I always think of this when I drink chamomile tea

Hmmm, this one is called, The DTs.  DT nightmare?  Yep, apt:

heigh ho

I'm still a quivering anxious mess over our future.  I took a trip down south and saw Trump signs and Confederate flags scattered here and there, but mostly I got to enjoy the scenery and pretend that nothing is happening.

Today I will do what Google says and celebrate Louisa May Alcott's 184th birthday.  Here are some cool quotes of hers:

I'm not afraid of storms, for I'm learning how to sail my ship.

Love is a great beautifier.

Housekeeping ain't no joke.

Let my name stand among those who are willing to bear ridicule and reproach for the truth's sake, and so earn some right to rejoice when the victory is won.

He who believes is strong; he who doubts is weak. Strong convictions precede great actions.

A little kingdom I possess, where thoughts and feelings dwell; And very hard the task I find of governing it well.

We all have our own life to pursue, our own kind of dream to be weaving, and we all have the power to make wishes come true, as long as we keep believing.

National day of Mourning

THIS IS NOT NORMAL. 

Highlight it. Underline it. Put it where you can see it. 

Repeat it to yourself during your shower.

Say it between every sip of coffee.

Shout it at the news on the radio as you commute to and from work.

Write it on a Post-It note and stick it to your dashboard, your desk, your bathroom mirror, and your bedside table. 

Write it on the check when you sign for your credit card payment at the restaurant where you have your lunch. 

Put it on a button and pin it to your shirt. 

Mutter it as a prayer before you go to bed. 

Never allow yourself to get complacent. Never allow yourself to just go with the flow or go along to get along. This is not normal. 

Don’t get over it. 

from Killer of Sacred Cows

The first Thanksgiving Day did occur in the year 1637, but it was nothing like our Thanksgiving today. On that day the Massachusetts Colony Governor, John Winthrop, proclaimed such a “Thanksgiving” to celebrate the safe return of a band of heavily armed hunters, all colonial volunteers. They had just returned from their journey to what is now Mystic, Connecticut where they massacred 700 Pequot Indians. Seven hundred Indians - men, women and children - all murdered.

This day is still remembered today, 373 years later. No, it’s been long forgotten by white people, by European Christians. But it is still fresh in the mind of many Indians. A group calling themselves the United American Indians of New England meet each year at Plymouth Rock on Cole’s Hill for what they say is a Day of Mourning. They gather at the feet of a stature of Chief Massasoit of the Wampanoag to remember the long gone Pequot. They do not call it Thanksgiving. There is no football game afterward.

Richard Greener, Huffpost 11.25.2010

http://www.uaine.org/

Things Steven Bannon said

"Darkness is good," says Bannon, who amid the suits surrounding him at Trump Tower, looks like a graduate student in his T-shirt, open button-down and tatty blue blazer — albeit a 62-year-old graduate student. "Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That's power..."  

"Like [Andrew] Jackson's populism, we're going to build an entirely new political movement," he says. "It's everything related to jobs. The conservatives are going to go crazy. I'm the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. With negative interest rates throughout the world, it's the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Ship yards, iron works, get them all jacked up. We're just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution — conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement."

Hollywood Reporter article


1930s USA was enduring the "exciting" time of the Great Depression, so are you talking about the 1930s in Germany, Steve Bannon?  Fuck you Nazi.

Or did you mean 1830s?  I noted your Andrew Jackson reference too:

Jackson strengthened himself against Congress by forging direct links with the voters. His official messages, though delivered to Congress, spoke in plain and powerful language to the people at large. Reversing a tradition of executive deference to legislative supremacy, Jackson boldly cast himself as the people's tribune, their sole defender against special interests and their minions in Congress. In other ways, too, Jackson expanded the scope of presidential authority. He dominated his cabinet, forcing out members who would not execute his commands. In two terms he went through four secretaries of state and five secretaries of the treasury. Holding his official subordinates at arm's length, Jackson devised and implemented his policies through a private coterie of advisers and publicists known as the "Kitchen Cabinet." His bold initiatives and domineering style caused opponents to call him King Andrew, and to take the name of Whigs to signify their opposition to executive tyranny.


Jackson's drive for party organization was spurred by his own difficulties with Congress. Unlike other famously strong Presidents, Jackson defined himself not by enacting a legislative program but by thwarting one. In eight years, Congress passed only one major law, the Indian Removal Act of 1830, at his behest.

To detractors [Jackson] appears an incipient tyrant, the closest we have yet come to an American Caesar.

good sign?

There was a rainbow in the sky this morning.  As I followed the lines from the horizon, the visible rainbow ended at the American Flag outside my work.  I'm embracing this as a sign that we will be okay.  It doesn't mean I'm not going to call my government employees or that I'm going to take a Rip Van Winkle. It just means that today I'm going to let my muscles relax, calm my anxieties and enjoy my time with my family on our road trip to the south of the good ole US of A.

Celebrate the water protectors

Our media is not reporting the facts on recent police brutality at Standing Rock.  This article reminded me.  I stand with the water protectors at Standing Rock.  Do not let the black snake go underground.  We must protect our life force.  I am a water protector too.

President Bizness

Consider these items from Mark Sumner's, DailyKos article:

Donald Trump is involved in over 500 companies. It’s an absurd number, one that is generated by Trump’s tendency to encapsulate every business deal behind a new entity. It makes Trump’s relationships—both within the United States and beyond—intentionally difficult to track. 

[The developers of Trump Tower Pune in India] have already visited the United States since the election to meet with the President-elect and plan how they can best take advantage of Trump’s increased brand-visibility. 


Lego Movie was spot on:

President-elect Twit

Donald J. Trump 

✔@realDonaldTrump

Prior to the election it was well known that I have interests in properties all over the world.Only the crooked media makes this a big deal!

8:14 PM - 21 Nov 2016

Well, show us your tax returns.  Our Jimmy Carter had to sell his beloved peanut farm.  Sell your shit and escort your children/business partners out of our White House.  You don't want to follow the rules, but you want your rules to be followed.  This is typical, spoiled brat dictator bullshit.  It has to stop.  The men and women who have been chosen by the government of the people to be our voice need to speak out against this and a whole slew of other things:

Racism

Sexism

Election Fraud

Russian influence

Cabinet elections

Conflicts of interest 

Nepotism

Kleptocracy

Fascism

Dictatorship

STOP THIS NOW

Disturbing article

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/election-reflection-white-anger-racial-violence-economic-despair-and-worst-yet-come

Strange. Red.

I'm so glad other people are able to adequately explain how I feel, since I have temporarily (hopefully) succumbed to "the dumbing".

Let’s call this PTSD post-Trump stress disorder, triggered by the election, to the most powerful office in the world, of a man who’s espoused wholesale exclusion of Muslim immigrants, deporting millions of undocumented immigrants, repealing Roe v. Wade, abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency, and encouraging Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia to develop nuclear weapons, among other polarizing proposals. While post-Trump stress in no way equals the level of trauma experienced by combat veterans in Afghanistan, Iraq or Vietnam, this is an experience shared by tens of millions of Americans right now. 
--Jeff Gillenkirk, Alternet


Dear people that love me,
See the red?  I am not unhinged.  You should be seeing red too.
Love,
A person that loves you

Bravo Rep. Ruben Gallego! Thank you.

Vote Notes

Here is some information about the current state of how our votes, our official voice, is being handled and how exiting polls are helpful in determining voter fraud.  Red and Blue shifts, Hacking, Corporate owned voting machines and ballot boxes, auditing equipment turned off, votes being destroyed before the normal destruction date...

Excerpts from:  Can we count election results... by Steven Rosenfeld, Alternet

Covertly, there was not just the open question of whether Russia would hack into election computer systems—voter rolls is one system, vote counting machinery another—but some real evidence that it might have happened in North Carolina.
What people heard about were scrambled voter registration database files in Democratic stronghold counties. What they didn’t hear about but what alarmed some computer scientists who track voting machinery, was the vendor that maintains North Carolina’s voter files was in all probability the “unnamed” Florida-based company hacked by the Russians. You can be sure nobody is quarantining those computer systems for immediate examination by computer security experts.
Jonathon Simons ...calls this one-way pattern the “red shift.” The bottom line, he said, is that both data sets—the exit polls released in real time on Tuesday, not “adjusted” later on to match the vote count, and reported results from election officials—cannot be reconciled. One has to be wrong, which raises questions about the polling, the machinery’s accuracy or vote count tampering. But without a transparent vote-counting process, people with questions run into a brick wall.
“We call a shift towards Republicans a 'red shift,' and a shift toward Democratic candidates a 'blue shift.' We are seeing no blue shifts in this election,” Simon wrote Friday. “This is a familiar pattern, indicative of electronic rigging, but in this case even more dramatic than usual.”
“With all that has been said and written about the vulnerability of the computers that count our votes in secret, one must ask why these votes and states shifted?” he continued. “And why the outcome-changing results are simply accepted as accurate and honest. There is every reason to investigate and then recount key states by hand where possible. This is too often not possible, because some of these results come from paperless, touchscreen computers. And even where possible, with optical scanners, it is just not done.”

Excerpts from a Steven Rosenfeld Interview with Jonathon Simon

SR: Let's go through this piece by piece, because it's a lot for people to really understand. You get the raw state-by-state exit polls that are commissioned by a big consortium of national media organizations. What did you find this year, that happened this week? What do you see in the raw data?JS: Of course, we don't get the raw data. The raw data would be... we have three definitions here. There's raw data, which is the actual questionnaires and the simple numerical toning up of answers on the questionnaire. That is never publicly released. It's if you want to characterize it as such, it's what's inside the sausage of exit polls, and we are not privileged to see that. I've had one opportunity in my life through an inside source to actually look at some of the raw data, but that's a very rare thing. It's not generally accessible to the public. Many of us have clambered for the public release of that raw data, certainly in the aftermath of the 2004 election and have been denied it.
just in this particular election, they bought machines in Ohio that had a feature in them that was basically capable of self auditing. It was a security feature. The Republican secretary of state of Ohio allowed the counties to switch off that feature. You have to ask why. You bought it and it had that feature. They said, Well, it would create chaos. You look at things like that and say hmm. You scratch your head and say, what is going on here? What may be happening in that darkness of cyberspace that the exit polls are giving us a pretty good hint about, but the vote counting system itself completely conceals?

The fact is, we are denied, when I saw we, the candidates, the public, very often election administrators, by the rules of their states, are denied access to the actual hard evidence we call it, that would allow a determination of whether the election has been accurately counted or perhaps has been illegitimately counted and manipulated. As a matter of fact, in quite a few states and usually under Republican control, but the Democrats have not been tremendously cooperative about this either. The trend has been for ballots to be removed from public record status so that they are no longer susceptible to four-year requests and similar public information requests, Freedom of Information Act requests. They are getting less transparent, not more so.

What we're left with is a system that was accepted more or less without real proof.
If that's what democracy is worth to us, then we deserve what we get. Democracy requires support. It requires citizen support. It requires an investment of care and an investment of vigilance and an investment of participation more than deciding, Yeah, I'm going to vote or I'm not going to vote. It requires the fulfillment of a duty to be part of the public that counts and observe the counting of the votes so we don't have the ludicrous situation where we hand our ballots to a magician who takes them behind a curtain, you hear them shred the ballots, comes out and tells you so-and-so won. This is what we've got now and it's what we've accepted. We spend more money in two weeks in Iraq then would cost us for 30 years to hand-count our elections. 

I see

So this is how this animal gets made?
I'm sharpening everything
everything is splayed
my accumulation is a riot
spilling out all over
no more free smiles
no more free breaths of fresh air
all my joy hidden for a select few
giving evil eyes all around
until I root all you fuckers out

Day 3

esp is on the fritz

My anger is not only about this, but...

On Tuesday November 8, the country proved its misogyny runs deeper than most of us could have ever imagined. We chose to elect a man who has admitted to sexual assault over the most qualified candidate in history, who happens to be a woman. And to be a woman who has to come to terms with that fact is deeply, deeply painful. 

                                                                                            --Jessica Samakow

more to come

Save the Pangolins!

Photo by Paul Hilton

This is the most trafficked animal in the world.
They live in Asia and Africa.
It's the only mammal known to have protective keratin scales.
It's tongue can be longer than it's body.
They curl up in a ball like a roly poly when threatened and emit noxious chemical like the spray of a skunk.
At times they exhibit a bi-pedal stance for some behaviors and are good swimmers.
Arborial species live in hollowed trees, while others dig and live in burrows.
They are insectivorous and consume an avg 140-200g of insects per day.
Pangolins have poor vision, rely on smell and hearing.
Evidence shows a close relationship to the Carnivora order that consists of hyena, bear and wolf.
They are a popular bush meat and used as medicine for many different ailments, including kleptomania.
South China and Vietnam's over consumption, in addition to deforestation, is the reason that all 8 species of Pangolins are listed as threatened to extinction, with two species are listed as critically endangered.
Here is an organization dedicated to saving the Pangolin.

via GIPHY

I like