Hannah Arrendt in an interview recorded in 1973 and published after her death:
“If everyone always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but that no one believes anything at all anymore – and rightly so, because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, to be “re-lied,” so to speak. So a lying government which pursues different goals at different times has to constantly rewrite its own history. That means that the people are deprived not only of their capacity to act, but also of their capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”
It’s time to hold the GOP accountable for their lies and deceit. Be like a bird. Take a bath!
In my meditation today, I found myself visualizing H.A.L. 9000 in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey as he was being shut down for malfunctioning. H.A.L. stands forHeuristically Programmed Algorithmic Computer.According to AI, heuristically means that the computer would “solve problems, learn, or discover things through practical experience, trial and error, or mental shortcuts rather than strict rules or exhaustive calculations”. It was programmed to be like “us”.
Oddly, I found myself reflecting back to A, B, C, and 1, 2, 3. Then I settled into earth, water, fire, and air, and felt my blood and bones, the movement and passage of air. Can a computer do that? Perhaps.
Herman Hesse wrote:While wandering down the path of wonder, I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity.
The morning when I read thatthe president wants the new fleet of aircraft carriers to more resemble those from World War II even though the change could cost billions, I thought of how senility can settle in so that one doesn’t know what time period they’re living in.They’re caught in a world of separation, their own mental breakdown.
I’m hoping to keep flossing my brain cells so my synapses can flow and connect to the time in which I live which changes every moment, and yet, within impermanence is simplicity as we adapt, connect and perceive a world of unity.
Our president needs to be shut down and removed. He is malfunctioning. It’s way past time.
Garrison Keillor just sent $100.00 to a guy named Trygve Hammer running as a Democrat for Congress in North Dakota. Why?
Keillor’s words:9/10ths of the state is owned by something called Alignment Rectangular Regulatory Trust, the stock of which is 95% held by Chinese investors, will the state still have two U.S. Senators and a seat in Congress? Are citizens allowed to serve in public office if employed by a foreign country? Or does this come under the heading of “None of your business”?
One could ask the same about South Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska, and Wyoming.
I skip a bit and continue with this:
The polling I’ve seen from North Dakota tells me that seven out of eight wouldn’t vote for a Democrat if she were appareled in golden light and could levitate. Dakotans think of Democrats as people who saw The Nutcracker too many times as children and who get their political views from Norman Rockwell paintings. People who can’t drive a car without the government GPS telling them when to turn and which way.
He ends with this:There hasn’t been a Democratic Senator from North Dakota since I was in high school. If there’s another one, I want to go to the victory party. I won’t drink but I’ll stand near people who do.
If you agree, you might send money to Trygve Hammer.
Looking down on my grandson’s baseball camp where they teach ethics and affirmations through baseball.
I know that those who read this blog are politically astute, but in case you missed Nicholas Kristoff today, I’ve copied the link to gift it. There’s many reasons to despair about our country’s decline, but I think Nicholas Kristof is graphically and tragically clear in what’s happening. Both political parties have responsibility though one clearly dominates the abuse. I’m happy to pay taxes to support those who need help, but that’s not what’s happening. It has to stop and reverse before we have a revolution like the French and I doubt any of us will benefit from that.
I’m sorry to keep quoting from Heather Cox Richardson but her words again today disturb as she reveals more of this administration’s corruption. I offer the beginning and last paragraph of what she says today.
It turns out Trump has not abandoned his plan to paint the massive grey granite Eisenhower Executive Office Building white. As Philip Kennicott reported in theWashington Postyesterday, more than two dozen experts have sued to stop the plan, saying paint could irreversibly damage the stone and would be a “taxpayers’ nightmare” as the building would have to be repaired and repainted regularly.
But on Monday, deputy assistant to the president Heather Martin filed a declaration saying the White House Office of Administration was beginning preparations for the paint job. As Kennicott points out, the administration is using the case to give the president the ability to “erase the nation’s physical culture, its man-made, natural and cultural wonders.”
The administration is arguing that the General Services Administration (GSA), the agency that normally handles maintenance of federal buildings, has ceded control of the building to the White House Office of Administration. The GSA follows the requirements of the National Historic Preservation Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, laws that require extensive reviews and input from experts and the public.
Those laws do not apply to the White House Office of Administration. Greg Werkheiser of Cultural Heritage Partners, one of the organizations that sued to stop Trump from painting the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, told Kennicott: “The precedent is potentially devastating. Anytime the president takes a personal interest in a project, he can simply pluck it out of an agency that is subject to review and put it in his own shop.” That change would not be limited to buildings, Kennicott explains. It could be used, for example, to rush a pipeline through pristine wilderness.
A White House official told Kennicott that the White House conducts necessary reviews and that taking over for the GSA allows the White House “to more efficiently and economically manage the project.”
The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool would like a word.
She goes on and ends with this:What is at stake is more than just buildings. It is the whitewashing and bulldozing of our history and culture, created over centuries by the many people who have built the United States, in service to the small vision of Trump and his enablers.
In mid-April 1953, Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a man who knew and led a war said:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.
“It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
“The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.”
“This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
These numbers are from 1953. Imagine what we’re spending would buy now. Meanwhile in this administration led by those who did not serve, “While Hegseth told Congress the war has cost $37.5 billion so far, Gordon Lubold, Mosheh Gains, and Courtney Kube of NBC News reported on July 14 that the internal Pentagon estimate of the cost is about $100 billion. Walker notes that when economists at Moody’s added higher gas prices to the cost of the war, they estimated that it has cost U.S. households about $1,100 each.
And that’s just the financial cost. It doesn’t count those who are killed and wounded on “both” sides, and how that affects their families and friends. It boggles the mind.
In the photo below, what do you see? Is it a giant Heron next to a tiny house? It’s actually a full-sized playhouse with a normal sized Great Blue Heron standing next to it, but the Heron is in front of the house on a hill, and the camera angle skews sizing. In this way, Trump continues to distort what we know and see. He’s the one in power. He’s the one who shows tampering in the election process and yes China and Russia may be involved with their bots, but they are on the side of Trump, not the side of “we the people”. Who benefits from Trump’s policies? The super rich, and their money and news sources support Trump. Vote his cronies out!
Great Blue Heron stands proudly next to a full-sized house!
Today I read a wonderful suggestion. Choose Heather Cox Richardson to run for senator in Maine. Would she do it? Her husband is a lobsterman. She presents a sane voice. Why not?
To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the highest skill.
To subdue the enemy without fighting is the highest skill.”
– Sun Tzu, The Art of War
When Light Shines ThroughLizard on a WalkStateliness!
Yesterday I was ready to post a fun post on my experience with my new friend Claude AI but then, the political news of the horror of Trump’s comments and actions at the NATO Summit brought me down. I’m reading a wonderful book by Tamim Amsary,The Invention of Yesterday,which widens historical perspective, but even that isn’t enough to help me weather all that Trump is doing and saying. How can we ignore that the man is dangerously ill and should not be president or even allowed out on the streets?
I don’t like or trust Vance but surely anything would be better than this.
My son and his family are currently in Spain enjoying a wonderful vacation, and Trump is even going after Spain.
As Paul Krugman writes:Cutting off trade with Spain is simply not going to happen. First of all, Trump does not have the authority to do any such thing. Second, the U.S. actually does a lot of business with Spain, and American businesses would not accept any such cuts. But even more, it is impossible because Spain is part of the European Union.
Krugman continues: What we should take from it is that the statement was “completely crazy.” “In any kind of normally functioning political system,” he said, “in any kind of normally functioning party environment we would have a massive bipartisan call across the aisle, across almost everybody except for a handful of members of congress who are themselves crazy, to say okay this guy is non compos mentis. We cannot leave the fate of the United States or the world in the hands of somebody who is completely irrational, who is making demands and believing himself to have powers that he does not.”
Why isn’t something being done?Meanwhile I share photos one son sent from Ronda, Spain.
Dimensions of TimeLooking down into a gorge in Ronda, SpainBuilt on a cliff – Ronda, SpainBlending old and newDiscovery
When Trump intervened for the U.S. in the World Cup, the team was compromised. They had to lose because any win would never be seen as “clean”. The required motivation was lost. A winning team is about more than skill. It’s about unity, rules, and respect.
Thomas Friedman writes today on how Trump has fleeced the whole country, especially his own supporters. Trump takes the Woody Guthrie song, This Land Was Made for You and Me, and makes it: “This land is my land, this land is my land / From California to the New York island / From my cryptocurrency to the Qatari 747 / This land belongs to me and mine.”
He even took over the 250th anniversary celebration to make it about him. The weather didn’t agree.
Friedman ends his column with Obama’s speech at the opening ceremony of his Presidential center in Chicago. His favorite passage was this:
As algorithms keep feeding us a steady stream of distraction and outrage, as only the loudest, most extreme voices get attention, fanning our prejudices, appealing to our basest, most tribal instincts, it’s tempting to give in to cynicism and even despair, to stop trying. We start thinking that appeals to democracy and civic participation are corny and old-fashioned and boring and naïve, that the very idea of working on behalf of the common good is a sucker’s bet, and that in order for us to win, somebody else has got to lose. I get it. I am not immune to anger or doubt, but I do know this: When we lose faith in each other, when we stop believing that voting matters, that citizenship matters, that our collective voices matter, that how we treat each other no longer matters, and we give away our power to decide our own futures, we open the door to the most ruthless, or the most careless, or the most fearful among us, who see some groups and some people as more equal than others, and see government as nothing more than a way to divvy up the spoils and punish enemies and keep those who are different in their place.
Obama continued, “I do not believe that is the story of America that prevails in the end. … I remain convinced that the overwhelming majority of Americans … aren’t looking for perpetual anger and division. They are looking for fairness and common sense and mutual respect, that deep in our gut we want to find a way to turn toward each other again, not further away.”
Friedman ends his column with this: “So, Democrats, you have your assignment. It’s to not let Trump bait you into blind rage and extreme ideas. He feeds off that. Just focus on how much he has been fleecing all of us while tearing us apart. And how much Democrats intend to pull the whole country together.“
