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Balloon Juice

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

“A king is only a king if we bow down.” – Rev. William Barber

We can’t confuse what’s necessary to win elections with the policies that we want to implement when we do.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

She burned that motherfucker down, and I am so here for it. Thank you, Caroline Kennedy.

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

This chaos was totally avoidable.

Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

So many bastards, so little time.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

We’re watching the self-immolation of the leading world power on a level unprecedented in human history.

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

Their boy Ron is an empty plastic cup that will never know pudding.

Not all heroes wear capes.

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

Today’s gop: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

If you don’t believe freedom is for everybody, then the thing you love isn’t freedom, it is privilege.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

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Guest Posts

You are here: Home / Archives for Guest Posts

Guest Post from WereBear – When Did the Madness Start?

by WaterGirl|  February 27, 202512:50 pm| 87 Comments

This post is in: Guest Posts

We bring you a book report from WereBear, which she and I first started discussing 3 months ago.  The book is:  The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism, by Joe Conason.

But first, a picture of Bud.

Guest Post from WereBear – When did the madness start? A book of the middle era.
5 years old, and 20 pounds of gorgeous love.

When did the madness start? A book of the middle era.

by WearBear

Mr Conason was a political columnist for twenty years, and was the executive editor of the New York Observer. His book, Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth is from 2003, around when I began getting more politically active… and found this blog. I found it a helpful, and well-written, backwards glimpse of How We Got Here.

This one begins in the Fifties, with words of admiration for historian Rick Perlstein, and a reference to his article in The Baffler. (The Long Con) I’ve read it, and it’s a fascinating account of how direct mail revolutionized Republican fundraising in the Goldwater campaign of 1964. Before that was McCarthy, who was early in the conservative anti-communist movement.

It started with the televangelist mailing lists. People already gullible and far too trusting of authority. The same copywriters were already adept at the tools they used. It appears a seamless transition from fundamentalist Armageddon fundraising and right-wing rabble rousing. But in some ways, it’s a medieval mindset at work in both.

Scaring people with “exaggeration, deception, and fabrication, permeated with racial apprehension and hostility.” The one goal was “to squeeze every penny from their dupes.”

This continues to this day, as a mentor/protégé/poacher/betrayal cycle which continues in front of our eyes. While this introduces Roy Cohn, Trump’s mentor, that’s only the start of a pattern.

It’s full of astonishing quotes and picturesque turns of phrase, and I enjoyed reading it despite the subject matter. If anyone wants to dip their toes back into the murky water, this book’s deep background has the benefit of distance.

From the publisher’s website:

From the “professional anti-communists” (whose tactics even J. Edgar Hoover despised) to the “populist” grifters of the Tea Party movement and the religious charlatans of the “prosperity gospel” (who provided a pious front for Trump), the right-wing ripoff has remained remarkably consistent, even as personalities change and new technologies emerge: Stir up anger and resentment, demonize political opponents, promise vengeance, and collect donations from the gullible. It’s a highly lucrative game that any unscrupulous charlatan can play, as many have – and they are named in these pages.

In an unsparing and often comic narrative, Joe Conason explores the right’s long, steep descent into a movement whose principal aim is not to protect freedom or defend the Constitution, but merely to line the pockets of pretenders and blowhards whose malevolent tactics now endanger the nation.

I know Republicans have become very dangerous, but they are also stupid and unwilling to understand cause and effect. Their ego will always persuade them they are incapable of error. Like the analyst who correctly predicted much of Hitler’s behavior,

If this book sounds like too much right now, I suggest The Myth of the Out of Character Crime by Dr. Stanton E. Samenow. Helpful for identifying them in our own lives, as well.

—

Your humble scribe, WereBear, is currently working on a second book about cats, and the first one (The Way of Cats ) got many lovely reviews.

Guest Post from WereBear – When Did the Madness Start?Post + Comments (87)

Guest Post – Eolirin – How Do We Move Forward?

by WaterGirl|  January 24, 20255:00 pm| 115 Comments

This post is in: Guest Posts, How Do We Move Forward?, Politics

This is the first guest post in our series, and I can’t think of a better one to go first.

I hope more of you are thinking of writing something up!

Where do we go from here?  How do we move forward?

by Eolirin

Guest Post – Eolirin – How Do We Move Forward?

I’m sure most of the people who’ve been paying attention to my posts will know I have a difficult relationship with brevity, but I think, for this, I will make the attempt. Any words I might have feel grossly inadequate to the moment, so I’ll try to use as few of them as possible.

I don’t want to talk about politics, not really. We’ve spilled plenty of words on that, and it feels a lot like spinning our wheels right now. I definitely don’t want to talk about the party and what steps could or should be taken by people who are about as likely to read any of this as I am to sit in any of the rooms where decisions get made. I don’t think there are any magic words we need to figure out how to string together or one neat trick we need to find. I’ll leave discussions of messaging strategies and changes to policy platforms to people who think those things matter.

I know not everyone follows the comment threads excessively, so while I know not everyone’s seen my opinions on how we’ve gotten to where we are, and what would be necessary to alleviate the structural inequities that make it harder than it should be for us to win elections, I don’t particularly think there’s much value in going too deep into them here.

But what I will do is pull on two themes around what I’ve been saying, when I have the time and space and energy left from the non-political havoc I’ve been dealing with in my life lately, anyway: vibes and culture.

I will of course, immediately subvert both topics and turn what has been a discussion about something broad and societal into something, instead, far more personal.

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I’ll start with feelings:

The election didn’t leave me feeling so much a sense of shock, as 2016 did, as much as a cold numbing sense of despair, quickly followed by a genuine sense of panic. I’m Jewish, and disabled, and queer, and non binary, and have mental health issues, about the only way I could be on more lists is if I was also a Spanish speaking black immigrant. It was a very rough few weeks.

I suspect, as they begin their fights to gut medicaid, a vital support and the only way I, and many others in similar circumstances to me, are likely to be able to get any kind of health insurance or access to care, so that they can pay for tax cuts that will benefit people who already have more money than they could spend in their lifetimes, that it will be a very rough few months or even years.

And that will likely only be the first salvo in a number of attacks of unknowable intensity against my various communities, and various other disenfranchised and marginalized peoples.

There are a lot of things about this election that are dangerously existential to vulnerable groups. It is, and will continue to be, terrifying, and heartbreaking, and horrific in many ways.

But what helped me turn the corner in processing my own emotions was remembering all the stories of the Holocaust, stories which are inescapable for anyone with even a modicum of Jewish education. Stories that I found myself turning to not for the examples of how cruel and barbaric human beings are capable of being, for I fear we may find ourselves with no shortage of new atrocities to remind us of that, beyond those we already have in the actions of Russia, and Israel, and Hamas, and others besides.

I found myself reflecting on our history, the history of that evil, not even as caution for how bad things can get, or how important it is to not treat a moment like this with complacency and a sense that things can continue as they are, though that too is, I think, important.

But I found myself reflecting most on stories of my people, facing an almost incomprehensible suffering, who had a clear sense of their own demise, and the actions they took in the face of that. Stories of how people could, under the worst of any imaginable circumstance, still find their way to kindness, to forgiveness, to acceptance, or even to resistance in full knowledge that it will not prevent thier death. You will forgive my vagueness here, my memories of all of these things blur together, and I don’t wish to misattribute or distort details on something this important, but I also don’t have the time or energy to go dig up sources.

I found myself asking how I would fare facing the same. Whether or not I would have the strength to find similar grace, to find my way to acceptance or forgiveness. And I came to the conclusion that it is, in fact, intolerable to me to meet whatever may come with hatred in my heart.

And so I strive every day to keep my heart open. To do my best to meet the moment with compassion, if not without much sorrow, and with as little anger and fear as I can manage.

I do this knowing there is a very good chance that things will get very very bad, that many people will be hurt by the next few years at minimum, that many may die. Democracy may or may not be dead. The future may be uncertain, but it is almost certainly going to be filled with some degree of additional pain for people who already suffering immensely.

I do this with the knowledge that there is no way to face that with an open heart that won’t hurt like hell. Just as there has been no way to face what’s been happening in Ukraine, or in Gaza, or in Syria, or Lebanon, or in many parts of the global South without pain. And even if the situation here does not devolve to anything even remotely as incomprehensibly horrific, the consequences of this election almost certainly will make all of those conflicts, or new ones, worse.

The world is awash in needless pain, unnecessary hardship, in cruelty, in a basic lack of humanity. It is exceptionally difficult to face the sheer weight of human suffering, and not be crushed by it, or else to not turn away, and refuse to bear witness.

It is difficult also, to not allow that suffering to transform into hatred for those responsible.

But this is corrosive. It closes the heart, and, perhaps, worst and most insidiously, it makes the victim invisible. It is subtle, but it is still a kind of turning away from that pain, and from those feeling that pain. Rage toward those doing horrible things may feel righteous, but it vanishes our shared connection to each other. If even only for that moment we are no longer experiencing empathy, no longer have a capacity for compassion.

So to keep the heart open is a difficult thing that will bring us much pain in the face of great suffering. And even if it’s the better alternative to turning away, in whatever form that may take, and I truly believe that it is, how then to deal with that?

I realize this will sound funny, given that I am very much failing in my desire at brevity, and given the nature of this community, but we can, and should, talk less and do more.

It is very easy to substitute, in our minds at least, talking about a thing with accomplishing anything of value. This is a trap that we need to avoid now more than ever.

I would call on people to get involved with something. To build community. Forge real and meaningful connections, and use them to make something tangible happen. I’m not sure it even matters what the things are, as long as they’re not designed to hurt other people.

Most importantly, find ways, always, to be kind. To others, to ourselves.

And this brings us to what I would say about values:

So much of what has gone wrong in our country, and in the world more broadly, fundamentally roots, to my mind, in the way we engage in disregard for each other. The ways we retreat from our common humanity, the ways we turn away from each other’s suffering, the ways that we prioritize self-righteousness, and self-interest over justice, indifference over compassion, lies over truth, ignorance over understanding, bigotry and hate over acceptance. The whole world is in an existential struggle between toxic and tonic masculinity.

We cannot fix this as individuals, we cannot fix this as a political party, and certainly as simple members of this community, we have very little power to affect the behaviors of very many people beside.

And even more than that, I think we’re about to face a discontinuity in our society, or at minimum in our politics; that things will not really be able to continue as they were or return to what we would have viewed as normal. It’s hard to say what we’ll need to do in the face of that. Predictions fall apart in the face of greatly changed circumstance; it doesn’t do us any good to be fighting the last war. It’s hard to say, even, whether that discontinuity will be for the better or the worse, in the long run, though our efforts will almost certainly matter there. And I won’t say I’m terribly optimistic.

But I think my optimism or lack thereof does not matter all that much to what I, really any of us, need to do in the face of what may be coming. And what that is is the same as it was before the election, the same as it’s always been, and always will be; to meet pain with kindness, anger with love, fear with patience. To put in the work of trying to make things better, in whatever ways we can, small or large. To stay involved, to stay open, to be curious, to care about each other, and to keep going, for as long as we can.

There is a zen saying: Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. I think there’s a corollary to our times: Before everything goes to shit: chop wood, carry water. After everything goes to shit: chop wood, carry water.

To the extent that, if we do that, and the rest doesn’t tend to itself, it’s really beyond our power to control.

Be kind.

Guest Post – Eolirin – How Do We Move Forward?Post + Comments (115)

Guest Post: How from where we started did we ever reach this Hanukkah?

by WaterGirl|  January 6, 20251:54 pm| 30 Comments

This post is in: Guest Posts

Today we have a guest post from Something Fabulous.  It’s not her fault that this is being posted on Jan 6, when Hanukkah ended on Jan 2 – it’s mine!  But, as someone who believes that only if the Christmas tree is still up on Valentine’s Day has it been left up too long, I at least came by this holiday timing honestly.

At left: The author’s parents, David and Muriel Afton, circa 1960. At right, the author (L) with a fellow fan of holiday parties and acronyms. Courtesy of Joan Afton

Hi Y’all! (As we, the raised-in-Skokie say.) Mostly-lurker Something Fabulous here, with an essay for the holidays, that WG has kindly set up to share with you.

I’ve never had any Holiday Season pics to share for that feature here, and always felt kind of funny about it. Now I realize: there are lots of reasons we don’t have those kind of photos in my family! Feels nice to be able to share something here for the holidays, after all.

So, for a little background: I’ve been doing spoken-word storytelling for a while now, also known as Live Lit, or first-person-narratives. Maybe it’s best-known as a “thing” in The Moth (which I’ve never done yet, just a broadly-known example of the form!).

Recently on a whim, I submitted a draft of one of these stories to the online magazine The Forward, since it had a kind of secular-Jewish theme I thought might be relevant. I’d initially created it a while back, as an application to participate in a new show, and it was rejected. (Lessons learned on not giving up?)

SHAZAM! This time, it was chosen, edited, printed… and paid for! Or, as I so professionally noted to my friends as I first shared: PUBLISHED AUTHOR, BITCHES!!

I love that it was published here for many reasons, of course, but a central one is that I grew up knowing that my maternal grandparents (the ones as I describe here as the no-narishkeyt side) had gotten The Daily Forward, as it was called then, delivered to their Chicago apartment every day in my mother’s childhood:

“Founded in 1897 as a Yiddish-language daily, the Forward soon became a national paper, the most widely read Jewish newspaper anywhere. By the 1920s its circulation outstripped The New York Times. It chronicled the events that affected a population of immigrants eager to earn their place in American life, and published regional editions around the country before any other newspaper. The English Forward was launched as a weekly in 1990… More than a million unique visitors turn to forward.com each month for award-winning news, thoughtful commentary, and captivating videos.”

Full circle!

I so hope you enjoy it. I looked it up, and Hannukah goes through January 2nd this year. Thanks for letting me share this one (story, and year!) with you. You’re the best! And with that, I wish a very happy HOLIDAY SEASON to all-y’all Jackals, far and wide, and best possible wishes for the new year coming at us.

 ✨✨✨✨✨

How from where we started did we ever reach this Hanukkah?

A tale of friendship, resilience, holidays, family, Katharine Hepburn and the power of an unpronounceable acronym.

by Joan Afton
December 13, 2024

HFWWSDWERTX?

My dad enjoyed making impossible, long acronyms out of everything, so in high school, my best friend and I came up with HFWWSDWERTX — “How, from where we started, did we ever reach this Christmas?”

We were jaded theater teens, loved old movies and were huge fans of both Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn. It was the morning of a sleepover at my friend’s freezing Victorian house, and we were wearing flannel nightgowns and woolen socks. Outside, there was a Chicago blizzard and The Lion in Winter was on cable. The movie was great — full of all the scenery-chewing, costumes, and quips our teen hearts could have asked for. Finally, with a mix of resignation and amusement and style, Hepburn turns to O’Toole and says, in the context of their failed marriage, insane children, and the very fate of the royal lineages of both England and France — “How, from where we started, did we ever reach this Christmas?”

It becomes part of our secret language from then on. These days, my friend and I still text it to each other, a catchphrase for whenever time seems impossibly past.

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HFWWSDWERTX — “How, from where we started, did we ever reach this Christmas?”

My dad was raised by his Orthodox-Jewish-immigrant widowed mother; he stopped any kind of religious observance as soon as he grew up. Mom, on the other hand, was raised by her Socialist-Jewish-immigrant parents, and never observed any kind of religious anything. Or as they put it, “None of that narishkeyt,” using one of the 10 or so Yiddish words that she handed down to me.

Guest Post: How from where we started did we ever reach this Hanukkah?
The author’s family, including her big brother (who isn’t so big in this photo). Courtesy of Joan Afton

When they decided to get married and have kids, though, Jewish heritage became important to them. So out came the silver menorah from Dad’s mother — one of the few things she’d been able to bring from Romania. And out came one of the prayers over the Hanukkah candles that Dad only vaguely remembered from bar mitzvah training.

BAAEMHSVVLH — If you know the prayer, you know the acronym.

Some years, my big brother and I would get eight small presents — like barrettes, or fancy socks, or paperbacks. During some more prosperous years, there would be one big present — like a new dress, or actual hardcovers. We did not truck with any of that Hanukkah-bush or holiday-tree business. None of that narishkeyt for us.

Luckily, my HFWWSDWERTX friend was also something of a heathen, though her parents were of the fallen-away-Catholic brand. They had lived all around the world for her dad’s job before we’d met, so their tree was always decorated with found objects and non-traditional items, each with its own story, carefully put away and brought back out year after year.

A favorite was handmade by Grandma Peg, who was an actual (“DEMOCRATIC, of course!”) state senator. She had cut a circle out of white construction paper and written in green sharpie: “53.04% for Carter,” glued it on a peanut in the shell, speared it all on a hook, and tied it with a green ribbon. This fragile treasure was carefully wrapped in tissue and put away each year, just like the blown-glass ones. The creche was handmade by artisans in Thailand. And every year, new animals from any and all other sources were added: Lego ones, hand-crocheted ones, a big rubber Godzilla.

The author with her mother and the holiday party matriarch. Courtesy of Joan Afton

For someone used to the uptight matchy-matchy ’70s white or silver fake trees with only those round silk or glass balls in all-red or all-green that the neighbors all seemed to have, it was magical.

And they loved to have parties. Christmas at their house was a place to go, with festive things to set up and do, people to hang out with every year. Such a contrast to our 15-minute Hanukkah at home with just the four of us! Their rituals, though secular, were FIERCE: Tinsel must be hung single strands at a time. There had to be a weird fruit salad with whipped cream and Bing cherries, the olives on the veggie tray had to be black and colossal. Songbooks were brought out year after year for everyone — some in Farsi on one side and English on the other, some from a department store in Maryland from the ’50s, some printed last week and stapled together at the office. Tradition!

One semester, just before Christmas break at the college I am attending, and hating, I get a call from Mom — “Everything is OK,” she says. Which, translated from Yiddish, means “Everything is decidedly NOT.” There’d been a house fire. No one was hurt, she tells me, but the damage is pretty severe.

I use this excuse to drop out of school and come home to stay with my family at their insurance-provided hotel. Though my father temporarily stops speaking to me because of this decision, we nonetheless go to the Christmas party; it’s where we feel supported and loved. My friend, famously not a hugger, runs to the door with her little sister and hugs each of us, taking our coats. “Happy Hanukkah, how are you, so sorry,” she tells my parents and my brother. And then, she whispers to me: “How, from where we started, did we ever reach this Christmas?”

Five years later, I’m finally at a different college, and about to come home for Christmas break when I get another call from my mother, which starts off with the dreaded “Everything is OK.”

This time, Mom has been diagnosed with an operable and relatively minor breast cancer, and is spending the holidays in the hospital. Dad’s lifelong seasonal affective disorder, and this news, catch up with him, and he is spending Christmas in a locked ward downtown at another hospital. This too turns out to be survivable. My brother and I spend the “holidays” driving between the two. Our extended family and neighbors rally around to help however they can. And somehow, we kids go to the Christmas party, as always. It is a deep secret why exactly dad is in the hospital too. But my friend is pretty sure what’s up without my having to say. This year, by way of greeting, we get hugs and, of course, HFWWSDWERTX.

Ten years on: I’m briefly, oddly, staying alone in my three-bedroom apartment in the big city. Someone breaks in while I am home, steals only my purse, and leaves, just two days after the bus I was on ran over a homeless man. I was unhurt each time. Still, my employer buys me a massage and spa day and tells me to, um, please take the holidays off.

I go, of course, to the Christmas party. It is the last one I would go to before moving to LA.

In the ensuing years, I occasionally fly home for the party and to visit my folks who are starting needing their various kinds of old-age support and help. We try to rally around when and how we can, but it’s no longer every year.

Joan and Tom Afton with their father on his 85th birthday. Courtesy of Joan Afton

My dad and mom have been gone now for 10 and 16 years, respectively. And then, spring of last year, my best friend’s mom, that daughter of the state senator, world traveler, such a stickler for the tinsel and the colossal olives, also passes away. I fly in to help pack up the condo she’d moved into to help stage it for sale. It’s like the big house I had spent so many Christmases in, but in miniature: immaculate, brimming with artifacts from everywhere — among other tasks, there are three boxes of ornaments, and odd mismatched creche critters to sort through.

I take home the portrait of Obama etched on a small wood panel, and the hand-carved mallard: I put them out on display year-round, because of course, no tree-narishkeyt for me, either. Obama hangs from the key to my filing cabinet, smiling down on the small wooden boxes of cremated remains of my two beloved cats I’ve never quite figured out what to do with. (My friend has grown up to be a Buddhist: In her own adult home they keep a place, of course organized and well-arranged, in memory of those who’ve passed. I remain… less organized).

My brother is now the one who’s the global traveler. Usually, we meet up in some global locale, but recently, for the first time in many years, he visits me in LA. I give him the mallard ornament, so he can have a memento too.

The author with her brother, Tom Afton, on vacation in Napa, circa 2006. Courtesy of Joan Afton

Hanukkah, I note, starts on Christmas this year. And that’s going to be that, as far any gatherings or parties for the holiday season for me are concerned this year. My friend and I will call and text, of course, and the acronyms will surely fly back and forth across the miles, and the years.

How, from where we started, did we ever reach this Hanukkah?

Cautiously. With a lot of love, antidepressants, and the support of many oddly-shaped and seemingly ill-assorted critters gathered around, singing their songs under the light of the stars that find us.

✨✨✨✨✨✨

Congratulations, Something Fabulous, on being published!

Link to the online article in case you want to share.

Guest Post: How from where we started did we ever reach this Hanukkah?Post + Comments (30)

Hope, With Feathers

by WaterGirl|  October 27, 20243:05 pm| 43 Comments

This post is in: Albatrossity, Guest Posts, Nature

Albatrossity sent me the annual first photo of Harley, which he does every year.  I am always relieved to see Harley; suddenly something is right in the world, and I teared up as I always do. Not for the first time, I asked Albatrossity if he would like to do a guest post – his perspective is a comfort to me in tough times.  And he graciously agreed.

(If you want to see all of Albatrossity’s guest posts, click on Albatrossity just below the post title.)

Hope, with feathers

by Albatrossity

Longtime readers on Balloon Juice might recall that there is a certain Red-tailed Hawk,  anthracite and ivory in color,  and a representative of the subspecies known as Harlan’s Hawk, who spends summers in Alaska or British Columbia, and winters here, about half a mile from my house in the other Manhattan, the one that is in Flyover Country. I have nicknamed him Harley, and I recall seeing him first in the winter of 2012-13, and many times since then.

They might also recall that he is swarthy, nay dark, and probably an undocumented immigrant. He has been making this journey every winter for the last 11 years or so, showing up in the fall and disappearing every spring. Finally, they might recall that I watch for his reappearance every fall with a mixture of anticipation (will he show up today?) and dread (will this be the year he does not show up?).

This year was particularly dread-filled, coupled as it is with the horror show candidacy of a felonious demented hate-filled fascist, and some sobering information about my own health that I received this summer. You know way too much about the former, and I won’t bore you with details about the latter (click on this link if you really want to know). But the bad national and personal news, and learning here about Betty Cracker’s health, in a time of my life when many people I knew have left us… Let me just say that I was not in need of any more hints about mortality. No sir, I did not need that. Not this year, or any other year for that matter. But the dread of the unknown was palpable this fall.

On a beautiful fall day here in the Flint Hills of Kansas, after a modest cold front blew some avian migrants our way, I decided to go see what blew in, and if one of them might be named Harley. I looked for his familiar profile on his favorite utility pole perch as I headed to a local fishing lake. And there he was. I pulled over, grabbed a few shots of him vamoosing to his second favorite perch, and breathed a huge sigh of relief. Maybe my eyes watered up a bit; it has been dusty here.

So I sent a picture to WaterGirl, who was touched, and also wanted to know if I would write up some thoughts about Harley and his return. I have lots of thoughts, and probably not all of them need to be shared. But I do wonder what bonds me to this bird, and why I care so much about his well-being, his comings and goings. I am pretty sure it is not reciprocal; he eyes me skeptically every time I stop to admire him, and usually takes off before I even get the vehicle to a stop. Our lifestyles could not be more different; he flies a couple thousand miles twice a year, and I have to debate whether I should take a walk up the street. That situation could be passed off as envy, but generally we don’t care so much about folks we are envious of. So what else is it?  Here are some random thoughts about this sort of attachment; feel free to chime in with others.

About the envy, I’ll admit it. He is a beautiful and striking creature, and other locals have commented on his gorgeous presence in the neighborhood. Additionally, I think part of every birdwatcher is envy for creatures that can simply take off and fly to a better place. I do envy Harley, not just for his ability to move freely in the air, but also for his ridiculously precise navigation, his appreciation for the seasons and the light, and yes, even his apparent disdain for the earthbound. He just seems too cool, and he doesn’t even need a tan suit to add to the aura of coolness.

As for the rest, I don’t pretend to know all of it. But some of it must include our need to engage with other living things, what the sage E. O. Wilson called “biophilia”. Obviously not everyone has that, or has it to the same degree. Elon Musk, for example, would probably be perfectly happy on a lifeless planet like Mars (and I would be happy to hear that he got there), so some folks either do not feel that need for a connection, or they have buried it under other layers of needs. Since I spent my working life as a biologist, perhaps I got an extra dose.

Another part of it is familiarity, I suspect. He spends half the year in my literal neighborhood, and we have become familiar with each other’s habits over the last dozen winters. We’ve been through the COVID years, and now as I head into similarly unknowable territory health-wise, it is good to have a familiar presence. Not a confiding familiar, for certain, but it just seems more tolerable when some things don’t change even as the changes of the world whirl around us.

Finally, I think it is the season. Fall has always been my favorite season, for some reason. As my friend and fellow biologist John Janovy wrote in his most excellent book Yellowlegs: “There is something about the end of summer that produces all sorts of strange yearnings in people like me.” It is a great time for doing, and watching, and reflecting, and learning more about all the creatures who share the planet with us. Janovy wrote about following a sandpiper to learn its ways, to “learn things that no teacher, no classroom, no public school, and especially no university could ever teach!” I am not about to follow Harley back to his summer haunts, but I learn from him every fall. And learning is one of my favorite activities. Some would probably call it a curse.

So that’s a long path to simply let you know that Harley is back, for another season in Flyover Country. The next weeks and months and years might be tough sledding, both for the country and for people who care, but I can report that at least one small and beautiful part of that world is in place, and that it is good. Please find some way to indulge in your own version of comfort and self-care. Go seek and find some beauty, and some good, in the world. We all need it.

.

Hope, With FeathersPost + Comments (43)

Guest Post – Tony Jay: UK Election 2024 Catch-Up, Part III

by Anne Laurie|  August 29, 20245:54 pm| 18 Comments

This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Guest Posts, United Kingdom

Wrapping up the trilogy.

… Looking over the vote tallies in constituency after constituency, a pattern emerges that will be causing major shrinkage in the corridors of Government – apart for those parts of it who see in it an opportunity for more Drang Nach Rechts energy – because of how thin and ephemeral it makes newnewlabourinc’s victory look. Time and again newnewlabourinc picked up seats because the Tory vote halved and split, but despite all the Lefty-punching and the sucking up to Tory-friendly media by dropping every progressive policy in the manifesto like they were sand-ballast from a soaring hot-air balloon captained by a man who’d just bet his house, his family and his beloved horse Monty on reaching the Moon ahead of the French, those ‘hero voters’ Der Starmerpartei had been pursuing relentlessly since 2020 didn’t necessarily swing their way.

In most cases it looks like a few might have, but not many, while the furthest Right Tories jumped ship to Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, splitting the righty vote and letting scores of centrally selected newnewlabourinc candidate-drones squeak in on a plurality with majorities thinner than a Trump intern’s resumé. Back in 2019 the opposite happened, when Farage and Flobalob reached an accommodation that saw the Froggy Fascist’s Brexit Party stand down in Tory held seats while running well-funded candidates in seats where Labour held the minority in the hope they could pick off ‘culturally conservative’ (read fucking racist) Labour voters who they thought would never vote Tory. There’s still disagreement over which side that strategy helped more, but this time around Farage definitely fucked the Right, not the Left, and absolutely crippled the Tories nationwide.

It’s also undeniable that the Labour vote went waaaay down, even though voting against Tories is pretty much the meat and potatoes of being a Labour voter. I guess all those sneering attacks from the Party’s Right painting left-wing, ‘urban’ voters (the Party’s most reliable) as childish emo-brats who didn’t understand politics and should fuck off to found their own loser Parties if they didn’t like the taste of the Plastic Peer’s netherglobes seems to have had the oh-so-unforeseeable effect of causing many left-wing, ‘urban’ voters to either fuck off to found their own Parties or just not vote at all. When the leadership of the Party you usually vote for repeatedly tells you that your priorities (more social spending, fixing the brutal welfare system, repairing the local government funding streams that the Tories broke, cutting off support for Israel and other rogue states, rebalancing inequality in education, etc) are too expensive and anathema to the voters it really wants (economically anxious about immigration, turgid for a strong military, flag-shaggingly pro-Monarchy) their demand that you shut your whining mouth and hand over that vote you don’t deserve but they let you have is… not conducive to enthusiastic turnout. Across the nation turnout was historically low, in Labour areas it was a full 5% lower.

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Now, in many tight constituencies where either Labour or the Liberal-Democrats were the main challenger to the Tories, there was a ton of tactical voting. Anything to get the Tories out (and keep Reform out) was one of the mantras in this Election I could really get on board with. The Lib-Dems didn’t pick up a single seat where there was a Labour incumbent, their 64 new MPs (giving them 72 in total) mostly coming from beating Tories around the head and neck with lukewarm abandon, and they were pretty concentrated in their heartlands of the South and Southwest. Labour picked up a good 50% of the seats the Tories lost, mostly across the Midlands and the North, with a swathe cutting out from Labour London (where Mayor Sadiq Khan actually increased his majority despite the hostility from the paranoid cultists down at newnewlabourinc central office) across Essex and Kent and a chunk in the more populous areas of the Southwest.

But, by the mesmeric balls of Hrungulug the Squatter Over Mirrors, the undemocratic nature of it all! Just look at these figures.

newnewlabourinc got 33.7% of the vote but 63.2% of seats at 411 MPs
The Fucking Tories got 23.7% of the vote but only 18.6% of seats at 121 MPs
The Lib-Dems got 12.22% of the vote but 11.1% of seats at 72 MPs
The Greens got 6.39% of the vote but only 0.6% of seats at 3 MPs

But get this:
Reform UK got 14.29% of the vote but only 0.8% of seats at 5 MPs.

That’s right. The Fascist Frog Party got more votes than the Lib-Dems (nearly 600,000 more in point of nauseating fact) but 67 fewer MPs. I mean, fuck the fascists with an endless line of ungreased Hakenkreuz, but that’s unsupportable. You fight the election on the rules as they are, blah blah blah, and all that, but the UK’s electoral system is obviously unfit for service and completely unsuited to the political realignment currently taking place. The two biggest parties got historically low proportions of an historically low vote percentage but between them gobbled up over 80% of seats. The three next largest parties got almost a quarter of the votes between them but got less than 3% of seats. The Lib-Dems themselves got 15 more seats than in 2010 but with roughly half the votes.

In a country where millions and millions of people are coming to realise that they’re locked out of a system usually geared towards schmoozing a few media oligarchs and buying off voters in a handful of target constituencies every five years, it’s very unhealthy and downright dangerous to put a rhetorical weapon like this in the hands of the Far Right. Because if anyone thinks Farage and his billionaire backers aren’t going to blitz right-wing voters with their own version of the Stolen Election myth, I’ve got a couple of bridges and an authentic Da Vinci or three to sell you.

Anyway. Not many laughs in there. Let’s summarise. Remember these are purely my opinions, strongly coloured by my own biases. But I’m also always right, so shake your salt however you like.

Starmer’s newnewlabourinc boosted their percentage of the vote from 2019 by a measly 1.7% while losing hundreds of thousands of traditional voters, but still gobbled up hundreds of seats because the massive, obnoxious, unbearable vileness of the Tory Party drove huge numbers of people to vote tactically to get them out, and the Tories also had the vote-drain of Reform sucking away on their Right like a behind-on-her-rent college student in those films Pastor Mike tells his son about. Come next election newnewlabourinc are going to have been the Government for five years and with their enormous majority of identikit MPs will have been expected to make serious progress on fixing the messes stemming from 14 years of Tory mismanagement piled on to the disaster of Brexit.

I have many, many doubts that this shower are going to do any more than tinker around the edges while Shadow Ministers scheme in the background to establish their own individual fiefdoms in expectation of a leadership election before 2029. Starmer went into this election unpopular, I posit he’ll be even more unpopular before the next one and will be ‘encouraged’ to stand down so that a more media-friendly figurehead can ooze into place. The UK is a severely damaged country, having the national purse strings in the hands of a gimlet-eyed Emo Phillips lookalike with a degree in squeezing the undeserving poor while lavishing doe-eyed come hither and delve into my deep bag of goodies looks at the Titans of Industry is a recipe for fixing fuckitty-all.

Meanwhile the Tory vote itself split down the middle. Thanks to years and years of them being fed increasingly dehumanising crank misinformation from the Great and Good of British Conservatism. Farage’s Reform UK swallowed up the majority of the exodus, but lots of other Tories just turned up the volume on Classic FM to Wagnerian levels and stayed home with a cheeky little bottle or three of Chianti, grousing about pension funds and waiting for their Party to become less of a reeking embarrassment. In the slow-motion Tory leadership squirm that’s currently taking place to replace Sunak (no results until September, probably) most of the candidates are on the Hard Right, with a couple claiming to be centrists and Mel Stride (Who the fuck is he? Sounds like an Australian DJ) trying and failing to straddle both flanks of the beast while looking like a chubby 80’s gameshow host with a Rodeo kink and mobility issues.

Farage is out there in the muck, bulbous eyes barely above the surface, waiting his moment to feed. We all know he wants to be the Leader of a Nationalist Conservative Party for the next election, and chances are he’ll get what he wants. Whether it’s from a Tugendhat or Cleverly victory allowing him to peel off defecting Hard Right Tory MPs to his own Reform UK Party while the Tories sink into 2000s era irrelevance, or one of Badenoch, Patel or Jenrick winning and entering into negotiations to go into the next election on a joint slate. They’ll all be looking at the 2024 results and seeing how many seats the Right – could – have won if their voters had been united under a single banner. It’d just be a matter of which leadership blinks first and takes a back seat. Will it be a Conservative Reform Party or a Reformed Conservative Party?

Does it even matter? No, probably not. The Right will have a shit-ton of money and five years of newnewlabourinc austerity and stroppy ineptitude to run against with, as usual, the backing of most of the UK corporate media.

I could go on. No, honest, I could, I don’t have to be this terse and stingy with words. But I wouldn’t want to outstay my welcome, not when you’ve got all that Harris/Walz momentum and excitement to get back to basking in. What I wouldn’t give for a potential future where power was invested in decent people with a positive, progressive vision of their country’s future and the drive, determination and basic decency to bring people along with them to make it happen. Sounds amazing, but that’s not on the cards for the UK. We get the Light Blue Meanies with their spiteful vendettas and their blinkered obsession with ‘proving’ that 2010’s era fiscal conservativism is always and forever the only ‘adult’ way to run anything.

And when they fuck up, as they always fuck up, we’ll get Frog Fascism and the kind of broad social unrest that’ll make the recent White Power Riots look like chilled-out flower-plaiting sessions at Woodstock.

In all honesty, we’re fucked. Think I may stay up here on this Island and get a job smoking fish.

It Is Finished

Guest Post – Tony Jay: UK Election 2024 Catch-Up, Part IIIPost + Comments (18)

Reflection: Fighting the Enemy Within

by WaterGirl|  June 6, 202410:55 am| 182 Comments

This post is in: Guest Posts, Open Threads, War

Today we have a thoughtful guest post from Nelle, in honor of the day.  Seems like a good time for contemplation and reflection.

Fighting the Enemy Within

by Nelle

For the last few days, the local news has been full of commemorations of the 80th anniversary of D-Day today and footage of the veterans, now in their 90’s and 100’s, who went to France for the occasion.  I looked for Band of Brothers to watch but came up instead with the Ken Burns documentary, The War, which came out in 2007.  I totally missed it then; we lived in New Zealand.  The first episode has a lot of interviews of veterans and we found ourselves thinking of our dads.

My dad was a Mennonite pacifist, but he accepted the draft, he said, for two reasons.  One, in gratitude for taking him in as an immigrant (he came from what is now known as Ukraine, but then was Russian territory).  He believed that, while he wouldn’t carry a gun, he couldn’t say no to a country that gave him a chance at a new life and allowed him to escape the Holodomor.

Secondly, and he didn’t say this for a long time, he had seen what war does to women and children (the German invasion of WWI and the Russian “civil” war that lingered in his area longer than most anywhere). While he wouldn’t talk about the details, Red soldiers were quartered in their house, with four young women, his mother, and two little boys.  Bucha, Ukraine can give us a clue.  He had an obligation not to turn his back on those who suffer.

In February of 1944, my father-in-law got leave in San Diego i to quickly go up to see his new son, who is now my husband.  Then he shipped out to the Pacific.  I don’t think he saw his family again until the war’s end.

Mr. Lewis, down the street from me when I was growing up, had shrapnel in his body.  Almost all the kids in my cohort, born in 1951, had fathers who were overseas during the war.

As far as I knew, none of our fathers talked about it, but my dad got Christmas cards from guys he served with and even met up, in the 80’s, with a prisoner of war he had cared for on one of the crossings.  The man wrote a book, entitled The Enemy has My Face.  That was a generation of men who faced Nazis and they paid a huge price, as did their families stateside.

What was it like for us, growing up with these men as fathers and grandfathers?  How do we meet their legacy?  What did we know about our mothers and their contributions?  (My mother sewed uniforms in a factory; my mother-in-law, who by then had an MIT degree in architecture, worked for Douglas Aircraft drafting airplane designs).  What do we owe them as we face the fascists within the country now, fascists who co-opt our own warnings about them as the enemy within and project it onto us?

Reflection: Fighting the Enemy WithinPost + Comments (182)

Werebear – Writing a Book In 10 Days!

by WaterGirl|  May 5, 20243:00 pm| 34 Comments

This post is in: Authors In Our Midst, Guest Posts

This may be more of a writers or creatives post than our typical Authors in Our Midst posts, and I think it will be great fun.  Some might call the concept crazy, but you won’t hear that from me.

Let’s give a warm welcome back to Werebear, who has been sorely missed in the comments!

And now for something completely different!

Writing a book in 10 Days!

by Werebear

I’m in the midst of a fascinating experiment. I’m writing a book in ten days.

The book which so inspired me was How to Write Pulp Fiction by James Scott Bell, writer of the Mike Romeo series. Five thousand a day until 50,000 words. The goal is creating what Monty Python called “a ripping yarn.” A spell-binding story.

Auto Draft 100

I’ve been healing up and my brain is working much better. Only, at unpredictable times. This makes conventional employment still impossible, but fortunately I’m not conventional. So I set myself the challenge. Ten days to draft, 2-4 days to let it cool, and then I turn on my editing mode.

This is rough copy, of course, especially since a lot of it I dictate on my nature walks or while sitting in the car once I get to the grocery store. By breaking up my writing sessions throughout the day, and making my scenes mostly dialogue, the words can flow between the characters I’m inventing as needed.

I’m using the dictation app JustPressRecord and the writing software Scrivener. The next step is collecting this mess into chapters, but any outline/mind map software can work.

Because I’m not writing it in order. I think of a scene it must need, and I start setting the scene and discover characters. This is the first time I’ve ever first drafted an entire novel. My next cat book is progressing with much more polished chapters. My fiction book is going well but is more advanced, though I can still use this technique to fill in remaining gaps.

I’ve always been a fan of draft, then edit. But never went to the tallest diving board before, starting a whole book with only a vague idea. It’s forming a satirical tone to match the outrageous premise. This is the most fun I’ve ever had writing something. Maybe I need fun. Maybe my readers do.

This might be helpful for any writer who dreads staring at the blank page. Because drafts don’t have to be good. They merely need enough potential to be polished into something good.

At five days I was halfway, 25,103 words. Now I see a book. And I think, like the main character in Stephen King’s Misery, the last difficult years might mean I’ve been “Scheherazade for myself.”

This is such a general creative question: “Where do you get your ideas?” (For writing and anything else.) My answer is that ideas are everywhere. I think it’s really about: “How do you make them live?”

Werebear – Writing a Book In 10 Days!Post + Comments (34)

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