Albert Einstein's advice for our current predicament

Happy Feast of the Immaculate Conception!

me dressed up and exercising at the airport before my 8 hour flight

They're using the confinement box, one of the most horrific methods of CIA torture in the post-9/11 black sites, against migrants now. This is the direct result of the lack of consequences for the architects of the torture program. Either there will be criminal penalties for this or it will expand.

“..Wordsworth describes how inspiration requires both the effort by which the mind ‘aspires, grasps, struggles, wishes, craves’ and the stillness of the mind which ‘fits [the poet] to receive it, when unsought’. [...] despite the effort, inspiration still only comes unsought.” ― Iain McGilchrist

Let us love the actual world that never wishes to be annulled, but love it in all its terror, but dare to embrace it with our spirit’s arms – and our hands encounter the hands that hold it. -Martin Buber

Trump makes the racist Great Replacement Theory official U.S. policy open.substack.com/pub/luciantr...

“The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his "ideas" almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture [..] His political platforms were only wings of a windmill.” ― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

—Peace Prize, it says! :: “This is your peace prize. It is also a beautiful medal that you can wear everywhere you want to go.” At this point FIFA might as well knight Vladimir Putin or appoint Don Jr. as Surgeon General of Cocaine.

Police Chief Brian O’Hara has delivered a blunt message to his department: If an officer witnesses ICE agents using illegal force and fails to step in, they will be fired. 👏 👏 👏

Mamdani: Oftentimes when we win elections, we tell people to go home and just trust us. But the message really has to be that we want you to come along with us… That’s something we’ve been looking to share with New Yorkers: We want to not only win with New Yorkers, but also govern with New Yorkers.

“I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. [..] Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.” ― Kurt Vonnegut

Mary Elaine LeBey Sign of the Day ... you know this has a good backstory...

[photo: Richard Avedon] “I am living. I remember you.” ― Marie Howe, What the Living Do: Poems

Each of Liliane Giraudon’s books begins as “an unreadable draft / and riddled with holes.” Poetry is what takes places in the holes of discourse and amid the blanks on the page. —Leon Pradeau on one of France's most important poets. Art by Andrew Zbihlyj [Poetry Foundation]

“The secrets of evolution are death and time—the deaths of enormous numbers of lifeforms that were imperfectly adapted to the environment; and time for a long succession of small mutations.” ― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“The world will not be saved by what we know — but by how deeply we grieve, how fiercely we love, and how unrelentingly we act.” — Adapted from Parker Palmer

YES!! New York Times Sues Hegseth, et al, Over Pentagon Loyalty Pledge Requirement for Journalists! open.substack.com/pub/annepmit...

It's weird that like every day this week he's done a thing where he's absolutely *surrounded* by fawning sycophants as he muddles and bumbles his way through profanity-laced hate speech.

“and I thought I am so many! What is my name? What is the name of the deep breath I would take over and over for all of us?” — Mary Oliver, excerpt of “Sunrise”, in Dreamwork

Goodnight

So am I.

GEORGE WILL: “.. The killing of the survivors by this moral slum of an administration should nauseate Americans. A nation incapable of shame is dangerous, not least to itself.” @postopinions.bsky.social www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

Our Bones Remember... open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...

More cracks in the dam

shark: *smirking* no hablo inglés

Soma Feldmar

"This is going to drive me into my own heart"

Trump’s 28-point peace plan with Russia “is misnamed,” @anneapplebaum.bsky.social argues. “It is not a peace plan. It is a proposal that weakens Ukraine and divides America from Europe, preparing the way for a larger war in the future.”

“Why was it, she sometimes wondered, that in dreams we can't do the simplest things?” ― George Saunders, Tenth of December

— Anna Akhmatova, In a Dream

Trump says he wants a long list of Democratic members of Congress executed. For the editors of NYT, this is not news worthy of publication... oh wait, I found a small piece about it on p 16. Sane washing on a massive scale.

Earlier today, I was notified that someone was at my door. This is who it was:

Philosophers checking their “intuitions”

I'd like to hear from a child psychologist on this one, but in the meantime, I suspect Joyce Carol Oates is correct.

“Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you?” -Terence McKenna

Here is the video. Her show was on fire. This was followed by a segment about a small Oregon town which is losing its life saving Coast Guard helicopter at the start of the extremely dangerous Dungeness crabbing begins. ICE want to use the land for a detention center — in a tsunami area….

Let love write on you for awhile. - Jonathan Safran Foer

Segment on Rachel Maddow tonight of a church in Charlotte NC where people were learning how to oppose the ICE raids. The commentator said "Steve Miller is expecting to encounter rock throwing rioters and instead he is getting frog costumes and "this little light of mine" sung by the elderly. YES.

The truth will have its day. That day is now. Release all the Epstein files.

“You’ve got a tear in the very fabric of reality, that’s how they keep getting in.”

[photo is “Ponyhenge” Lincoln Massachusetts] + “Stay young, always, in the theater of your mind.” —Mary Oliver

Your heart is like a great river after a long spell of rain, spilling over its banks. [..] And still the rain beats down on the surface of the river. Every time you see a flood like that on the news you tell yourself: That’s it. That’s my heart. — Haruki Murakami, Kafka On The Shore

i just read something about grief from C.S. Lewis and his book, “A Grief Observed” basically, when someone you love dies, it isn’t just them that you miss, but the parts of yourself that person brought out of you that can never be brought out again. i feel that with my dad.

“May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark. ~ Rabindranath Tagore