The Weird Times
Inner Monologues and Desultory Reporting from Outer Spaces
Issue 53, May 16, 2021 (V2 #1)
On May 15, 1906, American humorist Gelett Burgess coined the term “blurb” and dooms us all forever.
You got engaged to remove the most corrupt president in history. But he was just the tip of the spear. A fascist movement is at work—in this country, in state legislatures and in Congress—to replace the republic with an authoritarian government one brick at a time. Stay engaged! —Walter Schaub
“Do unto others 20% better than you would expect them to do unto you, to
correct for subjective error.” ― Linus Pauling
Nothing is simple. This week, CDC announced that fully vaccinated Americans can stop wearing masks in outdoor as well as indoor spaces. Except in trains, subways, buses, and airplanes. Even as our anxiety was lifted for a moment (though knowing that only 35% of our fellow citizens are fully vaccinated makes it unclear exactly how wonderful this could actually be), shooting war broke out between Israel and the Palestinians, and the Republican so-called “party” cemented its commitment to being the Neo-Nazi party, with Trump playing the role of Hitler (no joke – in Germany, it did not take a majority of Germans to install their dictator, and yes, it could easily happen here, with the help of years of funding by the Koch network to guarantee undemocratic elections and an authoritarian friendly court system to back it up.)
It’s a beautiful spring day, and the forecast is for darkness ahead.
Meanwhile … this week we celebrate Lloyd Price, the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer behind so many 1950s hits “Personality” and “Stagger Lee.” He passed on May 3, at 88.
Over and over
I tried to prove my love to you
Over and over
What more can I do
Over and over
My friends say I'm a fool
But over and over
I'll be a fool for you
—from “Personality” by Lloyd Price and Harold Logan
I don’t believe in doing product endorsements, but I think I am ready to make an exception. If you don’t already, you should take a look at Penzey’s – the spice company based in Milwaukee. I don’t know anyone there, but we’ve been using their wonderful goods for years. Being on their email list, I’ve noticed their strong tendency toward including support for progressive causes in their narratives. Their latest caught my eye and deserves to be shared. It reminds me how important it is to live your values in your work. And I don’t mind giving them a lot of space here, as what they have to say is so important.
Future historians will likely ask, when did the American Republican Party officially move from being a political organization to being a criminal organization? There’s a very good chance they will decide the answer will be this past Wednesday with the removal of Representative Elizabeth Cheney from Republican leadership. Wednesday they made it official; if you won’t promote blatant lies, if you object to stealing elections, the Republican Party is no place for you. Wednesday wasn’t a good day for democracy.
History teaches that to successfully move a large percentage of any population to fascism the move has to be gradual. Ten years ago if the leaders of the Republican Party had announced that the party was done with trying to honestly win elections and moving on to open fascism, there’s little doubt the typical Republican voter would have demanded different leadership or exited the party on principle. Back then Republicans still held American values. Fast forward ten years to the events of this past Wednesday and it’s now clear the Republican Party is just plain nuts.
[snipped out some of their offers]
Finally, in fairness maybe the Republican Party isn’t really nuts so much as criminally insane. Maybe it’s the rest of us who have the problem. To look the other way as warning sign after warning sign is presented about what the Republicans have become and what they are planning with the hopes this will all turn out okay isn’t rational. Without intervention our democracy is at risk.
America if you are listening, it’s time to hold accountable those who have been obstructing justice and attempting to tamper with our elections and this means serious jail time where warranted. I know there is the tradition in American politics that whatever the previous administration has done is just water under the bridge. But when Republicans are claiming their candidate who lost by a landslide is in fact the rightfully elected president of the United States, we don’t have a bridge, we have a dam. Without justice democracy ends. It’s time for justice.
Thank you Penzey’s!
Signs of Fascism
The GOP Is a Grave Threat to American Democracy: Unless and until Republicans summon the wit and the will to salvage the party, ruin will follow, Peter Wehner, The Atlantic, 4/26/21
Trump supporters already believed that a “deep state”—an alleged secret network of nonelected government officials, a kind of hidden government within the legitimately elected government—has been working against Trump since before he was elected. “That’s already baked into the narrative,” she said. So it’s relatively easy for them to make the jump from believing that the deep state was behind the “Russia hoax” to thinking that in 2016 Hillary Clinton was involved in a child-sex-trafficking ring operating out of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant.
A second finding, according to Longwell, is that for the first time, she’s hearing people say they pretty regularly tune in to Newsmax or One America News Network, two conspiracy-theory-minded MAGA television news outlets. She’s heard from some people in her focus groups that “Fox has gone too far left.” Overall, what she sees isn’t Trump supporters fleeing Fox in huge numbers so much as experiencing some cooling of their enthusiasm and a willingness to look to other sources of information. (Tucker Carlson, the most malicious and influential figure at Fox News, does have a certain rock-star status in MAGA world.)
Finding No. 3 is that many Trump voters believe the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent.
The Darkness: Illiberalism is on the march, all over the world, Noah Smith, Noahpinion, 5/13/21
There is a Darkness creeping over our world.
That is a melodramatic thing to say. But when I reach for words to express the profound unease that I feel watching the advance of illiberalism across my planet, the language of fantasy novels, children’s movies, and video games is the only one that seems up to the task. Throughout my youth, I consumed a great many stories that all had the same basic premise — an ancient evil, long ago banished from our world, is now returning, and once again we are called upon to rise up and fight it. Perhaps all those stories shaped my worldview and made me see complex, gritty reality in epic, Manichean terms. Or perhaps the stories were written by people who had themselves lived through a global wave of illiberalism, and were trying to pass down a warning.
There is plenty of darkness in the world even at the best of times. Wars, ethnic cleansing, rights violations, suppression of speech and religion…these things are always, or almost always, happening in some part of the globe. No leader and no country is spotless. And yet observers of comparative government and human rights are able to clearly identify times when respect for the rights and liberties of human beings begins to gutter and wane.
We are now in one of those times.
Rand Paul Is Working with ALEC to Suppress the Vote, David Armiak, Exposed by CMD, 5/3/21
U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) last month said he has spoken with state legislators through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) about passing state bills that restrict voting rights and impose greater legislative control over how elections are run.
In a live-streamed video on April 19, Paul told Kevin Roberts, executive director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an affiliate of the right-wing State Policy Network, that he has “been speaking to legislators through ALEC” about conservative electoral reform priorities since the November 2020 election.
Paul’s statement comes on the heels of the revelation that ALEC and the State Policy Network are working with Heritage Action for America on its $24 million plan to push new voting restrictions in eight states.
While admitting that challenges to the 2020 election results―many filed by former President Donald Trump and his allies―failed to convince courts of voter fraud or unlawful conduct by local or state elections officials, Paul insisted state legislatures must forge ahead with his proposals to curtail mail-in voting and politicize the administration of elections.
Our Freedom Only Survives If We Protect It, Liz Cheney, cheney.house.gov, 5/11/21
“God has blessed America, but our freedom only survives if we protect it, if we honor our oath, taken before God in this chamber, to support and defend the Constitution, if we recognize threats to freedom when they arise.
“Today we face a threat America has never seen before. A former president, who provoked a violent attack on this Capitol in an effort to steal the election, has resumed his aggressive effort to convince Americans that the election was stolen from him. He risks inciting further violence.
“Millions of Americans have been misled by the former President. They have heard only his words, but not the truth, as he continues to undermine our democratic process, sowing seeds of doubt about whether democracy really works at all.
Watch Liz Cheney’s speech on the floor of the House.
‘Pro-worker’ Republicans are status-quo toadies cloaked as populists: JD Vance, Tucker Carlson and Josh Hawley love saber-rattling about ‘elites’. But they have no interest in taking on corporate power, Bhaskar Sunkara, The Guardian, 5/10/21
Like the Clintonites, Republicans such as Hawley and Vance are trying to find a way to balance pro-working class appeals popular with voters with the enduring fact that their party is largely funded by rich donors and powerful business interests. Their solution is to offer Americans rhetoric about elites and the importance of hard work, but not to actually take power away from those elites or, say, enact job programs.
It took decades, but millions of voters came to see the New Democrats as frauds. The same, I hope, will be true of the New Republicans.
Why Confederate Lies Live On: For some Americans, history isn’t the story of what actually happened; it’s the story they want to believe, Clint Smith, The Atlantic, 5/10/21
A few years ago, I decided to travel around America visiting sites that are grappling—or refusing to grapple—with America’s history of slavery. I went to plantations, prisons, cemeteries, museums, memorials, houses, and historical landmarks. As I traveled, I was moved by the people who have committed their lives to telling the story of slavery in all its fullness and humanity. And I was struck by the many people I met who believe a version of history that rests on well-documented falsehoods.
For so many of them, history isn’t the story of what actually happened; it is just the story they want to believe. It is not a public story we all share, but an intimate one, passed down like an heirloom, that shapes their sense of who they are. Confederate history is family history, history as eulogy, in which loyalty takes precedence over truth.
Vaccines
The Yankees Covid Outbreak May Be Bad News for Ditching Masks: The spate of cases is a bad bounce—and it might show that lifting mask mandates for the vaxxed won’t be a grand slam, Adam Rogers, Wired, 5/13/21
Why The Vaccines are a Home Run Despite the Yankees’ Outbreak - But why the way the Centers for Disease Control removed mask requirements wasn't, Zeynep, The Insight, 5/15/21
How America’s partisan divide over pandemic responses played out in the states, Julie VanDusky-Allen, Olga Shvetsova, The Conversation, 5/12/21
Covid pandemic was preventable, says WHO-commissioned report: Independent panel castigates global leaders and calls for major changes to ensure it cannot happen again, Sarah Boseley, The Guardian, 5/12/21
The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill: All pandemic long, scientists brawled over how the virus spreads. Droplets! No, aerosols! At the heart of the fight was a teensy error with huge consequences, Megan Molteni, Wired, 5/13/21
Birds
Rare yellow bird needs wild roses to survive in British Columbia, researcher says an almost 20-year effort to save the yellow-breasted chat seems to be paying off, Hina Alam, CBC, 5/12/21
Songbird neurons for advanced cognition mirror the physiology of mammalian counterparts, UMass Amherst, Science Daily, 5/13/21
Birds May Hold Clues to the 'Bizarre' Life Cycle of Brood X Cicadas: Billions of cicadas will emerge in the eastern United States this spring, presenting a once-in-a-17-year opportunity for scientists to understand how they shape populations of birds andKaitlin Sullivan, Audubon, 4/19/21
Politics and Prose
Biden’s Pipeline Dilemma: How to Build a Clean Energy Future While Shoring Up the Present’s Carbon-Intensive Infrastructure: After Colonial’s cyber-attack and shutdown, he can’t ignore pipelines’ problems, but environmental groups want more aggressive act, Marianne Lavelle, Inside Climate News, 5/14/21
The U.S. Must Stop Being an Apologist for the Netanyahu Government: Over more than a decade of his right-wing rule in Israel, Mr. Netanyahu has cultivated an increasingly intolerant and authoritarian type of racist nationalism, Bernie Sanders, Portside, 5/14/21
Economic Demand Is Back. Supply Is the Problem: The difficulty in obtaining raw materials and workers has long-term implications for prices, growth and corporate balance sheets, Mohammed A. El-Arian, Bloomberg, 5/14/21
Ecology and Economy
Empty Lots, Angry Customers: Chip Crisis Throws Wrench Into Car Business: Car makers have cut production of 1.2 million vehicles in North America because of a shortage of computer chips, losing sales amid high demand, Mike Colias, Ben Foldy, Nora Naughton, Wall Street Journal, 5/13/21
‘Beavers are just being beavers’: friction grows between Canadians and animals: Beavers cause internet outages, steal posts and even put 30 sq ft of a town underwater – but experts say the animals have a profound effect on ecosystems, Leyland Cecco, The Guardian, 5/14/21
Inside Clean Energy: Arizona’s Energy Plan Unravels: An ambitious, bipartisan clean energy proposal stalls right before the finish line, Dan Gearino, Inside Climate News, 5/13/21
Planting a million trees in the semi-arid desert to combat climate change: Tucson's ambitious tree planting goal aims to improve the health of residents, wildlife, and the watershed, Quinn McVeigh, Daily Climate, 5/14/21
Artists chronicle climate change in the Arctic and Antarctic: Working in various media, they're capturing the full glory of rapidly changing places, Kristen Pope, Yale Climate Connections, 5/12/21
Antarctica’s Doomsday Glacier: How Doomed Are We? Two new papers offer radically different predictions of the glacier’s future — and thus for the future of low-lying cities around the world. Here’s how to understand the divergent projections, Jeff Goodell, Rolling Stone, 5/12/21
Study offers earliest evidence of humans changing ecosystems with fire, Mike Cummings, Yale News, 5/5/21
‘Sustainability makes good business sense’: Companies ramp up eco-friendly efforts for office returns, Tony Case, Digiday, 5/11/21
‘Meltdown’ is the new film about the Climate Crisis set to put things into perspective, Meltdown is a new documentary secured by Gravitas Ventures which will follow iconic photographer Lynn Davis alongside climate scientist Tony Leiserowitz as they confront the effects of climate change in an unassuming corner of the globe.
The documentary shows the pair travelling to Illulisat, Greenland, a country deemed “Ground Zero” for the climate crisis. Released in February, 2021. Look for it online.
Why Indigenous women are risking arrest to fight Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline through Minnesota: Enbridge's Line 3 pipeline construction is running into tribal resistance over fears of water pollution, wild rice impacts, climate change, and exploitation of Native Women, Hilary Beaumont, Daily Climate, 5/10/21
Why Ken Meter Is on a Mission to Build Community Food Webs: Industrial farming drained wealth from rural America. In his new book, Meter says community food systems can repair the damage, Nancy Matsumoto, Civil Eats, 5/7/21
Global renewable energy industry grew at fastest rate since 1999 last year: New wind and solar power projects in China, Europe and the US spurred 45% rise in rate of new capacity, Jillian Ambrose, The Guardian, 5/11/21
Innovative Partnerships and Exchanges are Securing the Gila River Indian Community’s Water Future: The Gila River Indian Community is restoring its “lifeblood” back through innovative partnerships and water exchanges, Sharon Udasin, Circle of Blue, 5/12/21
Celebrations
Brooks Robinson turns 83. Arguably the greatest third baseman of his time and one of the best ever - he won 16 consecutive Gold Gloves, was an 18-time All-Star and was named a World Series Most Valuable Player.
Reggie Jackson, Mr. October, is 75 today. Jackson was a 14-time American League All-Star, a member of five World Series championship teams and won the American League MVP Award in 1973, when he led the junior circuit in home runs, RBI and runs scored. In 21 big league seasons, Jackson totaled 2,548 hits, 563 home runs and 1,702 RBI.
A Fixed Idea
What torture lurks within a single thought
When grown too constant, and however kind,
However welcome still, the weary mind
Aches with its presence. Dull remembrance taught
Remembers on unceasingly; unsought
The old delight is with us but to find
That all recurring joy is pain refined,
Become a habit, and we struggle, caught.
You lie upon my heart as on a nest,
Folded in peace, for you can never know
How crushed I am with having you at rest
Heavy upon my life. I love you so
You bind my freedom from its rightful quest.
In mercy lift your drooping wings and go.
—Amy Lowell
Your fear of the leading light
if they are with you and your heart won’t fail
To see through a fearless eye
and know that danger finally goes away
still you’re trying
but there’s no leaving now.
—from “There’s No Leaving Now” – the Tallest Man on Earth
Where we live in Connecticut, birds are everywhere, the trees have finally leaved, our garden is partly planted, seeds are sprouting, and mask rules have been relaxed. More sunlight lifts spirits. And there is much work to be done. Stay engaged, keep well. And be in touch. Literally.