…The groundswell to outlaw abortions; increased killings and harassment of non-whites, the contrived accusation of “replacement theory,” the forced abortions in refugee quarters, the stranglehold in the public schools on children’s minds about reality, the attack on adult pairings of couples unlikely to produce offspring (LGBT), taking with it the U.S. Supreme Court.

To insure white births–and to maintain the caste system–Texas will fine doctors $100,000 per abortion procedure and up to 20 years in prison. In Georgia, after a woman’s embryo has reached six weeks of gestation, people are allowed to claim them on their tax returns by allowing the state to include fetuses in the state’s population counts. There is a suspicion that red states are trying to swell their numbers so as to have a greater impact in Congress. And we are reminded that mass incarceration for nonviolent crimes by non whites keeps a disproportionate number of men from the reproductive pool for a long time.

Is it just a black-white conflict, or something darker inside us? Wilkerson remind us that Tyre Nichols was fatally beaten by five black men who were black, like him. Perhaps it’s enforcing the hierarchy in order to uphold the caste system, and to maintain one’s own place within it.

I’m reminded of reading Lyndon Johnson’s fact-checked words on Google: President Lyndon B. Johnson once said, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

JUST CURIOUS

Published February 8, 2023 by Nan Mykel

Have any UFO’s ever been sighted on the Chinese mainland? Not funny, but kind of a laff that many of the sightings were from China, reportedly, and not Mars…

Daily Quiz: Who wore a fur coat to the State of the Union? If you don’t know then you’re more of a zombie than me.

An off camera observation: Has the Congress really turned into a sandbox? As long as it’s only sand they throw at each other I guess it’s okay. Is there still a ban on members carrying? Just curious.

Sorry, I Couldn’t Look

Published January 30, 2023 by Nan Mykel

I got all teary reading the New York Times’ opinion piece today about how the tech layoffs went and then turned to more on the unspeakable Tyre murder, but couldn’t bring myself to experience that. (My boundaries are a little permeable).

Doesn’t mean I don’t care. Just the opposite.

So no news is sometimes better than news, at least for me today, until…

….

Seriously…

Published January 27, 2023 by Nan Mykel

Keith Wilson of Musings of an Old Fart shares with us:

A nonpartisan and knowledgeable voice on US debt and deficit concern

From the desk of Maya MacGuineas of the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. I will offer no additional comment as it speaks for itself.

“Today, the Treasury Department announced that it has begun engaging in a set of accounting tools known as “extraordinary measures” to avoid breaching the nation’s $31.38 trillion statutory debt limit. Those measures are expected to delay that breach until at least early June and possibly later.

Without qualification, the debt limit must be increased or suspended, and it should be done so as quickly as possible. Ideally, we would return to the practice of lifting the debt ceiling without relying on extraordinary measures – which have become all too ordinary – and refrain from making the increase anything close to a last-minute showdown.

The debt ceiling is too important to turn into a game of chicken, and default should never be suggested by those with a fiduciary responsibility to govern the nation. Politicians who are rightly worried about the nation’s unsustainable borrowing path should take a hard stance against new borrowing and oppose legislation that would add to the debt while offering specific solutions to control the debt already on the books, rather than threatening not to pay the bills on borrowing that has already been incurred.

The debt ceiling does offer the opportunity for all lawmakers to pause, assess the fiscal situation of the nation, and take action as necessary. And it is necessary. The debt as a share of GDP is at near record levels. We are on track to begin adding $2 trillion per year to the debt by the end of the decade. Interest payments are the fastest growing part of the budget and are projected to start costing $1 trillion annually in only a few years. The Social Security and Medicare Hospital Insurance trust funds are headed toward insolvency. And last year alone, Congress and the President passed bipartisan legislation that added nearly $2 trillion to the projected national debt. This is an urgent problem that is not getting the attention it needs.

An ideal solution would be for Congress to lift the debt ceiling as soon as possible and at the same time put in place measures to improve our fiscal trajectory. This could include specific policies or processes such as a fiscal commission.

Attaching fiscal reforms to the debt limit was common practice in the past when both policies and processes to improve fiscal responsibility were included as part of a deal. More recently, in a jaw-dropping act of fiscal irresponsibility, politicians in both parties pivoted to support debt ceiling increases along with legislation that made the debt worse. Under President Trump, the debt ceiling was lifted three times with bipartisan support and included legislation that added in total a stunning $2.1 trillion in new borrowing to the debt.

Congress should return to the past model of a debt ceiling increase, legislation to improve the fiscal situation, and a broad based understanding that the debt ceiling must be increased in a calm and timely manner. We must not threaten default. The cost is simply too high.“

A COMMON SENSE APPROACH TO GUN DEATHS

Published January 25, 2023 by Nan Mykel

An opinion piece in the New York Times by Nicholas Kristof yesterday titled “A Smarter Way to Reduce Gun Deaths” is worth an entire read. In it Kristof faults both liberals and conservatives for focussing more on divisive approaches than common sense expeditious methods, and his suggestions are backed by (shudder) statistics. Kristof responds to the observation that for decades, we’ve treated gun violence as a battle to be won rather than a problem to be solved — and this has gotten us worse than nowhere.

See NY Times, Nicholas Kristof January 24 2023

Me and My Shadows

Published January 25, 2023 by Nan Mykel

I like being me inside my head
and never want to empty out
leaving my cavern of echoes.

What’s it like inside your head?
I wonder and wander–
can we try to compare?

Show me yours I’ll show mine.
Hear me think–no not that
I don’t smoke, snort, sniff or shoot

I’d choose psychotic
over robotic
any day or night.

Please! I don’t want to be a robot
instead of being me–not that
being me’s so hot but inside I can see

Pictures dancing in my head–
Metaphors chasing similes.
Feeling nothing’s what I dread.

I want me inside, not that.
Me and my shadows feel less lonely
than nothing and nothing.

Nan, about 2018

The Artist’s Studio

Published January 20, 2023 by Nan Mykel

You always suspected there was a place like this inside,
right? There’s more than science rolled up into the Self:
the arts, the experience of beauty, mystical sensitivity, the
home of the oceanic feeling, the pull toward the unknown, music,
other art forms, the experience of which communicate directly
with the experience of others, bypassing strictly cognitive
processing. The creative urge–the valuing of its products and
curiosity–will always stave off boredom; at least that’s been
my experience.

Metaphors rule in the language of dreams and artistic creations,
and stem from our very evolutionary roots. I think of metaphors
as strong similes. Similes use “like” (He acts like a bear in
the morning, versus the stronger statement “He is a bear in
the morning.”)

“The Artist’s Studio” could be a metamorphic way of referring
to the place we’re probably both in right now, or at least
headed that way. We need to attune our ears to metaphors if we
hope to receive feedback from our inner Self. That’s the
language it speaks. If you’ve ever tried to write a poem you
may have struggled. Let’s try an experiment if you’re game
[a metaphor?] Write a 1 or 2-line metaphorical (“loose”)
description of poetry. Okay, you can come up with several
versions. (No roses are red). Remember the Journal.

“If you can’t be a poet be a poem.”

HOW IN THE BLAZES DID I MISS THAT!?!

Published January 16, 2023 by Nan Mykel

Sarah Huckabee Sanders ran for and has become the governor of Arkansas?!? Where have I been! (If you’re surprised also, my source is David Badash on today’s AlterNet:

“We have to make sure that we are not indoctrinating our kids and that these policies and these ideas never see the light of day, we should never teach our kids to hate America or that America is a racist and evil country. In fact, it should be the exact opposite.”