Tag: Politics

Birthright Citizenship and April Fools’ Day

The joke’s on us. All of us.

There’s something entirely appropriate and also ironic about the U.S. Supreme Court hearing arguments about birthright citizenship on April Fools’ Day. Don’t get me wrong, they shouldn’t be hearing the case in the first place. But they are and here we are.

The first section of the 14th Amendment, guarantees that any person born or naturalized in the U.S. are citizens of the United States. Given how language can get tortured and twisted around by lawyers and scholars, the text of Section 1 is pretty clear on its face and doesn’t require a legal degree to understand.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

But, as I said, there’s a case (Trump v. Barbara) being heard tomorrow on April Fools’ Day. Traditionally a day for jokesters and pranksters to have some fun, this unfunny joke, in my opinion, is on us. All of us.

Bottom line, it’s yet another blatant attempt at remaking America, continuing the white supremacist myth that one race is superior to any other. The fools perpetuating this lampoon of law don’t really have the courage to spell it out so succinctly. But you have to grant SCOTUS some sort of sickly ironic gift for timing of the hearing. It comes a day after announcing a block of a Colorado law that banned “conversion therapy” for LGBTQ+ kids on the Transgender Day of Visibility.

The bad joke that this U.S. Supreme Court has become, along with most the rest of our government is anything but funny. In the wake of a fear so deeply held by this confederacy of dunces that their somehow supreme race is heading into some sort of imagined abyss so deep  that too many are constructing doomsday bunkers, I have a dim view of the possible outcome. I cant predict how it will end up. With this sad excuse of a president planning to attend the hearing tomorrow, making even more of a mockery of the episode, you just know we’re heading into another of those moments that are no laughing matter, but makes us all all victims of this dangerous prank.

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.

 

The Presumption of Looking Ahead: Chicago In 2050

Don’t leapfrog the current moment as we look ahead

In today’s insanity that tears at every thread of fabric we have, there’s optimism. There’s hope. And then there’s a presumptive impulse to embrace both and take a look ahead. The Chicago Tribune is running a series called Chicago 2050: Envisioning The City in 25 years.

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From the article announcing the series:

Voices from around the city will explore what Chicago could and should look like in 2050 in a series of essays. These pieces will publish each Sunday through May 10.

This collection represents a collaboration between Tribune Opinion and World Business Chicago, whose Horizon Lines: Visions for Chicago 2050 initiative also includes a design competition inviting the public to share the bold ideas and civic investments Chicago could make in the next 25 years.

The first two essays I’ve read do in fact put forth bold visions for the future. Laura Washington Wants To Bring Glittering Downtown Institutions To The City’s Neighborhoods. 

Tracy Baim Writes About The City’s Next Transformational ‘Great Migration’ sees a city where people move to Chicago for a variety of reasons, including access to reproductive and other health care, and a safer refuge from immigration crackdowns; all seeking a better life. Baim imagines the city passed a Bill of Rights for Chicagoans in 2027 that sparked the migration and the following investment needed to make it possible.

I applaud the Chicago Tribune for launching the series and look forward to reading more. It is important to look ahead and imagine a future beyond this current moment.

That said, I’d love to see the Tribune launch a similar series on how to confront the current realities of almost daily crisis we face as a city and as a country. Leapfrogging over those obstacles that blur any new vision for the future feels almost akin to looking at the city’s glorious skyline on a foggy day.

(Image from blvdone on Shutterstock.

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.

 

No Kings Rallies: Build On It

So much wrong, so little cardboard

Today was No Kings Day in the U.S. and around the world with large crowds in large cities and smaller ones in small cities, towns and hamlets. Regardless of the numbers, (estimates are running as high as 9 million at the moment) what’s important is people showed up, stood up, and showed they still stand for decency and the rule of law.

Due to being completely under the weather I had to cancel plans to attend the rally in Chicago, but I did tune into the national live stream. I’m not sure if that will stay up after the day is done, but I sure hope it does. 

What will be more important than the protest rallies will be what happens next. We all know weekend protests, as good as they are for building solidarity, are not enough and there’s still a big fight ahead. As the sign above says, so much wrong, so little cardboard. As wrong and dark as things have been, things are going to get more wrong and darker before whatever the end of this will be. 

I’ve linked to Bruce Springsteen’s song, Streets of Minneapolis here before, and you can catch it there or just about anywhere. Below is the short speech he gave before singing that song at the Minneapolis No Kings Rally. 

Sing and march on.

(Image from Bill Strait on Mastodon

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.

 

Bette Midler Updates Woody Guthrie’s ‘All You Fascists Bound To Lose’

Let’s turn the screws, you perverts bound to lose

Add Bette Midler to the growing ranks of musical artists offering up protest songs for our current crisis. 

Midler has updated Woody Guthrie’s classic, All You Fascists Bound To Lose, with new lyrics hitting many of headlines and moments we’re all living through under the current administration. Here’s a sample:

We’ll battle ICE together until they cut and run
Just like in Minneapolis and when the midterms come
You’re bound to lose, you fascists bound to lose

All you fascists bound to lose
All you fascists bound to lose
I said all you fascists bound to lose
You’re bound to lose, you fascists bound to lose

To hell with all the cowards who hide behind their masks
We’re gonna win the midterms, we’re coming for his ass!
He knows it too, that bastard’s bound to lose

Trying to distract us from the Epstein files
You gas and beat and murder us, protectin’ pedophiles
Let’s turn the screws, you perverts bound to lose

Give it a listen. Share it around. The fascists may be bound to lose, but everyone has something to gain when they do

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.

 

Paying The Pump

Up, up, and away

We’re back home after spending five days and nights with the grandkids. We drive a well worn path out and back, always stopping at the same places for whatever fuel we need for the car or our bodies.

Thanks to the war that isn’t a war that’s almost over, unless it’s just beginning, it was not really a surprise what we were seeing for gas prices. These before (on the left) and after shots are from our stop on the way out of town and our way back in.

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That’s quite an increase in five days. We typically stop at truck stops for refueling, and listening to truck drivers complain in the restrooms this trip was a lesson in invective. Although that didn’t seem to have an effect on what felt like typical truck traffic.

For the record, on our last trip before this one prior to whatever we’re calling what’s happening in Iran, we paid $2.69 a gallon at this stop.

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.

 

Flip Flopping In The Fuck You Fours

There’s zero harm when my grandson decides to turn on a dime from one story to the next. One emotion to another. He’s a kid. It’s cute. It’s funny. Often hysterical.

That said, at times his gyrations remind me of those of the idiot in the White House. Both know everyone is paying attention and crave it. My grandson will grow out of this. Most kids do. When adults stay stuck in that mode, it’s always trouble on scales large and small.

I can’t speak as to why the decaying sociopath destroying everything in his path, and those who enable him, seem to think this behavior is okay, beyond theorizing that there are more than I could have ever imagined like him to make me shudder. I’ve tried to understand it and can’t. I just know at some point what’s cute in kids is misery for the rest of us on this planet now that we’ve let this tyrant stay in his terrible two’s and fuck you fours.

It upsets me that I can’t enjoy these moments with my grandson without thinking about this.

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.

Sunday Morning Reading

Epidemics of reading, opinions, and the wild ways of artists

Spending a few days with the grandkids this weekend and into next week, yet still managed to find some time for a little Sunday Morning Reading. It’s a lesson in learning, watching as they begin to put it all together, compared to so many of the adults trying to own the world who seem stuck and unable to grow, or suffer some sort of reversion. With kids, it’s innocence. The rest of us have no excuses. Just stories. Makes you wonder what turns that on and off.

In the large discussion around screen time and attention spans, Carlo Iacono says What We Think Is A Decline In Literacy Is A Design Problem.The section looking back to “reading epidemics”  in the 18th and 19th century are more illuminating than any screen.

The First Casualty of Trump’s War In Iran Was The Truth. So says David Remick. That’s always true in warm even before the first bullets fly. But it’s become the truth in all aspects of how we try to survive together. Funny how we revert back to our early childhood ways of dealing with the world before disgarding the truth was supposedly trained out of us.

Everybody has an opinion about this war that we can’t call a war. Here’s one that I found interesting from Frida Ghitis. Check out What Everyone Gets Wrong About Iran.

David Todd McCarty tells us How I Learned To Hate AI. The more you know…

Chris Castle takes a look at The Great White House AI Copyright Dodge: Managed Decline, Global Spillover, And The Rise Of The Chief Personhood Denier.Hat tip to Stan Stewart for this one.

With everyone focused on The Strait of Hormus, Richard Bookstabler takes a look at our financial straits in I Predicted The 2008 Financial Crisis. What Is Coming May Be Worse. For the record, I didn’t predict the last one, but anyone with two nickels to rub together can predict the outcome of the one we’re heading into.

I did any number of odd (in all senses of the word) jobs in my early life supporting myself as an artist. Emily Watlington takes a look at The Wild Ways Artists Have Made Their Livings, From The Renaissance To Today.

Notes From A Burmese Prison is a comic by Danny Fenster and Amy Kurzweil. More than worth your time. Extrapolate the specific location and situation to any troublesome moment and remember whoever the guards are, you can’t trust them.

(Photo by the author)

If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. If you’d like more click on the Sunday Morning Reading link in the category column to check out what’s been shared on Sunday’s past. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.

AntiFreeze: A Web Based Solution To Track ICE

Life and the web finds a way

Remember ICEBlock? The app created for iPhone users to track and alert others of ICE activities nearby? You know the one that Apple and Google blocked. There were several others that got blocked as well.

In this moment of something new and horrible to distract attention from the latest happening almost every hour, ICE activities might have faded from the headlines, but those activities haven’t ceased.

joshuahacks has created a progressive web app called AntiFreeze. From his post on Daily Kos:

AntiFreeze lets anyone anonymously report an ICE sighting. When someone submits a report, every user within five miles gets a push notification on their phone in real time. If ICE is spotted four blocks from your house while you’re making dinner, your phone buzzes and tells you.

But it’s not just alerts… Open the app and you can see a map or list of every reported sighting within 25 miles from the last 72 hours. So even if you missed a notification, you can check what’s been happening in your area before you head to work, drop your kids off at school, or go to the grocery store.

No login. No account. No personal data collected. Completely anonymous.

You can read all about it and find out how to use it on that post. As the developer and author says, “It works. It’s free. And nobdy can take it away from you.”

Who’d a thunk that the web could be the answer?

(images are from screenshots of The AntiFreeze app and website

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.

 

Sunday Morning Reading

Life is a roll of the loaded dice

Nostalgia can be a mind fuck. Democracy, journalism, personal computing, they all feel like games with rules we all understood. No longer. Yes, the house always wins. Especially when everything feels like a war we’re not sure is beginning of ending. When all bets are off if feels more like sticking your head in the mouth of a tiger than a roll of the dice.  Yet we play on. Time for a little Sunday Morning Reading. 

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Kicking off is an excellent piece from JA Westenberg called Everything’s Casino. From Iran to the Dutch tulip crisis, with a dash of Dostoevsky. The section on When The Future Stopped Arriving is aces.

Follow that up Jon Ganz’s Command-Shift-War. Snake eyes.

Spend some time with this terrific series from Quinn Norton on Emptywheel that began a little over a year ago with A Normal Person’s Explainer On What Generative AI Is And Does. It concludes with an epilogue that is titled Small Models, Gently Loved, and subtitled An AI Speculative Fiction. It won’t spoil the rest of the series, so I’d suggest starting with that fictional epilogue, but also checking out Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.

John Gruber and Manton Reece both linked to this piece by Les Orchard called Grief And The AI Spit. I’m glad they did. You will be too.

Orchard’s piece above kicks off talking about how making computers do things is fun. Which is a nice companion to Sam Henri Gold’s reaction to Apple releasing the MacBook Neo called This Is Not The Computer For You. There’s nostalgia there, certainly. But I think it’s deeper than that. I’m betting Apple’s stake in the next game is solid.

Speaking of gambling, McKay Coppins was staked by his bosses at The Atlantic to a year long escapade to dive into the rise of gambling. His piece Sucker, tells the tale of his year as a degenerative gambler.

There’s an excellent series worth your attention from various writers on The Verge titled AI vs. The Pentagon: Killer Robots, Mass Surveillance, and The Red Lines. We sure are betting the farm on this, aren’t we?

If not advertising, then now what? That’s the question Hamilton Nolan poses in Patrons of Journalism.

In a piece on democracy dating back a few years, David Todd McCarty sticks his and our heads in the mouth of the tiger in Dreaming of Tigers. The house and the tiger always win.

(Image from Eyestetix Studio on Unsplash.)

If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. If you’d like more click on the Sunday Morning Reading link in the category column to check out what’s been shared on Sunday’s past. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.

If Shoes Make The Man…?

The jokes write themselves

It was a big deal and a rite of passage for the males in my extended family when Uncle Robert gifted you a set of Florsheim shoes on your sixteenth birthday. He was a shoe salesman. He knew shoes. He knew feet.

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He always carried his Brannock device, the metal device that measured foot length, width, and arch length commonly found in shoe stores of old. He would measure you up before your birthday, so the gift was not a surprise but a statement.

He not only believed in the cliché that “shoes make the man” but that saying was embossed on his business card and also on your birthday card, tucked neatly in the tissue paper in the top of the shoebox. Like I said, he was a shoe salesman.

That aphorism not only signified that you were moving out of your boyhood to become a man, but it also announced your social standing to the world around you, and supposedly signified that you were of good character.

I guess that well worn cliché, like everything else in this world during the last decade or so, will need to be resoled now that the made-for-TV Pedophile-in-Chief is not only requiring the simpering slaves in his cabinet to wear his favorite Florsheim shoes, but gifting them those shoes to ensure their obeisance.

If shoes ever made the man and defined character, watching these men march in lockstep, wearing comically ill-fitting symbols of their subservience, it certainly reveals (again) just how character-less these bumbling bunions are as they trip over themselves to please their master.

My uncle tired to set us on a course for success. I’m sure he’s turning over in his grave at how these simpering sops fail to measure up.

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.